CIVICUS speaks about Donald Trump’s attacks on US civil society with Christopher Einolf, professor of sociology at Northern Illinois University and a researcher on civil society.

Under the Trump administration, US civil society organisations (CSOs) have faced funding cuts, executive orders targeting advocacy work and congressional hearings designed to portray them as corrupt or anti-American. Legitimate civic activity has been reframed as a security threat, and diversity and inclusion initiatives are under direct attack. Yet civil society is pushing back: through coordinated solidarity, lawsuits and open letters, it is resisting the pressure that has already silenced law firms and universities.

What’s the current environment for CSOs in the USA?

It is extremely hostile. Just a week after taking office, the administration issued a funding freeze affecting most CSOs that provide social services, even if Congress had already allocated money to those programmes and taking those funds away was unconstitutional. Since then, executive orders have eliminated diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes, redirected the Civil Rights Division to investigate, penalise and eliminate organisations that promote DEI and reviewed all funding to CSOs deemed to be undermining American ‘security, prosperity and safety’. A separate order barred CSOs that receive federal grants from lobbying the government, even though this is perfectly legal under tax law.

The pace of this attack is unprecedented. To find anything comparable, you would have to go back to the communist scares of the 1950s or the attacks on the civil rights movement. And it is no accident. The Trump administration and its allies in Congress have studied the authoritarian playbook of countries like Hungary very carefully and applied those lessons here.

What makes this moment particularly striking is that most authoritarian rulers leave apolitical service providers alone as they provide services that make the government look legitimate. But the Trump administration has attacked them just as harshly as advocacy groups. No one has been spared.

How has the situation escalated since?

The turning point came with the assassination of Charlie Kirk on 10 September 2025. Republicans claimed, without evidence, that the attacker had been motivated and supported by a network of left-wing CSOs. Vice President JD Vance named the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Open Society Foundations as targets, and on 25 September the White House issued a national security memo directing the National Joint Terrorism Task Force to investigate and prosecute organisations that fund or support what it called ‘political violence’.

This didn’t come out of nowhere. Congress had been laying the groundwork for this narrative for months. Committee hearings with titles like ‘Public Funds, Private Agendas: Nonprofits Gone Wild’ had already been accusing environmental and immigration CSOs of corruption and smuggling undocumented migrants into the country. The accusations were false, but they forced organisations to spend resources defending their reputations and normalised the idea that CSOs were corrupt and dangerous.

The Department of Justice is now building cases. No prosecutions have happened yet, but this represents a qualitative shift. While the earlier measures were designed to defund and restrict civil society, this is designed to criminalise it.

What impact have these measures had on CSOs’ ability to operate?

Many organisations have already begun censoring themselves. They have removed DEI language from their websites, missions and tax filings to avoid drawing the administration’s attention and have eliminated programmes that serve transgender people and other excluded groups. At least one major domestic violence organisation has taken down all resources for LGBTQI+ people from its website.

Even politically neutral organisations have been hit hard. Food banks, for instance, have lost substantial funding and are struggling to keep feeding people. This creates a genuine dilemma: do you spend limited resources on direct services or on fighting back against a government that is taking those resources away? It is a painful trade-off with no good answer.

What strategies have proved most effective in resisting these pressures?

CSOs have learnt from the mistakes of law firms and universities, which faced similar attacks from the Trump administration and largely chose to keep their heads down and give in, hoping this way the bully wouldn’t notice them. It didn’t work. CSOs watched and chose a different approach: banding together, speaking publicly and fighting back.

The most successful tool has been litigation. Democratic attorneys general across the country have filed 76 lawsuits against the federal government since the start of the administration, winning 42 of the 52 cases that have seen rulings.

Thousands of CSOs have also mobilised publicly. More than 4,500 sent an open letter to Congress in February 2025 reminding legislators that civil society does essential work, and after Kirk’s assassination the National Council of Nonprofits led a letter signed by 500 CSOs and 150 foundations condemning both the violence and the unsubstantiated accusations against civil society. A separate letter objecting to the presidential memo gathered 3,700 signatories.

Some major foundations have also stepped up. Open Society Foundations pledged financial and legal support to affiliated CSOs and the MacArthur Foundation announced increased funding for organisations facing targeting.

How has the public responded?

The popular response has been largely spontaneous and has not been led by CSOs or the Democratic Party. People felt overwhelmed by the scale of what was happening and powerless. When someone suggested protesting outside Tesla dealerships to oppose Elon Musk‘s role in the Department of Government Efficiency, it resonated. People simply coordinated on social media and showed up. The No Kings protests followed a similar logic: a clear date, a clear target and an enormous turnout.

The most sustained form of resistance, however, has been against immigration raids. When Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) moves into a neighbourhood, word spreads immediately through apps and social media. People warn their neighbours, block streets and record arrests on their phones. In Chicago, the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights had already been monitoring ICE before Trump took office and stepped up its coordination, but the response it met was far larger than anything it had organised. People were ready to act. They just needed a place to channel it.

What does the future hold for civil society in the USA?

The administration’s intentions are hard to predict. Trump himself does not appear to have a clear agenda against CSOs, but Vice President Vance and a handful of other officials do, and they are the ones driving this attack.

Their strategy appears to be to pressure organisations into complying through fear precisely because the administration lacks the capacity to follow through on every threat. Two dangers, however, look serious: making DEI disavowal mandatory as a condition of receiving federal funding and criminal prosecution of CSOs engaged in political advocacy under the guise of combating domestic terrorism.

The November 2026 midterm elections may shift the balance in Congress, but civil society cannot rely on electoral outcomes alone. A more constrained president may become more aggressive, and civil society needs to be prepared.

What gives me some optimism is that civil society has already built informal infrastructure to respond: foundations ready to provide emergency funding, lawyers offering pro bono support and a growing culture of solidarity among organisations. CSOs are holding the line. They are not hiding. That matters.

CIVICUS interviews a wide range of civil society activists, experts and leaders to gather diverse perspectives on civil society action and current issues for publication on its CIVICUS Lens platform. The views expressed in interviews are the interviewees’ and do not necessarily reflect those of CIVICUS. Publication does not imply endorsement of interviewees or the organisations they represent.