Nonprofit Quarterly: Legal Defense Funds Protect Nonprofits Under Political Attack by Trump Administration

This excerpt is from a piece that originally ran on August 13, 2025.

Keith Thirion, vice president of strategy at Alliance for Justice (AFJ), a nonprofit legal advocacy association, told NPQ that what’s different now is the “sheer pace, scale, and…multi direction that these attacks are coming from.” From day one, he explained, the Trump administration has used executive orders and other efforts to target nonprofits, forcing them into unfamiliar legal territory, such as subpoenas, investigations, oversight demands, and suing local governments.

State-level attacks on nonprofits, Thiron warned, are also “coming even more fast and furious now that there is federal cover.” His colleague Natalie Roetzel Ossenfort, director of AFJ’s Bolder Advocacy program, added that some nonprofits are getting “very detailed requests” from state officials who want to scrutinize their books and activities “to figure out where there might be a violation.” Meanwhile, she said there have been “attempts via state legislatures to criminalize conduct that…wasn’t previously a criminal act,” leaving nonprofits scrambling to keep up and comply with rapidly changing rules.

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Amid mounting legal threats, nonprofits aren’t waiting for trouble to find them—they’re making plans. Ossenfort said groups that AFJ has talked to “are taking the time right now to figure out what they need to do, to shore up their defenses, to make sure that if they do find themselves under investigation, that they’re ready to respond.”

These efforts underscore the urgent need for robust legal defense funds and other financial backing for the nonprofits and lawyers joining the fight.

For funders who haven’t yet prioritized legal defense funds, Ossenfort said, “it’s time to pull the pockets inside out and give.” She stressed the importance of “giv[ing] general operating support and let the grantees figure out how they need to spend those funds” when the time comes. To help nonprofits make those plans, AFJ has offered since last year a self-assessment tool called the Advocacy Check-Up, focused on compliance under lobbying and election-related activity by tax-exempt organizations.

“Strengthening your organization is never going to be a bad thing,” Thirion said. “The nonprofit sector should be strong and have the systems in place that it needs to truly thrive. And that was true before Trump, and it’s even more true now.”

But Thirion cautioned against letting fear dictate strategy: “This is the time, more than ever, to take an eye to those vulnerabilities and where you can strengthen without stepping into complying out of fear with laws that don’t even exist…We can’t start compromising our missions in order to meet a threat that hasn’t come yet.”

Read the complete piece.