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Notes -
RIGHT?
I feel like when I was younger, if you were part of an "NGO" the implication was that you were privately funded but also worked in tandem with governments to achieve generally important goals. Like the Red Cross, or Amnesty International, the Government recognizes they provide important services that supplement the government's own capabilities and thus endorses but does not fund their operatons. Red Cross, at least still claims to meet this definition closely. This was helpful to make sure there is always excess capacity for emergencies, and possibly to avoid international disputes if 'official' government actors were to get involved in a space.
NOW, its basically tacitly accepted that a private organization can become an arm of the state but because of the label we don't expect it to be held to account by the voters, and also if the owners/operators become fabulously wealthy it doesn't quite register as "abuse of taxpayer funds" because in theory these NGOs can also take private money too.
And because the Constitution doesn't really create any strict rules on how such orgs can interface with the state the rules are made up and the funding can be tucked away in various large omnibus bills where nobody technically has to answer for or justify the spending.
On the flip side, as we've seen, that makes it fairly trivial to de fund them if the current President (with a friendly congress) turns a serious eye on them.
And yeah, I agree its a deliberate equivocation that lets them straddle the "private vs. public" divide without anybody thinking too much about how much that distinction matters.
There's plenty of other examples of grinding down the private/public distinction to a sheer fiction (revolving doors between large corpos and regulatory agencies, defense contracting, whatever Hunter Biden was doing) but the term "NGO" is the one that makes it a blatant mockery on its face.
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