Since the Trump administration took office in January, it has posed two distinct threats to philanthropy: first, that it would roll back many of the gains that foundations have helped achieve over the past half-century across a broad range of issues. And second, that it would directly target grantmakers as part of a broader authoritarian attack on civil society.
The first threat materialized immediately, as the administration eviscerated USAID and took a sledgehammer to the rest of the federal government, laying off tens of thousands of workers and cancelling billions in grants to nonprofits. That proved just a warmup to a much broader, sustained effort to roll back regulatory protections, kill the renewable energy industry, weaken the social safety net and worker protections, gut civil rights enforcement, and much more.
The second threat — direct attacks on philanthropy — remained mostly hypothetical for months. That changed recently in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, when Trump officials pledged to go after funders on the left, mentioning the Open Society Foundations and the Ford Foundation. Still, it was unclear when, if or how that might actually happen.
Now this threat has finally materialized, for real.
Targeting philanthropy
A top official at the Justice Department has directed U.S. attorneys’ offices to investigate the Open Society Foundations on a range of possible criminal charges, reportedly on orders from the White House. At the same time, the administration issued a presidential memorandum announcing a new law enforcement effort to “disband and uproot” groups that the administration alleges support “domestic terrorism.” (See IP’s reporting on this emerging story here, here and here.) These moves came during a week when the administration also secured an indictment of former FBI Director James Comey, with Trump vowing more revenge prosecutions to come.
As the United States moves more clearly into an authoritarian period, how should philanthropy respond to the existential threat at hand?
I’m not pulling the term “existential threat” out of thin air. This is how the CEO of one of America’s biggest foundations described the threat posed by Trump 2.0 when we talked months ago.
That description struck me as spot-on, especially given the two separate lines of attack described above. Even if the administration doesn’t follow through with a large-scale crackdown on philanthropy and civil society, its governance agenda threatens not only to destroy much of what grantmakers have achieved over many decades, but also to sharply narrow what these funders can hope to accomplish going forward.
How many leaders of major foundations agree that the sector — and U.S. democracy writ large — is facing an existential threat? I don’t know. What one well-connected democracy funder told me a while back is that “some people get it, others don’t.”
I’m guessing that as the administration’s authoritarian agenda becomes harder to deny, more foundations will get it. But then what? What would it really mean for a foundation to respond to an existential threat?
I’ll dig into that question in a moment, but first, let me say that I can’t think of more than a few foundations that have fundamentally changed how they operate over the past eight months, even those that have the most at stake. Just take a spin through the grants databases of the biggest liberal foundations and you’ll see what I mean. The stream of money going out the door in 2025 doesn’t look much different from 2024.
To be sure, a lot is happening behind the scenes that funders don’t want to talk about, even off the record. So it’s hard to know exactly how foundations and top donors are responding to Trump 2.0. Overall, though, I’m seeing a lot more business as usual than large-scale change to meet the moment.
Why aren’t foundations reorganizing for battle?
What kind of change do I have in mind?
Well, imagine if you led a country facing an enemy army on the march, with the clearly stated intention of wiping out your civilization.
Would you respond by modestly dipping into your treasury to strengthen your defenses, while keeping most of your wealth on the sidelines and continuing to invest in your usual priorities, such as schools and museums?
Or would you drop everything you’re doing, completely change how you operate, and fight with everything you’ve got?
I think the question answers itself.
Why aren’t foundations reorganizing themselves for an existential battle and fighting with everything they’ve got? I can think of a few possible answers.
First, perhaps they believe that the actions they’re taking are sufficient — that it’s enough to increase payout by a percentage point or two, move money to litigation and other familiar types of pushback, and also make sure they’re fully backing up current grantees facing funding cuts and security threats. Beyond that, perhaps funders don’t think that any single foundation throwing more money at this situation will make a difference.
If this is the thinking, I strongly disagree with that assessment. A dramatically larger level of funding is both badly needed and could be deployed effectively to defend U.S. democracy and block Trump’s governance agenda, as I’ve detailed here.
Another possibility is that even for those foundations that recognize the existential threat in theory, the gravity of the situation may still not have fully sunk in. Let’s hope this past week changes that.
On top of that, many foundations are surely just afraid, and for good reason, that pushing back a lot harder against the administration will make them targets — though we’re now seeing they already are.
A last possible explanation for foundations not fighting with everything they have is that these institutions are unable to change quickly enough to adapt to dramatically changed circumstances, regardless of how high the stakes are. I’ve made that argument here and elsewhere. In fairness, this is a common problem with all kinds of institutions; on the other hand, few sectors operate with more freedom of action than philanthropy.
Whatever’s going on here — and probably all the explanations above are at work — it’s clear that America is heading deeper into uncharted waters. The question now is whether philanthropy will play a much greater role than it has so far in helping us navigate through this period with our democracy intact.
