The Indicator from Planet Money - How far can philanthropy go to fill government gaps?

Episode Date: January 12, 2026

While Americans are known for their generosity, the U.S. government, increasingly, is not. The Trump administration’s cuts to SNAP benefits among other aid programs have forced states, foundations and donors to fill the gaps. But can they? On today’s show, the limits of philanthropic efforts to supplant federal aid. Related episodes: Why tech bros are trying to give away all their money (kind of) For sponsor-free episodes of The Indicator from Planet Money, subscribe to Planet Money+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Fact-checking by Sierra Juarez. Music by Drop Electric. Find us: TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Newsletter.  See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

NPR. This is the indicator from Planet Money. I'm Waylon Wong. And I'm Stephen Besaha here with two facts. The first is that Americans are some of the most generous givers in the world. In fact, Americans give even more than Canadians and about seven times as much as some Europeans, according to Philanthropy Roundtable. The other fact is that the American government has become less generous, at least when it comes to funding social safety net programs like food assistance. These two facts do fit in with the American concept of less government, more private good.

And given all that, it seems reasonable to imagine American philanthropy stepping in where the U.S. government is stepping out. The big problem with that is that the math doesn't work. On today's show, why charity can't fill the hole left by government cuts and why some philanthropists say doing that can be the wrong way to spend those dollars. To check in on the state of U.S. charities, we called up Kyle Caldwell. Kyle heads up a group that represents philanthropic giants in Michigan, like the Kresge Foundation, along with smaller foundations. Well, change in chaos is really the theme that we're having to sort of manage in philanthropy. He's talking about all the change and chaos caused by the federal funding cuts last year under the Trump administration. And I think that creates for us a real challenge because philanthropy cannot step into the breach.

To explain what he means by this, he pointed to a moment in Michigan when foundations did try to step in. This was during the government shutdown that started in October. The Trump administration said because of that, it would not be sending out funding for SNAP in November. Snap helps families pay for groceries, including around 1.4 million residents in Michigan. This caused a big concern that some families would go hungry. So Michigan turned to philanthropy. And the person who sent out the emergency signal was Dana Lanane. She's with the governor's office as the foundation liaison.

So in a way, it sounds like you're the, the, the, the, the, the, glue that makes the private and the public sides work well together. I like that. I'm going to borrow that. Yes. Dana said 160 foundations answered that call and all gone on a Zoom to figure out what to do. What does a Zoom room with 160 philanthropic groups look like? You know, Zoom, you know, the pages and pages. Well, certainly not everyone is introducing themselves. Yeah, you're not doing the icebreakers at that point.

No, we're not doing the icebreakers. This ended up being multiple calls in conversations, like how to even get the money out. They realized one group was already using an app to track about half of the Michiganders receive SNAP, and they already had a system set up to send out aid. We kind of said, whoa, this is huge. This is a quick turnkey solution where we know we can serve at least almost half of Michigan SNAP beneficiaries. Then it came down to convincing the foundations to send over the cash to cover those lost benefits. It was around just shy of $2 million, which is a lot. But when you have 160 funders

on the call, you can quickly mobilize and say, okay, who's going to do this? So they got the money and started sending it out. More than 2,000 families got the aid before the federal SNAP funding was eventually unfrozen. And this sounds like proof philanthropy can step up, a feel-good story about private foundations joining together to fill in for missing government aid. But the truth is they had to make sure those foundation boards were comfortable. They don't want to set a precedent to be a gap filler for federal government, for state government. And while the different boards did approve the aid, Kyle said they wanted to be clear.

That this was a very limited, short-term innovation on the part of philanthropy to fill a public sector gap that cannot be sustained. And the reason they didn't want to set this precedent? Everyone knows the math, and the math doesn't work. The math being that for all the money that philanthropy has in the U.S., it is just a fraction of the federal budget. To show his math work, Kyle points to the same federal program, Snap, and asks, what if Michigan foundations took over all those payments in the state? They need $3 billion in one year. And realize we have the Kellogg Foundation, Kresge Foundation, Kreske Foundation, Mott Foundation, Plus Community Foundation, Corporate Foundation.

We only spend $2 billion in everything that we do. So we can't even carry one federal program for a full year. Kyle said the math doesn't work on the national level either. If you took all of philanthropy's resources nationally, everybody, the Kresge Foundation, the Gates Foundation, not just their grantmaking, but their endowments, gave it over to the federal government and said, here you go. How long do you think that you could run the federal government? I feel like you'd get maybe two, three months. Am I being generous there? 79 days.

You actually weren't that far off, Stephen. Either right, not a great number. And, you know, it's not like all this money is just sitting there. It would have to be pulled from elsewhere, like food banks and after-school programs. This is why those groups were so reluctant to set that precedent. As generous as Americans are, there just aren't enough dollars being given to fill those gaps. This is also more than a math problem. There's another reason that Kyle said philanthropy should not just step in for the government.

They're both good at spending money in different ways. Philanthropy can experiment, public sector can scale. What he means by this is that philanthropy can be used to invest in risky, early ideas that might not pay off. And sometimes those ideas are controversial for their time, the kind you wouldn't expect the government to be on board with funding. Alexander Berger is the CEO of Co-Officient Giving, a philanthropy group that aims for high-impact giving. And he says one example of philanthropy-driven research that might not be controversial today, but definitely was in the 1950s contraception. One that I think doesn't get enough attention is philanthropy was really important in the development of the burst control pill.

An activist named Catherine McCormick played a big part in funding that research. She wrote out a check for $40,000. That's big money in 1953. And she kept the funds coming until the pill came to market in 1960. You've seen sort of philanthropy being able to make these, like, risky early stage investments in things that then become much more broader, popular things where people start businesses. Or he says the government can then scale a program or intervention later. Philanthropy also played a big role in the spread of kindergarten.

After those early privately funded projects are proven to work, government stepped in and scaled it up. That tends to be how this goes, philanthropy handing it over to the government. So expecting the opposite philanthropy taking over government programs is a pretty big change. Yeah, and again, there's just not the funds to do that, despite how much Americans give, which averages out to about 2% of gross domestic product. And that's been really steady for many decades, actually. But also there's sort of some parts of the country or, you know, increasing growing demand for people to give more. And so you've seen things like the Giving Pledge, where sort of billionaires are sort of committing to give away the majority of their wealth of the course of their lifetimes.

There's this idea of tithing, people trying to give sort of 10% of their income to really cost effective charities. And if you're going from sort of 2% on average to 10%, then that can be a big increase. And that actually could grow the pie a lot. So some optimism to end on. And hey, we've actually seen that here. Listeners have stepped up to fill some of the funding gap left by the loss of federal funding for public radio.

So thank you for growing that pie and hoping us continue to deliver economic stories. Yeah, thanks for buying our tote bags, everyone. Keep doing that. Appreciate it, really. This episode was produced by Julia. with engineering by Sina Lafredo. It is fact-checked by Sierra Juarez.

Kikinkan edits the show and The Indicator is a production of NPR.