Weakening Nonprofits

Many posts have discussed the politics of philanthropy. 

Thomas B. Edsall at NYT:

In a detailed email, Kim Lane Scheppele, a sociologist at Princeton, described the administration’s evisceration of the nonprofit sector:

The entire nongovernment community (or — as we might say in tax parlance — the 501(c)(3) sector) has been threatened with a combination of loss of tax exemptions, cuts to federal funding and potential investigations.

Some statistics indicate that fully one-third of NGOS incorporated in the U.S. lost funding in the first half of 2025.

In this atmosphere, Scheppele continued,

NGOs are nervous — and some are pulling back from some of the causes that they know this administration does not support. Some NGOs have created “sister organizations” in other countries to shield resources from U.S. coercive measures (vindictive lawsuits, sudden tax-status changes) and provide an escape route if necessary.

Tracking the financial condition of nonprofit groups is difficult at best. They are only required to disclose receipts and expenditures annually in 990 reports to the I.R.S. A tax-exempt group reporting receipts and expenditures for the calendar year ending Dec. 31, 2025, does not have to file until this coming May 15. In addition, charitable organizations with 501(c)(3) or 501(c)(4) designations do not have to disclose donors.

 In this murky world of political dark money, Trump and Republican allies appear to have inflicted damage on the most powerful collection of pro-Democratic nonprofits, an interlocking network operating under the umbrella of Arabella Advisors that for two decades has channeled billions to liberal advocacy and get-out-the-vote groups. (I say “appear” because no documentation of current fund-raising and spending is available.)

In 2024 alone, according to I.R.S. reports, four groups aligned with Arabella — the Sixteen Thirty Fund, Windward Fund, Hopewell Fund and New Venture Fund — raised a total of $1.46 billion and spent $1.48 billion, largely in grants to liberal and Democratic-leaning groups.

The first clear signal that the Trump attacks were having considerable effect was a Gates Foundation announcement in June that it was halting grants to the nonprofits administered by Arabella Advisors.

Not Rallying Around the Flag

Many posts have discussed foreign policy, war powers and the US military. This weekend, the US snatched Maduro.

Bart Jansen at USA Today:

One in three Americans approve of the U.S. military strike to remove Nicolás Maduro from the presidency of Venezuela to face federal drug-trafficking charges, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released Jan. 5.

In contrast, 72% of respondents worried about the United States becoming too involved in the South American country.

The two-day poll found a sharp partisan divide over the raid that President Donald Trump ordered, with his approval rating at 42%. The results found 65% of Republicans back the military operation, compared to 11% of Democrats and 23% of independents.

The Donroe Doctrine

Many posts have discussed foreign policy, war powers and the US military.  Yesterday, the US snatched Maduro.

Yesterday, Trump said:

Furthermore, under the now deposed dictator Maduro, Venezuela was increasingly hosting foreign adversaries in our region and acquiring menacing offensive weapons that could threaten US interest in lives. And they used those weapons last night. They used those weapons last night, potentially in league with the cartels operating along our border.

All of these actions were in gross violation of the core principles of American foreign policy dating back more than two centuries, and, uh, not anymore. All the way back, it dated to the Monroe Doctrines, and the Mo- -- Monroe Doctrine is a, a big deal, but we've superseded it by a lot. By a real lot. They now call it the "Donroe" Document.

I don't know. It's, uh, Monroe Doctrine. We sort of forgot about it. It was very important, but we forgot about it. We don't forget about it anymore. Under our new national security strategy, American dominance in the Western hemisphere will never be questioned again. Won't happen. So, just in concluding, for decades, other administrations have neglected or even contributed to these growing security threats in the Western hemisphere.

 George F. Will at WP:

Universalism flows from the ninth word of the most important sentence in this creedal nation’s catechism: “all.” All human beings are endowed with unalienable rights, including the right to government legitimated by consent. The perennial American argument concerns what, if anything, this catechism commits the nation to do.

Twenty-one years ago, George W. Bush’s second inaugural address proclaimed “the calling of our time” to be nothing less than “ending tyranny in our world.” This project has not fared well since then.

The 1823 Monroe Doctrine declared the Western Hemisphere closed to further European colonization, and, implicitly, open to U.S. intervention in order to guarantee … Here things become murky. Commercial considerations (long ago, bananas; today, oil) and geopolitics have driven interventions.

The doctrine, although promulgated by President James Monroe, should be called the Adams Doctrine, for his secretary of state, John Quincy Adams. (The Marshall Plan, announced in a brief Harvard commencement speech by Harry Truman’s secretary of state, George Marshall, is not known as the Truman Plan.)

Although European colonization in this hemisphere long ago subsided, perhaps the Monroe Doctrine is still apposite. But two years before the Monroe Doctrine was enunciated, Secretary Adams said of our nation:

“Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”

Jack Goldsmith:

In sum, it would not be terribly hard for the Justice Department to write an opinion in support of the Venezuela invasion even if the military action violates the U.N. Charter.

To repeat, that does not mean that the action is in fact lawful—and it pretty clearly isn’t under the U.N. Charter. It only means that the long line of unilateral executive branch actions, supported by promiscuously generous executive branch legal opinions, support it. As I wrote in connection with the Soleimani strike: “our country has—through presidential aggrandizement accompanied by congressional authorization, delegation, and acquiescence—given one person, the president, a sprawling military and enormous discretion to use it in ways that can easily lead to a massive war. That is our system: One person decides.”

This is not the system the framers had in mind, and it is a dangerous system for all the reasons the framers worried about. But that is where we are—and indeed, it is where we have been for a while.

The Separation of Powers at the Start of 2026

Many posts have discussed the separation of powers, which is rapidly eroding.

Zachary S. Price at The Atlantic:

In just the past 11 months, his administration has canceled billions of dollars in foreign aid, frozen billions of dollars in research grants, imposed new conditions on other grants and contracts, slashed agency staffs, and even sought to claw back certain prior grant payments. At the same time, it has employed military resources to assist immigration enforcement, offered civil-service buyouts without statutory authority, and reportedly used a private donation to help pay military salaries during this fall’s government shutdown.

 

"But Wiles conceded that attacking targets on Venezuela’s mainland would force Trump to get congressional approval. 'If he were to authorize some activity on land, then it’s war, then [we’d need] Congress.'"

- White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, November 2025 interview pic.twitter.com/xeajLbi3tM

— Ryan Goodman (@rgoodlaw) January 3, 2026

Without congressional authorization, the US military just attacked Venezuela and grabbed Maduro/

Vaccines: Information Gaps and Disinformation

 Many posts have discussed myths and misinformation.The greatest spreader of vaccine misinformation is the Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Lauren Weber, Caitlin Gilbert, Dylan Moriarty and Joshua Lott at WP:

The share of U.S. counties where 95 percent or more of kindergartners were vaccinated against measles — the number doctors say is needed to achieve overall protection for the class, known as “herd immunity” — has dropped from 50 percent before the pandemic to 28 percent, according to The Post’s examination of the public records from 44 states and the District of Columbia.

Most of the counties that previously lacked herd immunity for kindergarten classrooms got worse, according to the Post analysis, which in most cases compared the academic years 2018-2019 and 2024-2025.

 ...

Data collection efforts by states are uneven. Public health authorities in some places are flying blind, without adequate data to guide policy decisions, The Post found, because vaccination records have not been uniformly collected. Many school districts are unable to keep track of which kids have received shots.

In Kentucky, state data shows that the measles vaccine rate in Jefferson County, which includes Louisville, was below 60 percent for kindergartners.

Data collection efforts by states are uneven. Public health authorities in some places are flying blind, without adequate data to guide policy decisions, The Post found, because vaccination records have not been uniformly collected. Many school districts are unable to keep track of which kids have received shots.

In Kentucky, state data shows that the measles vaccine rate in Jefferson County, which includes Louisville, was below 60 percent for kindergartners.

“It leaves parents very confused about who they should trust and what information they should rely on,” she said. “And ultimately, often families are choosing not to vaccinate because that feels safer, or it’s easier to not do something out of fear than it is to choose to make a decision.”

The federal vaccine advisory committee Kennedy remade with his appointments voted in December to eliminate a long-standing recommendation for every newborn to receive a hepatitis B shot, which the CDC approved. And more changes could be ahead for the vaccine schedule.

The number of parents questioning vaccine safety in Anita Chandra-Puri’s Chicago pediatric practice has doubled in the last few years, she said. Many of them are highly educated, but they keep coming across misleading information on social media, she said.

Across schools in Chicago, the measles vaccination rate has dropped 6 percent on average since the pandemic.

“They have access to every resource, and they think that they can become the expert at something because they’ve seen it multiple times” on social media, Chandra-Puri said.

 

Jack Smith Testimony

Many posts have discussed the insurrection of January 6, 2021. 

On New Year's Eve, the GOP majority on the House Judiciary Committee released the transcript of special counsel Jack Smith's December 17 testimony.

Q But the President's statements that he believed the election was rife with fraud, those certainly are statements that are protected by the First Amendment, correct? 

A Absolutely not. If they are made to target a lawful government function and they are made with knowing falsity, no, they are not. That was my point about fraud not being protected by the First Amendment. 

Q I mean, there is a long list of disputed elections, I mean, the election of 1800,  1960, year 2000, where candidates believed they were wronged by the -- you know, because they lost. And there's a long history of candidates speaking out about they believe there's been fraud, there's been other problems with the integrity of the election process. And I think you would agree that those types of statements are sort of at the core of the First Amendment rights of a Presidential candidate, right? 

A There is no historical analog for what President Trump did in this case. As we said in the indictment, he was free to say that he thought he won the election. He was even free to say falsely that he won the election. But what he was not free to do was violate Federal law and use knowing -- knowingly false statements about election fraud to target a lawful government function. That he was not allowed to do. And that differentiates this case from any past history. 

Q A lot of these statements, though, you know, people come into the Oval Office -- I mean, the President isn't conducting his own due diligence. He is receiving people in his office that are telling him these things, whether it be Rudy Giuliani, whether it be John Eastman, whether it be Jeffrey Clark, whether it be Sidney Powell. And, you know,  for the most part, he is just receiving this information and, you know, his statements are almost just regurgitating what these people have told him. I mean, isn't that the case?

A No. And, in fact, one of the strengths of our case and why we felt we had such strong proof is all witnesses were not going to be political enemies of the President. They were going to be political allies.We had numerous witnesses who would say, "I voted for President Trump. I campaigned for Trump President Trump. I wanted him to win." The Speaker of the House in Arizona. The Speaker of the House in Michigan. We had an elector in Pennsylvania who is a former Congressman who was going to be an elector for President Trump who said that what they were trying to do was an attempt to overthrow the government and illegal. Our case was built on, frankly, Republicans who put their allegiance to the country before the party.And so the President got information from people he trusted on other issues. He rejected it whenever it didn't fit him staying in office. And there was a pattern in our case where any time any information came in that would mean he could no longer be President he would reject it. And any theory, no matter how far-fetched, no matter how not based in law, that would indicate that he could, he latched on to that. And we had -- we were confident that we had very strong proof of that pattern. He also, I would just add, very consciously did not try to reach out to the sort of people who have the most expertise on these issues. He reached out to people who he thought could back him up.

Looking Back on The West Wing

Past posts have discussed politics and the entertainment media.

Becca Rothfeld at WP  writes about the old TV show The West Wing:

“In Bartlet’s America,” wrote the New York Times’s James Poniewozik in a thoughtful reappraisal last year, “voters reward you for fighting lies and fearmongering with facts and reason. Good intentions and great oratory win the day. Well-meaning people reach across the aisle and reason with their colleagues. Politics is an earnest battle of ideas, not a consuming war of all against all.”

But “The West Wing” is a vastly more cynical show than many of its admirers remember, which why it is also a more compelling work of art than many of its skeptics assume. It is not, in fact, a paean to good government and the dedication of White House bureaucrats, nor is it an homage to good-faith debate or a portrait of political rationality. Rather, it is an honest and often quietly wrenching exploration of the Machiavellian maneuvering that corrupts even the most well-meaning people in politics.

White House Chief of Staff Leo McGarry (John Spencer), Deputy White House Chief of Staff Josh Lyman (Bradley Whitford) and President Bartlet — spend most of the show fretting over PR disasters and comparatively little time worrying about matters of political substance. In the episode after Bartlet brushes CJ off, Sam tries to persuade an official from the Office of Management and Budget to recalibrate the poverty index — not because he believes the agency’s calculations are wrong, but because the new measure would deem an additional 4 million people impoverished, which would look bad for the administration. In another episode, Josh agrees to append a provision to a health care reform bill — not because he thinks it is a good idea (indeed, he has not researched the proposal) but because the addition will persuade a recalcitrant senator to sign on. When Bartlet’s staffers take a more active role in shaping legislation, it is almost always by negotiating with politicians on the president’s behalf and almost never by advocating for policies on their own merits.