As the Undergraduate Student Government (USG) election cycle began, I noticed a distinct lack of public explanations about how USG’s finances work and why its funding decisions always somehow feel so capricious. Given that most of the slates running in this week’s election are campaigning on financial transparency, and that Annual Allocations is currently taking place, this seems like an oversight.
When I served as vice president of student organizations (VPSO), a position whose responsibilities included the coordination of finances, I wrote a technical guide on how USG finances work: USG Finance 101. As RSOs start to write their budgets for next year, I hope my insight can help them understand the byzantine process of USG funding and why, every year, it feels like it doesn’t work. USG funding feels capricious because it is largely arbitrary; it is structurally underinformed, inconsistently governed, and largely opaque.
The USG funding process starts at the University level when the University Budget Office sets the overall University budget. That budget then filters down to the Center for Leadership and Involvement (CLI), which sets USG’s budget. USG then drafts its own internal budget, written by the Executive Cabinet and approved (typically with few changes) by College Council (CC), which sets funds for the five finance committees, as well as USG’s operations, partially for the current academic year and partially for the upcoming one.
The five finance committees fund the vast majority of RSOs, but the USG budget also sets budgets for the Committee on Recognized Student Organizations (CORSO), the Cabinet, and the Committee on Marginalized Student Affairs (COMSA), which can also fund student organizations. RSOs are split across the finance committees typically by their color designation, which can be found on Blueprint, as USG has no other mechanism to classify RSOs. The color designation is an internal CLI metric to denote different RSO types, such as to differentiate athletic RSOs from other groups, and is critical to the amount of funding an RSO receives.
Some committees have massive color groups, like the Student Government Finance Committee (SGFC) and the Community Service Fund (CSF), while others are responsible for fewer than 10 RSOs, like the Coalition of Academic Teams (CAT). How much attention a committee is able to provide to a given funding request is almost directly correlated to how much money an individual RSO will receive. USG has not fully revisited how RSOs are distributed across committees since its split from the University-wide Student Government almost half a decade ago.
The smaller committees meet directly with each RSO, receiving complicated budget documents and a presentation from the RSOs themselves, while larger committees like SGFC and CSF simply set allocation levels for each club with minimal documentation. Only SGFC has a set of funding guidelines that are given to RSOs consistently in advance, though some guidelines posted to CLI’s website have apparently not been updated since 2017 and are in conflict with other SGFC guidelines also posted in the same sentence, on the same page, of the same website. Committees have set cost guides up in the past (I set up three for committees I ran), but RSOs are almost always funded by what I call “vibe-based finance”—i.e., “Does the request feel reasonable or not?”
Critically, no funding committee knows how RSOs spent their money in the past year—it is entirely self-reported information, and no audit (save for my audits in academic year 2024–25) actually looks at receipts and charges on accounts, which are available in Blueprint. USG almost never knows if a specific number is made up, whether it be the actual cost of a good or the attendance at a given event.
In my experience in USG, most RSOs have never been and never will be audited. Historically, SGFC has claimed RSOs “self-audit,” and forced them to fill out a form to do so, despite the form not being checked nor including actually auditable information. This lack of auditing allows for RSOs to inflate their spending in submissions to USG, as many do. This forces SGFC and CSF, as well as the other finance committees, to do flat-rate percentage cuts on requests (often hidden under the guise of “fundraising requirements”). In short, USG doesn’t know enough to actually make an informed decision on how an RSO will spend money, so it often just cuts the requests down to the amount the finance committee has to spend.
This, at its core, is why USG funding feels capricious—the “vibe-based finance” aspect, with rules not articulated in advance, combined with the flat-rate cutting, belies a wider truth: USG doesn’t know how it spends its money and doesn’t know how RSOs spend their money. The latter point cannot be overstated. In a Program Coordinating Council (PCC) budget from last year, there is a plea at the bottom of its proposed spending of half a million dollars—“need accurate numbers.”
In a recent CC meeting, SGFC didn’t even report the name of an RSO correctly. In an SGFC meeting in early March, a committee member asked an RSO how much it had received in the past for the same event—indicating that SGFC didn’t know. In that same SGFC meeting, a member handling the finance responsibilities of an RSO sat on a request for that same RSO; miraculously, he had no questions and the RSO was funded in full with no discussion. This same member is now running to be president of USG on a platform of financial transparency. USG’s caprice is clearly not an isolated issue—and when CC’s minutes modifying core election procedures consist of barely a page of misspelled content, it’s hard to blame them.
In this environment, making up numbers and currying favor with USG has no negative impact, and because this has in my experience become common practice among many RSOs, others are forced to do the same to get their piece of the pie.
Across committees, there are also wide funding discrepancies. For example, CAT RSOs will never need to visit SGFC—they are funded in full by CAT and cannot receive SGFC monies except for some on-campus events. RSOs in PCC, which funds Summer Breeze and other major on-campus events, cannot go to SGFC for any monies. There is no known reason for this difference; it simply is. Further, CAT and PCC organizations receive far more money than RSOs supervised by other committees, even if other RSOs might also need money.
The Phoenix Sustainability Initiative (PSI) does substantive work on campus, but because it is an SGFC group, it typically receives tens of thousands of dollars less than a group like Mock Trial, which has historically accepted a very small proportion of applicants and has next to no on-campus presence. Mock Trial was funded in full last year, receiving no cuts to its proposed budget; PSI was cut by well over 25 percent. This is an example that could be multiplied several times over. There is no cross-committee comparison to ensure value for money or even basic fairness—that lack of comparison causes the outcomes we see.
Cabinet, CORSO, and COMSA also fund RSOs in various ways. In the case of the Executive Cabinet, it sets itself an administrative budget (typically between $10,000 and $20,000), to fund some well-known programs, like the airport shuttles and the Taste of Hyde Park. It also can fund, at its discretion and normally without CC approval, any RSO. Hence, RSOs that have ties to Cabinet, in what amounts to a clear conflict of interest, can get extra funding for which there is no real public application or competition.
COMSA will also provide grant funds to certain RSOs, the criteria for which is not public. Because COMSA grants are approved by the Cabinet, COMSA too is captured by the Cabinet’s interests. CORSO awards certain grants to RSOs after a public application sent by email to every member of the student body, but these grants are typically quite small, to the tune of hundreds of dollars, and tend to go to RSO student advisors.
The question that arises is why none of this is public. CC, of course, has to approve each finance committee’s decision—why doesn’t it come out then? The Cabinet has public meetings, as does CC. One would be forgiven for not knowing that these meetings are public—they certainly aren’t posted on USG’s website. The issue is that CC is typically informed of finance committee decisions either at the very last or second-to-last meeting of spring quarter. Because CC is disinclined to extend the length of their meetings or hold more of them (or meet over the summer as they should), they just rubber-stamp what is put in front of them, making the problems of the finance committees permanent. In short, they could fix these problems, but they don’t. They have the power to but simply lack the drive to do so.
USG also doesn’t have the administrative capacity to even appoint members to its committees, much less keep accurate track of how much it has spent across committees. (When I was VPSO, I found over $15,000 in forgotten committee bank accounts). When CC was to appoint members to PCC, a committee that spends 25 percent of USG’s total budget, it couldn’t actually find the document that had their names, so the motion to appoint them was tabled. In this environment, it’s no wonder that such things aren’t public. Even if USG were aiming at total transparency, it simply lacks the capacity to be transparent.
With no publicity, flagrant conflict of interest issues, administrative incapacity, “vibes”-based finance, flat-rate cuts due to informational deficits, and myriad other smaller issues, RSOs are ill-equipped to navigate the system that determines their financial life-or-death. Until USG develops serious administrative capacity, the appearance of caprice will remain not a perception but reality. Until then, I say good luck; I hope this article helps.
Nevin Hall is a fourth-year in the College and previously served as USG’s vice president of student organizations and the Election & Rules Committee chair until his impeachment last spring.
