Trump Administration Targets Left-Leaning Nonprofits

President Donald Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and other administration officials have targeted left-leaning nonprofits generally and sometimes specifically by name for allegedly promoting political violence, responding to the killing of Charlie Kirk. There has been extensive coverage of their comments, including in the N.Y. Times, The Economist, and the Washington Post (subscriptions may be required to access these articles). While much of the coverage has focused on threats to tax-exempt status, for reasons detailed by Beth Gazley (Indiana University) and others such threats are unlikely to lead to revocations of tax-exempt status, including because it is a crime for most senior executive branch officials to even request that the I.R.S. examine specific tax-exempt nonprofits (or any other specific taxpayer) under 26 U.S.C. section 7217 or for an I.R.S. employee to fail to report having received such a request. That of course does not completely alleviate the potential chilling effect of such threats, or the more likely possibility of other adverse executive branch actions, such as denying funding requests, refusing to issue visas for employees, students, or others, and even criminal charges, all of which could create significant costs for the targeted nonprofits even if the courts ultimately overturned them.

In an attempt to counter these threats, many nonprofits are proactively pushing back against them, including more than 100 foundations that issued an open letting both condemning political violence and defending freedom of speech and the freedom to give. And perhaps most encouragingly, some conservatives have raised concerns about the threats to freedom of speech posed by the administration’s recent statements in the wake of Kirk’s killing, both speech by nonprofits and others. For example, the N.Y. Times story above quoted Scott Walter of the Capital Research Center as cautioning against targeting so-called hate speech because doing so would open “a Pandora’s box that we could all come to regret.” And several Republican Senators criticized the comments by the FCC chair that threatened agency action against broadcasters based on speech by Jimmy Kimmel.