Following the assassination of Charlie Kirk earlier this month, President Donald Trump and members of his administration have openly discussed targeting left-leaning organizations they allege are instigators. Experts suggest that one tactic mentioned, potentially highly damaging to some of the groups, involves revoking their tax-exempt status.
This accusation was most explicitly articulated last Monday when Vice President J.D. Vance singled out the Ford Foundation and the George Soros-funded Open Society Foundations. Vance stated, “We are going to go after the NGO network that foments and facilities and engages in violence,” referencing non-governmental organizations.
When asked about the Administration’s plans, a White House official informed TIME in a statement: “The White House is exploring a wide variety of options to formalize actions addressing left-wing political violence and the network of organizations that fuel and fund it. Specific details are still under discussion.”
Legal experts assert that losing tax-exempt status would represent an existential threat to most organizations. Nevertheless, the White House would face considerable difficulty in revoking any group’s tax-exempt status, a process that could lead to prolonged court battles.
For numerous charities, the loss of their tax-exempt status would mark “the end of the road,” according to Ofer Lion, a Los Angeles-based lawyer specializing in non-profit tax law. This categorization allows donors to deduct contributions from their taxes. Consequently, losing tax-exempt status would immediately hinder a group’s fundraising and could potentially force the organization to pay taxes on its endowment funds.
To obtain tax-exempt status, an organization must describe itself to the Internal Revenue Service and outline its intention to advance charitable, educational, scientific, or religious objectives. Current law already prohibits charities from supporting listed terrorist organizations and permits the IRS to suspend the tax-exempt status of any charity involved in or supporting terrorist activity. If a charity believes its tax-exempt status has been unfairly suspended, it can request an administrative review from the IRS and subsequently challenge the decision in court.
Roger Colinvaux, a law professor at The Catholic University of America, explained, “The typical IRS investigations are based on how the money is being used and whether the money is being used to further exempt purposes or if overall the organization is not actually operated for its exempt purposes or providing private benefits or is self dealing, or something like that.” He added that IRS investigations are not usually “targeted toward an organization’s viewpoint and really viewpoint shouldn’t come into it at all.”
Trump has increasingly demonstrated a willingness to utilize the power of the Federal government to regulate speech. On Wednesday, ABC altered its content hours after Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr had voiced complaints on a podcast about comments Kimmel made concerning Kirk’s shooting. Carr holds influence over local stations’ broadcast licenses, as well as a merger being pursued by the owners of some ABC affiliate stations. Carr stated, “We can do this the easy way, or the hard way.”
ABC’s swift compliance seemingly emboldened Trump. During his return flight to Washington, he remarked on Air Force One that if stations “give me only bad publicity—press—and they’re getting a license, I would think maybe their license should be taken away.”
During Vance’s podcast appearance last Monday, White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller disclosed that one of the final messages Charlie Kirk sent him urged the Trump administration to develop a strategy to counter left-wing organizations promoting violence. Miller declared, “I will write those words on my heart and I will carry them out.”
The threats emanating from Vance and a senior Trump official caused alarm among many of the nation’s major philanthropic organizations. In response, 158 philanthropic organizations published an open letter Wednesday, asserting that political violence “has no place in our democracy” and that organizations “should not be attacked for carrying out their missions or expressing their values in support of the communities they serve.” The letter’s signatories included both the Ford Foundation and Open Society Foundations, alongside other prominent charitable organizations such as the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the Bush Foundation. The letter concluded by stating, “Attempts to silence speech, criminalize opposing viewpoints, and misrepresent and limit charitable giving undermine our democracy and harm all Americans.”
Patrick G. Eddington, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, noted a lengthy history of political figures improperly deploying the IRS for political purposes. He wrote in an email, “The IRS has been misused repeatedly for politically motivated audits/reviews from the McCarthy era onwards.” Eddington cited the controversy surrounding IRS audits of various Tea Party groups as a more recent example, with many groups alleging they were unfairly singled out. The Trump administration reached a settlement over the IRS investigations in 2017.
Congress was sufficiently concerned about White House involvement in IRS activities to pass a law in 1998 explicitly prohibiting “executive branch influence over taxpayer audits and other investigations.” The law makes it illegal for a President, Vice President, or any employee in their offices “to request, directly or indirectly, any officer or employee of the Internal Revenue Service to conduct or terminate an audit or other investigation of any particular taxpayer with respect to the tax liability of such taxpayer.”