In the latter half of the twentieth century the federal government greatly increased its role in delivering social programs and in funding the nonprofit sector to do so on its behalf with the federal government tripling its investment over those years (Hall 2011). Most of this investment was made through contracts and grants (Smith 2011) and, not surprisingly, many authors talk about the tremendous growth in the number of nonprofits during this period particularly from the 1960s through 1990 (Hammack 2002).