This has a lot of words, and I’m not convinced they’re right, or complete, or that I’m not just another white dude on the internet spouting off on crap I don’t actually know enough about. So I would encourage you to tell me where I’m wrong.

In early 2020, before the first COVID case reached our shores, the US was in trouble. In the recovery from the 2008 financial collapse, recovery had been focused at the top. Banks were bailed out, the stock market had recovered, but lingering inequity had never been addressed.

In 2020 many remained unemployed, or underemployed. The gig economy that was purported to empower the workers operating within it was really just an even worse form of exploitative, extractive, Capitalism focused on grinding every last cent of profit out of the workers side of the ledger. 

Banks survived their self immolating subprime mortgage debacle via government handouts, but still foreclosed on homeowners, undermining the primary support for wealth building in the modern era. That burden was also unequally applied to BIPOC communities, as have so many failed policies of the last 100 years. Those facing eviction or foreclosure have never historically had very much support. But we failed them yet again by not connecting those who couldn’t afford their rent, or who were being foreclosed, by not taking that investment into banks and using it to buy up foreclosed homes and provide them to those needing housing at reasonable rates. We stood on the precipice of a fundamental shift in how we provide housing, and we failed, falling backward into our established, toxic practices again. These themes returned in the economic devastation that followed the spread of COVID. We continue to feed the functionality unlimited stream of money the Federal Government can spin off into the juggernauts of the economy, with no strings attached around racial or social equity.

Inequity in policing was nothing new, particularly to our Black neighbors. But over the last few years, more and more of it had been caught on cell phone video, or even on the officers’ own body cams. We, myself included, shouldn’t have needed this video proof to believe our Black neighbors, but seeing it, over, and over, and over again overwhelmed our excuses. We, the largely white group who had been slow on the uptake, again, myself included, began to see police as the occupying force they have represented for so long to communities of color, acutely and inarguably so in Black communities. We learned to ask questions around why individuals with guns, handcuffs, and the state sanctioned ability to restrict freedoms or even take a life without much if any accountability were the same people who responded when a kid has a fight with their parents, or someone experiences a mental health crisis. We began to educate ourselves on how years of financial, housing, and education policy had created neighborhoods and even entire cities where there was no reasonable hope for steady employment or wealth generation for anyone born inside their borders. None of this was new, but it was increasingly more visible. The confluence of the recordings of state sponsored violence and murder broadcast to us, increasingly live, as it happened, and the culmination of years of advocacy trying to highlight that there were better ways, places to divert the increasingly militarized police funding cycles.

Then COVID came. American’s are dying faster than they did in the Civil War, an 4-year period where Americans were literally tasked with killing other Americans as efficiently and quickly as possible. So where do we go from here, a point that may be the bleakest days of American history since the eve of the Civil War, and how do we even begin to think about getting there? 

Due to reasons we’ll dig into further, the government may be at a historical low in terms of how suited it is to respond to such massive problems. This is certainly true at the Federal Level, and a mixed bag at the state level. But the key input to any recovery plan has traditionally been supplied by the Federal Government: money. Notably, it has almost unlimited borrowing access, as well as the ability to literally create money out of thin air. But the fate of any Federal help rests not just on two Senate runoffs in Georgia, but the bleak legal and legislative picture regardless of the outcomes of those elections. We must explore other routes.

So what does that Federal investment look like for a year? Non-discretionary spending of almost $3 trillion is important and pays for the social safety net programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. But those are also pieces of the government that those not interacting with them pay very little attention to. So for scale lets, focus on discretionary spending which in the 2020 Federal Budget is $1.4 trillion, but half of that is military spending. So the non-military portion of the Budget is about $700 billion. That’s a lot of money, but it just so happens there’s another entity in the US with a trillion dollars, albeit not annually — philanthropic foundations. Foundations hold an estimated $1.076 trillion dollars in assets as of September 2020, enough to fund all federal non-military spending for a year plus, and still have money to spare. 

The legal framework establishing foundations lays out the idea that they exist for the public benefit. They are required to spend 5% of their assets every year on their mission and the original public contract around the founding of foundations was they would trade the missing tax income for institutional spending that would benefit the public. Foundations spending less than the 5% are subject to heavy tax penalties to recover that money from the failure to address the public good, and reinvest it in the public via government spending. But what would it look like to have foundations and philanthropists funding direct service delivery? It would look a whole like the Works Progress Administration under the New Deal. 

The New Deal came about in a time that would feel very familiar to those of us paying attention to the problems in the US today. At its highest point ever recorded, about 1 in 4 Americans was out of work in the early 1930s. Years of runaway greed and capitalism had blown up the stock market, hurting not those responsible, but the workers who were laid off as a result. Sound familiar? 

One of the New Deal programs was aimed squarely at putting those people back to work. The Works Progress Administration was a wide ranging approach to relief by employing folks to do everything from airport and road construction to poetry and art. It represented a far broader base of employment opportunities than most undertakings would ever have tried to facilitate.

Part of this represented the scope of the hiring push, as the WPA was looking to fund employment for over 5 million who were out of work in 1935. There just weren’t that many jobs to be filled in any one field or focus area. But it also represented an important acknowledgement of the varied skills of those out of work, and the wide scope of work the country needed at the time. There was no point in taking an out of work journalist or artist and having them build roads. It would have helped the unemployment numbers and given them a way to earn a living. But it would not have represented the most efficient use of their skills, and the country as a whole could benefit more from them being employed in their chosen field.

Part of it was also self reinforcing. Putting people to work has immediate value to those employed under the program. But it also often faces backlash by those already employed, pushing back on unnecessary tax dollars wasted on those other folks who weren’t trying hard enough. But by doing many public works projects, including many miles of NJ’s famous boardwalks, and paying artists, photographers, and writers to catalog those efforts, the program attempted to literally create something for everyone. Whether you were employed, enjoyed the public amenities being built as part of the program, or were an art, literature, music, or poetry connoisseur, you could see yourself as benefiting from this wide ranging federal program.

One lesser known, at least to me, program under the WPA was dedicated to the growth and protection of public libraries across the US. By 1938 over 38,000 library employees were employed through the WPA Library project, providing a critical career path to women who were excluded from many of the WPA employment projects at the time. However, segregation in the WPA wasn’t only along gender lines. The WPA operated segregated divisions for Black and white workers, undermining pushes to desegregate workforces. There was also backlash that the employment of minorities, particularly Black workers, should match their levels of unemployment, which was higher than the white population, not the proportion of their overall representation in the community. There was also pushback that swing states, and states that Roosevelt needed to shore up politically saw more WPA funded projects, and the the south, a lock for Democrats at the time and with much higher levels of Black unemployment, were discounted for projects in the west where there was more political upside. So the WPA was not perfect, and changes would undoubtedly be necessary in re-implementing such a program, but is that even possible given the politics of 2021?

With the Works Progress Administration the government role was explicit. Not just to inject capital but literally put people to work, employed by the Federal Government. Could this work in 2021? Without Democrats taking control of the Senate, of course not, totally impossible. Mitch McConnell has now come right out and said his aim is to not pass a single Democratic bill, even if he supports what is in it. No legislation to create a Works Progress Administration 2.0 can pass in that environment. Funding increases to existing departments to ramp up employment don't stand a chance in McConnell's Senate either. But let's be joyful and assume that Democrats take the Senate. They abolish the filibuster, add DC and Puerto Rico as states, maybe even rebalance the Supreme Court. But this takes time. They pass some new laws, establishing programs to put people to work, help address racial disparities, and start to counteract climate change. Maybe they even manage to set up some equitable taxes. But again, this all takes time. Then the lawsuits start. Sure many will be frivolous but some will move through the system and while they do new departments and new programs may be frozen, awaiting the outcome. Have we gotten to the midterms yet? Have we lost the House, the Senate?

Even in the rosiest legislative scenario, many of these needs are not best addressed by the Federal Government. Federal intervention in these areas often manifests as funding passed through the states and counties and ultimately used to give grants to nonprofits that are ultimately providing the services. Which is why philanthropy is so well suited to solving this problem in this time when the government is not.

Fast forward to a brilliant future. We have fixed our most racist systems. Abolished or worked around the Electoral College, reshaped the Senate to remove the overwhelming influence of the slave states, depoliticized the judiciary and our government works again. We have an equitable tax code allowing the government to actually help citizens who need food, housing, education, and we’ve started to pay reparations to descendants of slaves, indigenous people, victims of police violence, and families who were redlined. At the lowest level, nothing has to change. 

Instead of funding baseline social, racial, economic, and environmental justice via foundations the government has gone back to providing grants for all these services. Foundations are free to return to their former focus, but basic human needs have been built out and paid for. But first we need that bridge loan from the philanthropies. 

Using just their existing assets, foundations could fund the non-military portion of the discretionary federal budget for 2 years. In the end, they’d probably still have a couple hundred billion dollars left over to keep operating on. Furthermore, the estimated $1 trillion in foundation assets as of September 2020 represents a very conservative 1% gain since December 2019. We know the stock market has been ignorantly blissful of the pandemic and the erratic Federal leadership, so it is likely that foundations’ holdings have grown well beyond that estimate. 

State budgets total about $2 trillion dollars a year, meaning foundations current assets on hand could fully fund all 50 states for about 6 months. This is not to argue we should pay for the stuff the Federal Government or states already pay for, but instead to establish the scope of the monetary resources we have available to us to help solve our problems. I think the scope and power of our philanthropic wealth is generally underestimated as often this work happens behind the scenes or deep in the weeds of the nonprofit sector. But beyond traditional foundations there’s an even greater and almost entirely untapped source of philanthropic funds we could apply to the problem as well 

Formally established nonprofit foundations represent only a portion of high end philanthropy. During the pandemic the wealth of the 1% in the US has grown by more than $700 billion, probably closer to $1 trillion at this point. Some of those individuals do a good job of donating away sizable portions of their wealth, but the majority do not. Now of course they should have been equitably taxed that increase in wealth and were not, but again a future argument. If the 1% donated just their pandemic riches to the effort, together with foundational wealth, they could fund the entire non-military Federal budget for 4 years. With those same funds we could fund all 50 states for about 18 months. These are big numbers and levels of spending that we traditionally think only the government can provide. But that’s not true anymore and we need a new playbook and a new sense of urgency. 

But it’s also not sustainable to burn foundations out of all of their assets in a few years. So we would need to ultimately refocus on the fact that all of this wealth exists because it escaped proper taxation. Factor in that the 1% was estimated to have assets totaling over $25 trillion in 2016 and we start to see that even a modest investment by those holding an immense share of the wealth could rapidly and sustainably support a wide expansion of the nonprofit scope and workforce. And again, as the government recovers to a point where it is functional again, we start taxing that immense wealth at levels we previously thought nothing of. In the 1940s the top tax rate was 94% and through the 1970s it remained above 70%. Even if we only taxed on wealth above $1 billion, a dizzying amount of money for one person to have access to, we could recover trillions of dollars to help our most vulnerable and systematically oppressed neighbors.

MacKenzie Scott is an author and every bit the philanthropist that her ex-husband Jeff Bezos isn’t. Since the start of the pandemic she’s given away $6 billion dollars. With a B. From what I can tell, it’s out the door, the check has cleared type giving, not made some pledge to give that much over the next 10 years. She signed onto the Giving Pledge within two months of dropping Jeff’s downward pull on her philanthropic inklings. At her current pace, she’d give away her current fortune in about 10 years. Of course she’s also making money, even during the pandemic, so she’s unlikely to actually run out of money, but this is the level of effort we need. We need other individuals like Ms. Scott to collaborate with foundations, fund foundations, and we need foundations to adopt her sense of urgency. The problem is getting worse. Those suffering can’t survive if we aren’t willing to take a big, bold step and hold our societal hand to help them.

As covered previously the Federal Government is extremely unlikely to be able to introduce, much less fund the Works Progress Administration of 2021. It’s not clear that the Federal Government should even try to hire people given all the ways the world has changed since the WPA first came about. But what about at the lower levels, in states, counties, and local government? Here too, funding is an issue, and in many states and counties Republican control is a major obstacle. But one of the biggest changes in the shape, or face, of government services since the original WPA was the rapid increase of nonprofits doing the service delivery, funded by government grants and their own hard won individual donations and foundation grants. So what does that mean in 2021?

What if we took the massive employment push of the original WPA, a workforce that built roads, dams, and airports but also employed musicians, writers, artists, and poets and seed funded it entirely off the government’s books? We need social workers, addiction specialists, lawyers, solar installers, wind turbine maintainers. We need healthcare aides, energy efficiency specialists, health clinic staff, violence interrupters. We need community organizers, child advocates, mental health workers, crisis counselors. We need mentors, after school counselors, early childhood educators, classroom aides. We need botanists, marine biologists, conservationists, environmental engineers. And we still need construction workers, civil engineers, traffic engineers, railway engineers, surveyors. We need writers to tell our stories, poets to make us cry, musicians to lift us up, and artists to capture our essence. Oh, and the one I always forget, we need forest rakers, so many forest rakers.

But who would decide what a community needed? Under our Capitalist trajectory it’s increasingly the mega-corporations, and their owners in 1% that are making these decisions without any input from the community. Look no further than cities and states debasing themselves trying to land Amazon’s HQ2. At the same time, the communities who would have been forced out under eminent domain, would have seen their commutes and neighborhoods forever altered to accommodate tens of thousands of Amazon hires, and would have suffered the costs of the huge tax giveaways through higher taxes on low income families and the inevitable loss of services when those touted increases to tax revenues failed to materialize. Under a Works Philanthropic Administration we would need to ensure the communities would decide, working directly with the nonprofits already in their communities, to help decide which programs, which projects, which roles are most needed, and will do the most public good.  The focus must be on the communities themselves, looking at all questions through an equity lens to ensure that we don’t repeat the past mistakes of grant makers and experts in theory overruling the local knowledge that can only be obtained by working in, living alongside, and witnessing the struggle of those who are there, surviving one day at a time.  

So we let the community decide, and we look to staff from within. Who is already a trusted voice who can do outreach about community health services. Who is the organizer who is already on the ground, doing the work on top of their hours at a low paying job, who would be that much more effective if they could give the community their full attention directing more resources and earning a steady paycheck. Who is the one who sees trouble brewing and steps in-between, allowing cooler heads to prevail and how many more could she train to do the same, if she had a budget and a staff? Remember, these jobs, these projects are from the start designed to address a gap in our current system. We can not be having philanthropists or foundation leaders parachuting in with bags of cash and starting to give orders nor can the checks come with strings attached. We are trying to address the systemic under resourcing of these communities. To address the problems that existed before COVID, which magnified its impacts on our BIPOC neighbors, we need to invest. We need to recognize and empower talent. We need to remove the roadblocks, address the historical inequities, make the connections and then give the communities the control we have so often talked about, but so rarely ceded. 

The NJ Attorney General led a task force to recommend changes to youth justice in NJ.

They held several community listening events throughout the state. Even just the type of event “community listening” speaks volumes. We must ensure that a Works Philanthropic Administration is listening. At one of the events, a 1st grade teacher said it better than I ever could. “We've said what we want for years and decades now. We want what's happening in the city's just next door where this doesn't happen to their kids. If it's lawyers we want those. If it's good teachers, we want those. If it's what's being poured into families, we want that.” These communities want equitable resources, to be deployed by their own neighbors to the most pressing needs they have identified. A process that plays out every day in wealthier, more advantaged, whiter neighborhoods all across this country. A Works Philanthropic Administration would provide those resources.

Millions of us are already employed by existing nonprofits, some in the roles identified above. But we’ll need to hire millions, tens of millions really, more of them, as they’re currently overworked, underpaid, and under appreciated. We need to think bigger. Nonprofit solar is becoming a thing, but nonprofit wind farm construction and operation and nonprofit highway construction seems like we’d be breaking new ground. As local journalism is dying or being sold for scrap by private equity, what if there were well-funded, local, nonprofit news outlets in every state, in every county within the state?

Nonprofits have done a great job for years, building their communities, serving their communities, organizing and protecting their communities. But that is no longer enough. There’s a quote attributed to Desmond Tutu, “There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they're falling in.” Nonprofits have for years, done more with less, advanced their missions, been moved forward by sheer will and the blood, sweat, and tears of their employees. But too often, nonprofits, due to lack of resources, lack of funding, lack of access, are stuck downstream. Helping the formerly incarcerated after they’re released from prison. Helping the homeless after they’re evicted. Spending years advocating for the government to pass common sense legislation that people would help millions, because they don’t have the ability or resources to make those changes without the government’s help.

What does that mean for a Works Philanthropic Administration? It means it’s not enough to pick people up where society and our government spits them out. We need nonprofits to move upstream or we need to create new nonprofits that are built from day one to do the work upstream. We need to keep people out of the river. Hungry children can’t learn. Poverty is criminalized and a huge percentage of our country lives in poverty. Safe housing is a human right, but the “place” for nonprofits is either advocating for protections for renters or scooping people up post eviction. And please don’t take this the wrong way, there is now, and will continue to be a need for all these nonprofits, and all these services, at least for the foreseeable future. It’s not their fault they’re drowning, they’re pulling people from the river. That’s why we need more staff, more resources, more funding, and arguably at least some new nonprofits who can operate upstream while those down river continue to pull people out.

As foundations and those who have literally cashed in on our country, residents, and the benefits of our government and systems, bring their financial resources to bear that money has to go somewhere. Below the big foundations there’s a layer of community foundations, focused on a geographic area, and sometimes quite large themselves. In some areas these community foundations have self-selected their own focus on causes, or communities within the geographic focus because there is more than one foundation operating there. This provides important local context and coordination, helping connect nonprofits with funding, nonprofit and for profit partners, and providing an interface to the various levels of government for local nonprofits that may not have those connections or resources. Working with funding, expertise, and connections from those foundations above, nonprofits would, under this proposal, increase their staff, increase their programming, increase their grants and assistance to individuals. We would build out proper nonprofit workforces, not the bare bones, all hands on deck attitudes toward staffing that limited and unreliable funding have caused in the past. Nonprofits would be funded to hire with the explicit focus of reducing unemployment, by adding staff working to advance their respective missions.

They would be encouraged to launch new programs, ones that they’ve dreamed of having the funding and staff to initiate for years. They could partner with other nonprofits, spinning off expanded programs into entire new organizations. One of the clear lessons of COVID has been that nonprofits have seen an unheard of increase in requests for their services. Until larger governmental and societal changes can catch up we need to fund and grow the nonprofit sector to cover the gap. Some of these changes will be temporary like increases in rent subsidies to slow a rising flood of evictions. But more importantly this funding will allow for nonprofits to move upstream and that becomes a permanent change.

Before COVID, America was a uniquely failing country. We had allowed 1% of our country to acquire and grow their wealth to unimaginable levels while 40% of the country couldn’t handle an unexpected $400 bill. We were unique among most of our peers in our allergy to providing a real social safety net attacking both the funding and social acceptability of such programs.

COVID presented a unique set of challenges worldwide but we managed to fail our neighbors in a uniquely American way.

As much as we like to pretend we don’t, we have the resources to ensure the well being of all of our neighbors. While we can’t take the most logical and tested approach of the government providing for its residents, we have a huge untapped pool of funding and with the economic downturn a huge untapped workforce. We just have to bring the two together. This will help with both the initial wave of increased funding necessary to stabilize things and the ongoing increased funding levels necessary to bridge to a period in our country where we accept that we can no longer treat our neighbors this way. Starting with ultra wealthy who’s riches have grown since the start of the pandemic we can make connections with established foundations.

Those foundations already have connections to nonprofits and to community foundations who have focused on causes and geographic areas and can help target organizations most prepared to expand. The nonprofits provide the key layer, as they are both the hiring engine and the service provider to those affected by the pandemic and economic disaster but who cannot or do not want to be hired by the nonprofits.

When our society and by extension our government has realized that certain things like food, housing, education, and healthcare are human rights these philanthropic endeavors can shift to government funding, downsize, or refocus their efforts. The original WPA had it’s employment gains overtaken by the nearly full employment of the war effort. However there’s an argument to be made that it could and should have remained in place to allow for continuing employment and infrastructure work after the war. The original goal had been to ensure there was a societal response to chronic long term unemployment and the war eliminated that problem. But after the war there was still a need for roads, trains, and national parks and our current crumbling infrastructure highlights the short sightedness of building things and then destroying the programs that built them. 

The new WPA should learn from this mistake and be designed to live on. Rather than being funded entirely by the good will of a few individuals and foundations, we would look to transfer that funding back to the government, who would have started equitably taxing those individuals to ensure those basic human rights for all its residents. This would have been accomplished largely by an influx of new politicians at the federal level made possible by the support of nonprofits. New politicians who had affordable childcare available to them for the first time. Those who couldn’t run previously because they couldn’t afford to take time away from their hourly pay job. A new type of politician whose wages paid by their nonprofit provided them not only enough to scrape by on the edge of poverty, but to actually save and later fund their political run. These politicians will have grown up in and govern a world where they have directly benefited from our newly built, philanthropically seed funded, government operated, social safety net. Unlike the current generation of federal politicians they won’t have grown up benefiting from their white skin and generational wealth and that will be the enduring change of this program.

We could take this further, beginning to actually restructure the government to better support and encourage the philanthropies. Without this step it’s likely we’re just masking the problems for another few years, rather than restructuring our society and government to fundamentally value all of our neighbors. Making the head of the Works Philanthropic Administration a cabinet position, moving the nonprofit departments of the IRS under the new organization, and beginning to think of the nonprofit sector as a peer to government, not subservient. This would somewhat align with the international Non-Governmental Organizations model where nonprofits are operating in spaces instead of governments or because the government in those places lack the functionality or resources to provide services that one would typically expect from a government. 

With higher income tax rates and a wealth tax, we would create incentives to act philanthropically by allowing donors to retain a measure of control of their investment. Once taxed, individuals have very little control over how their money is invested by the government. But if that same money is donated, the mission of the organizations invested in, the geography of where those organizations do their work allows the donor to have some sense of how their money will be spent. If you could no longer just horde all of your money over $1 billion dollars, the decision point would become to donate, or give it up via taxation. There would have to be limits, the 5% spend down of foundations would have to be raised. We wouldn’t want to encourage people to just park their money in nonprofits that weren’t actually spending, hiring, doing the work.  But with an enforcement arm that is dedicated to the nonprofit space, these things would be easier to regulate, monitor, and provide guidance about. 

With the better integration of government and nonprofits under a single cabinet position we could see better collaboration and coordination. We could right-size nonprofit workforces, spread best practices, and help ensure that we’re continuing to cover the gaps in government programs with nonprofit resources. This would also allow a continuing focus on moving those resources upstream, addressing conditions in our communities head on, before they can cause problems that would have traditionally tied up philanthropic resources later in the cycle. As the Works Progress Administration and COVID have demonstrated, addressing the conditions upstream that allow individual problems to manifest minimizes the damage to our communities and is always more efficient than pulling people out of the river.

You might agree with all of this, some of this, or you might hate it. But one thing is clear. If we want our neighbors’ 2021 to be any different from 2020, or even 2019, billionaires and foundations need to step up and follow MacKenzie Scott’s lead.

Sources

U.S. Federal Budget Breakdown

The FY 2022 federal budget proposal was over $6 trillion, with an estimated revenue of about $4.2 trillion, creating a deficit worth about $1.9 trillion.

Current Federal Mandatory Spending

Mandatory spending is estimated to be $2.966 trillion for fiscal year 2021. It includes Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other needs-based programs.

Jobless Hope: How The Works Progress Administration Worked In The 1930s : NPR

Few episodes in American government have left as permanent an imprint on the national memory. And perhaps none has left so much of a visible legacy on the American landscape.

Works Progress Administration - Wikipedia

Historical US Unemployment Rate by Year

The unemployment rate has fluctuated greatly since 1929. Learn how GDP, inflation, economic events, and other policies have historically impacted unemployment.

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2019/06/25/six-facts-about-wealth-in-the-united-states/

https://files.taxfoundation.org/legacy/docs/fed_individual_rate_history_nominal.pdf