When the Paperwork Disappears, Power Doesn't

When I joined a small research and advisory organization after years working at a government funding agency, one of our early institutional decisions was to avoid government funding. The compliance requirements were significant, and we simply did not have the capacity to absorb them without diverting energy from the work itself. We had made a clear-eyed judgment that it was not worth it for us.

Then I made an exception.

A larger organization invited us to join their consortium as a technical partner. Our role was specific: contribute our expertise to one component of the proposal. The lead organization was clear that we wouldn’t need to do much work. Much, I would learn, was subjective. I spent hours drafting and redrafting our technical contribution, and more hours reconstructing our past performance and reformatting CVs of proposed personnel. The proposal required five examples of relevant prior work, each with the name and contact information of someone who could verify it. Some of those people had moved on - from the organizations we had worked with, sometimes from the sector entirely. One was deceased. I tracked the four down anyway.

I had written requirements like these. It was only when I was the one doing the tracking that I began to wonder what, exactly, all of that effort was producing and for whom.

Every consortium that applied proposed to do roughly the same thing. That was not a failure of imagination - it was a consequence of how the requirements were written. What would separate one proposal from another was past performance and people: the credibility of what you had done before, and the quality of who you were proposing to do it again.

Everything else was compliance. The CVs formatted to a standard template. The project narratives organized according to prescribed sections. The assurances that yes, we would do what the funder wanted, none of which was especially novel. That work confirmed eligibility, it did not determine fit.

The weeks of preparation did not substantially improve the quality of what we submitted. What they produced, more than anything, was a record - a documented basis for decisions that the funder had already shaped by writing the requirements in the first place. In a system where applicants could appeal selection outcomes, that record mattered. It meant decisions could be defended, audited, and if necessary, explained to someone outside the room.

The rigor was partly epistemic and mostly institutional. The burden it placed on applicants was real. The improvement it produced in decision quality was marginal. What it reliably produced was cover for decisions that were, at every stage, an exercise of power.

Philanthropy has been moving in a different direction. The trend toward trust-based and relationship-driven grantmaking has simplified what applicants are asked to produce - shorter proposals, fewer requirements, less compliance overhead. That simplification is genuine and worth acknowledging.

But simplifying the process is not the same as simplifying the judgment. And it does not redistribute the power.

MacKenzie Scott’s giving is the most prominent example of where this logic leads when taken to its conclusion. Her approach involves no application, no published criteria, no process that organizations can engage with. Organizations are identified by an internal research team, vetted without their knowledge, and contacted with a gift. The only strategic lever available is visibility to the people doing that research. A recent analysis by Wayan Vota found it could describe who got funded but not why, because the decision criteria were never made visible.

Many organizations have hoped to receive Scott’s support, not only because of its size, but because of its quality. Unrestricted funding changes what organizations can do, how they plan, and what risks they can take. Those inside the relationship get flexibility. Those outside are more likely to receive restricted grants with reporting requirements and compliance overhead. The gap is not just about volume. It is about what kind of funding you can build a strategy around.

I know what both sides of that feel like. At the same organization where I spent hours reconstructing past performance for a government funding proposal, we also maintained relationships with funders who had already decided we were worth supporting. Those relationships were simpler. I preferred them.

But I also spent time trying to build new philanthropic relationships with funders whose work overlapped with ours, whose priorities seemed aligned, whose support would have mattered. I failed. Not because our work wasn’t good, but because we didn’t have the relationships. Our work wasn’t on their radar. Nobody within those networks endorsed us. Government funding processes, for all their burden, were at least theoretically open - you could apply, take your chances, make your case. The trust-based world had no equivalent entry point for an organization that hadn’t yet found its way into the right networks. That is not just an access problem, it is a power problem - one that the language of trust and simplicity does not always acknowledge.

In government funding, a disappointed applicant could at least - in theory - contest the outcome. In invitation-based philanthropy, the decision happened before the applicant was visible as an applicant at all. And unlike a competitive process that resets with each cycle, the relationships that determine visibility can persist for decades. Term limits on grantmaking staff are uncommon, which means the program officer whose network shapes who gets invited today may be shaping those same decisions ten or fifteen years from now. For an organization on the outside, there may be no later.

The language used to justify these decisions is usually strategic. Organizations are selected because they align with stated objectives, because they operate in priority geographies, because their approach reflects the funder’s theory of change. In a field where many organizations are doing similar work with relatively similar approaches, that framing raises a question worth considering: what is strategic alignment really doing?

In a crowded space, it serves less as a filter and more as a rationale. The judgment has already been made. Strategic alignment is the language used to explain it afterward - to the organization being invited, to colleagues, and sometimes to oneself.

What is really operating in that moment is much harder to name. Pattern recognition, probably. Familiarity, possibly. The accumulated sense that this organization, this leader, this framing of the problem is credible - built through conferences, convenings, and the slow accumulation of reputation in a fairly small world. That is not illegitimate. But it is not neutral, and it is not apolitical. It advantages organizations already visible in the networks where program officers spend their time - which is not always the same as the organizations doing the most important work. That advantage is not incidental. It is how power quietly reproduces itself in philanthropic practice.

The honest version of strategic alignment, in a crowded field, is often something closer to: this organization fits how I already think about this problem. That is a judgment call. It is also an act of power. It deserves to be examined as such - not because program officers are acting in bad faith, but because the system offers them almost no structural incentive to examine it at all.

I have sat on both sides of this. I designed processes that demanded weeks of effort from applicants and reviewed the submissions that resulted. I tracked down counterparts who had moved on to satisfy requirements I had once written. I now work in a system that has dispensed with much of that machinery - where the judgment happens earlier, more quietly, and with less documentation demanded of potential applicants.

The process changed more than the judgment did. The burden shifted. The visibility decreased. The person making the call remained.

Program officers hold more power than the language of strategy usually acknowledges. We decide who is worth a conversation, whose framing of a problem is legible, whose past performance is credible enough to warrant an invitation. Those decisions are made with partial information, shaped by networks and familiarity, and rarely examined with the same rigor we apply to the work we fund. The system does not require us to examine them.

That is not an argument for returning to formatted CVs and reconstructed project histories. It is an argument for honesty about what replaced them and what didn’t.