Social scientists and commentators have for years been expressing concerns about what they call the “authoritarian playbook.” To be clear, no such book exists. But would-be and actual dictators do tend to follow a common set of strategies to consolidate power.
Since the 2000s, populist leaders from Russia to Venezuela have used their countries’ own democratic systems to overturn democracy itself. One reason for their success may be the fact that supporters of democratic institutions do not seem to have a defensive playbook to match the authoritarians’ offensive one.
Institutions that support democracy, including many nonprofits and media outlets, have few examples to learn from. And in many countries, their responses have been weak and disorganized.
I am a sociologist who researchers how membership in nonprofits can affect someone’s democratic values and how nonprofits manage to operate in nondemocratic regimes. Because there are many signs that the U.S. government is becoming increasingly autocratic, I’m now studying how U.S. nonprofits are responding to a spate of attacks on their freedom to operate.
I’ve found that many of them have been surprisingly successful.
Nonprofits under fire
The second Trump administration has cut billions in funding for nonprofits focused on improving access to healthcare and childcare and providing food for low-income people. It’s also slashing aid to developing countries.
Nonprofits that previously had contracts to carry out U.S. foreign aid priorities, such as Oxfam, Save the Children and the International Rescue Committee, have been especially hard hit after the Trump White House dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development.
The Trump administration also restricted the ability of nonprofits to operate free from political interference.
For example, it changed the rules on a program that forgave student loans to employees of nonprofits, barring loan forgiveness to employees of nonprofits that the administration disapproves of. These include nonprofits that help undocumented immigrants, provide gender-appropriate medical care to transgender children, engage or abet what the administration calls “illegal discrimination,” or support political protests that might violate state laws against “trespassing, disorderly conduct, public nuisance, vandalism, and obstruction of highways.”
The Trump administration has also threatened to criminally prosecute nonprofits for doing advocacy work, even though advocacy by nonprofits is legal.
Congress is playing a role
Congress has added to the pressure on nonprofits by holding hearings that have accused some of them of smuggling undocumented immigrants and alleging that others made improper payments to former Biden administration officials.
At a February 2026 House of Representatives hearing, three Republicans – Jason Smith of Missouri, David Schweikert of Arizona and Tracey Mann of Kansas – accused the nonprofit Future Farmers of America of being connected to the Chinese Communist Party.
But much of this pressure is coming from the executive branch of government.
After the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk on Sept. 10, 2025, Vice President JD Vance pledged to go after a network of nonprofits that he claimed, without evidence, “foments, facilitates and engages in violence.”
Later that month, President Donald Trump issued a national security memo that defined left-wing terrorism in terms so broad that it included protected political speech. The memo pledged to “investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations,” including “non-governmental organizations,” and designate them as “domestic terrorist organizations” if they support views that the administration considers to embody “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, extremism on migration, race and gender, and hostility towards those who hold traditional American beliefs on family, religion, and morality.”
In December 2025, then-Attorney General Pam Bondi issued instructions to field offices telling them to begin prosecutions of the “Antifa-aligned extremists” and “domestic terrorist organizations,” including nonprofits, that were described in the earlier national security memo.
That same month, Rep. David Kustoff, a Tennessee Republican, and Sen. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, introduced a bill that would allow the Secretary of the Treasury to label nonprofits as a “terrorist-supporting organization” and strip them of their tax-exempt status.
The House passed a similar measure in 2024. It did not clear the Senate.
So far, the White House and Congress have followed up on few of those threats. However, the Justice Department indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights nonprofit, on criminal charges in April 2026. The Trump administration accused the organization of fraud, not of having ties to terrorist groups.
Elisa Schu/picture alliance via Getty Images
The nonprofit response
In many countries, authoritarian attacks on the nonprofit sector have been met with ineffective resistance. Some nonprofits fought back, but in the end, most nonprofits either compromised with the new reality or were forced to shut down or go into exile.
But in the U.S., many nonprofits and large philanthropic donors are working proactively to unite and protect one another.
An April 2025 Zoom meeting where nonprofit leaders discussed their strategies crashed when more than 11,000 people tried to participate – it only had a capacity for 5,000.
Thousands of nonprofits have signed open letters protesting the Trump administration’s policies.
For example, in September 2025, 3,700 nonprofits signed an open letter protesting the national security memo that called for the prosecution of nonprofits for allegedly being “domestic terrorists.”
On May 20, 2026, the Open Society Foundations, the philanthropy run by the family of billionaire investor George Soros, responded to this threat by pledging US$300 million in legal and financial support to many of the nonprofits that find themselves targeted by the government.
Some large foundations, including the Marguerite Casey Foundation, the McKnight Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, have increased their grants to nonprofits that lost federal funding.
Bowing to pressure
Of course, not all nonprofits have pushed back.
Many of them have instead changed their mission statements, or the brief descriptions of their activities that they submit to the IRS, dropping references to anything that might displease the White House. One common revision: removing references to any efforts to advance diversity, equity and inclusion for historically disadvantaged groups because of the Trump administration’s efforts to wipe out DEI policies across the country.
Another self-preservation strategy is for nonprofits to change their websites. In February 2025, the National Domestic Violence Hotline removed information and resources for LGBTQ+ victims from its website. By July 2025, 1 in 12 foundations had censored themselves by removing DEI language from their websites.
In many cases, authoritarians come to power in countries where the nonprofit sector is weak. For example, Russia and Hungary had small, young nonprofit sectors that had only come into existence in the 1990s after the fall of communism. In poorer countries such as Bangladesh, Ethiopia and Indonesia, the nonprofit sector is vulnerable because of its dependence on foreign funding, which governments can easily restrict.
But the U.S. nonprofit sector is centuries old, well organized and very established. If successful, its efforts to resist the nation’s democratic backsliding may one day inform efforts in the rest of the world.
