President Donald Trump is already inspiring thousands of people to demonstrate from coast to coast. I spoke with Dr Beth Gazely, a professor at the Paul H. O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University, an expert on Congress’ proposed new laws criminalizing street protests.
Lisa: Dr Gazley, we saw people marching in the street in New York City the day after Donald Trump announced that the United States should own Gaza. Can you talk about the Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act? What’s going to happen to some of these protesters, potentially?
Beth: Well, first of all, let’s start by asking you to call me Beth. We academics do not live in ivory towers, and I think the public needs to hear that right now. These laws affect us and our kids just like they affect anybody else. And so, HR 9495 was something that has seen the light of day before. There have been multiple votes on it over the past couple of years. It passed the house in the fall and now it sits in the Senate. I’m hoping the Senate has bigger fish to fry so they don’t shut down our government because they can’t pass a budget. So, I’m hoping this doesn’t go anywhere at the moment, but what it would do, if it passed the Senate, would allow the Treasury Secretary, who’s a political appointee, to be able to designate organizations unilaterally, without going through the due process requirements the Internal Revenue Service has in place, and it could designate these as terrorist supporting organizations.
Everybody who’s commented on this- institutions much more of a resource than I, have called it for what it is, political partisanship. It’s going after organizations that are considered to be, you know, part of the deep state, and contrary to federal priorities right now.
Lisa: So, as you look across this news environment, and you look at what’s happening with what the Trump administration is doing to the FBI, USAID, all these things, what is the big picture for the people that are marching in the street now?
Beth: You know, it’s so funny. I think we’re just so tired of talking about Trump the personality, that a lot of people moved away from that and started to talk about Trump’s policies. But I think we can overthink this very easily, and we really need to go back to a fairly insecure personality, who, in my view, is a narcissist. I’m not licensed in clinical but that’s my personal viewpoint. And this is somebody who Press Secretary Levitt is saying has a mandate. He’s got control of Congress, and he is thinking out of the top of his head about ideas that he’s had or ideas that have been submitted to him, and just going with them to see what the public will take, what his political allies will take.
I don’t have much in common with my senators from Indiana. I’m in a red state. I didn’t vote for them, but I do communicate with them, and one of the things I could communicate with them as a political scientist is the value of balance of powers, and, you know, the institutions of government. It’s been so sad for me to see the Senate and Congress roll over. And my senator got targeted by Elon Musk. There was a tweet that went out that then got withdrawn calling him a deep state puppet. Then he rolled over on RFK’s nomination for HHS. And so this is a president who really does have control of Congress and thinks he’s got control of the judiciary, and he’s going with it. And people have anticipated this for a long time, I think.
Lisa: So, when it comes down to everyday people, voters, citizens, and also people that don’t have complete citizenship, in your experience studying how government works, what should we be doing now?
Beth: Well, those of us who’ve been paying attention have been really challenging our institutions, especially schools, to offer resources and support to students. And I would challenge and encourage not-for-profit organizations as well to really rely on their networks right now and their coalitions for support and advice and information. This, I think, is a time when we ought to be forgetting about any kind of minor divisions that we have, ideological divisions and [we focus on] organizing. I’m glad to see protests in Washington. I’ve been wondering and waiting when they would begin. I don’t think they’re going to stop. When people get marginalized and when people lose the resources they have, such as an ability as a constituent to appeal to senators, then we have to use the tools that we still have, and one of them becomes public mobilization.
On Nonprofits
Lisa: Beth, In the work that you’ve done at the Paul O’Neill school for Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University, what have you studied?
Beth: Oh, well, thanks for asking. I’m kind of a generalist on U.S. not-for-profit organizations, tax exempt organizations. They often get stereotyped as, you know, the food pantries that you and I support and the little nonprofit down the street, but it’s a very complex society. It’s 10% of the US workforce, close to 10% of the US GDP, so it’s large and massive. It Includes educational institutions, healthcare institutions, public radio and a lot in between.
Lisa: How has the nonprofit sector evolved over the past 20 years? I can remember when I was young listening to Ronald Reagan basically saying, ‘We’re going to downsize services and make the nonprofit sector take them on’. But can you talk about how you’ve seen this industry change?
Beth: Reagan’s election was the first election I had the chance to vote in, not saying who I voted for. But back then, Reagan’s famous first, I think it was his inaugural speech, ‘Government is not the solution, Government is the problem’. Cut the discretionary budget by about 50%, increase the military budget by a substantial amount, and of course not-for-profits tax exempt organizations become much more self sufficient. So what we’ve seen in those 60 years or so is a much higher dependence by the nonprofit sector on what we call earned income. So you know, 60 years ago, you could probably go into a public museum, a not-for-profit museum, and not have to pay anything. Now we’re used to fees, and so we’ve seen that across the board, these are organizations that, across the entire sector, are about 50% dependent on dues, tuition, fees, other kinds of earned income. So that, I think, is the biggest change we’ve seen. What it has forced the sector to do is become much more professionalized. 60 years ago, there were probably three programs that taught not-for-profit management across the United States. Now there are dozens, if not hundreds of programs. So that’s a good outcome of this. We see a much more professionalized, much more efficient and effective sector providing services to people.
Lisa: What’s the downside? Is there a downside?
Beth: Well, the downside, I think, is one of identity. There are still many institutions out there that really depend on philanthropic dollars, but on the other hand, there are many institutions that are charging people at the door. People don’t think that’s very charitable, and I totally get that. But these are also institutions, children’s museums, you know, boys and girls clubs that have to make a living and have to balance the budget.
Lisa: What makes that so difficult, because where I live, a lot of nonprofits have tanked in the past 15 years, as if the sector was never actually big enough or effective enough to take on some of the roles that were abdicated by government, including mental health care, in which Ronald Reagan basically shut down the state hospitals and said, ‘No, this is going to be something that the local communities have to do.’ But there was no funding for it. There was no ability to support that. And I feel as if I hear echoes in that. When I hear President Trump say, ‘We’re sending it back to the states’, it sounds like a great big unfunded mandate.
Beth: Yeah. And I can tell you with a story about something that just happened this week to some people I know. I mean, one of the things I think we can overlook is how closely the sectors collaborate with one another and work together to meet common public needs.
So, government and nonprofit collaboration is a really long and really respectful history, and one example of that, what I saw this week, I do some research on what we call Friends of the Parks, and also school supporting foundations, booster clubs. You know, I sold hot dogs for the soccer team, right, In my daughter’s public high school. We’ve all done that, and we’ve all raised money, essentially, for public institutions. And people forget that charities, collaborating with governments and supporting public goals and public benefit work, that there’s some money coming from the charitable sector into the public sector, not the other way around, and so, so that’s one thing that we have seen out there.
The thing that really is getting my goat this week is that every federal monument, battlefield, historic site, every federal park out there, all the great public parks have Friends of the Parks organizations that support them, and the National Park Service had a list on its website of those entities. And in the process of canceling all the public parks Rangers’ contracts, where they’re also considered not to be essential (so any member of the public reading this story, if you’re going to go visit the public parks this summer, you’re going to encounter a hot mess, unless this gets reversed) Well, they also took down the list of the Friends of the Parks, the park supporting entities, and that just seems to me so mean spirited to kind of deny the public and then also deny people who might be losing their jobs the ability to find what other kinds of park supporting resources there were out there.
Lisa: As we look at the big picture of the work that you do and what you study, and again, this time of major change right now, I suspect that you’re the kind of nerd who knows a lot more about things a lot of us think we know about but we don’t, and that’s like nonprofits, right?
Beth: No, I don’t, I wouldn’t say I know more, because we all have our experiences to share, but I do think my contribution can be to put some perspective on things and help people understand why something might be happening, and hopefully reassure them at times too that there are other ways.
The not-for-profit sector is the sector that sometimes at least has the capacity to come up with solutions that either the market can’t provide or government won’t provide. And you know, when the political winds shift, we do see the most disruption out there. And when the economy is not very solid, we see some disruption. It’s also a very grassroots sector. And so the fact that entities come and go and some nonprofits don’t survive, to me is- look at the market…I think one of the statistics is one in three restaurants doesn’t last a year or a few years, right? You know? So, you know, these are, again, these are market economics that happen in the not for profit sector that I think are pretty normal. My advice to people is, if you’re going to support not-for-profit, support them for the long term. Be a reliable supporter so they can budget on it and bank on it, right and hire based on your support.
Lisa: Another thing that I wanted to ask you about is, you know, when we think of the nonprofit sector, a lot of us put political organizations in the same basket, just because the ACLU is a nonprofit, the National Abortion Rights Action League is a nonprofit…Can you talk a little bit about the difference between political organizing nonprofits versus service providing nonprofits?
And I think maybe when we’re looking at the transgender communities right now that are under so much attack, there’s even a little of both of that happening. Can you just sort that out for us a little bit?
Beth: Yeah, what we call 501(c)(3) organizations are what most people view as kind of the heart and the core of the nonprofit sector. Those are charitable, educational and religious institutions of various kinds. It’s still even within the c3 family, that’s still about three quarters of all the not-for-profits that are operating out there. But there are also other parts of the tax entities and the ACLU, the Planned Parenthood, Planned Parenthood Action Fund, which is the lobbying and advocacy arm of the Planned Parenthood service delivery. There are entities out there that operate in the c4 space and the c4 organizations, they’re different than charities. They’re not charities. They’re still tax exempt, and they’re still providing public benefit activities. Another great example is the National Rifle Association, advocating for Constitutional Rights of, you know, that’s their position, and they have unlimited freedom to engage in the lobbying process, and also some restricted rights to participate in political campaigns as well. And that’s a quite a distinct difference between C4’s and C3’s. What they don’t get is the ability to offer donors a tax deduction on donor gifts. That’s the big difference, but it’s still considered to be public benefit activity.
Lisa: And there’s, again, there’s so much going on right now in society, politically and even in the environment. It’s difficult to get your arms around.
As you look out at this time of great change, what do you have your eye on because it’s like trying to figure out a popcorn popper.
Beth: Thank you for asking that. The message that I would want people to be paying attention to is that governments shift all the time, and when you have a federal government that is playing partisan politics with people’s lives and with services. I don’t think that’s something that Republicans should support any more than Democrats, because these winds can shift. And so the idea of a nonpartisan government that provides its services to all people, without singling out certain kinds of organizations like NPR or other kinds of organizations for retaliation, is really a constitutional requirement, that requirement of nonpartisanship, otherwise we can’t have a function in government. And so I really you know, even if you think everything that’s coming out of the Trump administration is the right call, right now, we can’t allow partisanship to dictate the way these laws actually get implemented on the ground,
Lisa: Because it could happen to the other sides too in the future.
Beth: That is correct.