My argument that the govt tracks itself isn’t really based on expenses, though, it’s based on the reports themselves. The avg quality of these reports is just so much higher than those of private sector reports. So it isn’t just a matter of overpaying.

That leaves the question of whether the govt is producing these nice reports and ignoring them. I don’t know much about USAID, but I do think the CCDP report I linked to is an excellent example of a project that made sense in theory and was rigorously evaluated and then dropped - if that same project had been done by a private charity with good fundraisers, nothing would have stopped it from lasting 100 years and becoming one of the largest and most reputable charities in the nation. Maybe even being featured as a high-impact nonprofit someday.

Even if the reports are ignored, at least the govt is putting itself in position to be examined and criticized if and when people start to care. More than foundations can say.

What it comes down to for me is that the govt is 100x less accountable than a private company subject to competition on results … and 100x more accountable than any private foundation. If Americans trust private foundations more, I think they’re wrong (though right to trust the private sector more in some other areas).

I advocate more govt aid, consequences for private philanthropy be damned, until/unless private philanthropy demonstrates some reason to believe it is reliably better than govt.

Some thoughts:
1) Holden presumes that the government hires better consultants to do more work than private philanthropy does. In my experience, its the exact same consultants being hired by both groups. The government just pays more for the same work. Therefore we were not making the lower overhead argument, but the “government routinely overpays” argument, also known as the “$527 hammer” argument.

2) Of course, anyone who has done contract work for the government knows that the reason they pay more is that they have to — working for the government requires a huge amount of pointless record keeping and paper shuffling. Doing more work is not necessarily getting more done.

3) My experience is all in international aid work, so I can’t speak to domestic issues. In the international aid area, the government is mostly known for doing lots of studies and then not doing anything about the results. Essentially they “learn” from their mistakes by doing thorough evaluations, then repeat the same mistakes over and over. There’s plenty of evidence of this in books as varied as “Inside Foreign Aid” published in the 1970’s to “The White Man’s Burden” published last year.

4) None of this is to claim that private philanthropy is necessarily any better. I’m on record as saying “Private philanthropy could go toe to toe with foreign aid in a heavyweight waste and ineffectiveness bout”. As was said in the post, the comparison is certainly worth considering.

5) The main points of the post were a) that it’s not clear whether one is better than the other if you look at the whole pie (e.g. all of private philanthropy vs. all of federal spending) and b) Americans have historically trusted private individuals more than the government.