Photo: Sophie Park/The New York Times/Redux
The second Trump administration has launched an audacious assault on federal funding for universities. Under the very thin cover of a presidential executive order and wielding threats to freeze or terminate all federal dollars, a multi-agency “Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism” has been terrorizing selected high-profile outposts of American higher education, beginning with private Ivy League universities, as The Wall Street Journal reported this week:
[T]he group’s stated goal is to “root out antisemitic harassment in schools and on college campuses,” a mission that emerged from pro-Palestinian protests that disrupted campuses last year. But along the way, the task force is taking on university culture more broadly in ways that echo the MAGA dreams for remaking higher education—including ending racial preferences in admissions and hiring.
The task force, with the president himself cheering it on and White House policy director Stephen Miller reportedly identifying targets, is bent on intimidating universities into a virtual Trump administration takeover of key policy decisions, as the New York Times reported:
The White House scored an early win with Columbia’s capitulationlast month to a list of demands that included tightening disciplinary policies and installing new oversight of the university’s Middle Eastern, South Asian and African studies department.
Since then, the Trump administration expanded its focus to six more of the nation’s most exclusive universities, including Harvard.
But Harvard has interrupted the intended MAGA march through higher education with a refusal to seek or reach an agreement with the administration to call off the hounds. Right away, the U.S. Department of Education froze $2.2 billion in federal grants and $60 million in federal contracts. But then Trump himself upped the ante with a new threat that goes far beyond cancellation of federal grants (per a Truth Social post):
Perhaps Harvard should lose its Tax Exempt Status and be Taxed as a Political Entity if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting “Sickness?” Remember, Tax Exempt Status is totally contingent on acting in the PUBLIC INTEREST!
To be clear, the president does not have the power to revoke anyone’s tax-exempt status unilaterally, but obviously his appointees at the IRS could give any target of the president’s ire problems. And there has also been Republican legislation percolating in Congress that would give the Treasury Department the power to strip tax-exempt status for any organization it chooses to deem “terrorist-supporting.”
In any event, Trump is reviving an ancient right-wing complaint about tax subsidies for “liberal” institutions; the renowned racist presidential candidate George Wallace talked a lot about big nonprofit foundations (many of which backed civil-rights causes) that could dodge federal as well as state taxes. But there’s a bit of a consistency problem with Trump railing against private nonprofits that in his estimation get “political” on the public’s dime. Trump himself, like many allies of the Christian right, has called for the repeal of existing laws banning nonprofit politicking.
The principal safeguard, the so-called Johnson Administration (named after LBJ, who sponsored it as a U.S. senator back in 1954), provides that tax-exempt nonprofit organizations, including churches, “are absolutely prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office.” Conservative clergy have regularly denounced the Johnson Amendment as an abrogation of their right to practice their religion “in the public square.” And on the 2016 campaign trail Trump promised to secure its repeal, a pledge that helped seal his support from previously skeptical Evangelical leaders. Very soon after taking office, moreover, Trump pledged to “get rid of and totally destroy the Johnson Amendment and allow our representatives of faith to speak freely and without fear of retribution.” Later on Trump claimed to have indeed “gotten rid of” the Johnson Amendment by executive order, but he clearly did not have the power to do anything more than relax its enforcement. So it remains on the table as a potential favor to the conservative Christian leaders who are now a MAGA bastion.
Trump’s threat against Harvard, though, goes in the opposite direction. If he believes churches should be able to endorse candidates from the pulpit and even contribute to political candidacies (which full repeal of the Johnson Amendment might well facilitate), how can he defend stripping other nonprofit organizations of their tax exemptions simply for “promoting” political points of view, far short of any campaign activity? The only coherent answer, if you want to call it that, is that it’s the nature of the political involvement that Trump would make crucial to maintaining or losing tax-exempt status. If it’s on his behalf, that’s fine. Otherwise, you’d better start paying taxes pronto.
