Demonstrators rally for the release of Rümeysa Öztürk and Mohsen Mahdawi, then imprisoned by ICE, outside New York’s Federal Court.Selcuk Acar/Anadolu/Getty
The “nonprofit killer” is back—this time tucked into congressional Republicans’ aggressive new tax proposal, which they’ve dubbed the “One, Big, Beautiful Bill.”
For those who forgot: In November, the House of Representatives passed HR 9495, or the “Stop Terror Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act,” which would give the Secretary of the Treasury the power to strip a nonprofit’s tax-exempt status on the suspicion of giving or receiving any backing from a ‘terrorist supporting’ group or person—as defined by the White House.
The legislation started with widespread bipartisan support that waned as experts and constituents voiced outrage; it waned further after Donald Trump’s election. Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas), initially a backer, is one of dozens of House Democrats who flipped their vote. Doggett, as Sophie Hurwitz reported for Mother Jones, was less concerned about the bill’s text than the way Donald Trump was likely to use it:
One of the organizations whose nonprofit status Trump wants to terminate, Doggett said, “has protested one of my speeches.”
“Protests are inconvenient,” he said. “The one I had was inconvenient. [But] America is stronger when we protect dissent in all its forms, as long as it is done in a proper way.”
“There has been much made in this debate of the fact that some of us have been switching positions,” he said. “Well, we listen to our constituents.”
Kia Hamadanchy, the ACLU’s senior policy counsel, says the measure grants the Secretary of the Treasury “broad and unilateral discretion” to strip organizations of their tax-exempt status “without any due process”—or any evidence beyond the “accusation that they support terrorism.”
Hamadanchy calls that an authority that no administration of any party should have, one that “could be weaponized against people across the political spectrum,” particularly by the Trump administration. “They’ve already shown,” Hamadanchy says, “that they want to weaponize things like nonprofit status.”
Nonprofits are taking note, too.
Dom Kelly, who heads the disability rights group New Disabled South, characterized the legislation as “a continued attempt to silence those who work in opposition to the Trump administration and the right’s extreme agenda.” The bill’s vague, expansive language, Kelly explains, “means that this administration can go after organizations for any reason they want.”
Still, Kelly isn’t backing down: “If they come for us,” they said, “we will fight them with everything we’ve got.”
For most nonprofits, especially smaller ones, that fight won’t be easy. “Even having to litigate is a huge mess, takes time, causes all sorts of headaches,” Hamadanchy says, offering the example of universities targeted by the Trump administration over student protests.
“If they come for us, we will fight them with everything we’ve got.”
“A lot of people in Congress conflated student protesters with Hamas, without really any evidence,” he says. “You can imagine a world where the Trump administration tells a university: ‘You let these people protest on your campus? You are providing material support to Hamas.’”
Indeed, the Trump administration has already stripped Columbia’s research funding to the tune of $400 million, ostensibly motivated by allegations of antisemitism following pro-Palestine protests last year. Harvard University has lost more than $2.5 billion in federal support since April, when it balked at Trump’s demands—again largely citing antisemitism claims—for sweeping power over its campus, curriculum, and personnel.
Hamadanchy doesn’t think every application of the bill will survive legal challenges, but harm would be done simply by its becoming law: “It basically serves a larger purpose,” he says, “of chilling speech.”
