It's ongoing and we need to be prepared to defend our work and the vulnerable who need us!
This year the US president and his allies will attack nonprofits and foundations. They will attack our First Amendment freedom of speech, assembly, and advocacy. They’ll use rhetoric, legislation, hearings, and intimidation to do this. Why? To silence dissent and secure their own power. Most of the advice nonprofits will hear is to prepare for these attacks by getting their legal and financial ducks in a row. But this battle is not so much legal or financial. It’s politics and optics. We can’t cower in fear, go on defensive, and “obey in advance”. Instead, we need to go on offense, and boldly call-out their nonsense! Moreover, we need to declare the value that nonprofit workers, volunteers, and activists provide to our democracy, economy, communities, and society. Read this piece by Mike Berkowitz of the Democracy Funders Network in the The Chronicle of Philanthropy’s The Commons https://lnkd.in/eDiefHjP Although it doesn’t make headlines, the Trump team has actually been attacking nonprofits for a while. Here are just a few lowlights from Trump and his friends in the House and Senate this past year: — In April 2024, Mr. Trump made the following public statement: “How do so-called ‘non-profits’ get away with spending all of their time and money on ‘getting Donald Trump.’ That’s not the deal. We are watching these thugs and sleazebags closely!” https://lnkd.in/eZGntdmi — In May 2024, during student protests over Israeli killings in Gaza, Sen. JD Vance introduced legislation that attacked free speech and university endowments. His bill would have required colleges to remove protest “encampments” from campus within 7 days. Institutions that failed to comply would have lost federal financial assistance, including Pell grants and federal loans, for five years. To replace these, institutions would have been mandated to provide students with equivalent grants at the institution’s expense. If a college failed to do so, it would have faced a tax equal to 50% of its endowment. https://lnkd.in/env6wH2g — In September 2024, the House GOP introduced what we called the Nonprofit-Killer Bill (HR 9495), which would have enabled Trump’s Treasury Secretary to strip any nonprofits of their right to exist by smearing them as ‘terror-supporting’, without offering evidence of wrongdoing or adequate due process to challenge the punishment. Since it had little chance of being signed by President Biden, some have said it was a messaging bill, a kind of virtue signaling against virtue. Some or all of this is likely to be recycled in some form in the coming months. Be prepared to proactively stop it on behalf of the entire nonprofit sector, as well as preparing to defend your own org.
