Nothing Screams Soft Authoritarianism Louder Than a Grant Application

This is the third in a series on soft authoritarianism in philanthropy. The first named the system. The second profiled its caretakers. This one examines the mechanism: the grant application.

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I recently shared some advice I was given early in my fundraising career by a mentor who’d spent decades raising money for conservative evangelical organizations. “Don’t submit a proposal,” he said, “unless it’s already been discussed over lunch and agreed upon with a handshake.” I asked what to do if no one would meet. His response was simple: “Then don’t ask.” In other words, if anything in writing came before the relationship, it wasn’t worth it. What mattered was trust and genuine conversation. The application was just paperwork—something you filled out to formalize what had already been agreed upon.

But that experience isn’t universal. For many, the application has become the relationship—an intermediary, shaping what could be said, how needs were framed, and what kinds of organizations were deemed “ready” for support. Over time, the application took on a quiet authority—not just documenting power, but enacting it. It set the terms. It filtered the language. It managed the boundaries of legitimacy. And the strangest part? No one really owns that dynamic: neither the funders who depend on it nor the nonprofits who adapt to it. It governs without declaring itself. That’s what makes it so effective—and so hard to confront.

In two of my recent essays, I named what’s really going on. First, we introduced soft authoritarianism—not the kind that barks orders, but the kind that governs through process, performance, and polite delay. Then we profiled its caretakers: the Nice Guys of Philanthropy—well-intentioned, well-credentialed fellas who’ve mastered the art of strategic restraint. Now comes the part no one wants to talk about: the mechanism. How do the Nice Guys keep everything intact?

A few weeks ago, I argued that the sector’s funding model was entering a harsh winter—that Big Philanthropy, government funding, and consumer-oriented giving tactics won’t disappear, but they’ll become increasingly unreliable. And the Nice Guys seem to agree.

If we’re all right—if this moment is really as destabilizing as some say that it might be—then we should ask: what are we still holding on to that we may want to let go of? What habits and practices are we clinging to that shouldn’t survive a collapse?

For me, at the top of that list are the things that get in the way of real gift relationships—the rituals that make the gift feel conditional, measured, and performative. And nothing embodies that more than the grant application.

The grant application. The form. The rubric. The cycle. The theory of change. The deliberation process. The thing everyone complains about but still participates in. The thing we all say is broken but still pretend to fix. If the institutions around us are truly under threat, we owe it to ourselves to ask: what exactly are we defending? And if it’s this—the slow churn of application cycles and approval rituals—why would we ever want that back?

Let’s be clear: the grant application is not just bureaucracy. It is governance. And it was never meant to be neutral.

And here’s the harder truth—one that makes this question even more urgent: systems like this don’t simplify over time; they compound. If you’ve been waiting for the grant process to become more flexible, more relational, more human, it’s worth knowing: that’s not how high-modern systems behave. If the Trump administration rattles Big Philanthropy the way the Nice Guys think it might, then, after the dust settles, we may find the grant application hasn’t disappeared—but that it wants to come back with a vengeance.

After a shock, bureaucratic structures like those behind the grant mechanism don’t scale down; they expand. When something goes wrong, they don’t remove steps; they add them. They invent new forms, new safeguards, new layers of compliance. But the underlying logic never goes away. And, over time, the system becomes heavier, slower, more opaque—all while convincing itself it was working in the first place.

Nonprofit Neighborhoods and the Architecture of Control

Throughout my continuing discussions about Big Philanthropy, I keep coming back to Claire Dunning. Her book Nonprofit Neighborhoods tells a story the sector rarely wants to face: a large corner of what we now call the nonprofit sector was never designed to be independent. It didn’t rise organically as a vibrant third place between state and market. It was constructed—intentionally—as a substitute for public goods. Especially in cities like Boston, where Dunning centered her research, nonprofits emerged not as grassroots Tocquevillian associations but as privatized extensions of the state—contractors for a government retreating from its responsibilities.

This wasn’t accidental; it was public policy—shaped by the neoliberal turn of the late twentieth century. Rather than invest in direct programs or universal services, the federal government redirected public dollars through competitive grants to nonprofit intermediaries. These organizations were expected to fill gaps in housing, education, and social services—without holding any real political authority or long-term financial security. The grant was the tether. The state offloaded its obligations but retained control.

Dunning also makes another critical observation: the federal government didn’t just withdraw. It designed the architecture of accountability that Big Philanthropy would later adopt. The application, the evaluation framework, the reporting requirement—none of these were original ideas of our making. They were tools of administrative governance. And, once these structures were in place, private foundations embraced them—not because they had to, but because they offered legibility, distance, and control. The mechanism migrated; and with it came the illusion that philanthropy offered freedom—when in fact, it borrowed the same architecture of control.

And here’s what gets overlooked: private philanthropy was never supposed to replace public investment. Dunning makes it clear that foundations themselves saw their role as limited. They were never going to fund community development or neighborhood revitalization at the scale necessary. But the illusion stuck. And, over time, a generation of nonprofit leaders came to maturity within that illusion—adapting their language, reframing their work, and reshaping their missions to remain fundable.

That’s how the grant became governance. It didn’t just support the work; it structured it. “Innovation” became a proxy for compliance. “Impact” became a justification for austerity. Funders found ways to say yes without sticking around to be accountable. And the sector adjusted. The application became the relationship. A mechanism designed to regulate became a model for how we understand partnership.

Dunning doesn’t describe her findings as soft authoritarianism. She doesn’t use Foucauldian language. But her readers have. Because what she documents is not a system of violence, but a system of formatting. Expectations become rules. Access becomes dependence. Control becomes ambient. And a sector that once imagined itself as democratic slowly begins to govern like a state.

The Grant as Panopticon

Michel Foucault didn’t write about grant applications, but he didn’t need to. He gave us the tools to recognize them for what they are.

In Discipline and Punish, Foucault draws on Jeremy Bentham’s late 18th-century model of the panopticon—a prison designed around a central observation tower. From this tower, a single guard could theoretically observe all inmates, while the inmates, unable to see the guard, could never know if they were being watched. The innovation was not constant surveillance, but the architecture of possible surveillance. The design prompted prisoners to regulate their own behavior. They didn’t need to be watched to obey; they needed only to believe they might be watched.

Foucault used this as a metaphor for modern power: not power that coerces or punishes, but power that normalizes and disciplines. Structures of observation—whether schools, hospitals, or bureaucracies—shape conduct by making certain behaviors visible, legible, and preferable. Over time, people begin to internalize what the structure expects of them.

The grant application fits this model precisely. It’s not a command or a threat; it’s a structure, a template. And it doesn’t need to say “do this or else.” It simply defines the criteria for visibility. It tells nonprofits what language gets funded, what timelines are viable, what budget lines are acceptable, what outcomes must be promised, and what tone won’t scare off a board. The grant doesn’t require obedience; it rewards legibility. And, once legibility becomes survival, the rest takes care of itself.

This is the power of panoptic governance: no one has to enforce the rules if everyone has already learned to behave as though they’re being evaluated. Nonprofits preempt critique. They manage themselves. They rewrite their missions in someone else’s language. They present work not as it is, but as it needs to appear.

And the most dangerous part? Over time, they forget there was ever another way. That’s not a flaw of the system; that’s its success.

So when one of us calls out “crappy funding practices,” we’re not wrong. But we are missing the point. The inefficiencies, the delays, the rigid formats—they’re not signs of dysfunction. They’re the mechanism doing exactly what it was built to do. The grant doesn’t malfunction when it silences urgency or flattens complexity. It succeeds.

The application is the tower—whether the Nice Guys are inside it or not.

The Grant as Gardening

In their essay “Governing as Gardening,” Nasir and Turner extend Foucault’s metaphor of the panopticon by offering another: the garden. Where the panopticon functions through surveillance and internalized discipline, the garden governs through cultivation. It doesn’t command directly. It shapes environments. It creates conditions in which certain behaviors flourish while others wither. In Singapore—their case study—this model explains how the state governed not through overt repression, but through the “symbolic manipulation of nature” and the careful weeding and pruning of its citizenry.

That’s what makes their metaphor so powerful for understanding philanthropy’s dominant funding mechanism. The grant doesn’t coerce nonprofits to act a certain way; it conditions the environment. The budget templates, the allowable expenses, the timeline and outcomes—all these features structure the field so that only certain kinds of work can thrive. Innovation looks like compliance. Risk-taking looks like misalignment. Anything that can’t be made legible to the logic of the plot gets left out.

This is what Nasir and Turner describe as governmentality in action. It’s not about issuing commands. It’s about cultivating preferred outcomes while preserving plausible deniability. And what results isn’t domination; it’s consent—not because nonprofits believe in the structure’s justice, but because they have adapted to its logic. The structure doesn’t need to punish disobedience when it can preempt it altogether.

The brilliance of the metaphor is that it makes clear what is usually denied: that even the most aesthetically pleasing system—green, neat, efficient—is still a managed one. The nonprofit sector, under the governance of grantmaking, is not a democratic forest; it is a well-manicured lawn. And, like the Head Gardener of Singapore’s soft authoritarianism, funders don’t need to micromanage every blade of grass. They simply need to tend the soil, set the boundaries, and pull the occasional weed.

This is where John Jost’s system justification theory brings the picture into sharper focus. Jost argues that people are often psychologically motivated to defend the very systems they depend on—even when those systems harm them. The instinct isn’t purely rational; it’s emotional, existential. Systems provide coherence, predictability, and a sense of moral order. And, when the stakes are high—when livelihoods, credibility, or community standing are on the line—that emotional investment becomes harder to dislodge.

Jost’s findings are especially resonant in the nonprofit sector where dependence on the grant system is nearly total. When funding becomes your lifeline, critique starts to feel dangerous. Disruption starts to look irresponsible. Even unjust systems begin to feel safer than the uncertainty of an unstructured alternative. And here’s the paradox which Jost names most clearly: the more a person or organization is burdened by a system, the more inclined they are to defend it. Not because it’s fair, but because challenging it feels untenable.

That’s what makes the garden so effective as a metaphor. It’s not just about growing desired outcomes; it’s about cultivating consent. Nonprofits shape themselves to fit the plot and then begin to mistake the boundaries for reality. They normalize the restrictions. They explain away the delays. They adapt, internalize, and conform—not because they’ve been told to, but because the structure has taught them that survival depends on it.

And, when that happens, the structure no longer needs to enforce anything at all. The belief does the work.

The Gift Refuses the Mechanism

The application, the portal, the logic model: none of these belong to the gift. They belong to a system built to manage, verify, and contain. The gift doesn’t fill out forms or wait for approval. It doesn’t align with fiscal calendars or strategic outcomes. It moves on in a relationship. It acts in trust—not as recklessness, but as a commitment to mutuality over management. The gift creates impact, but not on demand. It doesn’t measure itself against dashboards or deliverables. It moves quietly, sometimes unpredictably, but always in freedom.

That freedom makes the gift difficult to manage. It resists containment. It doesn’t operate inside cycles or perform outcomes for validation. It doesn’t submit a theory of change because it already is one—disruptive, relational, and often irreducible to metrics. This is why it doesn’t conform to the logic of the panopticon. This is why it can’t be cultivated like a garden. The gift can be encouraged, received, and reciprocated; but it cannot be disciplined without losing what makes it a gift.

In a moment where soft power is unraveling and hard power is rising, the gift’s independence becomes more important—not less. Systems of managed generosity—grant cycles, application portals, outcome metrics—were never designed to respond to disruption. They were built to defer it. But the gift adapts. It finds its way through broken systems because it doesn’t rely on them. It responds to relationships, not hierarchy. It’s carried through people, not portals.

If there’s a way forward through the chaos ahead, it won’t come from refining our processes. It will come from recovering our nerve—our willingness to give without needing permission, to act before everything is clarified, and to build trust where no framework can substitute for it.

That’s what makes this moment clarifying. Trump may threaten democratic norms, but what he also threatens is the entire infrastructure of polite control that institutional philanthropy has relied on. He disregards procedure. He discards legitimacy as performance. And, in doing so, he exposes just how much of our sector’s authority was built, not on resilience, but on the appearance of order.

That’s why so much feels unstable, not because everything is collapsing, but because the systems we expected to hold things together were never built for disruption. The grant application isn’t just inefficient; it’s an architecture of restraint. It shapes how nonprofits speak, what they prioritize, and how they come to understand their own role and contribution in society.

So we arrive at a question we can no longer avoid:

Do social change leaders in a post-Trump world really need to submit a grant application?

Not as a provocation. Not as a metaphor. As a real, urgent, structural question.
Because if the answer is yes—then we should say so plainly. We should acknowledge what we’re preserving, what we’re adapting to, and what we’re unwilling to leave behind.

But if the answer is no—then we have work to do.
Because walking away isn’t easy. It’s not symbolic. It’s not sentimental.
It means surrendering the rituals that have kept us legible to power, and stepping toward the unpredictable work of real relationship.

It means building something different—before someone else builds something worse.

- Jason Lewis, Founder, Responsive Fundraising

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