Editors’ Note: HistPhil co-editor Benjamin Soskis reflects on two Congressional hearings held this summer scrutinizing federal funding of nonprofits and on the ways they helped to delineate right-wing antagonism to the nonprofit sector.

I knew it wouldn’t exactly be a University of Chicago faculty seminar. The cheeky title of the hearing on the federal funding of nonprofits held in June by the House Oversight Committee’s Delivering on Government Efficiency (DOGE) subcommittee—“Public Funds, Private Agendas: NGOs Gone Wild”—gave the game away; I suspected it would likely serve more as an opportunity for political theater than for the carefully considered critique of the relationship between nonprofits and government. But, given that the DOGE subcommittee is chaired by MAGA movement stalwart Marjorie Taylor Greene, it seemed wise to pay attention. There was a chance it could help bring some clarity to one of the more puzzling dimensions of the Trump administration’s hostility to the nonprofit sector: how far does it actually extend?

After all, one of the distinguishing characteristics of the administration’s antagonism toward nonprofits is how sweeping, expansive and indiscriminate it has been. Whether in the realm of rhetoric—as with Elon Musk’s claims on the Joe Rogan podcast that 90% to 95% of nonprofits are not doing good work, or Trump’s characterization of nonprofit leaders as “thugs and sleazebags”—or in the realm of policy, where the administration’s funding cuts and directives have disrupted the work of nonprofits across the board, the administration has made little effort to restrict its focus to a particular sub-class of disfavored organization.

There seems to be a belief within the right that the “woke” mind virus has infected large swathes of the nonprofit sector. You also see this willingness to project wholesale antipathy in the administration’s tendency to label all nonprofits “NGOs,” a term which had in the past generally been selectively applied to nonprofits operating in the international realm, but which, from the vantage point of authoritarian regimes, carries the whiff of (and was frequently strategically deployed to convey) alien cosmopolitanism. The administration and its allies took that term, and all its ideological baggage, and thrust it on nonprofits as a general class.

Yet even amidst all this general disruption, it’s still been difficult to determine how much of it was intentionally calculated, and how much of it was just a matter of some organizations getting swept-up in a clumsily tossed dragnet, directed to a narrower class of suspect organizations. After all, another hallmark of this administration’s attitude toward nonprofits has been precisely its willingness, even its eagerness, to discriminate. While other administrations have sought to target their ideological “enemies” more surreptitiously, the brazenness with which the Trump administration practices ideologically targeted attacks against very particular institutions and organizations has been unprecedented.

Sometimes the relationship between parts to whole is clear as day, as when the administration explicitly picks an institution to make an example of—Harvard, for instance, whose persecution was meant to “serve as a warning to all universities and academic institutions across the  country”—in order to break a broader class within civil society. But the relationship between suspect parts to whole—to what or who is being targeted, and why—is not always so clear. And one way to gain some clarity on that dynamic is by determining whether the administration, and the MAGA movement more generally, has any discernible, affirmative understanding of voluntarism or civil society beyond the punitive and retaliatory that might offer a Tocquevillian refuge where the antipathy does not extend.

A little while ago, there was little evidence that it did. But it’s a fact, though an uncomfortable one, that the tax bill signed in July by the president contains a provision that’s been on the wish list of the nonprofit sector for years—a significant nonitemizer charitable deduction. In recent weeks, you could make out in certain administration pronouncements pledging to “unleash…America’s economic resurgence to fuel Americans’ individual generosity” faint Reagan-era echoes. And within certain precincts of conservative philanthropy, there’s been a resurgence of arguments against federal funding of nonprofits out of concerns for the damage it does to civil society itself. Like some awakening chorus of cicadas, with planning for the nation’s 250^th anniversary in the works, we’re even beginning to hear from the right renewed celebrations of America’s exceptional civil society.

Those few counter dynamics make the case for a more intentional surveying of the scope of the administration’s attack on civil society. They raise the question of whether there is any room for a countervailing endorsement of charitable or voluntary action like we’ve seen from every other previous administration (except perhaps Trump I), a crack in the parched earth of right-wing thinking in which a theory of MAGA voluntarism could germinate. I’m not the only one wondering. In a revealing recent interview between NYT columnist Ross Douthat and Jeremy Lewin, the 28-year old former DOGE employee now overseeing the institutional corpse of USAID, confusion about the answer to that question was palpable. Throughout the course of the conversation, Douthat made clear he was searching for the boundary where the administration’s grievances ended and where its positive moral vision began. Was it really the case that all humanitarian agencies were worthy of contempt? In the past, Douthat asked, conservative administrations had championed the work of religious NGOs like Samaritan’s Purse and Catholic Charities in delivering aid. Were they also now suspect—or was the administration really advancing a more targeted assault on the left-wing flank of humanitarian NGOs? “It’s a little unclear to me sometimes what the administration is critiquing,” Douthat protested.

Me too. Which brings me back to that June DOGE committee hearing. Could it help answer some of these questions? It was in that spirit that I watched the two-hour plus proceeding. Then I did it again (the second time at 1.5x speed—even I have my limits). And then for good measure, I watched the July 15^th hearing of the Judiciary Committee’s Oversight subcommittee on “Leftist Nonprofit Networks.” I won’t pretend these were pleasant experiences. The hearings were unsurprisingly marked by partisan showboating—the lowlight being a confrontation between Texas Rep. Brandon Gill and the lone witness called by the Democrats in the DOGE hearing, Diane Yentel, president of the National Council of Nonprofits. Trying to play gotcha based on a sophistic reading of a definition of anti-racism that he linked to Yentel and claimed she did not live up to, Gill demanded repeatedly to know if she was actually a covert white supremacist. (Yentel, graced in the moment with preternatural imperturbability, refused to take the bait).

I certainly can’t say I walked away from watching the hearings entirely clear on the scale and scope of the political right’s antipathy toward the nonprofit sector. The grievances were all tangled. Sometimes they seemed to be directed to a select cohort of progressive organizations that received government funds; sometimes to the practice of federal funding of nonprofits more generally; and even sometimes to the sector as a whole. But the hearings did give a glimpse of some more positive attitudes toward charities buried under these attacks. In doing so, they raised an additional host of questions which will be important to track in the coming months: how will these hints of MAGA voluntarism relate to the overall attacks on the nonprofit sector—and, just as importantly, to an effective defense of it.

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That relation was in fact a sub-theme of the DOGE subcommittee hearing: the split between good and bad nonprofits. The Manichaeism was struck by the hearing’s opening witness, Scott Walter, head of the Capital Research Center, an organization which investigates progressive nonprofits, and one of the Right’s go-to sources for intelligence confirming the nefarious nature of left-leaning philanthropy. (Walter was also a witness at the Judiciary Committee hearing. A side note: the Capital Research Center’s influence in these debates is significant enough that it warrants some more journalistic scrutiny in its own right. Philanthropy journalists: consider this a Bat Signal).

On the one hand, Walter posited in his remarks, there are “real charities, that actually help people,” which Americans generally love. A few weeks later, during the Judiciary Committee hearing, Walter announced that “America’s nonprofit sector is one of its glories, the envy of the world.” Up until relatively recently, we haven’t heard much of this sort of encomium to the “good nonprofit sector” coming from the right, though it taps a deep historical well. Even if the main purpose of this sort of talk was to serve as a rhetorical foil for “bad nonprofits,” its prominence during the two hearings was one of its most notable elements.

In any case, against “real charities,” Walter positioned “NGOs.” They are, he said, distinguished by two characteristics: they receive most of their funds from the federal government (and “not from citizens,” a term implicitly here contrasted to taxpayers), and they reflect progressive values or seek to further progressive policy that promotes the Left’s Big Government agenda. In other words, he wasn’t opposed to nonprofits as a class but to “politicized pseudo-charity, aimed at boosting government and seizing political power.”

Unsurprisingly, the two examples of such “pseudo-charity” targeted by the DOGE hearing related to key elements of the progressive policy agenda: climate change and immigration. The witnesses focused on nonprofits that received funding, alongside United Nation agencies, that allegedly facilitated illegal immigration into the United States and on climate-focused nonprofits and regranting intermediaries that received large-scale funding as part of the Biden Administration’s Inflation Reduction Act.

When Republican attacked the federal funding of nonprofits, and specifically the funding of these “politicized psuedo-charities,” they often argued that such funding allowed Democrats to evade democratic accountability and to promote policies that otherwise would gain little public support. “If this funding were put to a vote from the American public, little to none of it would survive the democratic process,” claimed Walter, adding, and clearly relishing the opportunity to perform a bit of partisan rhetorical jujitsu, “This funding is democracy suppression.” Some of the Republican committee members, showing an impressive lack of irony given the current political moment, elaborated, arguing that these nonprofits had allowed Democrats to bypass “that pesky thing called Congress” and the appropriations process more generally. Yet the argument aligns with the broader view that the progressive domains of the nonprofit sector represent an unaccountable zone of political power, an adjunct to MAGA’s attack on the “deep state” and of the anti-managerialism that Nathan Levine has argued sits at the heart of the new right’s grievances (and that has a long pedigree in previous alarms raised about a “New Class”).

At several points during the hearing, a defense of voluntarism itself provided grounds for an attack on federal funding of these suspect nonprofits. “If the American people support their climate and other woke causes, they can choose to personally donate to these entities. They can pay for it themselves,” Taylor Greene announced during hearing, with a hint of support for charitable pluralism. “The American people are the most generous people in the entire world…They should be the ones who decide where their money goes. They can choose if they want to donate to a nonprofit and which nonprofit.”

Yet the insinuation in the remarks of several of the Republican committee members was that the progressive state was interfering in the charitable realm much like it meddles with the market. One, for instance, accused progressive nonprofit leaders of turning to federal slush funds as a way of dealing with the problem that “nobody wants to open up their checkbook” to support their pet causes. So they come to DC “to convince lawmakers, their friends, their family members, their allies, to write a check that no one in the private sector would want to write.”

The wielding of voluntarism by the right for partisan ends when it had been largely ignored for much of the early months of the second Trump administration is worthy of note. But beyond that, it’s difficult to know what to make of this argument at a moment when an administration has claimed a mandate to pursue policies that large swathes of the public do not support. Why should there be more solicitude for the conservative citizens whose tax dollars went to support nonprofits that care for immigrants during the Biden years than for progressive citizens whose tax dollars go to support the expansion of ICE and the brutalization of immigrants today? Why would this line of attack not extend to all nonprofits that receive government funding and could receive private funding as well, a variant of the crowding-out critique?

Perhaps it does? At one point in the DOGE hearing, Scott Walter suggested as much. “No one explains why it’s wonderful that so many nonprofits are as dependent on government cash as a meth addict is on methamphetamine,” he quipped. But at another point during the Oversight subcommittee hearing, he narrowed his critique in a way that made space for the good/bad charities dichotomy. “If tax dollars ever go to a nonprofit,” he stated, “it should probably be performing biblical good works, healing the sick, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked and the like.” (Someone tell Lutheran Family Services).

When it came time for her testimony, NCN’s Yentel pushed in the opposite direction, rejecting the good/bad nonprofits dichotomy. She repeatedly sought to highlight, on the grounds of pluralism, the need to defend the nonprofit sector as a whole, and to redirect attention from the particular “politicized” nonprofits featured by the Republicans to the broad base of nonprofits across the US that were experiencing funding cuts. In her opening statement, she declared, “The administration’s targeting of organizations and institutions with which it disagrees is a fundamentally un-American action…In a functioning and healthy democracy, nonprofits must be free to identify and meet local needs without political interference, fear of retribution, or facing punishment for holding a different point of view from those in political power.”

In the coming months, in the face of continuing and perhaps intensifying attacks on the nonprofit sector, it will be worth following the development of this strain of MAGA voluntarism. It’s possible that the Manichaeism inherent to it will be amplified, as the administration ramps up a crackdown on “bad”—i.e., progressive and radical—associations and networks. We can perhaps even detect some of this in the simultaneous veneration of grassroots associational activity mourning Charlie Kirk with attempts to repress “antifa” activism deemed somehow responsible for Kirk’s death.

In that case, it will probably make sense to reject the bad vs. good dichotomy entirely, as Diane Yentel did during the Congressional hearings, and to insist on the solidarity afforded to voluntary associations and organizations as a general class under the aegis of the defense of civil society. But in doing so, it is still worth considering whether, for those seeking to defend and promote that general class, there is something worth cultivating in those glimmers of MAGA voluntarism. What that cultivation might look like is an open question. It might mean pushing on the belief that, in Scott Walter’s words, the US’s nonprofit sector “is one of its glories,” in determining how it might be supported, through public and private means. But it also might mean leaning into legitimate concerns, that have long come from the right and left, regarding how federal funding of nonprofits relates to the independence of civil society. It might even mean finding in those unsatisfying invocations of Tocqueville the barest plot of common ground on which to pitch the longer-term work of safeguarding civil society in the years to come.

-Benjamin Soskis

Benjamin Soskis is co-editor of HistPhil.