Hundreds of millions of taxpayer money is being funneled to non-profits that are founded and operated for certain racial, ethnic, and religious groups. Many of these non-profits have little to show for the money they are given by taxpayers, like the Indo-American Center that was featured in this article. Others receive money for infrastructure improvements which makes no sense since they are non-profits, formed to ostensibly exist on their own. In many cases the same NGO is receiving millions of dollars through multiple grants that are appropriated on just as many different page numbers in the budget. There is no way that any legislator has looked at a spreadsheet of all the grants organized by entity prior to voting on the budget.
So we did their work for them for the FY 2025 budget – after it was passed. In this article, we separated all the easily identifiable grants going to racial, ethnic, or religious non-profits. We found over $237 million dollars worth of grants.
Here’s just an A-B-C sample of some of the grants we found going to strictly racial, ethnic, or religious organizations.
There is definitely more money going to non-profits than what we found in plain text in the budget, however. For example, the state has at least two different Security Grants for non-profits. According to GATA, the Illinois Non-Profit Security Grant has active awards of over $25 million to various non-profits for security. The Non-Profit Security Grant is a different grant and has allocated over $94 million to non-profits. Some entities are visible in the FY 2025 budget as the awarded money was allocated in other budget years.
Part of the reason to do this DOGE IL project is to also illustrate the lack of transparency in the budget. Here is a snapshot of the grants going to the Puerto Rican Cultural Center. Each of the grants is on a different line in the budget. Again, there is no legislator that knows how much these racial, ethnic, and religious organizations are getting or what the money is awarded for.
Illinois is broke, we can’t afford to fund other people’s cultural events.
The non-profit grants we pulled for our information are not money going to hospitals. We did not include grants going to non-profits that provide child care, preschool, and work with the developmentally disabled. Those grant recipients will be underneath bigger spending programs run by Departments of Healthcare and Family Services, Human Services or Education.