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Charitable nonprofits say they are facing an existential crisis as targets of the Trump administration. NPR's Jennifer Ludden reports on a new survey that warns some of those groups are struggling to survive.
JENNIFER LUDDEN, BYLINE: Since President Trump took office last year, his administration has repeatedly cut or held up federal funding for nonprofits, part of its mission to shrink the size of government, it says. It's also made broad allegations of fraud or domestic terrorism and threatened to revoke some groups' tax-exempt status.
ELISHA SMITH ARRILLAGA: The sector is really at an inflection point and in a crisis right now.
LUDDEN: Elisha Smith Arrillaga is with the Center for Effective Philanthropy, which surveyed nearly 400 nonprofit CEOs. Nearly three-quarters say they face increasing demand for services, even as many have had to cut staff, pull back or even shut down.
SMITH ARRILLAGA: Organizations that provide meals to seniors and those seniors aren't receiving those services, domestic violence victims who aren't receiving the services that they need.
LUDDEN: President Trump has also called programs that support diversity or transgender rights radical, wasteful and illegal. Smith Arrillaga says groups working in those areas are more likely to have seen a hit to their budget. And in a new move last month, the administration charged the Southern Poverty Law Center with money laundering and fraud for the way it infiltrated right-wing extremist groups. The civil rights organization denies the allegations. Now, there is a long history of American presidents from both parties going after groups they don't like.
BENJAMIN SOSKIS: But it's mostly happened behind closed doors.
LUDDEN: Benjamin Soskis is with the Urban Institute, a think tank focused on upward mobility. Despite such targeting, he says there has always been bipartisan support for charity as fundamentally American. But today, the Trump administration openly portrays many nonprofits as an enemy to go after.
SOSKIS: Targeting itself has become a kind of normalized and even celebrated function of government.
LUDDEN: Soskis says that poses a challenge to democracy, and there is a history of it around the world.
SOSKIS: One dynamic that defines authoritarian regimes is their explicit hostility to an independent civil society.
LUDDEN: But Scott Walter says U.S. charities and the foundations that support them need more scrutiny. He heads the Capital Research Center, a free-market think tank that studies how such groups spend their money, and he thinks most Americans would agree it should not be for things like DEI and LGBTQ rights.
SCOTT WALTER: We have not always lived up to this, obviously, but constitutionally, we're not supposed to be segregating and treating differently people by race or sex or religion.
LUDDEN: Walter hopes the administration's actions lead some groups to rethink their mission.
WALTER: I'd love to see foundations take a serious look at what they're funding and say, you know, maybe we have to make people's lives better instead of advocating for a variety of basically political causes.
LUDDEN: Smith Arrillaga with the Philanthropy Center says, nonprofits do help Americans every day at libraries and after-school programs with job training, mental health services and disaster relief.
SMITH ARRILLAGA: And because nonprofits are doing that quietly often, you know, or seamlessly, we don't realize the important role they play until they're gone.
LUDDEN: Twenty-nine thousand nonprofit jobs were cut last year alone, she says, and millions more are at risk if groups keep losing government funding.
Jennifer Ludden, NPR News, Washington.
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