Tired of ads? Subscribers enjoy a distraction-free reading experience.
Click here to subscribe today or Login.

Trump administration not equipped to run country

It has suddenly dawned on me.

The United States of America is a nonprofit organization. It was never meant to be a for-profit company.

An article in Pro Publica discussed how nonprofits should look for CEOs and also how for-profits should look for CEOs. There’s a difference in thinking for each.

The point is that never in our founding as a nation was it ever considered that we should try to have our government make a profit. The goal — real or unstated — was to break even, but not to make a profit. A for-profit company has a goal to make as much money as possible. It doesn’t matter if it’s public or private, the bottom line is what counts.

But a nonprofit’s goal is to serve the constituents of its goal. A nonprofit that serves poor preschoolers is only interested in serving those children. Whatever money is taken in is set to serve them. As a nonprofit CEO, you have to answer to a completely different group of people with different goals for the organization.

Then if you add a CEO who’s only experience is in a privately held corporation, he or she won’t know how to handle entities that can override him.

That’s what happened in the 2016 presidential elections. We elected a private, for-profit CEO with absolutely no experience running a nonprofit. And then to top it off, he chose like-minded people to advise him. It’s like handing out knives to the Trump administration to equip them for a gun battle.

Ed Cole

Clarks Summit

(AP Photo/ Evan Vucci)
https://www.timesleader.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/web1_Trump.jpg.optimal.jpg(AP Photo/ Evan Vucci)