Article by Stephen Prager republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
(Photo by Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images)
“There are entities that seek to hold the government accountable, and so the government uses the tools in its toolkit to try to silence them.”
President Donald Trump is reportedly considering a major escalation of his war against left-wing nonprofits with an executive order that would seek to suspend their tax-exempt status with the stroke of a pen.
The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that the order plans to label some nonprofit groups as having “terrorist” ties—an act that would immediately suspend their tax-exempt status, dramatically imperiling their ability to operate and raise money.
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According to the report, the administration is seeking to use a little-known provision in the federal tax code to strip nonprofits of their status without going through the normal Internal Revenue Service investigation and appeals process.
The law, signed in 2003 by then-President George W. Bush, allows the president to identify an organization in an executive order as supporting or engaging in terrorism. The law also prevents organizations from challenging designation or suspension in proceedings concerning federal tax liability.
It’s not clear yet which groups will be targeted, but the administration and its allies in Congress have already signaled their intent to go after left-leaning groups like George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).
The latter was forced to cease operations in Florida Thursday following a state-level “terrorism” designation by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis.
In September 2025, weeks after the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, Trump signed National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), which identified “anti-capitalism,” “anti-Christianity,” “extremism on migration, race, and gender,” and “hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality” as ideological characteristics associated with “domestic terrorism.”
The memo directed the IRS and other federal agencies to investigate nonprofits and their funders for alleged connections to political violence.
Shanna Singh Hughey, a policy strategist at the anti-authoritarian watchdog group Protect Democracy, said in September that the memo’s vague and subjective language gave the administration expansive powers to target the nonprofits of its political foes.
“It goes way beyond that to the organizations that are connected to the folks who might be accused [of violence], including board members and staff, as long as that organization is accused of either funding or facilitating the violence done by the target,” she told Inside Philanthropy.
“This is exactly what we expect to see when authoritarians attempt to consolidate and hold power,” she said. “There are entities that seek to hold the government accountable, and so the government uses the tools in its toolkit to try to silence them.”
Then-White House Deputy Chief of Staff and Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller speaks during an event with US President Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House on August 6, 2026, in Washington, DC. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Trump’s reported plan to attack nonprofits comes on the same day that he named Stephen Miller, the chief architect of NSPM-7, as his new White House chief of staff.
Weeks before the memo was signed, Miller vowed to “dismantle and take on the radical left organizations in this country that are fomenting violence.” He has said that descriptions of Trump and his immigration policies as “authoritarian” or “fascist” were examples of language that “incites” violence.
He has also referred to the Democratic Party itself as “not a political party,” but “a domestic extremist organization.”
During a State Department ministerial on terrorism in July, Miller said that under NSPM-7, the administration was empowered to “disrupt, identify, defund, debank, arrest, and prosecute” what it called terrorist organizations.
In the same speech, he claimed that left-wing extremists invoke “civil liberties” disingenuously to evade criminal punishment.
Describing leftists as the “enemies of civilization,” he said, “It is essential that we are wise enough and strong enough to understand that these appeals must fall on deaf ears.”
Article by Stephen Prager republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
