Vera Wants the Money Without the Accountability
When an advocacy network calls oversight “persecution,” look at what it is protecting.
Vera.org is sounding the alarm again. This time the complaint is that a proposed federal grantmaking rule would require discretionary grants to demonstrably advance the President’s policy priorities and would give federal agencies greater authority to impose conditions on, or terminate, awards that no longer serve their purpose. Vera presents this as a threat to public safety. I see something Vera does not appear interested in discussing: accountability for how more than $1 trillion in federal grants is awarded and spent.
The federal government is not a charitable foundation, and federal grant money does not belong to the organizations receiving it. It belongs to the American taxpayer. An organization is not entitled to continued funding simply because it previously received an award, hired employees, developed partnerships, or built programs around the expectation that Washington would keep sending money. A grant must serve a legitimate public purpose, produce measurable results, and remain consistent with the policies of the elected administration responsible for managing the executive branch.
Vera objects to political appointees having greater control over discretionary grants, but elections have consequences. Every administration establishes priorities and directs discretionary spending toward them. Vera did not object to federal power when that power funded programs aligned with its own agenda. The objection began when a new administration decided that those programs should face closer scrutiny or no longer reflected federal priorities.
Vera’s strongest-sounding argument is that the rule’s standards are undefined. It points to language allowing termination when a grant fails to “effectuate program goals” or when a grantee’s conduct might “damage the reputation” of the government, and it insists this vagueness is the whole danger. There is a fair point buried in there, and I will concede it plainly: a “reputation” standard written without limits is poor drafting and ought to be tightened before the rule is finalized. But the broader complaint proves too much. Discretion has always lived at the center of discretionary grantmaking. Federal agencies have long held authority to attach conditions, monitor performance, and terminate awards that no longer serve the government’s interest. Vera did not describe that discretion as an abuse of power when it worked in Vera’s favor. A standard is not illegitimate merely because it can be applied by an administration Vera did not want to win.
That distinction matters because Vera is not a neutral observer in this debate. It is an advocacy organization that has spent years promoting reduced incarceration, alternatives to traditional prosecution, the elimination of surety bail, and taxpayer-funded pretrial systems. Vera routinely describes these policies as “evidence-based,” often relying upon research produced within the same network of organizations, foundations, consultants, and reform advocates. One organization funds the program, another helps operate it, a third evaluates it, and the results are then cited throughout the network as independent proof of success. That is not transparent, independent evaluation. It is a closed loop wearing the costume of science.
This is why Vera’s appeal to the crime decline should be read carefully. Vera credits nonprofit programs like the ones it funds for recent drops in serious crime, citing outside studies about community organizations in general. But a study finding that neighborhoods with nonprofits fare better does not establish that these particular federally funded grants, run by these particular recipients, produced that result. Vera moves from a general correlation to a specific claim about its own funding and hopes the reader will not notice the leap. The programs may be worthy. That is a separate question from whether they can prove they caused what Vera credits them with.
Vera points to the cancellation of roughly $500 million in Department of Justice grants awarded to 221 organizations, including $5 million previously awarded to Vera, as evidence that communities are being harmed. It lists sympathetic programs involving domestic violence survivors, addiction treatment, gun violence, child protection, and crisis response. Those programs deserve individual consideration, but placing every grant beneath the broad banner of “community safety” does not establish that every recipient produced results or that every funded activity should continue indefinitely. The name of a program is not evidence of its effectiveness. Neither is the size of its network.
The proper questions are straightforward. What did the program promise? What measurable results did it produce? How much did each result cost? Was the work independently evaluated? Were failures, repeat offenses, victim outcomes, court compliance, and unintended consequences fully reported? Vera’s article does not answer those questions. Instead, it assumes that losing federal money is itself proof that public safety has been damaged. That conclusion protects the grant recipient. It does not protect the taxpayer.
Consider the example Vera offers as its cautionary tale. It describes an intermediary that received federal money and passed it down to smaller community partners, and it warns that when the intermediary lost its grant, the partners lost their funding too and the organization eventually closed. Vera intends this as proof of the rule’s cruelty. It is closer to a confession. A funding structure in which one canceled grant collapses an entire chain of dependent organizations is not a model of resilient public safety. It is a description of a network so dependent on federal money that it cannot survive a single budget decision. Vera calls that fragility a reason to keep the money flowing. A taxpayer might reasonably call it a reason to ask why programs serving genuine needs were left so wholly dependent on a single federal grant that one budget decision could end them.
But the heart of Vera’s article is not really about grant standards at all. It is an attempt to fuse a grants-management rule with a set of separate law enforcement actions and present the whole package as a campaign of political persecution. In the span of a few paragraphs, Vera moves from the OMB rule to a memo cataloguing grants, to a fraud indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center, to a Department of Justice investigation of George Soros and his foundations, to a presidential memorandum on political violence. Vera offers these as a pattern, evidence of a broader intent. Even taken that way, they do not bear on the question the rule actually raises. An indictment is not a canceled grant. An investigation is not a funding condition. A rule governing how discretionary grants are awarded does not become persecution because prosecutors, in separate matters, have brought a fraud case or opened an investigation. Vera bundles them together because the grants rule, standing on its own, is simply a demand for accountability that is difficult to argue against. The persecution narrative requires the other material to survive. Strip those separate enforcement actions out of the article, and what remains is an advocacy group objecting to the possibility that its funding might be reviewed. That is the argument on its actual merits, and it is a far weaker one.
There is also a plain contradiction in Vera’s position. It insists that federal officials should not use discretionary grants to advance the elected President’s policies, yet Vera has spent decades using government grants to advance its own policy agenda. Federal funding has helped build an extensive criminal justice reform network that influences local governments, prosecutors, courts, correctional systems, and public debate. When public money finances policy advocacy, technical assistance, research, and subgrants within a single ideological network, oversight is not political persecution. It is a basic responsibility of government.
Some federally funded programs undoubtedly perform valuable work and should be preserved. Others may need reform, closer monitoring, or termination. Those decisions should rest on independently verified performance — not institutional reputation, political connections, carefully selected statistics, or the argument that a recipient has become too dependent on federal money to lose it.
In the end, Vera’s article is less about public safety than about control over public funding. Vera was comfortable with federal discretion when that discretion financed its preferred policies. Now that the priorities have changed, the same authority is described as dangerous and illegitimate, and unrelated prosecutions are folded in to make routine oversight look like a purge. The American taxpayer deserves a better standard than that. Federal grants should fund measurable public safety results. They should not sustain an advocacy network simply because that network has learned to call everything it does “community safety” — and to call every question about the money an act of war.
Sam Feineh
