How the Trump Admin Has Sown Fear Among Progressive Nonprofits

Private security details. Lawyering up. Moving assets overseas. Keeping comms on encrypted apps. Creating new legal entities to build a shield against federal investigations.

Nonprofits devoted to progressive causes are taking new precautions as the Trump administration repeatedly declares that it will direct law enforcement to investigate groups advocating for views that it disfavors. The Trump administration and its supporters frame these threats as part of a sweeping, necessary investigation into “antifa,” the chimerical assembly of “domestic terrorists” that it accuses of fomenting political violence.

TPM spoke with executives at nonprofits advocating for immigration reform, action on climate change, democracy, civil rights, and other causes that are largely opposed by the administration. Each described the threats as thin cover to launch investigations that could bring their nonprofit status to an end or even prompt criminal prosecutions of their staff. They also saw the saber rattling, at least in part, as a use of the bully pulpit that will drain their resources without the government ever having to bring a case to court.

The administration has repeatedly suggested the threat is real. It has made it clear via memoranda and public statements that it intends to target the funding streams that keep these nonprofits alive. The administration has said that it’s tasking Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) with overseeing aspects of the effort. House committees have sent letters to hundreds of nonprofits, threatening their tax-exempt status but with slapstick moments: one nonprofit said that it learned it had been sent a congressional letter only after seeing its name in a press release. The letter had been sent to the email account of a low-level employee and automatically sorted into the “spam” folder.

The result is that nonprofits and their funders are spooked. Many have hired more lawyers; they all wonder whether their reactions play into the administration’s plans to intimidate them.

“The strategy here is not so much about the work that the nonprofits do, it’s about destabilizing the groups, the exact groups that would be able to push back against what’s essentially an authoritarian grab,” one executive at a national civil rights organization told TPM, adding that focusing on funding is a “smart move” because “they’re essentially trying to destabilize any opposition to their policies.”

Capital research

Right-wingers have eyed using the power of the federal government to go after left-leaning nonprofits for years. In 2021, then-Senator JD Vance declared in an event at the Claremont Institute that the next Republican administration should target the tax breaks, liability protections, and other benefits granted to nonprofits and universities if they are staffed by “people who are driving this country into the ground.”

Into that mix walked the Capital Research Center, a right-wing nonprofit that has focused since the 1980s on investigating left-leaning nonprofit groups.

The group’s president, Scott Walter, met with White House officials in March to brief them on the group’s investigations of and findings about progressive and Democratic Party funding infrastructure. Walter told TPM the meeting was at the administration’s request. In September, one week after Charlie Kirk’s killing, CPC researcher Ryan Mauro appeared on Glenn Beck’s show to describe a report he authored titled “Exclusive: Soros’ Open Society Gave Terrorist and Pro-Terror Groups Over $80 Million.” The report focuses on statements from groups that received money from Open Society Foundations and who then expressed support for Palestinians after Oct. 7, or who urged people to attend various protests. It described its findings as potentially serving as the “justification for various accountability actions, including federal investigations and prosecutions, U.S. State Department and Treasury Department sanctions, revoking of tax-exempt statuses of Open Society and its grantees by the Internal Revenue Service, congressional investigations, and civil suits.”

“Today the counteroffensive begins,” Mauro said on Beck’s show, adding that the report was “100 percent correct.” Beck said that he would “personally” give the report to Trump, and praised Mauro for having “done a lot of the work for the FBI.”

The report took off. A DOJ official reportedly cited it in a letter urging federal prosecutors to investigate groups funded by George Soros; at an Oct. 8 roundtable on the threat posed by “antifa,” President Trump asked law enforcement to use the report and another as the basis for investigations.

This all prompted intense reaction from groups named in the report.

“These are preposterous, baseless allegations,” Christine Neumann-Ortiz, director of Voces de la Frontera, an immigration group named in the CRC report, told TPM. She added that her group had taken “heightened security measures” in recent months.

Since October, CRC has backpedaled. Walter, the CRC president, admitted that the report does not offer evidence that could be used in a prosecution.

“The point of saying that it’s understandable there might be investigations is, there is a lot of smoke here,” Walter told TPM in an interview. “It would be reasonable for the authorities to determine if there is actual fire.”

Walter and Mauro strongly denied to TPM that they had been asking for groups to be targeted based on their speech, or that the report’s intent was to chill the speech of the nonprofits named within.

“I violently object to any claim that this is speech suppression,” Walter said.

Mauro, the report’s author, added that the document distinguishes between those who offered merely rhetorical support for incidents like Oct. 7 — not criminal — and other actions that the report describes as potential grounds for investigation or revocation.

The IRS can revoke statuses of nonprofits if a judge has found that an activity they engaged in violated the law. Under the law, the bar is exceedingly high to prove that a given nonprofit — Soros’ foundation, for instance — directed some kind of terrorist act via a grantee.

The report itself is scant on ties between nonprofits and protests that later turned violent.

Walter defended the report as merely showing “smoke.”

“At a minimum, these places are risking their tax exempt status, because that’s a privilege,” he said.

Panic and accommodation

Progressive advocacy groups named in the CRC report are reacting as if they’re under a federal microscope.

That reaction is partly due to the nature of these groups. Charities tend to attract do-gooder types. They’re rule-followers by nature, on edge about the causes for which they’re fighting and — often more critically — the streams of funding that keep the fight going.

Part of the problem, one nonprofit executive said, is that the administration has indicated that it’s interested both in the groups themselves and the people who fund them. The CRC report singled out Soros, a longtime right-wing bogeyman, which has been seen as a shot across the bow directed at other, less well-known but still influential funders.

In a statement to TPM, an Open Society Foundations spokesman described the claims in the CRC report as “false and reckless.”

“These accusations are politically motivated attacks on civil society, meant to silence speech the administration disagrees with and undermine the First Amendment right to free speech,” the statement reads.

Still, the pressure that the administration is bringing to bear on the wealthy funders that back up the nonprofit system may be starting to have an effect.

“Funder instincts tend towards keeping their foundations around for a long time, which means keeping their heads down at the same time that nonprofits need the resources now to be able to fund the threat that the nonprofits are so concerned about,” the leader of one national nonprofit argued.

The impacts are being felt in other ways, as well. Multiple staffers told TPM that encrypted messages are now the norm. A director at one climate nonprofit said that the group was evaluating ways to relocate money outside of the United States.

The director of one group that supports fiscal sponsorship, an arrangement by which a nonprofit lends its tax-exempt status to an unincorporated project or initiative, told TPM that it was moving to incorporate each project as its own LLC.

“We’re hoping that it stops with them, and it doesn’t take down the whole enterprise instead,” the person said.

Another group, the social justice-focused Hill-Snowdon Foundation, was preparing to issue grants to groups that are being targeted by the administration, said executive director Nat Chioke Williams. Hill-Snowdon was not named in the CRC report but, Williams said, the group still saw it as a warning shot. “The tactic is to add on additional work to these organizations to divert some of their attention and divert some of their resources into figuring out how to protect themselves.”

Others are seeking to strike a finer balance.

Edward Ahmed Mitchell, national deputy director at the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a nonprofit named in the CRC report, told TPM that pressure from the government was nothing new. Civil rights groups like CAIR have faced federal investigations and threats to revoke their nonprofit status going back decades, he said.

Mitchell was careful in the interview with TPM to delineate what he described as “Israel First extremists” from those who support a foreign policy that “puts American interests first.”

“Within the Trump administration, there are Israel-first extremists who want to shred the Constitution for the benefit of a foreign government,” he said. “There are also people who truly do believe in putting America first and recognize that part of being American is tolerating dissenting and opposing viewpoints.”