Donors privileged over the democratic electorate.
The below article originally appeared in Compact on October 11, 2024.
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In August, the San Francisco’s District Attorney’s office’s chief of staff sent a memo to the MacArthur Foundation that declared, “Our office will not be used as sharecroppers to a foundation’s vision of criminal justice reform.” As first reported by Joe Rivano Barros in Mission Local, the memo was written by Monifa Willis on behalf of District Attorney Brooke Jenkins. Directed to Monique Garduque, director of MacArthur’s Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC) program, it responds to the foundation’s decision to suspend payment of $625,000 in grant funds. The money was to have been the final installment of some $5.2 million in criminal-justice reform grants to San Francisco dating back to 2018 and would have been a small part of the $380 million MacArthur has spent nationally on criminal-justice reform during the past 10 years.
This episode is the latest reminder of the threat that can be posed to democracy by the philanthropic support of traditionally governmental functions. Willis’s memo, which runs seven lively and spirited pages, is the sort of feedback every foundation deserves when it seeks to flex its power over elected public officials. According to the memo, MacArthur focused excessively on one particular “deliverable” in the grant agreement, namely, the goal of reducing the jail population. “Success is solely being measured by how rapidly we release people from custody regardless of their risk to the public,” Willis writes. “The Foundation’s simple focus on jail population numbers, not holding people accountable, and/or offering no consequences for unsafe behavior is irresponsible.”
Although MacArthur had other complaints about compliance with the grant terms, it is easy to see why Willis concluded that the foundation was obsessively focused on a single metric. Garduque’s memo notifying the DA’s office of the grant suspension stated that “the Foundation is particularly concerned about the increases in [San Francisco’s] jail population and racial and ethnic disparities,” because “the average daily population in jail is now consistently above your SJC baseline of 1,210 and well above the target of 800 proposed in your sustainability grant” from September 2022.
As Willis’s response notes, left unremarked in the MacArthur memo is the fact that the DA in San Francisco changed in 2022—when notorious radical Chesa Boudin was recalled by 55 percent of the city’s voters. Boudin’s determination to reduce jail populations no matter what was among the primary reasons for that recall.
The subsequent, grant-violating increase in jail population relates directly to Boudin’s successor Jenkins’s determination to do whatever she could to reverse the spike in crime that Boudin’s laxity had brought about. But, MacArthur seems to be saying, electoral results be damned—we’ve got measurable outcomes to meet!
It isn’t the first time that policy-oriented philanthropy has funded governmental functions, of course, and it won’t be the last. As one of us once noted in The Giving Review, for an early example, Bowling Green professor Judith Sealander’s informative 1997 book Private Wealth and Public Life tells the story of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.,’s funding of federal farm-demonstration agents early in the 20th Century. Between 1906 and 1914, the Rockefeller-funded General Education Board (GEB) spent “almost $1 million in ‘supplements’ to the salaries of some six hundred special Agriculture Department farm demonstration agents,” as reported by Sealander. True to the era’s progressivism, the privately funded farm-demonstration agents taught farmers about “scientific agriculture,” according to Sealander. The GEB called the pilot project “a ‘perfect illustration’ of public-private cooperation.”
The supplement scheme, however, “was actually a ruse. Agriculture paid GEB-supported special agents one dollar per year.” Later, “the halls of Congress rang with denunciation” of the Rockefeller funding, Sealander writes. Sen. Hoke Smith of Georgia said, “As a member of the Senate, I thought every dollar of the fund came from the Federal Treasury …. I think our Treasury is strong enough to pay for anything that ought to be done for the general welfare of the people of this country.” Congress barred government acceptance of any similar subsidy from Rockefeller in particular or philanthropy in general to expand the program any further.
Another, more recent example: The foundation-funded World Resources Institute (WRI) hired the State of Washington as a contractor in 2017. Under the curious arrangement, “the state agreed to perform a ‘scope of work’ for the nonprofit that includes ‘activities and deliverables’ to advance a green agenda” led by WRI-funded employees in then-Gov. Jay Inslee’s office, according to a critical Wall Street Journal editorial. A spokeswoman for Inslee defended the project, saying two other positions in his office were previously funded by private grants and lauding “public/private partnerships” like this to “fill critical gaps.” Other governors including California’s Jerry Brown and New York’s Andrew Cuomo have reportedly relied on similar, privately supported staff on energy and environmental issues.
Less directly, the philanthropically supported Collective Action Fund for Accountability, Resilience, and Adaptation, a fiscally sponsored project of the New Venture Fund, has made “charitable grants that enable cities, counties, and states hard hit by climate change to file high-impact climate damage and deception lawsuits represented by expert counsel,” as the Hewlett Foundation has described the arrangement. Other support reportedly has come from the MacArthur, JPB, Hewlett, and Gordon and Betty Moore Foundations, along with the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. The Bradley Foundation, on the program staff of which we served, supported private attorney Ken Starr’s legal defense of the groundbreaking public Milwaukee Parental Choice Program in the late 1990s against constitutional challenges to it.
External to the policy-oriented context, of course, there is substantial private philanthropic support of governmental functions of all sorts—including, for example, of police foundations for things like bulletproof vests, of public school-district foundations for any number of education-related purposes, and of entities that can receive grant funding for enhancing the beauty of or improving facilities in public parks. There is a question, however, about whether philanthropy should offer such charity to what’s almost always supposed to be tax-financed government.
MacArthur’s experience in San Francisco offers a good lesson for those foundations interested in using their philanthropy to support functions of democratically chosen governments, and in a particular way. They should at least knowingly assume the risk that their philanthropically chosen and imposed approach may, if and when it becomes more widely known, be rejected—democratically. The goals and metrics of “strategic philanthropy” may not be so seamlessly accepted by a voting public as by officials and bureaucrats.
Other lessons are broader, and just as—if not even more—serious. Supposedly strategic private support of government poses a risk to the larger charitable sector if and when it leads to decreased trust in the sector and the underlying legal structure meant to incentivize its charity.
Further, there is a risk to democracy itself when philanthropic power—however “strategic,” however much it might confidently cite its well-funded and well-credentialed, data-driven expertise as serving to best effect the people’s unarticulated will—so directly tampers with or manipulates democracy. Philanthropy, after all, owes a responsibility to democracy.
At the heart of strategic philanthropy, with its logical models and theories of change, is the determination to hold a grantee to measurable outcomes. That approach may merit criticism even when a grantee is a nonprofit, the director and board of which will have signed off on a grant contract and its terms; we have tried to offer such criticism elsewhere. It is another thing altogether when a grantee is the government, in which case the grantmaker is insisting that the public entity deliver agreed-upon results even if an officeholding implementer is changed mid-grant, which in effect means the donor is privileged over the democratic electorate.
MacArthur’s treatment of the San Francisco DA’s office was an irresponsible imposition by a distant private foundation on a real-life, democratically accountable, criminal-justice organization trying to do a good job on the ground, under difficult circumstances. Willis’s memo was a warranted reaction that speaks and bodes well for democracy.
