How should nonprofits and foundations respond to an unprecedented assault from the federal government?
The mood among American nonprofits these days is dark. Extremely dark.
I have spent the past 40 years working in the nonprofit sector, and I’ve never seen anything like this. The second Trump administration has been engaged in a sustained assault on civil society, using its fiscal and regulatory powers, as well as the bully pulpit, to try to bring advocacy organizations, charities, universities and philanthropies in line. Thousands of federal grants have been cancelled. The cost to American nonprofits is difficult to calculate, but it almost certainly amounts to billions of dollars.
The threat of civil rights investigation has been wielded aggressively, particularly against American universities. What institution wants to submit their internal correspondence to discovery in a court of law? Who knows what embarrassing or even self-incriminating things government lawyers might find when they sift through all those emails?
In the wake of the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, the Trump administration went into overdrive, promising to “go after” organizations that it believes are guilty of fomenting violence, including a potential criminal investigation of the Open Society Foundations (founded by George Soros). The administration has even made noises about revoking the tax-exempt status of disfavored charities, including Harvard University.
In the face of this unprecedented assault, some nonprofits and foundations are taking the long view, effectively hoping that “this too shall pass.” Sure, things look bad at the moment, but the courts will probably limit the administration’s overreach, a corrective midterm election is likely in 2026 and the Democrats have a decent shot of winning the next presidential election. It may take a few years, but things will eventually return to normal, or close to it.
Against this line of thinking are those who believe that civil society is facing what amounts to an existential threat. With the wolves baying at the door, some prominent philanthropic leaders are arguing that “complacency is complicity.” Instead of silence or, god forbid, “appeasement,” they believe that foundations need to show some guts and disperse even more money than they are currently granting.
Taking stock
Anyone who was around for the first Trump administration can be forgiven for thinking that we’ve already seen how this movie ends.
Back in 2016, many foundations and nonprofits all but declared themselves part of the #Resistance to Trump. This was entirely appropriate for some organizations, given their preexisting missions. But the resistance to Trump also sucked in numerous agencies that had heretofore appeared apolitical or middle-of-the-road.
Some minor skirmishes were won along the way, but the war was resoundingly lost: Despite a massive expenditure of time and resources by philanthropy and nonprofits, Trump returned to the presidency triumphantly in 2024. Significantly, Trump’s victory was fueled by non-college-educated voters and improved levels of support from Blacks and Hispanics, exactly the kind of “vulnerable communities” that philanthropy and nonprofits typically aim to serve.
So if running back the Resistance isn’t the answer, what is?
A good first step would be to engage in some introspection. Nonprofits and foundations should look at the current state of politics in the United States and ask some hard questions about whether they have contributed to the hyper-partisanship and polarization that currently plagues us. The honest answer, for many, will be “yes.”
In recent years, many service delivery organizations have chosen to expand their remit and get involved in advocacy work. Many foundations have been responsible for underwriting “intense policy demanders” — activist organizations that have proven enormously influential, helping to move American political parties away from the center and toward more extreme policy positions.
Some philanthropic insiders have come to recognize the downsides of this approach. For example, Suzette Brooks Masters spent nearly a decade as a grant maker focused on immigration. With hindsight, she believes that she was so caught up in winning that she was blind to the possibility of backlash: “I didn’t seek out enough evidence about the unintended negative effects immigration battles could have on a large portion of the public who might have reasonable or principled questions or concerns about demographic changes fueled by immigration.”
According to Daniel Stid, formerly a program officer at the Hewlett Foundation, “You've got these networks of media, NGO activists, foundations, think tankers and policy wonks that are effectively pulling both parties out to the hyper-partisan poles … I think philanthropy is particularly implicated in this phenomenon … Philanthropy [is] bankrolling most of the elements of the so-called shadow parties.”
Even the Ford Foundation, a leading funder of social justice causes, has recognized this dynamic. In a 2024 missive highlighting a global initiative to combat polarization, the foundation acknowledged that “we must be diligent to ensure we do not make polarization worse through our own actions or rhetoric … in philanthropy, we must all be aware of funding solutions-oriented and transformative work, not just doubling down on one viewpoint.”
What is to be done
Once they have fully taken stock of their own role in fueling polarization, the pillars of civil society should actively seek to shift gears. For foundations, this means recalibrating their giving so that they are funding more efforts to reduce the temperature of our politics and to build bridges across social divides. Nonprofits should actively rethink their communication strategies. Too many organizations have essentially given up on actually attempting to persuade the majority of Americans who do not vote for the Democratic Party.
These types of changes will hopefully yield long-term dividends, but they will not halt the Trump assault in the here and now. For that, foundations and nonprofits should be engaging in collective action, both in the courts and in the public square. A recent open letter signed by hundreds of foundations represents a first step. “Attempts to silence speech, criminalize opposing viewpoints, and misrepresent and limit charitable giving undermine our democracy and harm all Americans,” the signatories affirmed.
While that’s a good message, its effectiveness is undercut by the composition of the foundations who agreed to sign on. The headline “Left-Leaning Nonprofits Push Back on Trump’s Crackdown Threats” was typical of the way that news outlets covered the open letter.
The framing of the battle between the Trump administration and civil society as just another left-right dispute plays into Trump’s hands. The more that the effort to defend philanthropy and the nonprofit sector can be portrayed as a nonpartisan issue, with significant support from conservatives, the more effective it will be.
Given this reality, it was heartening to read a recent interview with Lawson Bader, the president and CEO of DonorsTrust, a conservative philanthropic organization, in The Free Press. Bader called out the White House for engaging in “dangerous” rhetoric and creating a precedent that could be used against conservative organizations in the future. “The whole conversation needs to tone down,” Bader said. “I think it’s going to come back to haunt us.”
What civil society needs now is a chorus of Lawson Baders. Nonprofits and foundations perform tasks that are vital to the health of American society. They deliver valuable services that businesses will never take on because there is no profit to reap. They spark innovation in a way that government cannot. Most important, they are part of the connective tissue that binds us together as Americans. If civil society hopes not just to survive the current crisis but to emerge stronger, it must embrace self-examination and cross-ideological partnership, not burrowing into partisan trenches. In the process, nonprofits and foundations can embody the kind of live-and-let-live pluralism and basic decency that are essential to a thriving multi-ethnic democracy.