February 8, 2011; Source: News & Record | The House Democrats in North Carolina have decided that it would help them in their budget cutting ruminations if they were to tally up all the grants made by the state to nonprofit organizations. Tom Tillis, Speaker of the House, said, “We will most likely announce a focused effort on expenditures to nonprofits and nongovernmental organizations this week just to get a bead what service they’re providing, the extent to which it duplicates a core service that we do internally.”

Tillis goes on to tell the News & Record, “Clearly there are going to be expenditures there (sic) are important and we consider to be worthwhile, but you always have to ask the question, is that expenditure worthy of priority over all these other things we know are important like funding classrooms, funding teachers and those sorts of things. That’s how we’re trying to get people to look at the tough trade-offs and make that more tangible to the average voter.”

This exercise of looking at the type of vendor (for-profit, government, or nonprofit), rather than the service first, seems odd. Have any of our readers seen this before? What do you think of this?–Ruth McCambridge