Overhead

CharityWatch keeps track of the relative overhead of charities: how much of the money they get goes into salaries and advertising and whatnot. Low fractions are good, high fractions warn of scams. Something like UMCOR had 3%, while BLM Global Network had 53% overhead (and poor governance and transparency).

They don't rate USAID. I wonder how much money turns into actual assistance.

To be fair, it's not clear that was ever exactly USAID's purpose. Before the current revelations I assumed that part of its grants went into direct aid programs, and part to development infrastructure (physical and legal) schemes, from which the local elite skimmed what they pleased--an unofficial bribery. (Oh, and apparently trying to overthrow the occasional government. I'm not saying that is never in the US interest.) Evidently the administrators thought that the USA also needed aid in developing in their favorite directions. I suspect that the net overhead--combining that at USAID and at the NGOs they funded--was extremely high, but I haven't yet seen numbers.

Relatedly, I read a claim that north of 90% of money for aiding Haiti stayed in the USA. I don't know where they got that number, nor exactly what it means: Did it include buying products here and shipping them there? Just sending money to Haiti--you might as well make the process efficient and put it in Swiss bank accounts directly.

Even when the parties are honest and dedicated, the overhead involved in keeping track of how a grant's money is used and the associated paperwork for grants can be noticeable -- so there's going to be some waste. The more diverse the programs which the entity funds, the greater the waste must be, since you need administrators knowledgeable about and able to detect shenanigans with reports about a variety of different things: not just orphanages and well projects.