Guest post by Irv Katz, president and CEO of the National Human Services Assembly

I assume many Independent Sector members and readers of this blog have seen the Washington Post op-ed by Bridgespan’s Daniel Stid. Harking back to Eisenhower’s warning of a Military Industrial Complex, Stid suggests that human services in the U.S. now comprise a Social Services Industrial Complex, which is, by extension, comparable to the Military Industrial Complex. The metaphor is clever but the case is sketchy at best.

President Eisenhower warned of the potential power of government and business operating in collusion to rob resources from other national needs, including the social welfare of the American people. Whether it was that power or mere inefficiency on an unimaginable scale, there have been ample examples of the military and weapons manufacturers and even the military and plumbing suppliers in unholy alliances that were not in the best interests of the American taxpayers and that did, in fact, rob resources from other national needs. Stid cites examples of human service/human development programs that have failed evaluations but continued to receive funding. First, there is a matter of scale between abuses of the Military Industrial Complex and that of the alleged Social Services Industrial Complex. Second, some of the program evaluations were themselves faulty. But third and most important, that a program found definitively faulty is still funded is a failure of public oversight and decision making not of influence by an industry. 

Do social service providers and constituents try to influence decision making? Of course they do. Again, consider the scale.  Nonprofit providers do advocate and as long as they do so with other than public dollars, they have the right and, I would argue, the responsibility to. That aside, not only do nonprofits have much fewer resources for lobbying but the extent of resources that nonprofits may use for influencing public policy is limited by law. Much as organizations like Independent Sector and National Human Services Assembly seek to coalesce organizations around common issues, it is safe to say that the resources of such groups pale in comparison to those of the major voices of business, industry and labor. 

To dub a sector an "Industrial Complex" is to suggest tightly intertwined relationships comprising a monolith. While the collective funding of several of the big brands of human services adds up to the tens of billions, the reality is that most of the public funding received by social service providers is payment for services rendered by tens of thousands of individual locally-owned and directed nonprofit organizations. Many may share common national brand names and principles of service delivery, but the vast majority of these national-brand providers are independent entities and their national organizations are associations not HQs. And then there are the thousands of locally-based providers that are not associated with a national brand or association. Hardly a monolith.

What is particularly surprising about this public comparison of social services to the notion of a Military Industrial Complex is the timing. Aside from the big entitlements (Social Security, Medicaid), funding of social services is small compared with most other national priorities, much of it relegated to the always-under-fire federal discretionary budget. More significantly, in terms of timing, is that we are in the midst of wave after wave of cuts in social services at all levels of government.

The underlying problem that perhaps frustrates Mr. Stid, and many of the rest of us, is that the American system of meeting human needs and fostering positive human development is complex and overlapping—in the extreme. To say that it is fragmented and lacking cohesive policy direction is an understatement. What do we want to achieve for our children, our elders, American families? There is almost no way of knowing because we operate in a Tower of Babel of disconnected policies, programs, and bureaucracies. Now that's an appropriate target.