For decades, autocracy and state distribution of jobs and welfare were closely intertwined. However, in recent decades, many autocracies––whether austerity-stricken, hydrocarbon-reliant, or post-communist––have scaled back distributive commitments by shrinking public sector employment schemes, subsidies, and welfare provisions. In the place of distributive state institutions, a new set of political entities called Government-Operated NGOs (GONGOs) have emerged in a wide range of autocracies: in Russia, China, Egypt, UAE, Malaysia, Kazakhstan, and Ethiopia, to name a few. Often funded by regimes, GONGOs operate semi-independently and ostensibly in civil society. With their hybridity and elusiveness, GONGOs challenge how scholars think about autocracies as typically seeking to dominate the public sphere and assert citizen dependence on formal state institutions. Through an analysis of youth GONGOs in Jordan, this dissertation addresses the puzzle of why authoritarian regimes clothe themselves in the garb of GONGOs. Existing explanations highlight either coercion––that GONGOs’ hybridity allows regimes to operate in civil society and crowd out independent actors––or legitimacy––that GONGOs help project a veneer of pluralism to both international and national audiences. In contrast, I argue that GONGOs are key institutional mechanisms helping to insulate the monarchy from the demise of the distributive state while managing citizens’ changing expectations of the state in the context of autocracies’ abandonment of distribution and welfare. Because distributive state institutions (consisting of formal government institutions) are increasingly producing tragic outcomes (youth unemployment, rising living costs through subsidies removal), GONGOs shift the locus of interpellation––the site of the regime’s address of citizens––away from the distributive state which has historically addressed citizens at the site of their subsistence needs and aspirations to economic security. Instead, GONGOs circumvent the distributive state to directly foster attachments to the monarchy while encouraging citizens to extract themselves from state dependence and to care for themselves. Moreover, GONGOs help protect the regime from citizens’ claims-making by displacing the state as a unitary object of grievances. The kind of acquiescence that GONGOs produce rests not on legitimacy or coercion but on persuading citizens not to regard the state as an irredeemable stumbling block to individual flourishing, even amidst extreme economic uncertainty. In making these arguments, this dissertation focuses particularly on Jordanian youth whose growing frustrations amid unemployment and economic immiseration are particularly threatening to regime stability. This dissertation builds on immersive fieldwork––interviews and ethnography––in Jordanian youth GONGOs in addition to archival research on historical youth governance. The dissertation seeks to contribute to bridging the literatures on autocratic institutions, on the one hand, and neoliberalism, as a macroeconomic policy program and an ideology that seeks to install competition and enterprise into almost every facet of life, on the other hand. GONGOs provide an ideal vantage point through which to explore evolving modes of state-making and unmaking and the way in which citizens experience, adapt to, and occasionally resist autocracies’ evolving strategies in the post-welfare era.