Conservative Nonprofits Were Behind Many of the Successes of the Trump Era

Elections have winners and losers, and to many nonprofit leaders, Joe Biden’s election looks like a big victory. The large number of people from nonprofits serving on its transition teams reflects “a real sharing of values between these nonprofits and the incoming Biden administration,” Alan Abramson, a George Mason University scholar, recently told the Chronicle.

Looking at the political contributions nonprofits and the people associated with them made in the 2020 election cycle, that melding of views is even clearer: According to Open Secrets, about 75 percent of candidate contributions from nonprofit organizations and the people associated with them went to Democrats in the 2020 election, with Joe Biden collecting 10 times more than Donald Trump.

But the Trump administration had its supporters in the philanthropic world, too, and not just those justifiably branded as hate groups. Four years ago, a Trump presidency looked as welcoming to a variety of reputable nonprofits as a Biden presidency does to many other organizations today.

This should be a reminder that despite its overwhelming financial support for Democrats, the nonprofit world is not monolithic but speaks with a multitude of voices on political issues. In doing so, it plays a valuable role in expressing the breadth of public opinion in American society — especially minority views — and thereby strengthening democracy.

How One Legal Group Achieved Success

The organization that has perhaps had the most prominent role in the Trump administration is the Federalist Society. Founded 40 years ago, it consists of law students, scholars, and lawyers who share “conservative and libertarian” views about legal issues, like favoring a more limited role for judges and respecting the original intentions behind constitutional provisions.

When one of its founders, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, died during the 2016 election campaign, then-candidate Trump brandished a list of potential replacements reportedly provided by the group. Since then, the Federalist Society has been a reservoir of nominees for the large number of vacancies in federal courts the Trump administration has filled, including three seats on the Supreme Court.

Indeed, it has been so influential that Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse devoted his first round of questioning during the confirmation hearings of Justice Amy Coney Barrett to exposing what he considered as the baleful impact of the Federalist Society and the “dark money” that was funneled to it from donor-advised funds.

Victories for Religious Causes

Some religious groups also enjoyed a welcome in the Trump administration. In May 2017, the White House issued an executive order titled “Promoting Free Speech and Religious Liberty.”

Among the results: After unsuccessfully battling the Obama administration, Little Sisters of the Poor were able to use the order to obtain an exemption from an Affordable Care Act rule requiring it to include contraception in its employee health-insurance plan. With White House backing, it subsequently won a Supreme Court case upholding the action. Later the same year, the State Department recognized Jerusalem as the official capital of Israel, a goal long sought by Jewish organizations, but which had not been achieved, despite bipartisan endorsement.

Trump’s Education Department is another area where nonprofits and philanthropy had great influence. Since Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos had been a philanthropist and a leader of education-improvement groups, the Department of Education not surprisingly proved responsive to nonprofits favoring charter schools and other types of school choice. It also sought to revise Obama-era higher-education rules on student loans and sexual-assault allegations and began to investigate anti-Semitism on campus and compliance with rules requiring reporting of gifts from foreign countries such as China.

The work of organizations like the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and the National Association of Scholars helped drive these efforts.

Climate Change and Health Care

The Trump administration also relied on nonprofits to develop its policies on climate change and auto-emissions standards, including the Competitive Enterprise Institute (whose program director on energy and the environment initially chaired the transition team examining the Environmental Protection Agency).

At the Food and Drug Administration, the White House’s first director, a research fellow from the American Enterprise Institute, launched an effort to streamline the approval of new medical treatments, with results that are already proving useful in responding to the coronavirus pandemic.

AEI and other conservative-leaning think tanks have also modified their programs to make them more relevant to some of the priorities of the Trump administration, such as reshaping U.S. relations in Asia.

In addition, a number of new organizations, including the Edmund Burke Foundation and American Compass, and nonprofit publications, such as American Greatness and American Affairs, have sprung up to focus on White House priorities, such as giving nationalism a more prominent place in American foreign policy or addressing the needs of the administration’s working-class constituents.

With Joe Biden coming into office, what those think tanks will lose in access to the policy-making process they are likely to make up in opportunities to critique it and raise money for doing so.

That is exactly what the nonprofits that will play important roles in the Biden administration did during the Trump era. Some went even further, lumping Trump-allied groups with which they disagreed, especially on hot-button issues like immigration and climate change, as extremists, not worthy of being taken seriously, let alone being involved in policy making. Last spring, the Federalist Society fought off an effort to make mere membership in the organization a disqualification for serving as a federal judge.

There should be no place for hate groups in public life, but neither should it be acceptable to stigmatize organizations over policy disagreements or question the legitimacy of supporting beliefs that other groups might not share. The nonprofit world has had a long and generally honorable history of advancing minority and unpopular views in American political life. It gives people whose opinions are controversial or not widely held a way of taking practical steps to try to affect government actions. Those who have different opinions can likewise organize and air their disagreements with the public ultimately (but usually not once and for all) deciding.

That is why, as the incoming Biden administration engages nonprofits sympathetic to its policy positions, it is also worth acknowledging — perhaps even celebrating — the role the much smaller share of conservative-leaning groups has played in the outgoing Trump administration. In a country as deeply divided on issues as the United States is, nonprofits continue to create avenues through which members of the public can express their views effectively.

Rather than endangering democracy, the involvement of organizations in government — from both the right and the left — improves its responsiveness and safeguards its legitimacy.