Montgomery County, MD taxpayers and residents are funding an ice cream social, a giant “self licking ice cream cone”. Only, none of us get to actually enjoy any of the ice cream and very few people in the community are served by it. That privilege is reserved for a few connected “non-profit industry” insiders who rake in millions in taxpayer grants from the County and state of Maryland.
What is a “self-licking ice cream cone” in policy or political speak?
“The term has been used to describe the purported habit of government-funded organizations and programs spending taxpayer money to lobby for more funding from the taxpayer.” notes Wikipedia’s entry.
Another way to put it: a self-bolstering system that has no purpose other than to sustain itself.
Consider CASA of Maryland. We’ve covered them a lot lately, following the outrage over ignorant comments the org inexplicably decided to post on X.com regarding (tragic) geopolitical events thousands of miles away.
CASA has a sprawling staff page. Over 109 people are profiled and there are all kinds of roles / jobs highlighted. There is a “Director of Development”:
There is current Maryland state Comptroller Brooke Lierman’s brother, (He /Him / El) who is CASA’s “Maryland Organizing Director”:
There are “immigration integration managers” and of course, “community organizers” galore (this is like “ACORN” 2.0“?):
There’s just about every “job” one can imagine at a non-profit supposedly just focused on “immigrant assimilation”. What is the point of all this? It seems to be… to simply self-perpetuate CASA and give its lobbyist / executive team further rationale for asking for more and more taxpayer money from the local politicians (who CASA helps to elect).
“CASA now has a staff of over 109 and needs every penny to further our important work,” one can imagine a CASA lobbyist telling a member of the MoCo Council. Per public reporting and scrutiny of its tax form 990, CASA gets about 2/3rds or more of its funding from you. The federal, state and local taxpayer.
CASA’s paid public policy director is a young person, Cathryn Paul (She / Her / Ella), who has allied with and donated to a MD statehouse politician who claims he wants to end “settler violence and genocide in Gaza” (while saying little to nothing about violence against civilian Israelis). This delegate, Delegate Acevero, organized a sparsely attended “rally” in Rockville, MD recently and now is openly attacking his own state senate team over their letter to CASA.
Cathryn Paul is also very proud of disrupting prior US Senate confirmation hearings, as evidenced in this screen shot from her public-facing Instagram account that is itself a screenshot from MSNBC:
A real class act. “CASA has adopted increasingly aggressive tactics in recent years.” notes Josh Kurtz at MarylandMatters.org.
Of course it does. The self-licking ice-cream cone relies solely on government largesse to further fuel its own organizational growth and subsequent lobbying efforts – it isn’t going to give up relevancy and power and money like that without becoming more and more outlandish and hysterical. CASA also wants more and more unfettered, unvetted “immigration” into Maryland not because of any free market economic ideal or to bolster Maryland’s workforce – but to bolster CASA’s budget and future asks for more and more taxpayer money!
We see now why CASA and a few other orgs in MoCo were so aggressive and hyperbolic during the Trump-era. It wasn’t about immigrant rights or helping legal immigrants find jobs and get housing — it was that their funding and lobbying for more money by the taxpayer was under direct threat.
Remember: we taxpayers in the states, like MD, pay the federal government and then the federal government in DC turns around and “re-distributes” tax dollars to various state and county governments each budget appropriation. Unfortunately, until recently, that “budget appropriation” has just been a massive “omnibus” free-for-all that lets orgs like CASA get millions under the dead of night, tucked away in 50,000 page “budget bills”.
We don’t mean to pick on CASA and CASA alone – in future postings, we’ll showcase some of the other “self-licking ice cream cones” of MoCo. More to come.
