Everyone wants to donate to program work, but never to operations.

Even grants that carve out for operations aren’t always realistic.

Major gifts is one of the best ways to get unrestricted donor funds.

You can get a lot of information from the 990 filing of an organization.

In other comments, I agree that in many non profit organizations there are people who might not last in for profit.

Most of those people however are working in roles that are $30,000 , maybe $40,000 a year and there wouldn’t be someone in for profit who would take that role, for that amount of pay.

Overwork and burnout in the field is very real.

Unrelated to that staffing, I would again go back to operational expenses - rent, electricity, payroll etc. Depending on the nonprofit, this may be a huge percentage… but if you have an organization that has a $250,000 a year revenue, two staff to accomplish what their mission is…. What actually goes to program work might be very little.

If you instead kept that $100 to spend on yourself, you would give the government $40 and you could spend $60.

In the case you give it to charity, the development/executive staff pays income taxes on that $90, so if their marginal rate is the same as yours (assuming they're highly paid), they pay $36 in taxes, have $54 to spend, and $10 goes to programming. If it goes to staff paid under $147K, they pay their (lower) marginal rate on it, but the full 15.3% amount for Social Security and Medicare is paid on those funds.

It seems like the government is only out ~$4 ($40 less from you; $36 more from someone else), with ~$10 available for programs.

(The largest loss is that you lost $60 of spending power in exchange for only $10 in programming while development staff got an extra $54 of spending power. You lose way more than the government loses.)