This April, a spring shower of rumors hit the environmental movement. Messages circulated suggesting the Trump administration was planning to revoke the tax-exempt status of climate organizations and their funders, launch investigations of green groups and make overseas funding more difficult. And they were going to do it on Earth Day.
Then April 22 came and went without any announcements.
But five months and seemingly several lifetimes later, President Donald Trump and top White House officials are bluntly threatening nonprofits and their funders — and potentially targeting a much broader swath of the sector. The administration has repeatedly linked Charlie Kirk’s assassination to what Trump characterizes as an organized “radical left” — law enforcement has not made such claims — and threatened a broad crackdown on left-wing nonprofits and foundations.
“My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it,” Trump said in remarks following the shooting.
Days later, Vice President J.D. Vance said he would “go after the NGO network that foments, facilitates and engages in violence,” and named the Ford Foundation and Open Society Foundations, the network of grantmakers funded by George Soros. Stephen Miller, Trump’s top policy advisor, has sworn to “use every resource we have” in that effort.
Those words sound like marching orders for Trump’s appointees across the government, whether in the Department of Justice or Homeland Security, both of which Miller mentioned. While it is as yet unclear exactly what steps the administration will take against philanthropy and nonprofits, if any, such a course would fit its pattern of pursuing real and perceived Trump enemies, as well as major liberal institutions.
What’s the administration’s strategy? What might Ford, OSF and others face?
Threats have proved very successful for Trump. His administration has won concessions from several colleges by threatening their federal funding, including in a face-off with one of the world’s wealthiest nonprofits, Harvard University. His lawsuits have landed him payments of $16 million from Paramount and $25 million from Meta, while ABC gave $15 million to his presidential library. His administration also forced settlements with several top law firms previously engaged in litigation it opposed. We’ve even seen two late show hosts — Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel — effectively lose their jobs after drawing the administration’s ire.
“The pattern we’ve seen in the other areas suggests that they can get a great deal of results from a relatively modest amount of intimidation, and that model is attractive to them,” said David A. Super, a professor at Georgetown Law.
Super noted that in Trump’s first term, large law firms served as co-counsel on several of the major lawsuits challenging Trump’s policies, while this term, cases have been brought by nonprofits. That may be part of what is driving the administration to threaten them.
He believes the administration is targeting Ford and OSF because they are “high-profile actors” and doing so will have a chilling effect, similar to its face-offs with Harvard and Columbia.
“It’s pretty obvious the administration is deliberately not going after the risk takers, but going after funders that many people will say: ‘if they’re doing it, I’m probably doing it too, and if something bad happens to them, something bad could happen to me too,’” he said.
Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer, a Notre Dame Law School professor who focuses on nonprofit organizations, emphasized that nonprofits are protected by IRS rules prohibiting anyone but the attorney general from directing audits, particularly since IRS employees themselves could risk prosecution by following an order from the White House to take action without due process, such as terminating an organization’s tax-exempt status.
“I still think the risk is pretty low with respect to tax exempt status because of the legal barriers,” he said.
He noted the administration has clear leverage over institutions receiving federal funding, such as universities, but otherwise, its options are limited largely to criminal prosecution. Plenty of nonprofits receive federal funding, of course — and many have lost it this year — but very few foundations do.
At the same time, efforts to put broad limits on what funders and nonprofits can do could adversely affect groups the administration favors. For instance, an earlier proposal to require disclosure of international funding received pushback from conservative Christian groups.
“If you try to target groups more broadly that are engaged in public policy efforts or political efforts of various types, you’re going to get people on both sides of the aisle and both sides of issues,” Mayer said.
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What types of groups might the administration target, and how?
Assuming the administration carries out its threats, what types of nonprofits might be targeted for prosecution? “The administration has conveniently provided us a list,” Mayer said.
A March 7 executive order on public service loan forgiveness revises the definition of “public service” to exclude organizations that violate immigration law, support terrorism, engage in discrimination (“that’s the DEI part,” he said), facilitate child abuse (“what they mean by that is gender-affirming care for minors,” he said), or engage in disruptive protests. Around 11,000 public comments have been filed on the proposed rules, including one by a group of nonprofit legal experts including Mayer.
Both Mayer and Super stressed that the costs to nonprofits of preparing for investigations or cases can be steep, including the costs of hiring lawyers, dealing with adverse publicity and fielding investigative requests. This, in itself, could be part of the administration’s strategy.
“An investigation can be quite crippling, because you swamp [an organization] with document requests, many of them incoherent, so they can’t comply,” Super said. “Even if you lose all those cases, you still accomplish something because a million dollars that could have been spent on programs was spent on attorneys fending off your investigation.”
Yet neither suggested what the administration has disclosed so far adds up to robust cases. In reviewing possible moves, Mayer noted that it’s a complex procedure to label a nonprofit a terrorist organization (which would be a means of stripping it of tax-exempt status, among other potential punitive actions) and it’s unclear whether domestic organizations can be given that label. He also emphasized it’s very hard to link a nonprofit to acts of violence. Rhetoric alone is not sufficient.
“The most troubling statement — and I’m not the first one to say this, by any stretch — is the Attorney General’s statement that she’s going to go after groups that engage in hate speech,” he said. “What exactly is hate speech is very unclear.”
Mayer recommended two steps for nonprofits seeking to prepare amid this fresh outburst of threats. First, they should take a close look at their own operations and activities to see what might draw attention and whether that cost is worth it to them. Judging by what we’ve seen already of website revisions and missing staff pages, many institutions are doing just that.
Second, he suggested nonprofits work to align themselves as a single front. While many foundations have been largely quiet in the face of the Trump administration’s moves — including Ford and OSF — initial signs suggest both nonprofits and foundations may be more aligned than, say, universities or liberal-leaning law firms.
Can the philanthrosphere hold the line?
Earlier this year, the sector mobilized successfully to fight off a bill that would have allowed the Treasury secretary to unilaterally declare a nonprofit a “terrorist-supporting organization.” The so-called “nonprofit killer bill,” H.R.9495, didn’t make it into Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, though it could be resurrected down the line.
More than 700 philanthropic organizations and sector groups also signed a statement, hosted by the Council on Foundations, in support of funders’ ability to make grants as they see fit, citing the First Amendment. Before this administration, mainstream philanthropy was typically united against proposed policy changes or reforms — for instance, the sector successfully mobilized against the Accelerating Charitable Efforts Act, with conservative groups like Philanthropy Roundtable calling for “philanthropic freedom.”
But perhaps it is notable that philanthropy’s joint response this week came from a smaller and largely left-leaning group: This Wednesday, more than 140 foundations and donor networks signed an open letter again defending the freedom of speech, while also condemning political violence and the administration’s attempts to tie such acts to nonprofits. Signatories included Ford and OSF, as well as several signatories of the earlier statement.
“We reject attempts to exploit political violence to mischaracterize our good work or restrict our fundamental freedoms, like freedom of speech and the freedom to give,” it read. “Attempts to silence speech, criminalize opposing viewpoints, and misrepresent and limit charitable giving undermine our democracy and harm all Americans.”
Later this week, a broad array of mostly progressive nonprofits came together via two additional open letters, one hosted by Public Citizen and another by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, urging the sector to stand united against repression.
Asked about the recent administration threats to nonprofits, Kathleen Enright, the Council on Foundations’ president and CEO, noted there is already a robust infrastructure in place to regulate nonprofits and that standards should apply universally.
“Institutions whose purpose is to act in the public good should be held to a high standard of transparency and accountability,” she said in a statement. “That’s why there are several institutions charged with oversight, including the IRS, state attorneys general, state charity officials. In a free and fair society, whether a group’s views align with those in power or fundamentally diverge, they all must be treated equally under the law.”
Diane Yentel, president and CEO of the National Council of Nonprofits, who has been a powerful defender of the sector over the past year, expressed more pointed concern about the situation. She said the administration’s “reckless rhetoric” is endangering nonprofit staff and volunteers at a time when escalating political violence makes the work of organizations to unite communities even more necessary.
“Let’s be clear: those making these accusations have presented no evidence linking nonprofit organizations to political violence,” she said in a statement. “This is not about public safety — it is a calculated attempt to exploit a tragedy in order to intimidate and silence nonprofit voices. This is censorship masquerading as protection.”
Super noted that the administration has shown it is willing to pursue ever greater concessions in the face of compliance, such as in the case of Columbia University. But many of its warnings have proven to be basically hot air.
“There certainly are a lot of threats they’ve made that haven’t come to anything,” he said. “Senator Schiff is not in jail. Kamala Harris is not in jail. Hillary Clinton is not in jail.”
Michael Kavate covers climate philanthropy and billionaire donors. He welcomes all feedback, tips and requests.
