(Illustration by Peter Grant)
If there is one thing that distinguishes the role philanthropy must play in the current crisis brought on by the Trump administration’s dismantling of the liberal state, it is the extent to which philanthropy as an institution is itself implicated in those attacks. It is not only an external respondent to the assaults but a target of them.
That means that questions surrounding the legitimacy of philanthropy—what value it provides to the public, how responsive it is to the public’s needs, and how it aligns with democratic norms and institutions—must sit at the center of its response to the moment. Yet there are at least three ways in which that imperative can serve as a constructive opportunity for lasting change.
1. Philanthropy should worry less about moral hazards and more about the messaging potential of philanthropic triage.
Philanthropy’s response to government cuts has been shadowed by fears that stepping in to support programs, services, and institutions that have lost revenue will in effect provide social license for retrenchment, legitimating a new border between private and public responsibility and permanently diminishing the territory of the latter. That’s why nearly every public statement or funding announcement from a major donor or foundation has been accompanied by a disclaimer: Of course, philanthropy can’t replace government.
As a matter of sheer mathematics, that assessment holds (though the disparities are less extreme if you’re talking about nonmilitary, discretionary government spending). But letting it dominate discourse can provide a cover for inaction and can weaken the power philanthropy holds to reshape public priorities—and values. Right now, philanthropy’s emphasis should be less on avoiding a moral hazard encouraging privatization than on helping the public understand the valuable services provided by nonprofit organizations and institutions that have lost government support. One of the most direct ways donors can do so is by putting their money where their mouths are—stepping (and funding) boldly into the gap left by government cuts, making public the urgency and tragedy of the philanthropic triage they are compelled to perform, and leveraging that attention to build public support for those programs and institutions as worthy of future government assistance.
Philanthropy should support organizations facilitating that process of triage. (Project Resource Optimization, helping to match US philanthropies to aid programs that lost funding when the administration shuttered USAID, is one example.) But philanthropy should also help nonprofits make that case for themselves. The opportunity to do so is profound, the flip side of the peril they are now facing. The reality or the threat of absence, as romantic partners know well, can clarify value. But what that absence would mean needs to be communicated. Harvard University has the endowment (at least for now) to refashion its website to highlight the contributions of the research it produces. Few nonprofits have anything like those resources. Philanthropy should help grantees dramatize the harms caused by retrenchment, with funding (general operating support can’t hurt) and technical assistance, and should bolster efforts from infrastructure organizations to collect and publicize the impact of those cuts.
2. Beware of the limits of philanthropic deliverism.
Another related lesson this current crisis is bringing home is that one cannot assume nonprofit services speak for themselves; so much of the work is not broadly visible or intelligible or is simply taken for granted. Americans have recently learned a version of that lesson in the political realm, where the 2024 election made clear the limits of deliverism, the political theory that voters would reward those in power for delivering “tangible legislative results for them.”
For some, a reckoning with these limits called for the need to better educate voters on what was actually being delivered, and, as the above discussion suggests, that certainly applies to what might be called “philanthropic deliverism” as well. But the limits of deliverism go deeper in both politics and philanthropy, pushing beyond a purely transactional understanding of the relationship between those with power and the public they serve.
In a prescient 2023 article in Democracy, Deepak Bhargava (now president of the Freedom Together Foundation), Shahrzad Shams, and Harry Hanbury elaborate on this deeper meaning in ways that can instruct philanthropy at this moment as well. “Solving the authoritarianism challenge,” they write, “requires a progressive program and organizing strategy that speak directly and persuasively to the wave of unhappiness and despair and are rooted in the texture of everyday life—what people actually talk about, care about, and worry about.” This means taking “identity, emotion, and story much more seriously,” as well as “social connection, isolation, and community.”
In responding to this moment, philanthropy cannot stake its own legitimacy and base its response to the administration solely on highlighting programs that are imperiled by budget cuts and pledging to restore some portion of that funding. It must contend with the toxicity, deep mistrust, and social disconnection that characterize so much of public life. These are not quick-fix issues, and they will require philanthropy to reckon with the way its own practices have contributed to that animus and alienation, pushing back against the inclination toward insularity, technocratic imperiousness, jargon, and condescension. These are not quick-fix issues either. But there has never been a better time to take them on.
3. Make the case for civil society, and for philanthropy’s place within it.
One means of responding to the current political situation in a way that addresses the contemporary crises of “social connection, isolation, and community” is through a defense, and an affirmative promotion, of civil society.
Other past presidential administrations have attacked particular nonprofit institutions associated with their political opponents and ideological antagonists. What are distinctive about the Trump administration are its antagonistic posture toward the nonprofit sector more broadly and its assault on civil society as a whole, as freedoms of association, protest, and expression are under threat. A strong, thriving civil society, characterized by independence (from the market and the state), pluralism, active civic engagement, and an ethic of reciprocity, can help provide individuals with connection and community.
The defense of civil society and the values that undergird it present emerging opportunities for bipartisan and transideological concordance. Recently, conservative institutions like the Philanthropy Roundtable, DonorsTrust, Cato Institute, and the Wall Street Journal editorial board have championed civil society in advocating against stripping disfavored nonprofits of their tax-exempt status or imposing significantly increased excise taxes on private foundations.
Philanthropy should help cultivate these areas of convergence, so that a broad array of civil-society actors from across the political spectrum can collectively defend civil society’s prerogatives and interests. This might require new investments in advocacy work to illuminate those prerogatives to the public and continued investments in infrastructure to provide civil-society organizations with security and legal needs. It will entail propping up and making space for alternative forms of organization, beyond the tax-exempt 501(c)(3). And it will certainly call for building networks and relationships between the various components of civil society—small and large nonprofit charities, hospitals, universities, and also religious organizations, labor unions, and more informal collectivities.
In all this work, philanthropy should position itself not merely with an eye to the policies that specifically imperil its own projects, but with solicitude for civil society more generally. To this end, philanthropy does not need to lead the fight. It perhaps should not lead, if doing so entails standing at a remove from the rest of civil society. Philanthropy should take its place within civil society, as a vital component of it and as a contributor to its defense—and that is enough.
This series appeared in SSIR’s Fall 2025 Issue, including a new follow-up essay from MacArthur Foundation President John Palfrey.
Read more stories by Benjamin Soskis.