In March, Akilah Watkins, the president and CEO of Independent Sector, announced the creation of the Panel on Sector Independence “to strengthen the nonprofit sector so organizations may freely pursue their missions with robust and effective self-governance.”
Left unsaid was the reason such an effort is particularly necessary right now: the Trump administration’s unprecedented threats to sector independence.
Well before he became vice president, J.D. Vance blasted progressive funders including the Ford Foundation, the Gates Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation, along with Harvard University, and suggested their tax-exempt status should be revoked.
Then Donald Trump returned to the White House and proceeded to threaten Harvard in just that way, suggesting that the IRS should investigate it and other universities, as well as a nonprofit, CREW, that has criticized his administration. He ramped things up last fall, calling on the Justice Department to investigate the Open Society Foundations, based on the actions of some of its grantees. Mackenzie Scott has also drawn criticism from some in conservative media outlets for supporting the social justice funder and regrantor Solidaire Network.
Some philanthropy leaders have declined to be silent, and from the beginning of Trump’s second term have pushed back on the administration’s aggressive agenda and program cuts — though to be sure, silence reigns in many quarters. Others have signed on to statements defending the right to give and objected to attacks on individual funders, or joined efforts to protect philanthropy, like Unite in Advance, and resist authoritarianism, like the Block & Build Funder Coalition. Though it’s not citing the Trump threat specifically, this new panel from Independent Sector is the latest addition to those efforts.
What will the panel aim to accomplish?
The Panel on Sector Independence will convene regularly over the course of this year and develop best practices and policy recommendations. It will build on Independent Sector’s 33 Principles for Good Governance and Ethical Practice.
Watkins and Jeffrey Moore, Independent Sector’s chief strategy officer, will participate in the panel, as well as representatives from philanthropy, academia and the nonprofit sector. Philanthropy leaders include co-chairs Tonya Allen, the president of the McKnight Foundation, and John Tyler, general counsel, secretary and chief ethics officer at Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.
Others include Cheryl Crazy Bull, president and CEO of the American Indian College Fund, Mason Rummel, president and CEO at James Graham Brown Foundation, Noorain Khan, chief innovation officer at the Ford Foundation, Andrew Dunckelman, deputy director of philanthropic partnerships at the Gates Foundation, Lisa Rice, president and CEO at National Fair Housing Alliance, Heather Dill, former president and CEO at the John Templeton Foundation, and Benjamin Soskis of the Urban Institute and HistPhil.
Moore outlined the panel’s goals. “The first will be a reanimation, a rejuvenation of the Gardner narrative [John W. Gardner cofounded Independent Sector in 1980] as to why independence is so critically important to the sector, especially today.”
Moore said the panel will also consider practical steps people in the sector can take to reinforce its independence and provide recommendations for policymakers — “not with specific legislative proposals, but with guardrails for debate when they take up legislation that has an impact on our sector,” he said. “We want them to remember what is at stake when it comes to anything that would encroach upon that independence of the charitable nonprofit sector.”
When the Independent Sector team reached out to sector leaders about the panel, there was a lot of interest, Watkins said. “Folks were eager to serve, to donate their time and intellectual curiosity and energy, and to contribute in meaningful ways,” she said.
Civil society faces a generational challenge
As the panel convenes this year, demands on the independent sector are only likely to increase, given deep cuts in government safety net programs and the ballooning affordability crisis. “Our sector is where most Americans retreat to when they need their most basic needs met, or they’re in some of the most vulnerable places in their lives,” Watkins said.
Independent Sector cofounder John Gardner — who served in Lyndon B. Johnson’s cabinet, was president of the Carnegie Corporation, and founded Common Cause — highlighted the sector’s extraordinary contributions in a 1979 speech. “Virtually every significant social change of the past century — the abolitionists, the populists, the suffragettes, those who sought legislation against child labor, the civil rights movement, the environmentalists, consumer groups — all these and many more sprang up in the nonprofit arena,” he said.
It’s in spite of — or maybe because of — this history that the current administration has sought to intimidate and silence nonprofits it disagrees with.
In March, at an Urban Institute event that explored the relationship between nonprofits and the government, Diane Yentel, the CEO of the National Council of Nonprofits (NCN) reflected on the administration’s actions, observing that “in the nearly 30 years that I’ve worked for or with nonprofit organizations, I’ve never seen a moment where the threats to the sector are so immediate, so widespread and so potentially devastating.” To illustrate that point, Yentel noted that in the first year of Trump’s second term, NCN filed four lawsuits to counter administration efforts to undermine the sector’s work. In its 35 year history, she pointed out, NCN has never before been involved in a lawsuit “beyond an amicus brief, much less as a lead plaintiff against a sitting administration.”
As with individual funders themselves, some efforts to safeguard the nonprofit sector have been more forthright about the nature of the threat than others. Early indications are that the new panel intends to avoid directly confronting administration actions, but it marks another notable move by philanthrosphere players to work together to protect the sector and its activities. For now, the menace remains nebulous and incoherent, but it could get real — real fast.
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Can nonprofits — and philanthropy — stay “above the fray”?
The new Panel on Sector Independence doesn’t have a flashy name or a controversial-sounding mission, but that may be the point. Not drawing attention or raising red flags may be the best way to avoid the attention of an administration that seems intent on slapping back at critics and using every lever of power at its disposal to silence individuals and institutions with whom it disagrees. And so far, at least, big philanthropy seems to have been spared from the unwelcome attentions of the Justice Department — though that may not last, and is little consolation to the thousands of nonprofits already impacted by federal cuts.
In a recent interview, Moore was reluctant to criticize the Trump administration and denied that the new panel was created in response to its recent actions. “The fact that the sector is free from political and financial constraints gives us space to innovate, to create, to allow individual initiative,” he said. “All of those things are intimately tied to the independent nature of the work that we do — independent of government and independent of the market. That principle has always been subject to threat and political whim; it’s not just about one particular administration or another. This has always been something that we have to be on guard against: that the sector’s independence is not being encroached upon.”
Moore did concede that “it is probably fair to say that that feeling of encroachment is particularly acute now.” But he pointed out that there are members of the panel from across the political spectrum, and all share the belief that the sector’s independence must be preserved. “This has always been and will always be important to folks who believe in what the sector does, wherever they sit on the political spectrum.”
Panel co-chair John Tyler of the Ewing Marion Kaufmann Foundation also avoided criticisms of the current administration. “There are organizations and people who are speaking out and they are critical,” he said. “I don’t think that Independent Sector or this panel need to do that, nor do I think it should, actually. I think it needs to sort of stay above the fray, to truly be objective and broad-based in looking at the principles of independence, the principles of the sector. If we were to focus on a particular policy moment in time, if you will, I think that the principles that we arrive at would likely be reactive, rather than neutral and objective.”
Tyler and Moore may be right that remaining neutral will give the Panel on Sector Independence more credibility with sector members and members of the public of all political leanings. In March, when Watkins announced the new panel at the Urban Institute event, she underscored the importance of the sector strengthening its advocacy muscles, but also maintaining bipartisan support. “Our sector cannot be reduced to political football,” she said.
Avoiding becoming a political football is critical if the sector is to function and thrive. At the same time, remaining above the fray and not addressing the administration’s actions in this political moment may make it difficult for the panel to achieve its objectives or have an impact. Whether the members of the new panel choose to acknowledge it or not, the sector’s independence has never been more at risk than it is under the current administration.
