The brouhaha revolves around a Times investigation last month complemented a few days later by a follow up editorial attacking a trio of senators for supporting a change in reimbursement policy for a class of drugs used by kidney dialysis patients.

In early January, as the negotiations were coming to a head, lawmakers on the Senate Finance Committee—Republicans and Democrats—inserted a paragraph in the bill (in Section 632) that delayed a number of oral medications from Medicare price controls, including Sensipar, a pill made by Amgen, the world’s largest biotechnology company, for an additional two years.

The Times’ instinct, if not its execution, was good. The nature of health care reform opens the door to potential legislative mischief as lobbyists attempt to “correct” legislation that is doing its job fine, thank you. If there is corruption, let’s shine a light on it.

As the Times had it in its narrative, Amgen was handed a $500 million gift in the form of a secret provision modifying the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. According to the newspaper, the change was sneaked into the bill in a conspiracy involving the biotechnology firm’s army of 74 lobbyists and a handful of politicians.

The Times’ article, implicitly, and the editorial, explicitly, smeared three Finance Committee senators in particular: Max Baucus (D-MT), Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and Mitch McConnell (R-KY). The newspaper asserted each had “deep financial and political ties” to Amgen, all but stating they had sold out the American people in exchange for campaign contributions.

“This dreadful episode is a classic example of the power of special interests to shape legislation and shows how hard it may be to carry out the reforms needed to cut health costs,” the Times wrote.

As is often the case with America’s most influential paper, the articles had huge impact. Within days, the web exploded with hundreds of stories slamming Amgen and the senators. A quartet of Congressmen introduced a bill to repeal what they called the “Amgen gift.”

“This eleventh-hour, backroom deal confirms the American public’s worst suspicions of how Congress operates,” said co-sponsor Democrat Peter Welch.

Based on the just-released CBO analysis, it appears the Time and the critical lawmakers got the story wrong. The independent CBO report suggests numerous journalistic missteps, starting with the paper’s myopic focus on Amgen. Its editorial was titled “Amgen gets a lift from Congress.” Yet, the company most impacted by the provision is the Genzyme subsidiary of French pharmaceutical giant Sanofi Aventis, which makes the dialysis drugs sold as Renagel and Renvela. Those crucial facts are conveniently absent from the Times piece–perhaps because they would have made the narrative too messy.

The Times also omitted that the provision was designed to protect Medicare seniors who live in rural areas. That’s why Sen. Hatch (Utah), Sen. Baucus (Montana) and Sen. McConnell (Kentucky) said they were persuaded to support the extension in the first place. There are just “too many unanswered questions about how to make sure patients get the medicine they need and how rural dialysis clinics would navigate the new layers of red tape it creates,” Sen. Baucus said at the time.

But there’s more, as they say in late night TV. The Times entire story spun on the unsourced claim that the extension “is projected to cost $500 million.” Projected by whom? The reporters never tell us, and now it appears the newspaper of record may have reported as fact an errant comment or pure speculation.

The CBO notes that many of the drugs in question will go off patent and costs will naturally go down as generics enter the marketplace. Consequently, a delay would actually save Medicare more than $1 billion. Repealing the clause and locking in an unnecessarily high payment rate for the targeted brand name drug rates, as the Times and the Welch-led bill are urging, would have the unintended effect of locking in higher reimbursement rates, nixing the sizable benefits of lower cost generics.

The CBO estimates that if the delay was extended until 2017, Part D beneficiaries would save even more through lower out of pocket costs—as much as $500 million. Stretching the extension out ten years would yield additional savings, as much as $4 billion.

The drugs in the crosshairs help patients with chronic kidney disease on dialysis manage secondary hyperparathyroidism which if untreated can lead to medical complications. If access to the medicines were removed from Medicare Part D prematurely, poorer patients on the margins would undoubtedly choose to forgo taking appropriate drugs because they would now be too expensive.

After ballyhooing the story twice in January, the Times has so far chosen to ignore the CBO study, leaving its readers in the dark. Neither the paper nor the reporters involved have responded to my request for a statement.

Last April, the Times ran two articles in a week promoting Howarth’s claim that shale gas generates more greenhouse gas emissions than the production and use of coal. It would be difficult to overstate the influence of this paper, which ricocheted through the media echo chamber and was even debated in the British parliament.

What the Times didn’t report then, and until now has been systematically ignored, is that almost every independent researcher—at the Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Energy Department, and numerous independent university teams, including a Carnegie Mellon study partly financed by the Sierra Club—has slammed Howarth’s conclusions. Within the field, Howarth is considered an activist, not an independent scientist. Many commentators, including independent lefty columnist Joe Nocera, think the gas is too valuable to be left in the ground, as the hard Left is urging.

Maybe a little fresh air is finally leaking into the Times’ insular chambers. Calling Cathles’s report a “fresh rebuttal” of Howarth’s much-maligned study, Dot Earth’s Andrew Revkin cites the latest researcher to diss its shaky science. The twist is that the point scientist for the new study was Howarth’s colleague at Cornell, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences professor Lawrence Cathles, who is an expert in this field, unlike Howarth.

Cathles convincingly demolishes Howarth’s four major claims, two of which we’ll highlight here:

•    Howarth et al. claimed that shale gas wells are virtual methane sieves. But as Cathles shows, Howarth appears to have deliberately used EPA estimates of venting in 2007, a century ago by shale gas technology standards. He’s off by at least 10-20 times—at least.

•    Howarth used decades-old data from the Soviet Union to make a bogus case that unconventional gas wells leak more methane than conventional wells.

Cathles conclusion that “The data clearly shows that substituting natural gas for coal will have a substantial greenhouse benefit under almost any set of reasonable assumptions” is critical but unremarkable in that it reflects the conclusions of almost every major researcher in the field, except Howarth and hard Left advocacy magazines such as Mother Jones that blindly promote marginal science when it mimics their ideological take on an issue.

Even New York Times blogger Revkin seems to agree, stating “[T]he notion that gas holds no advantage over coal, in weighing the climate implications of energy choices, is fading fast (to my reading of the science and that of many others).” It’s great to see the Times bloggers catching up with the science… about a year late… but it is a shame that they put Howarth on the fast track to progressive icon status with his reporting last April.

In fact, the “farcical position that shale gas is dirtier than coal” was never scientifically serious enough to fade; it is and was a fiction of activists, including Howarth, whose goal is to undermine a balanced scientific debate on shale gas and climate change.

Jon Entine, senior research fellow at the Center for Health & Risk Communication at STATS/George Mason, is a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Through Friday, the Consumer Product Safety Commission’s Chronic Hazard Advisory Panel (CHAP) is holding public meetings in preparation for issuing a final report on restricting phthalates and phthalate substitutes.

Here’s the background. Found in children’s products and tubing, phthalates are used to make plastics like polyvinyl chloride more flexible. In 2008, President Bush signed into law the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA), which set stricter regulations, particularly on the elements used to make consumer products.

To date, based on the public hearings, the CHAP appears to be bumbling its way through the science. Here’s five things that government regulators should keep top of mind:

(1) Stick to science. Focus on health risk not fear. U.S. regulators rely on risk-based analysis—documenting actual health dangers. Yet CHAP seems to be edging towards a precautionary model, reacting to anti-plastic public fear campaigns now in high gear.

(2) Not all phthalates are created equal. So-called low-density phthalates—DEHP, BBP, DBP, and DIBP—widely used in children’s toys and medical tubing, are less stable and release outgasses. In contrast, high-density phthalates such as DINP, DIDP, and DPHP are tightly bound, more stable and resilient. They offer significant benefits for millions of uses, many with no safe or effective alternatives. Don’t confuse the types.

(3) Measure costs and benefits of potential alternatives. CHAP appears tempted to regulate in a world with no trade-offs. The profile of each phthalate must be compared to the potential risks, known and unknown, of a substitute. Reformulating products are costly, and the consumer pays in the end.

(4) Consider regulatory precedents. The panel has previously seemed to ignore reviews by other regulatory bodies. For example, the EU has classified low phthalates as reproductive toxicants, but does not regulate tightly bound high plasticizers such as DINP, DIDP, and DPHP, which are considered safe. Will CHAP take an anti-science “one size fits all” approach?

(5) Weigh the evidence. It is not clear whether CHAP is considering the weight of the evidence presented and “all relevant data.” According to last year’s  report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, phthalates do not pose a health hazard in any usual way in which someone might be exposed to soft plastics. “Phthalates are metabolized and excreted quickly and do not accumulate in the body,” it concluded. That report endorsed the findings in 2004 and 2010 studies by the Children’s National Medical Center and George Washington University School of Medicine that showed no adverse effects in organ or sexual functioning in adolescent children exposed to phthalates as neonates. Another recent study has found that even high levels of DEHP have shown no effect on the genital development of marmosets—let alone humans.

In sum, no studies using oral doses (as humans are exposed) have found evidence that plasticizers are toxic or are likely to cause cancer or have strong estrogenic effects, as critics often allege. Federal regulators need be careful about demonizing proven safe chemicals, and replacing them with potentially risky substitutes that have not been tested. Will CHAP follow the science?

Jon Entine, visiting fellow at AEI, is senior research fellow at STATS and the Center for Health and Risk Communication at George Mason University.

An investigative piece in Ethical Corporation magazine, “Who Blew Up the ‘Bridge to the Future,’” examines the troubling truth behind the turnaround.

(1)    Technology: With the discovery around the world of vast reserves of shale gas and advances in fracking technology, natural gas is no longer a diminishing resource. The International Energy Agency estimates there is quarter of a millennium’s worth of cheap shale gas in the world based on current energy consumption. Meanwhile, advances in solar and wind technology have slowed, and they are increasingly seen as fool’s gold from a cost/benefit perspective.

(2)    Media and NGO Manipulation: Many media organizations who often work hand in hand with hard Left environmental groups—the usually venerable New York Times comes to mind—have taken on the role of advocates, cherry picking questionable studies to promote an anti-fracking narrative. The anti-shale gas mindset has gotten so pervasive that The New York Time’s public editor has twice taken its own reporters to task for channeling anti-fracking propaganda.

(3)    Money: While the NYT runs a front-page exposé of industry support for shale gas exploration and production, it ignores the far more explosive story of the money fueling much of the media coverage and even backing anti-fracking research scientists. The Park Foundation, an environmental philanthropy based in Ithaca, New York and tied to Cornell, has poured more than $6 million over the past two years into supporting groups that only provide one side of the shale gas story.

This soft conspiracy is troubling. Perhaps even more concerning, while a range of independent researchers from across the ideological spectrum have found shale gas to be environmentally safer than coal or oil, one Park funded researcher at Cornell, Robert Howarth, who has no previous research background in this area, reached an opposite conclusion, calling natural gas dirtier than coal or oil. Many media outlets, the NYT’s in particular, have almost exclusively promoted his study and ignored the consensus research (including by the Environmental Defense Fund and the Natural Resources Defense Council, and a sharp rebuttal by Howarth’s own colleagues at Cornell.)

The most intriguing question lying ahead is whether politics—the ideological forces lining up against unconventional sources of natural gas—will trump the science. Anti-shale gas advocacy groups are forging bizarre alliances, including with the Russians and the Iranians who thought they were going to corner the gas market in the coming decades.

That won’t change the facts in the ground. Natural gas is no longer the bridge to the future. It IS the future—unless “progressives” kill it.

Jon Entine is Senior Fellow of Health & Risk Communication at George Mason University/STATS, Visiting Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and founder of the sustainability consultancy ESG MediaMetrics.

So earlier this year when researchers Robert Howarth and Anthony Ingraffea at Cornell University released a letter based on their unpublished research—not peer reviewed—suggesting that shale gas might be worse for global warming than coal, it was hyped by the New York Times and widely picked up. Many analysts, from experts from energy firms and even unlikely places such as the Council on Foreign Relations and the Natural Resources Defense Council poked holes in the study, but their comments got little play.

This deafening silence was repeated again earlier this month when scientists at Carnegie Mellon University, in a study partly funded by the Sierra Club, concluded just the opposite, in concert with the mainstream scientific view: shale gas, in this case derived from the huge Marcellus Formation which lies under New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio, has significantly less impact on global warming than coal.

“Marcellus shale gas emits 50 percent fewer greenhouse gas emissions than any US coal-fired plant,” said study co-author Chris Hendrickson. John Hanger, the former head of Pennsylvania’s environmental agency during the prior Democratic administration, wrote on his blog that the study “debunks and decimates professor Howarth’s hit piece study that the NYT gas reporter and other media gave so much attention.”

Hanger is referring to the much-maligned series of reports attacking natural gas fracking (the process used to extract gas from shale) by embattled New York Times reporter, Ian Urbina, whose work has been rebuked on two separate occasions by the Times’ public editor, Arthur Brisbane.

But Urbina is at it again. In an article published earlier this month, he dredged up a 27-year old incident, claiming that hydraulic fracturing fluids contaminated a well in West Virginia. That would seem to conflict with comments from the industry, and even EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, who said in May, “I am not aware of any proven case where the fracking process itself has affected water.”

Even if Urbina is correct, that’s one known incident out of more than one million wells hydraulically fractured in the history of the industry. But as Forbes’s contributor and University of Houston professor Michael Economides wrote yesterday, the cause of that one instance remains unclear, which is why organizations that track fracking, such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission, still maintain there have been no contamination incidents.

Even worse, Economides writes, Urbina falsely accuses industry representatives of trying to prevent a 1987 EPA report that cited this West Virginia case from circulating, when in fact the case was sealed, as is common in legal settlements. All in all, he says, more questionable reporting, particularly by the Times, and more misleading fodder for anti-fracking environmental activists and policy-makers.

Jon Entine is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Health & Risk Communication at George Mason University and STATS, and is a visiting fellow at AEI.

The Times has raised eyebrows across the ideological spectrum for its “Drilling Down” series—what has appeared to many a long, un-nuanced attack on natural gas and the shale gas extraction technique known as hydraulic fracturing. A slew of commentators, from liberal Joe Nocera (of the Times) to Scott Anderson of the Environmental Defense Fund to almost every energy expert, from MIT to Wall Street, have made hash of claims by a faction of environmentalists that fracking poses extraordinary environmental dangers.

The Urbina “the sky-is-falling” express went off the rails completely on June 25 and 26 with two front-page stories asserting that shale gas reserves are being hyped by the natural gas industry. Urbina and the sources he quoted suggested parallels to Ponzi schemes, Enron, and the housing bubble.

Scientists at MIT and elsewhere, who have confirmed massive shale gas reserves but whose research was not referenced in the piece, immediately issued sharp rebukes of the Urbina narrative. As I noted in a critique for RealClearPolitics, the Times’ article left out key editorial framing details, such as the dubious credibility of the only two identified sources. And as Michael Levi of the Council of Foreign Relations pointed out in his blog, this latest critique of shale gas consisted almost entirely of cherry-picked comments from anonymous sources:

There’s a pattern: Urbina was clearly looking for negative views of shale gas, and had no problem finding them. Given the massive size of the industry, and the number of financial bets being placed upon the sector, that shouldn’t be a surprise. What is a surprise is that Urbina hasn’t done much to put them in context.

Brisbane criticized the stories for painting a complex issue with “an overly broad brush and didn’t include dissenting views from experts who aren’t entrenched on one side or another of the subject.”

The Times’ only identified shale gas critics were fringe critics. One has been at war with a major natural gas company, Chesapeake, for years, although the Times failed to disclose this.

Brisbane concluded, “My view is that such a pointed article needed more convincing substantiation, more space for a reasoned explanation of the other side and more clarity about its focus. . . . The article went out on a limb, lacked an in-depth dissenting view in the text and should have made clear that shale gas had boomed.”

Perhaps most distressing was the self-defense response posted by National Editor Rick Berke and his deputy Adam Bryant within minutes after Brisbane’s analysis appeared. They conspicuously failed to address the many omissions and flaws pointed out by Brisbane.

For example, Brisbane made the point that Urbina threw a cloud over the entire natural gas industry; the piece repeatedly referred to “natural gas companies” and “energy companies” as behind a Ponzi scheme-like hysteria. The embattled editors sidestepped the muddled reporting, saying that the article was not addressing all of the natural gas industry but only independents. Yet there is zero evidence from the piece even hinting that that was Urbina’s thesis.

The Times is a great newspaper. Thankfully it has the integrity to wash its dirty laundry in public. That should help make for quality journalism going forward. But if its own editors can’t swallow the medicine and own up to their reporting and ethical failings, then such public acts of cleansing will end up being little more than performance art.

Jon Entine is a senior fellow at the Center for Health & Risk Communication at George Mason University and a visiting fellow at AEI.

Catch your breath before reading Thursday’s Newsweek interview with two top Food and Drug Administration (FDA) officials about its regulatory oversight strategy. Alberto Gutierrez and Elizabeth Mansfield, respectively director for the Office of In Vitro Diagnostics in the Center for Devices and Radiological Health and for Personalized Medicine medical devices and personalized medicine, told Mary Carmichael that the agency has no responsibility to evaluate the economic impact of its regulations on companies or the general effect on industry.

“No, we don’t take into account cost,” said Guiterrez. “That cuts agency wide,” added Mansfield, underscoring that this is general FDA policy.

Continue reading this post.

Image by kyz.

Capitulation is probably a better word for what’s transpiring. The Swiss food giant has been hammered for more than two weeks by the multinational advocacy group in what is shaping up to be the most successful anti-corporate social media campaign ever.

Greenpeace has long been at odds with Nestlé over a variety of issues, including encouraging mothers to use infant formula that could be mixed with tainted water and for using ingredients made from bioengineered crops.

In its latest salvo, Greenpeace has been seeding social media sites with allegations that Nestlé is contributing to the destruction of Indonesia’s rainforest, exacerbating global warming, and endangering orangutans. It posted a grisly mock commercial of Nestlé’s iconic “Have a Break” Kit-Kat ad on YouTube. The company got it removed from YouTube, which served only to send it viral across the Internet. As part of its orchestrated campaign, Greenpeace supporters stormed Nestlés’s Facebook fan page with nasty posts and swamped Twitter with propaganda focused on Nestlé’s dealings with an Indonesian firm, Sinar Mas, which Greenpeace accuses of destroying rainforests for plantations. Protests took place across Europe as around 100 Greenpeace activists, some dressed as orangutans, went to Nestlé’s headquarters in London, Amsterdam, and Frankfurt, and to seven Nestlé factories across Germany. They called on Nestlé staff to urge the company to stop using palm oil that’s the result of forest destruction.

The day the protest began, on March 19, Nestlé posted a response that it had stopped dealing with the firm, which only supplied 1.25 percent of the all the palm oil it used last year. But Nestlé has said that because palm oil batches are often mixed, it can’t guarantee that some tiny fraction of the oil it uses still doesn’t originate with Sinar Mas. Needless to say, the concession didn’t end the protest.

Deep in damage control, Nestlé appears to have abandoned its Facebook page altogether, leaving it to Kit-Kat bashers, who are now calling for a boycott of all the company’s products. And if things couldn’t be any worse, beleaguered Indonesian palm oil planters are threatening to boycott Nestlé as well for demonizing their livelihood and cutting ties.

The brouhaha has touched off a tsunami of analysis about the increasing role of anti-corporate social media campaigns. Slate’s Bernhard Warner debates whether an ill-prepared Nestlé can ever recover its Facebook page, which is now firmly in the hands of its fiercest critics.

Richard Telofksi, who analyzes corporate social media campaigns on his blog, Irregular Competition, suggests that Greenpeace, though clearly the winner in this campaign, has stepped on the facts to make its case. Other bloggers have weighed in about how to prevent your site from becoming a Trojan horse. The Atlantic’s Niraj Chokshi has her list of what companies can learn from Nestlé’s fumblings.

As hard as it may be for Nestlé to accept, this battle is over. It may just have to let this storm run its course as it takes steps to reorganize its supply chain and begins to rebuild its brand.

Image by Greenpeace Finland.

Most liberal analysts claim the European scheme is flawed but getting better, while many conservatives blast it for being both inefficient and for not reducing carbon emissions. Just recently, Kenneth Green of the American Enterprise Institute testified before the Senate Finance Committee and noted that cap-and-trade tries but fails to cap carbon emissions. Instead, it “caps economic growth.” Many conservatives argue for a carbon tax, claiming it is more cost-certain, which businesses crave. Liberal skeptics believe some conservatives disingenuously support carbon taxes as a way to throw a wrench into congressional debate and ultimately undermine support for carbon reduction legislation.

In recent weeks, the controversy has taken a new turn, as critics on the Right gained allies from the Left. While most environmental groups (ENGOs) are rallying for a worldwide cap-and-trade system, some aggressive ENGOs, including Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, have long made the case that carbon offsets are a boondoggle that would not help the environment very much. Now the iconoclastic duo, joined also by Public Citizen, has launched a new attack, spearheaded by a report by Friends of the Earth titled “A Dangerous Obsession.” According to FoE, cap-and-trade has not produced sweeping results because of rampant corruption and inefficiency inherent within the system. It claims carbon trading schemes are allowing speculators to grow rich but are not delivering the emissions cuts promised.

The trade in carbon permits and credits, mainly based in Europe, was worth $126 billion in 2008 and is predicted to balloon to $3.1 trillion by 2020 if a global carbon market takes off. But instead of being a trade between polluting industries, says FoE, it has become one dominated by banks and speculators making big profits. It’s feeding a carbon bubble, FoE says, that when popped could rival the economic damage brought on by the sub-prime mortgage debacle. FoE and Greenpeace continue to push for a carbon tax, although it differs in structure from one advanced by many conservatives.

The renewed attack on cap-and-trade was greeted with glee by gum-up-the-works conservatives at The Wall Street Journal and on Capitol Hill. But the truly interesting response has been the defensiveness of the Left, which has been struggling to hold its cap-and-trade coalition together. The liberal site TreeHugger dismisses FoE’s claim, citing a study authored by liberal NGO economists and released by the German Marshall Fund that the trading systems in Europe have led to annual carbon reductions of 2.5 percent to 5 percent with the “carbon market now worth 56 billion U.S. dollars.”

Patrick Birley from the European Climate Exchange jumped into the fray, calling the report “misguided,” and accusing FoE of demonstrating a loose grasp of financial markets by relating carbon trading to complex sub-prime trading. “Carbon trading is a very simple trading tool much like trading in oil or gas,” he said. He pointed out that carbon trading is merely a tool to achieve carbon caps set by governments.

The fierce contretemps further dampens congressional prospects for a cap-and-trade system and leaves the Left in the position of fighting itself at the very moment it needs to close ranks behind a bill, any bill, that could get to the president’s desk.

AEI intern Moon Doh contributed research assistance for this post.

Much money goes to non-political NGOs that do invaluable work that governments do not have the expertise to address. But some funding is highly politicized. Israel is a major target. Earlier this summer, NGO Monitor detailed how the Swedish government funds explicitly anti-Israeli NGOs under the banner of “human rights” and “humanitarian aid.” Last year, NGO Monitor did a similar expose of Denmark’s pro-Palestinian NGO handout strategy. In fact, many of the “civil society” organizations deeply involved in the conflict are funded under the European Commission’s Partnership for Peace Program, which has taken a highly biased approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Now, the International Policy Network, based in London, has released a startling report, “Fake Aid,” on the latest NGO funding corruption scandal. According to the IPN, Britain is passing out more than $250 million this year to a select group of NGOs to “fund lobbying activities, marketing, and the promotion of political ideology,” rather than to deliver aid.

The UK government started funding a select group of NGOs, including such high-profile activist organizations as Oxfam, ActionAid, and the World Wildlife Fund, through the Department for International Development’s (DFID) Partnership Program Arrangements fund in 2000 with a budget of about $55 million. The list of recipients has grown, but is now frozen, so those lucky enough to be grandfathered in have a guaranteed income flow that’s set to grow to more than $300 million by 2011—a total outlay over a decade of well more than $1.5 billion.

Where is this money going and to what causes?

The funding is unrestricted, which means that some NGOs with hard-edged ideologies that conflict with UK policy end up campaigning against the government that funds them. ActionAid, for example, openly decries free trade. “There is very little evidence to support claims that free trade lifts people out of poverty—in fact, the opposite is true,” it declares in a diatribe posted on its website, ignoring the dramatic advances in China, India, and other developing countries that have embraced free trade. The IPN report is filled with dozens of similar stories uncovering the spending inconsistencies of numerous NGOs.

The UK handout program, like similar giveaway efforts in other EU countries that together total several billions of dollars, is politically invested in the “human rights-based approach” to international development that’s favored by the United Nations. That trendy idea emphasizes the loudest of the advocacy NGOs and the politicized solutions that they advocate. Pressure groups argue that wealthier countries give too little aid to poorer countries, demanding that they meet an arbitrary target of 0.7 percent of GDP set back in 1970.

But does much of the aid really trickle down to the neediest? One recent study raised serious doubts. A 2006 DFID study by Mike Battcock of Oxfam’s first five years in DFID’s program concludes, “National governments complain that UK NGOs (not specifically Oxfam) take strong positions on issues that bear no relations to the views of the people.”

Is this where reasonable people want government dollars to go? It kind of takes the “non-governmental” out of “non-governmental organizations.”

We’re going to be taking a closer look at the funding sources of NGOs and where they spend their money in the coming months at NGOWatch. Stay tuned.