A second Trump term poses significant threats to nonprofits, with policies that could undermine public education, women's rights, environmental protections, and more, leading to increased demand for nonprofit services without additional resources. Nonprofit leaders should prepare for potentially devastating impacts on their organizations and beneficiaries.
How a Second Trump Term Could Devastate Nonprofits and Their Beneficiaries
As noted in a post last week, nonprofit leaders must follow and get involved in presidential politics because presidential administrations impact the nonprofit sector and its beneficiaries. Ordinarily, that would be a simple matter of nonprofit risk management and due diligence: evaluating how any change in presidential administrations may pose threats and opportunities makes sense.
I ended that last post, however, with an observation. Attention is especially warranted during this presidential cycle. This is not Martin Van Buren v. William Henry Harrison, a historical footnote (although no doubt important at the time). This is Harris v. Trump, and the stakes could not be higher for the nonprofit sector and its beneficiaries.
If you are the leader of one of many dark money nonprofits that have cowed the IRS and swamped U.S. politics with cash supporting right-wing causes in the aftermath of Citizens United, stop reading now, because this analysis will run directly contrary to your interests. Same with most charter schools, all anti-choice nonprofits (like this one and this one), and other nonprofits that support socially conservative positions. On balance, you may benefit from some aspects of a return booking by Donald Trump.
For the rest of the nonprofit sector, a return of Donald Trump would be an unmitigated disaster. There is no need to guess about this: we face a race between a sitting vice president against the immediate past president. We have seen what Trump did and wanted to do during his first term, and he and his allies have spoken in detail about what they want from a second Trump term. As Maya Angelou said, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” Let’s see what Trump would actually do to issues that matter to most nonprofits and their beneficiaries.
Like seemingly every Republican president since Reagan, Trump tried to eliminate the National Endowment of the Arts. He failed during his first term. While Trump has shown his true colors in that effort, James Abruzzo notes that “NEA funding is almost irrelevant” financially “because it is small and insignificant.”
The real issue is about money. Abruzzo notes that the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act championed by Trump as a signal achievement during his first term “adversely affected individual giving.” “If Trump is reelected,” Abruzzo continues, “Many of the TJCA components (higher limits on estates, lower tax rates) scheduled for elimination will be continued, and we speculate that they will remain in place or even tilt further away from helping the sector.” In other words, the Trump tax regime would continue to put pressure on charitable giving.
More broadly, Abruzzo also worries that a second Trump term would affect the arts communities’ ability to “express new ideas and lead the country to a new level of democracy.” Given Trump’s conservative preferences, “we may find the very core of American creativity departing the U.S. during the next Trump administration.”
Trump and his allies are advancing policies that would “gut American public education,” with “low-income children of color . . . among the chief targets.” Trump has long championed “school choice” (i.e., voucher) programs that undermine traditional public schools. But according to Mathew Stone writing in EducationWeek, even against Congressional opposition, in his second term Trump could stop civil rights investigations relating to schools, rescind long-standing regulations that require some school districts to address racial disparities in special education, and roll back Biden-era rules imposing additional regulations on new charter schools.
As for higher education, Owen Dahlkamp, writing in The Nation, contends that “the former president’s plans for a second term could reshape American education and academic freedom as we know it.” Trump wants to defund the Department of Education, but he also plans to use even seemingly innocuous tools like accreditation to force colleges to “adopt Trump’s right-wing values” or face the likelihood of “losing federal funding.”
We know that the Trump-majority Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, but as profound an attack on women as that was, the hits don’t end there. During his first term, according to the Center for American Progress, “his administration . . . used every tool in its arsenal to chip away at women’s health, employment, economic security, and rights overall.” Expect more of the same: Carrie Baker, in Ms. Magazine, labeled Trump’s policy preferences on women’s issues for his second term as a “dystopian plan” designed to “make[] women second-class citizens.”
A long-time climate denier, Trump has tried before to gut environmental protections. The New York Times writes that in a reprise, Trump “would likely face fewer legal and bureaucratic obstacles to dramatically remake the E.P.A.” He also still intends to “drill baby drill” – now apparently in the belief that this will single-handedly cure inflation.
During his first term, Trump tried to cut health care, housing, and other assistance for low-income persons. At the time, the Shriver Center on Poverty Law warned that the “Trump Administration is . . . aggressively pushing a harmful agenda to dismantle programs that support economic security and upward mobility for millions.” He “deepened inequality” along countless measures during his first term. It seems reasonable that similar policies would have similar effects in the second. Honestly, I challenge anyone to find a single sincere statement from Donald Trump demonstrating that he understands the plight of the poor – let alone that he wants to do anything about it.
Trump claims that “no president has done more” than him “for our black community.” That’s just not true – in fact, the Biden Administration has surpassed Trump’s efforts even on his own very narrow terms.
But let’s be clear: Trump’s racially charged attacks on Harris show who he is. Furthermore, if there were any doubt, Trump dismissed “the Black Lives Matter movement’s repeated calls for police and criminal justice reform” and engaged in “law and order’ rhetoric” that “incites violence and has long been racist.”
People working on the Trump-adjacent Project 25 plan have championed defunding the Minority Business Development Agency and removing race-based consideration for Small Business Administration support. And as icing on the cake, his team says a second Trump Term would instead emphasize supposed reverse racism against white people caused by DEI programs.
The Trump Administration tried (and failed) to invalidate the Consumer Fraud Protection Bureau during its first term. Even though the CFPB survived, Trump would likely continue his efforts to reduce and slow-roll consumer investigations. As Dennis Kelleher of the watchdog group Better Markets asserts, “The top line is that the [first] Trump administration” was “probably the most anti-investor and consumer protection administration in decades, if not ever.” What do we think Trump would do with four more years? See Maya Angelou’s dictum.
Trump signed but then worked to undermine the First Step Act, which was designed to rationalize criminal justice sentencing. The ACLU and others fear that a second Trump term would lead to more harassment, more criminal prosecutions, and more jail sentences.
Although the first Trump Administration spoke of helping address housing affordability, his last budget in office intended to “slash[] housing assistance and community development” by “15.2%.” He also called for “a ‘crackdown’ on homelessness in Los Angeles and threatened federal intervention.” His rhetoric has continued on the 2024 campaign trail, where he has proposed banning urban camping, claiming that “our first consideration should be the rights and safety of the hardworking, law-abiding citizens who make our society function.” He continues to tout these preferences for a second Administration.
Trump has steadfastly opposed the Affordable Care Act without proposing any viable alternative. Trump has also stated that he would end health care for undocumented immigrants who qualify under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
Trump opposes gender-affirming care for minors, vowing to “stop” that care and push schools to “promote positive education about the nuclear family” and “the roles of mothers and fathers.” More generally, in a second Trump Administration, Project 25 proposes that he essentially “stop any and all acknowledgment of an[d] acceptance of gender identify and LGBTQ people, period.”
What would all this mean? If any of these vectors of harm are realized, it will cause a dramatic increase in demand for nonprofit services. If all of them come true, there will be a disastrous increase in need – without any plan or prospect of greater resources for addressing that demand. The nonprofit business model, always challenging even in the best of times, would be further burdened. Furthermore, we would risk nonprofits having to fight on behalf of their beneficiaries with fewer legal tools and with a hostile Executive Branch standing in opposition on every front.
This post doesn’t address what Trump would mean to voting, where he wants to reduce the opportunity for disadvantaged people to engage in the political process and has fundamentally undermined Americans’ trust in the election process. It doesn’t address what electing him would do to the federal judiciary, which is already reeling because of Trump’s remaking of the Supreme Court and many crucial courts of appeals. It doesn’t touch on what the reelection of an insurrectionist, womanizing, serial liar would do to American mores and the rule of law. It does not address how four more years of constant crazy-making behavior of a Trump presidency would sow uncertainty and confusion.
Even setting aside these other considerations, there is simply no doubt that the stakes could not be higher for nonprofits and their beneficiaries in this presidential election cycle. A second Donald Trump Administration would be the worst presidency in history for the nonprofit sector. We don’t need to guess about this: he has already shown us the receipts.
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