The Republicans Who Enable Socialists
GOP lawmakers can’t agree on spending reform, so they keep funding the tax-eating nonprofits.
House Republicans left for summer recess on Thursday after passing a budget bill with as much substance as a beach novel. The tenuous GOP majority looks to have given up on serious spending and tax reforms this year.
Many Republicans seem content serving as tax collectors for Democrats’ welfare state and the bureaucrats whose jobs depend on it. They might consider that the rise of the socialist left coincided with an eruption in federal spending that began during the pandemic, with gobs of money flowing to state and local governments and left-wing nonprofits.
California is the biggest beneficiary of the lava of largess. Since 2020, federal Medicaid payments to the state have doubled to $134.5 billion, more than the general fund of any other state. The state also received hundreds of billions of federal Covid dollars in government aid, rental assistance, public transportation and more.
Between January 2020 and December 2025, California added 249,920 establishments and 580,862 jobs in healthcare and social assistance, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. These industries accounted for 98% of the state’s private job growth during that period. The state’s biggest source of new jobs has been “individual and family services”—i.e., social work.
California has 12% of the U.S. population, 62% of its individual- and family-service establishments and 28% of the sector’s employment. Many of these entities are nonprofits run by progressives with advanced degrees in fields like urban planning, social work and public policy.
Progressive policies create social and economic dysfunctions—e.g., housing shortages and homelessness. Nonprofits lobby for taxpayer money to solve problems, only to exacerbate them instead. Rinse and repeat.
A report last week found that the number of people living on Los Angeles streets increased 7.9% compared with last year. Mayor Karen Bass (master’s in social work, University of Southern California) blamed President Trump and “funding cuts at the federal and state levels.”
“The Trump Administration has driven up the cost of gas, groceries, and rent—pushing more families to the edge—and slashed critical safety net funding,” she wrote. No mention that L.A. has been the country’s biggest beneficiary of federal money for homelessness. Or that 40% of the vagrants the city has put up in temporary housing wind up back on the streets, often because of drug addictions.
In June, the Housing and Urban Development Department cut off federal funding for L.A.’s homeless agency, citing fraud and flagrant mismanagement. A federal court has temporarily blocked the funding cut. Audits by the county auditor-controller, city controller and an outside consulting firm found the agency wasn’t tracking how money was spent or whether housing providers complied with government contracts.
HUD noted that while federal funding for Los Angeles had increased 178% since 2013, homelessness in the city has doubled, free housing has more than tripled, and “HUD Continuum of Care funding per homeless person in LA has increased 39%.”
Ms. Bass at least acknowledged last week that her city’s homeless agency is “a broken system.” “The City must build something better—results-driven, transparent, and centered around the people we’re trying to help, not the bureaucracy,” she wrote. That was a dig at her Democratic Socialists of America opponent in November, Nithya Raman.
Ms. Raman, who leads the City Council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee, has championed policies to keep people on the streets. She opposes clearing encampments and backs programs in which government-funded nonprofits distribute sterile syringes and crack pipes to homeless addicts.
Before joining the council in 2020, Ms. Raman (master’s in urban planning, MIT) founded a nonprofit that caters to these people on the streets. Solving the homeless problem would mean less money for it. Yet Republicans in Congress are enabling the left’s spending addiction and waste of taxpayer dollars.
They could implement Medicaid block grants that end the all-you-can-spend federal Medicaid buffet. Or impose sobriety and work requirements for housing providers that receive federal dollars. Or end the student-loan forgiveness program that discharges debt for grads who work for government or nonprofits if they make de minimis payments (as little as $10 a month) for 10 years.
Loan forgiveness merely encourages progressives to pursue extravagant graduate degrees—many costing upward of $200,000—and go to work in nonprofits. A Congressional Budget Office report last week projected that the feds will write off between 24 and 34 cents of each dollar in debt for graduate borrowers who enroll in income-based repayment programs.
The GOP’s main “achievement” this year is a housing bill shepherded by Sen. Elizabeth Warren that creates a panoply of grant programs to funnel ever more taxpayer money to local governments and nonprofits. That means more power and employment for progressives like Ms. Raman and New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s housing czar, Cea Weaver (master’s in urban planning, New York University).
Republicans’ complaints about socialism will ring hollow as long as they persist in subsidizing them.
