New Orleans      Make no mistake about it, autocrats everywhere come first for the soft targets, like nonprofits.  The cover story may be slightly different from country to country, but it’s all about power and control.  Autocrats want to eliminate any voice or sign of opposition and nonprofits and public services are the easiest targets, regardless of whether they are advocates, opponents, or an unorganized segment of the public different from those in power.

It’s easy to follow the playbook.  For most countries, it begins as a claim of foreign involvement and alleged threats to sovereignty, and then it goes from there.

India’s Indira Gandhi might have been one of the pioneers in developing these tactics for a putative democracy.  She and other former colonial countries, might have been able to use the glow of re-emerging as an independent country as a rationale for barring some money to organizations from their former colonizers, but her imposition of martial law, citing threats, both real and imagined, including India’s long antipathy to Pakistan after the partition, took her to the limit.  Having blocked foreign money and required organizations to have a special approval status from the state to receive such money then, made it easier for the current autocratic prime minister, Narendra Modi to broaden the scope to target nonprofits by withdrawing their FCRA or foreign contribution premised on whom were seen by the government as advocates or anti-India because of different views on development and business practices.  All of which has hammered Greenpeace, the Ford Foundation, Oxfam, and many others both large and small, while chilling nonprofit organizations generally, even while continuing to allow some to receive money from Indian residents.  Under Modi it has meant armed police takeovers, frozen accounts, and removed records and computers, crippling any continued operations.

Russia’s Putin was among the first to make it more obvious over the last 20 years.  It started, once again, by contributions and requiring audits of foreign-based affiliates, then moved to bar them completely.  Over the years, the ban was extended to Russian-based and organized nonprofits, including the popular one that supported mothers and veterans of Russian wars.  In various forms, we’ve seen the same gameplan in Hungary, Poland, Turkey, Nicaragua, Myanmar, Tunisia, Venezuela, Cameroon, Ethiopia, and other countries with various rationales.  Kenya even blocked UN aid for feeding programs from the UN in a destructive and false claim that the country would make up the difference, which of course didn’t happen.  Some of these countries didn’t pretend to be democracies, but all of their leaders in attempts to consolidate power and eliminate any dissident voices targeted nonprofits and stopped their funding and operations under any pretense.  The fact that it harms their people is collateral damage in the quest for unitary control.

It’s impossible not to see the Trump attack on federal funding, universities, public service work, and federal agencies as mostly about consolidating power and eliminating opposition.  Musk’s DOGE has saved little money and its attack on agencies and contractors has been politically focused on softer targets like parks, education, civil rights, and the environment and at so-called deep state actors in the opposition like unions, researchers, and scientists or accountability measures like data collection, inspections, and reports.  Big contracts in defense and elsewhere seem off the radar.

We haven’t hit the big reveal yet on a widespread attack on nonprofits, but Trump’s speeches have certainly issued the warning.  They want to limit or bar from funding and possibly more organizations involved, like in India, against their perspective on policy, industry, and business which makes America “great.”  The restricts on public service exemptions for student loans make it clear that the government wants to cherry-pick “acceptable” nonprofit activity.  Opponents to development in energy, timber, natural resources, etc, are now suddenly in danger of being classified as “enemies of the state.”  In the case of opponents to the US blindness on Israel’s role in the Gaza war, regardless of the provocation, organizations and individuals now stand to be charged as undesirables and terrorists.

You get the point.  It may not get as bad as it could be as public support, judicial reckoning, and some mobilization continues, but where Trump and his team are traveling now is on a path long paved by autocrats and dictators.