Genocide, the Non Profit Industrial Complex and the Democratic Party Establishment

Over the past couple of years, a hybrid type of activist has emerged in Washington, D.C.

To get a paycheck and pay the bills, they toil away inside the non profit industrial complex – made up of non-profit organizations generally aligned with the Democratic Party.

Then they have side gigs, where they go on Substack and podcasts and rip away at the  beast, without mentioning their employment with the public interest group in question.

In the May/June 2026 edition of the Capitol Hill Citizen, we interviewed one of these public interest warriors – Aaron Regunberg. 

During the day, Regunberg works on climate change for Public Citizen. 

At night, he goes on podcasts and speaks out on topics Public Citizen dares not touch. While Regunberg has repeatedly condemned Israeli genocide in Gaza, Public Citizen has not. 

On March 19, 2026, Public Citizen put out a press release titled – $200 Billion for Trump’s Iran War is Grotesque Beyond Words. 

But Public Citizen has said nothing that we could find about the billions the Biden and Trump administrations have been shoveling to Israel to commit Israel’s genocide in Gaza. 

And that’s true for most of the inside the beltway public interest groups – with few exceptions. 

We asked Regunberg – Why is that?

“Liberal groups might be scared of running up against the Democratic establishment,” Regunberg said.

Might be scared?

Just this week, Public Citizen held its annual gala at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. 

And the keynote speaker? 

AIPAC recipient and friend and defender of the nuclear power industry Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island). 

In a Capitol Hill Citizen front page article in the May/June 2026 issue – Big Tech Campaign to Fast Track Nuke Energy – our reporter Peter Castagno laid out how Senator Whitehouse and Senator Cory Booker (D-New Jersey) “were the primary architects of the legislative architecture that the Trump administration has since used for maximal deregulation.”

(Early in its existence, Public Citizen’s Critical Mass Energy Project was a lead campaigner against nuclear power in the United States. It has since been shuttered.)

In March 2024, Whitehouse voted to defund UNRWA, the key organization in Gaza that delivered food, water, and medical supplies to Gaza. And he has voted in favor of Israel’s yearly military aid package.

In October 2024, members of Jewish Voice for Peace disrupted speeches by Senators Whitehouse and Jack Reed in Providence at a fundraiser for the Democratic Party. 

The protesters called on the Senators to stop funding the Israeli genocide in Gaza — to no avail. 

Or take the case of Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), the national organization pushing for single payer healthcare in the United States. 

Like Public Citizen, PNHP is tightly aligned with the Democratic Party and has refused to condemn the Israeli genocide in Gaza. 

When asked about this, PNHP executive director Ken Snyder said that the organization does not make statements or take positions outside of their main issues – health care and national Medicare for All.

Snyder said that while the Israeli genocide has been raised by PNHP members, it never came before the board because of the focus of the organization is on single payer.

Bett Capehart is a single payer advocate and for fifteen years was a board member of the PNHP chapter in the state of Washington. Then in January 2024, she resigned from the PNHP board because, she said, the board voted against a resolution to condemn the Israeli genocide in Gaza.

“I’m still a member of PNHP, but I’m not on the board anymore,” Capehart told an early May gathering for Kshama Sawant’s Congressional run in Washington’s ninth Congressional district.  

“I’m still a member of PNHP, but I’m not on the board anymore. I put my faith in the medical students who are members of PNHP, and when I donate, I donate to the medical students, not the whole PNHP organization,” Capehart told the gathering. 

“I had to leave my board position with PNHP over the issue of a genocide,” she said. “The medical students brought a petition to the board. It was from Healthcare Workers for Palestine, and it was at the very beginning of the genocide.”

The board voted down the resolution in January 2024, Capehart said.

“I couldn’t sit with that. I thought – I’m kind of not doing what I’m supposed to do. But that experience is very similar to the disappointment that a lot of us have around organizations and nonprofits during this genocide who have not stepped up and taken a position and instead sort of still cowering before the Democrats.”

“After all, it was the Democrats who gave us the genocide,” Capehart said. “Let’s not forget that.”

Capehart told Capitol Hill Citizen last week that the medical students’ petition “was rather benign, calling for solidarity with the Palestinians, condemnation of the genocide and an end US arm sales to Israel.”

Capehart recalls that her and two other board members supported the resolution, while five other board members opposed it. Those who voted against the resolution told Capehart “this is between Israel and Hamas.”

Capehart said that the national PNHP has said nothing about the genocide.

While medical organizations like PNHP are refusing to speak out, individual doctors are another story.

Take the case of Dr. Diana Lapp. Dr. Lapp is a practicing family physician currently working at a community health center in Portland, Maine.

For 25 years, she was an active member of the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP). Earlier this year, she renounced her AAFP membership.

Why?

“For over two years, I and some of my colleagues urged the AAFP leadership to speak out against Israel’s genocide in Gaza and its deliberate destruction of the Palestinian health care system,” Dr. Lapp wrote in an op-ed in January in the Portland Press Herald. “We believe it is our ethical obligation as physicians to insist on the protection of health care workers according to humanitarian international law – without exception.”

“Between October 7, 2023, and October 20, 2025, Israel killed at least 1,700 Palestinian health care workers and detained 431 from Gaza and the West Bank. While 309 are now confirmed to have been released, we know that at least another five died in detention, including two senior physicians, and 95 remain in Israeli custody.”

“AAFP’s response? Nothing but a toothless resolution passed in July 2024. The resolution purported to ‘support the safety of health care and humanitarian aid workers along with safe access to health care, health care facilities and humanitarian aid for all civilians in areas of armed conflict.’”

Dr. Lapp says that AAFP is not alone in its failure to condemn the genocide.

“The American Medical Association and all other major U.S. medical professional organizations have remained silent,” Dr. Lapp wrote. “Rather than supporting this complicity, I will stand behind the Hippocratic Oath I took 28 years ago. I will not support any medical professional organization’s silence.”

Both Code Pink and Doctors Against Genocide have been active in protesting the AMA and other medical associations who have failed to condemn the ongoing genocide.

But to this date, no major American medical organization has yet to speak out.