When President Donald Trump tells Congress what he accomplished during his first six weeks in office, he’ll probably point to a flurry of executive orders that froze contracts and slashed government spending — even though many of those orders are being challenged in court.
But a coalition of nonprofit organizations that sued after the White House canceled their federal grants say that Trump’s scorched-earth campaign is hurting the people they have pledged to help.
If the Trump administration doesn’t heed a court ruling that fully restores funding to nonprofits, they say, their clients likely will get sick, go hungry or suffer significant, possibly irreversible harm, including death. And the impact will hit particularly hard in Black communities.
“We don’t know what President Trump will talk about in the State of the Union, but his administration’s actions so far are harmful to the health and wellbeing of Americans,” said Dr. Georges Benjamin, president of the American Public Health Association, speaking at a joint virtual press conference Monday afternoon. “People are getting sick and the dollars are not getting to where they need to go.”
Although the court halted the freeze, “some of the funding gaps have not been corrected as they should have,” Benjamin says. “Until we get back to where we had a reasonable funding stream, people are still going to be at risk.”
Shortly after Trump took office Jan. 20, he signed a stack of executive orders that rolled back decades-old policies, hacked away at the federal workforce and took a chainsaw to federal spending. That included directing the Office of Management of Budget to freeze all federal grants and loans, including allocations to nonprofits.
The move, however, effectively shut off public dollars to organizations that provide low- or no-cost services like healthcare, food support and other services to the working poor and low-income people.
Almost immediately, a nonprofit coalition — National Council of Nonprofits, American Public Health Association, Main Street Alliance, which promotes small businesses, and SAGE, an organization that helps LGBTQ seniors — sued the administration to prevent the freeze from taking effect. A federal judge temporarily blocked the OMB’s move, but the budget office has restored just a trickle of the funding allocated for nonprofits.
To call attention to the problem ahead of Trump’s speech to Congress, the nonprofit organizations organized a virtual press conference.
Diane Yentel, president and CEO of the National Council of Nonprofits, says organizations like theirs do essential work in every community, “in red states and blue states, in rural, urban and suburban areas alike.”
By “vilifying” nonprofits and cutting federal funding, people nationwide will be harmed “in real and measurable ways,” Yentel says. The NCN and its partners, she says, “are fighting back, in the courts and beyond, to stop the administration’s reckless attempts to starve nonprofits of the funding they need to serve our communities.”
Typically focused on improving their clients’ wellbeing, nonprofits bridge the gap between underserved and vulnerable populations and services, especially healthcare.
Studies show some 31 million people get health care services from federally-funded healthcare clinics, and around 20% are Black. A 2021 analysis by Broadstreet Institute found that nearly 30% of patients treated at those clinics don’t have insurance and 9 in 10 live well below the poverty line.
At the same time, almost 50% of the nation’s hospitals are not-for-profit and other healthcare services nonprofits handle range from cancer research to domestic violence prevention and suicide hotlines.
While Trump may see his blitz of orders as an accomplishment, nonprofit leaders say it has caused confusion and put their clients at risk.
The nation has been “in a state of disarray since Jan. 20,” Benjamin says, including the censoring of key public health information.
“We’re a nation that doesn’t have universal health care for all of our citizens. We’re the only industrialized nation that does not have it and we also have the worst health outcomes of all the industrialized nations.”
Even communities in middle America “are really struggling each and every day to receive the good, optimal health care,” he says. “And these nonprofits, small nonprofits, large nonprofits, fill that critical gap.”
If nonprofits disappeared tomorrow, “we would have enormous death and disability in our country,” Benjamin says. ”We were hearing from health care providers who could not make payroll the next week, and the fact that we now have those funding gaps on pause now means that funding is at least flowing to those groups. Now, there are still some holes in the system.”
Nonprofits operate in more than 95% of U.S. counties. Well over 100,000 public charities relied on federal funding to keep their doors open and without it 60% to 80% of them would experience a financial shortfall.
“Those underserved populations are going to still be at risk,” he says. “And it’s important that we have some certainty that when you pick up the phone and you call the clinic that’s down the street, or the provider you had down the street to provide you services, that there’s somebody there to answer the phone.”
“And in this environment,” Benjamin says, “I’m very concerned that there won’t be.”
