Full disclosure off the top: I was a grant maker for more than 20 years, first as a member of the California Arts Council, and then for 17 years as a member of the Children and Families Commission of Orange County, California.
The California Arts Council dealt in relatively small amounts of funds appropriated by the state legislature. It was a mini-National Endowment for the Arts.
By contrast, Orange County’s "Prop 10" Commission, as it was originally known, distributed tens of millions of dollars of cigarette tax revenue annually to grantees dedicated in some way to the mission, dictated by the language of the voter-approved initiative, of "making children 0-5 and their families healthy and ready to learn" by the time they began kindergarten.
DOGE UNCOVERS OVER 4M GOVERNMENT CREDIT CARDS RESPONSIBLE FOR 90M TRANSACTIONS
Proposition 10 was passed by the voters of California in 1998. The brainchild of actor Rob Reiner and former Republican Rep. Michael Huffington, Prop 10 laid a 50-cent tax on every pack of cigarettes. The money raised thereby was divided 20% to the state’s Prop 10 Commission, and 80% to the 58 county commissions. The 80% was divided up on a per capita basis, so Los Angeles, of course, got the most, but Orange County got a large chunk every year.
Each county commission had to have a majority of its members from the private sector. I put up my hand to be one of the five private sector commissioners on our commission of nine because that was real money going out the door and I wanted a say in how it would be spent.
The "job" required two meetings a month at $100 a meeting with no benefits or pension. (I may be among the very few people subject to the California CAIR Political Practices Act for more than two decades who did not accrue a pension and who lost money on every meeting.) There was a lot of homework, but the small staff was made up of superb professionals, and it was public service of the old school sort.
I think Orange County’s commission, at least, did good work — blocking and tackling public health stuff, paying for school nurses for example, providing support for new mothers of limited means, etc. We audited ourselves and, 10 years in, brought in Bainbridge Strategic Consulting to survey our past work and our plans going forward and to suggest greater efficiencies. The staff was small and superb. We employed contractors whenever we could. We kept track of the pennies.
I’d gladly have stayed on the commission for as long as I could do the math, but I left California for Virginia in 2016 and, of course, resigned. I keep an eye on it from afar. It is still doing good work, because it was built to resist the three great temptations of grant makers.
The first temptation is to never examine the efficacy of a grant once it is made. If outcomes are not tracked and performances cannot be measured, it’s a good bet they aren’t worth reaching for. Bainbridge provided the outside eyes, but from day one the emphasis was on data-based outcomes. If a program didn’t "work," it went away. The first temptation of a grant maker is to never look at what the results of previous expenditures were. If DOGE is doing at least that, good.
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The second temptation is to give money to your friends. We never got close to that line because the laws in California are very strict about self-dealing, and the nine members never included any shy people. More important by far: All grants were awarded in public meetings. All were explained in the materials provided to the public. Grant making ought never to be done in half-light, much less in the dark.
DOGE should be asking who made decisions to award money and who was watching. The scandal at the EPA seems to be the opposite approach. If you haven’t seen it, watch Administrator Lee Zeldin’s "throwing gold bars off the Titanic" video. Rushing $20 billion out the door after an election is a recipe for airmailing money to friends.
Finally, and most obviously, the last temptation of a grant maker is self-enrichment. It should go without saying that a grant maker should never, ever give money to themselves or a family member or to an organization at which they expect to work. If DOGE finds that federal grants went out the door to recipients where the grant maker ended up working … then DOGE should call Attorney General Pam Bondi. That’s not "waste, fraud and abuse." That’s probably a crime.
The end results of DOGE are hard to predict but the bright light it is shining or promises to shine on grant making and other discretionary funding by federal agencies is much needed. Scrutiny of recipients and of rules for eligibility to assure they are clearly understood, easily explained to applicants and transparently made, is long overdue. There are no "small grants." Every grant made to "A" is a grant not made to "B." And every grant that sounds outrageous almost certainly is.
Dig deep DOGE folk. The good grant makers will have nothing to fear or hide.
Hugh Hewitt is host of "The Hugh Hewitt Show," heard weekday mornings 6am to 9am ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh wakes up America on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcast, and this column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/ TV show today.
