By Bill Wilson
The power-hungry political class that has wreaked havoc on American independence, security and freedom for decades extends far beyond Congress, to a dense web of heavily influential tax-exempt institutions and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) funded by a steady stream of taxpayer dollars.
This grim reality is at the heart of President Donald Trump’s so called “war” on the shadowy institutional class, a group filled with unelected ideologues who are shaping funding and policy priorities while betraying the American people at every turn.
President Trump’s war on the institutional-class came to a head in April when he floated the idea of removing Harvard University’s tax-exempt status, asserting that Harvard is engaged in promoting its own ideological agenda, not acting in the public interest, and does not deserve tax-exempt status any longer.
“Perhaps Harvard should lose its Tax Exempt Status and be Taxed as a Political Entity if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting ‘Sickness?’” Trump said on Truth Social last month. He added, “Remember, Tax Exempt Status is totally contingent on acting in the PUBLIC INTEREST!” This is key.
On top of threatening to revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status, Trump froze $2.2 billion dollars in federal grants and $60 million in contracts to the university, demonstrating he will not allow politically radical institutions to promote anti-American propaganda while using our own taxpayer dollars against us.
As can be expected, the left-wing mob are horrified at the prospect of Harvard losing its tax-exempt status, and up in arms about Trump’s “war” on non-profits.
In her opinion piece for the Washington Post, Natasha Sarin, a professor of law at Yale Law School recently likened President Trump’s “attack on nonprofits” to Nixon’s use of his position to strip power from political opponents.
She recounts how the Nixon Administration tried to unsuccessfully compel the IRS to “investigate hundreds of its handpicked enemies” and then suggests Trump is doing the same. “President Donald Trump appears to be taking a lesson out of Nixon’s playbook”, Sarin writes.
The comparison misses the mark entirely. Unlike the Nixon Administration – which was willing to resort to unsavory means in an attempt to secure Nixon’s reelection in 1972 – President Trump is not focusing his wrath on political opponents for his own electoral aspirations.
Trump is recognizing and calling out the utter lack of accountability that powerful, left-wing cultural institutions like Harvard – and far more sinister organizations – benefit from while promoting a deeply destructive globalist agenda.
President Trump’s audit of USAID or the United States Agency for International Development uncovered a litany of waste, fraud, and abuse that taxpayers were unknowingly funding through NGO pet projects.
USAID’s funding list included such vital policy priorities as $32,000 in taxpayer dollars for a “transgender comic book” in Peru, hundreds of millions of dollars to dig irrigation canals benefiting the Taliban, millions to one of the organizations involved in research at the Wuhan lab, and hundreds of thousands of dollars for a non-profit linked to known terrorist organizations, according to the White House’s extensive list.
Then there is the dizzying array of United Nations-affiliated NGOs whose primary purpose appears to be funneling millions of illegal migrants into Western countries. A planning document from the Inter-Agency Coordination Platform for Refugees and Migrants from Venezuela that listed over 200 affiliated NGOs was planning to spend $1.4 billion on sending migrants north to the United States in 2025 and $1.2 billion more in 2026.
It is these organizations – operating in the shadows and receiving billions upon billions of taxpayer dollars – that promote some of the most abjectly anti-American sentiments, and that is why President Trump is considering rescinding tax-exempt status from organizations that undermine the American people.
Sarin’s column later points to the so-called reforms passed by Congress in response to the Nixon Admnisantion’s actions, which include barring the executive branch from directing the IRS to request an audit of political opponents.
While attempting to tie President Trump’s actions to Nixon’s and throwing around phrases like “weaponizing the IRS”, the left is once again forgetting its own – very recent and chilling – use of the IRS to directly penalize conservatives in the wake of the Tea Party revolt against big government.
Under the Obama Administration beginning in 2010, the IRS was rumored to be scouring lists of conservative and patriotic-coded organizations to scrutinize their tax status and delay their applications.
The unjust targeting of conservatives was so widespread that in 2017 the Justice Department reached a settlement with dozens of conservative groups that claimed they were unfairly scrutinized for their political leanings by the IRS beginning in 2010.
The radical left’s blatant hypocrisy and willingness to protect their narrative at any cost knows no bounds. The institutional class are furious that President Trump is poised to force through crucial reforms in the nonprofit sector for organizations that have been weaponized against the people for far too long.
Bill Wilson is the former president of Americans for Limited Government.
