MAGA Attacks Nonprofits. It Took Lessons From Authoritarians.

“The Trump administration is really the first to all-out attack nonprofits.”

This piece was produced in partnership with Assigned Media.

The seeds of the federal government’s unprecedented political assault on a major medical group were planted a year ago when the Federal Trade Commission convened what it billed as a workshop on gender affirming care.

Of the more than 20 speakers and panelists at the event, not a single one represented a mainstream professional organization. However, they did include Michelle Cretella, a veteran of the anti-trans extremist movement whom the FTC identified as a pediatrician though she has not held an active medical license for six years.

Then there was Jamie Reed, described as a whistleblower though her widely publicized accusations against a Missouri gender clinic were debunked by local news outlets. They ultimately proved so meritless that despite building his political career on anti-trans rhetoric, the conservative state attorney general, Andrew Bailey, did not pursue them.

Another panel at the workshop, on the “politicization of science,” featured Leor Sapir, a senior fellow with the right-wing Manhattan Institute whose doctorate in political science has apparently qualified him to produce dozens of anti-trans pieces.

So it was a natural progression when the FTC announced this month its newest action against the nonprofit World Professional Association for Transgender Health: a lawsuit that experts say twists consumer protection law to punish the group, which has, for 46 years, set standards of care for a minority group the Trump administration has targeted for months.

“Historically, the FTC’s regulatory actions against medical professionals and organizations have focused strictly on antitrust, anticompetitive practices, or commercial fraud,” Lawrence Gostin, professor of law at Georgetown University and faculty director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law, said in an email interview.

“The FTC has never before challenged the scientific validity of clinical guidelines,” he added. “Consumer protection law is fundamentally designed for commercial transactions, making it a blunt and poorly tailored tool for evaluating evolving scientific data.”

The lawsuit, Gostin said, relies on the FTC Act’s prohibition against “unfair or deceptive acts or practices” But he said “this framework is not suitable when applied to medical standards or clinical guidelines.”

“This lawsuit raises major concerns about weaponizing federal regulatory agencies to achieve political goals that Congress never intended. The Trump administration is using consumer protection as a backdoor mechanism to restrict care that it opposes ideologically.”

A Broad Attack

The case is also emblematic of the administration and Congress’s widespread, politicized attacks on nonprofit groups involved in issues that the political right disfavors.

Databases maintained by the National Council of Nonprofits and the International Center for Non-Profit Law provide a stark look.

Nonprofits focused on climate change, reproductive rights, Palestinian and campus speech, immigration, racial equity, LGBTQ rights and the legal defense of democratic principles have faced particular threats in a variety of forms: from investigations, subpoenas, funding cuts and lawsuits to, in the most extreme case, the filing of criminal charges against the Southern Poverty Law Center, long a nemesis of the right.

“The Trump administration is really the first to all-out attack nonprofits,” said Christopher Einolf, a sociologist at Northern Illinois University, who has studied nonprofits in the United States and internationally. ‘’Maybe the closest precedent is the McCarthy era, but I don’t think they went after nonprofits in particular then. They went after other institutions, and they really went after individuals.”

“The U.S. right has devised a strategy based on 20 years of experience from Putin’s Russia to Orban’s Hungary to Erdogan’s Turkey,” Einolf continued, noting that the Conservative Political Action Conference convened a number of meetings in Budapest. “And the opposition to authoritarianism has not done as good a job of learning from other oppositions about what works and what doesn’t.”

Einolf nonetheless is optimistic that nonprofits in the US can push back successfully if they avoid the traps that befell law firms and universities early in the second Trump administration.

“One of the strengths of the US nonprofit sector is that it is big, well established, and very cohesive,” he said in an interview. “Nonprofits are used to working together here, which isn’t the case in a lot of countries.”

When he presents his new paper, “The Trump Administration’s Attack on Nonprofits and Their Response,” at the International Society for Third Sector Research in Lisbon, Portugal, next month, Einolf will also make the case that the nonprofit sector has learned important lessons about combatting the Trump administration’s divide-and-conquer tactics. “Its leaders learned from the experiences of law firms and universities that hiding and capitulating does not work,” he writes, “and took preemptive action to present a common front.”

More than 3,700 leading organizations signed a letter last fall saying that no president “should have the power to punish nonprofit organizations simply because he disagrees with them” and declaring that “we stand with those wrongly targeted and with each other.”

That means going to court, preemptively in many cases. The nonprofit advocacy group Democracy Forward has taken a lead on the litigation front, filing more than 150 lawsuits against the administration in 2025 alone, many in conjunction with nonprofits. Democratic attorneys general have filed over 100 more, Einolf said.

Broadly, Einolf said, “based on a reading of international attacks on nonprofits, the more they band together, the earlier they do it and the stronger the approach they take, the more likely they are to be successful.”

An impulse among nonprofit leaders to keep one’s head down is understandable, and even effective to a limited extent. “They don’t want to lose funding because if they do, their clients will go hungry, their clients will lose child care,” he said. “So, they’re thinking, ‘well, if I just change some language on my website, I won’t catch the government’s attention.’”

But the fear of losing federal funding has led to some significant capitulations, Einolf said, pointing to a decision by the National Domestic Violence Hotline last year to remove a page of resources for LGBTQ+ people from its website. In another case, the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network removed all references to transgender people from its website, including a page once devoted to trans survivors.

Conservative or Radical?

Navigating this terrain has continued to prove difficult. In one prominent case, a leading medical nonprofit seemed to many critics to be overly intent on not offending the administration, at some cost to its reputation.

Organizers of the American Diabetes Association’s annual conference this month directed the police to expel several senior members who were handing out copies of an editorial printed in its own flagship journal. The piece, which criticized Trump administration changes to biomedical research, was being distributed by members on the day a top NIH official had been invited to speak.

The organization initially seemed to hide behind its status as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit to say, incorrectly, that the distribution of the editorial would have violated IRS rules. (Members of such groups are allowed to engage in educational advocacy.) The uproar over the association’s heavy-handed response eventually prompted its CEO to issue an apology.

Close to two million nonprofits are now registered in the United States, David Armiak, research director for the Center for Media and Democracy, said in an interview.

Groups on both the right and left have become adept at obscuring the sources of their funding and using so-called 501(c)(4) action groups and affiliated political action groups to directly promote political positions. The Heritage Foundation, for instance, one of the most powerful conservative groups, has an affiliated 501(c)(4) action group Heritage Action for America and it helped start the political action group Sentinel Action.

Beyond that, 501(c)(3) groups have taken full advantage of fiscal sponsorship rules that allow support to be channeled through multiple fictitious or dba entities. “You can register a large number of names to your one nonprofit,” Armiak said, “which allows these dark money groups to shoot up everywhere.”

“We’ve seen for many years now that organizations on both the right and the left have developed a more sophisticated infrastructure,” he said. “For one, they know that the IRS is lax in terms of enforcement and they know complaints are oftentimes not really acted upon, or at least there’s no publicity of them being acted upon.”

Though dark money has flowed on both the right and the left, systemic abuse is more likely when one party has what Armiak called a “trifecta” hold on power via the executive, legislative and the judiciary.

“Certainly, you can make a case that the DOJ is far more politicized than it’s ever been,” he said. “You can make the case that the federal court system has moved further to the right than it’s ever been.”

“Conservative is not a good word to use for many of these courts, including the Supreme Court,” Armiak added. “When you’re overturning 50 years of precedent, that’s not conservative, that’s radical, extremist behavior.”

Among those left particularly vulnerable, he said, are groups disfavored by the right, for example those that are aligned with Palestinian rights, that provide care to trans people, that examine climate change.

Said Einolf, the sociologist, “Authoritarians gain power by identifying enemies and drumming up hatred.”

“I think that the nonprofit sector in the U.S. is going to do better than most countries in resisting authoritarianism,” he added. “But that’s only a small battle in the overall war.”