11 February 2025
by Sergei Davidis
Source: Facebook
Following the USAID freeze, there’s a lot of rhetoric on social media premised on the idea that foreign grants are a bad thing.
A strange stance, if not absurd, no matter how you cut it.
There’s no reason to claim that grant recipients are in some particular way dependent on those who give the grant.
As with conversations about responsibility, here we have to juggle different meanings: this time of the word “depend.”
Our lives depend on a tremendous number of people, from the janitors in our apartment buildings to the deputies in parliament, from the doctors at the hospitals to our bosses at work. Dependence in this sense implies that we are affected by what someone does or doesn’t do.
But it would never cross anyone’s mind that our social positions and views, as well as our actions to realize them, are dictated by the instructions and wills of the people mentioned above.
It has been explained repeatedly to those unfamiliar with the grant funding system that it’s not the grant giver who dictates what the grant recipient should do; rather, the prospective grant recipient seeks support from grant givers who are willing to support their work.
This does not make a grant recipient the agent of a grant giver. Their interests and goals are aligned. And there’s nothing strange about, say, the fact that supporting human rights and democratic institutions serves the interests of both Russians as well as the American government.
You’d be more likely to find a willingness to compromise on values and act purely for money, rather than the public good, in someone who sells their services on the market (such as a political strategist or a consultant).
What’s more, it’s particularly strange to contrast commercial and non-profit activities and demand self-financing from the latter. There are many things in the world that are necessary and important, but not self-financing. In a democracy, these are largely — although not entirely — financed by the state. In a dictatorship, socially beneficial efforts that the government views as a threat are not only denied funding — the government obstructs public funding for them as well. In such situations, foreign funding acts as a natural substitute for government and, to some extent, public funding.
Moreover, from a purely economic standpoint, you could say that society gains an additional benefit, since they’re not the ones funding these useful efforts, but an external party.
Of course, funding from outside the market comes at a cost, and it is potentially less effective than market-based funding. But the market allocates funds for many useless or sometimes even harmful things, from fortune tellers to homeopaths. And understanding the disadvantages of distributing money outside the market makes it possible to largely offset them through transparent procedures and formalized criteria. That’s essentially how it works.
Nevertheless, errors in bureaucratic non-market systems do accumulate, especially in organizations that distribute as much money as USAID has. Audits and performance evaluations are therefore entirely reasonable. The way it was carried out is regrettable, but that’s secondary. I think that common sense will win out in the end.
And while we’re at it, let me address the much-discussed proposal made by a prominent lawyer that all beneficiaries of the grant system should retrain, if not as building managers, then as construction workers. The proposal seems reasonable enough: from an economic standpoint, it makes much more sense to orient your life strategy around the market, not around the ever-changing world of grants. But at the same time, people seem to choose the non-profit sector primarily because of their values and a desire to put them into practice, not because of the economy. Of course activism isn’t a profession, but there are many fields and activities that demand expertise and are difficult to fit into non-working hours or engage in without funding.
One can only applaud the wise choice of a lawyer who has been deprived of the opportunity to pursue their passion, in which they have achieved great success. However, this choice cannot be seen as universally applicable.
Translated by Nina dePalma
