Editor’s Note: This article is part of the DOGE Files, a series of investigations into federal grants to nonprofits that Capital Research Center is conducting. We are pleased the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and others are exploring the vast forest of nonprofits trying to influence the U.S. government—an area that Capital Research Center has spent years mapping.
This article explores grants made by the Department of Defense.
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is an entity established within the Executive Office of the President and publicly associated with entrepreneur Elon Musk, which is focused on (among other things) government spending and waste. That is a laudable objective. One area in which the federal government spends a tremendous amount of money is grants to nonprofits. An analysis of these grants from USASpending.gov provides examples of some of the things that DOGE may wish to examine.
While government efficiency should hopefully be a bipartisan aim, DOGE is specifically associated with the second Trump Administration. Accordingly—and for both recentness and simplicity—this analysis focuses primarily on grants with performance periods that began during the Biden Administration. It pays particular attention to grants that conservative Americans might find ideologically objectionable, as well as grants with questionable usefulness or effectiveness. The amounts given refer to the total “obligated amount” according to USASpending.gov, which does not necessarily correspond to the total “outlayed amount” at any given time.
The following are some examples of federal grants made to nonprofits by the U.S. Department of Defense.
DOGE and Defense
“Efficiency” can mean several different things in the DOGE context, and while there are doubtless major opportunities to improve it at the Department of Defense, relatively few of them would seem to involve grants to nonprofits.
Consider the following: According to USASpending (as of early March 2025), the department awarded approximately $1.81 trillion from FY2021 through FY2025, primarily across more than 16 million different contracts and 37,427 different grants. Restricting this just to recipients classified in the database as nonprofits yielded $60.55 billion. Further restricting this just to grants brought the total down to $1.88 billion. This means that barely 0.1 percent of all the department’s awards (as reported on USASpending) over those fiscal years were in the form of grants made to nonprofits. If this data is limited still further to only new awards made from FY2021 through FY2025, nonprofits received just 592 grants worth about $562.7 million total.
Moreover, many of these grants support medical research and related work, which is not a particularly controversial field. Still, DOGE should examine it for waste like everything else. A large proportion of the department’s grantmaking to nonprofits in recent years has gone to a single 501(c)(3) charity called the Henry M. Jackson Foundation for the Advancement of Military Medicine. Its mission is to “improve health diagnostics, treatment, delivery, and disease prevention for veterans, active duty military and their families, and civilians.” This is certainly a worthy objective, and the group receives hundreds of millions from the Department of Defense annually. It can be difficult or impossible for an outside observer to accurately assess the value of many of these grants—DOGE is far better positioned to do this internally—but some grant descriptions raise eyebrows. For instance, in late 2024 the department awarded the foundation what appear to be two separate awards worth a combined $3.7 million to study deployment-related diarrhea.
HIV/AIDS Prevention Program
One notable program through which the Department of Defense makes grants to nonprofits is the HIV/AIDS Prevention Program. The program’s objective is “to train and assist selected foreign militaries in establishing and implementing HIV/AIDS prevention, care, and treatment programs for their military personnel and dependents.”
Some nonprofits have received significant sums through this program. A 501(c)(3) charity called Jhpiego, which is affiliated with Johns Hopkins University, has been awarded millions annually, including $15.42 million in FY2023 and $11.37 million in FY2024. In 2023, Jhpiego reported total revenues of $421.2 million, approximately 69 percent of which came from government grants. Population Services International, another 501(c)(3) that has also been awarded millions under the program, reported $349.6 million in total revenues in 2023, over 62 percent of which was from government sources. Separately—but perhaps notably for conservatives—Population Services International lists “safe abortion” as one of its eight operational focus areas.
Without minimizing the deleterious impacts of HIV/AIDS in developing countries or the lifesaving importance of countermeasures, would ordinary Americans see a compelling national defense rationale for spending millions to mitigate the disease’s effects upon foreign militaries? Ceradis, a foreign nongovernmental organization, was awarded $756,000 for “strengthening the resilience of the armed forces of Benin (FAB) to HIV AIDS,” but in 2020 Benin had only about 12,000 personnel serving in its military, alongside a nationwide estimated prevalence of HIV/AIDS among adults aged 15 to 49 of 0.7 percent. Allowing for some wiggle room—including that HIV infection rates could be modestly higher in the armed forces—this crudely works out to about 84 infected Beninese servicemembers total, or about $9,000 in U.S. federal grant money each.
Population Services International was awarded $2.1 million under the program for the benefit of the Lesotho Defense Forces, which number just 2,000. While Lesotho suffers one of the world’s highest rates of HIV infection, that comes out to over $1,000 per soldier, HIV positive or not. A California nonprofit called Community Development International Alliance was awarded over $6.3 million for “HIV prevention in the Angola military,” a country where HIV prevalence among adults age 15 to 49 is estimated to be 1.5 percent. In 2022 and 2023, the only two years for which the Community Development International Alliance has reported its financials, 100 percent of its revenue came from government grants.
A question to consider: After years of U.S. assistance, are the governments of these countries able to take responsibility for HIV mitigation within their own armed forces? If not, perhaps the AIDS Healthcare Foundation (which already operates substantial programs in Sub-Saharan Africa) could pick up the tab with some of the tens of millions it has controversially spent pushing rent control ballot measures in California.
Thoughts and Questions
As with every branch of the federal government, DOGE should scour the Department of Defense for ways to reduce waste and improve efficiency. Compared with other departments such as HUD or Education, grants to ideologically oriented activist groups may not factor meaningfully into this process. But the department’s contracting with nonprofits would seem ripe for internal DOGE scrutiny, if for no other reason than that the numbers are astronomical. Some individual multiyear contracts are worth hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars. Are there ways to save money there?
A related issue that can be illustrated through the Department of Defense but is by no means unique to the department is the payment of seven-figure executive salaries at nonprofits that are almost entirely funded by the government. For example, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit called the MITRE Corporation brought in over $2.3 billion total revenue in 2023, almost all from government sources (including the Department of Defense). That same year, it paid its president and CEO over $3 million. The Battelle Memorial Institute, another 501(c)(3) that in 2023 received almost 89 percent of its $12.4 billion revenue from government sources, paid its president and CEO over $4.9 million. On the one hand, these are gigantic organizations with equally gigantic management responsibilities, and greater responsibility rightly brings with it greater compensation. On the other hand, they are also tax-exempt nonprofits that operate almost entirely on the public dime. Would the ordinary American taxpayer see such salaries as reasonable?
