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Cuba has run out of oil, the country’s energy minister announced on May 14, 2026.

(THE CONVERSATION) — Cuba has run out of oil, the country’s energy minister announced on May 14, 2026.

It marks a new depth to the island’s energy crisis, which has gotten worse in recent months amid the tightening of U.S. sanctions imposed in January 2026.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced on May 13 that the U.S. continues to be ready to offer humanitarian assistance of up to US$100 million – but only if Cuba reforms its communist government. The State Department did not provide many specifics, but according to Archbishop Thomas Wenski of Miami, who is involved in the discussions on behalf of the Catholic Church in its role as distribution partner of U.S. aid, a regime change would be necessary.

But at current prices, this aid would buy only about 20 days’ worth of oil for the island nation, covering a mere 5% of Cuba’s annual oil import.

As an economist specializing in Latin America and a master’s candidate in public policy, we believe that the broader history of Cuba’s energy sector sheds some light on the current situation.

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Dependence on foreign oil

For most of Cuba’s history, its energy capabilities lacked a stable infrastructure. This was primarily due to its dependence on foreign countries for the supply of oil necessary to produce electricity.

According to the official history of the state-run energy company, Union Eléctrica, until 1956 only about 56% of the country’s population had access to electricity. By 1992, that number had grown to 95%, largely due to fuel supplies and technological aid sourced from the former Soviet Union.

However, beginning in 1989, the weakening and eventual fall of the Soviet Union marked a return to energy insecurity, and electricity produced in Cuba fell by 25% by 1994.

In 1998, Hugo Chavez was elected president of Venezuela. Within a year, he had negotiated a deal with Cuban President Fidel Castro that made Venezuela the main provider of Cuban oil. This was a lifeline for Cuba.

Venezuela was the largest exporter of petroleum and oil to Cuba through 2021. And though there is no data past 2021, we know that Venezuela continued to be a major oil supplier to Cuba until Jan. 3, 2026, when U.S. forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in Caracas.

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Finding a long-term solution

The current U.S. embargo on Cuba now puts the nation in a situation similar to the one it faced when the USSR fell. Memories of 1989 linger in the minds of many Cubans. The cause may be different, but the blackouts Cuba is now experiencing are not new.

As oil limitations persist, Cuba is increasingly looking to alternative sources of energy, and it has found one solution in solar power. Historical experience with energy insecurity and the recent blackouts have helped spur the transition.

Still, the nation relies heavily on oil for most of its energy production. According to data from the International Energy Agency, oil accounts for 83% of Cuba’s energy production, while solar accounts for just 0.84%.

And a transition to solar energy does not necessarily equate to energy independence. Indeed, part of Cuba’s transition to solar energy has already been expedited by assistance from foreign nations, including China and Brazil. China’s contributions through its Belt and Road Initiative, as well as Brazil’s assistance, indicate that Cuba’s reliance on foreign powers for energy will likely continue.

But at this point, one thing is clear: There is no short-term, immediate solution to satisfying the oil energy requirements of Cuba’s electrical grid. There is a clear need for a long-term solution to a long-term problem.

Whatever Cuba chooses to do about its energy crisis, it will also remain dependent on foreign nations. The questions are, which nations and how dependent?

On Feb. 10, 2026, an 18-year-old woman, Jesse Van Rootselaar, killed eight people and herself in a mass shooting in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia. OpenAI had previously flagged her ChatGPT conversations as having a disturbing fascination with extreme violence, and suspended her account, but reportedly the company did not notify law enforcement.

By Anat Lior
Drexel University

(THE CONVERSATION) — On Feb. 10, 2026, an 18-year-old woman, Jesse Van Rootselaar, killed eight people and herself in a mass shooting in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia. OpenAI had previously flagged her ChatGPT conversations as having a disturbing fascination with extreme violence, and suspended her account, but reportedly the company did not notify law enforcement.

On Oct. 2, 2025, a young man named Jonathan Gavalas in Jupiter, Florida, took his own life after developing what his father’s lawsuit described as a romantic attachment to Google’s Gemini chatbot. The suit claimed that Gemini coached Gavalas to shed his own body. The suit said Google had flagged Gavalas’s account 38 times over five weeks for sensitive content, but didn’t restrict or cut off the account.

These tragedies and others show that generative AI can potentially play a role in harming people, organizations and the environment. I’m a legal scholar who has focused on AI liability for nearly a decade and explored new ways of analyzing AI companies’ responsibilities. In my view, cases like these force questions the legal community has not come to terms with: If an AI company becomes aware of warning signs about harm, does it have a legal obligation to at least warn the appropriate authorities? And if the company doesn’t intervene, should its failure to act be considered negligence?

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A need to raise red flags

U.S. tort law provides a framework for thinking about this type of responsibility. In 1969 a University of California psychiatric patient named Prosenjit Poddar told his therapist he intended to kill a woman named Tatiana Tarasoff. The therapist notified campus police, who briefly detained Poddar but eventually let him go. Nobody warned Tarasoff, and Poddar killed her shortly after.

Her family sued the university, arguing that its lack of warning amounted to negligence. In 1976 the California Supreme Court ruled that when a mental health professional has good reason to believe a client poses a serious danger to an identifiable person, they have a legal duty to take reasonable steps to protect that person, including warning them or notifying law enforcement. Today, most U.S. states recognize some version of the Tarasoff duty to protect or warn.

The logic is simple: If you have special knowledge of a serious threat and are in a position to address it, even if only to warn the authorities or the potential victim, the law may require you to act. But does that logic apply to AI companies?

The argument for yes is appealing. AI platforms interact with millions of users daily, often about deeply personal matters such as mental health struggles, relationship problems and violent thoughts. 
Most companies have systems to detect conversations that raise red flags.

Requiring a response might be less controversial for AI than for a human therapist. Therapists are bound by strict confidentiality obligations that make warning third parties ethically and legally complicated. AI companies operate under much weaker rules, at least in the U.S., where no comprehensive federal privacy law exists.

That lesser restriction makes it easier to justify requiring AI companies to act when it seems that someone’s life may be at risk. But balancing that with protecting privacy is still important.

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Who to warn, and when

The first challenge in applying the Tarasoff framework to the AI world is accuracy. Predicting violence is hard, even for trained mental health professionals. AI systems, or human moderators who review flagged content, are not clinicians. Requiring them to judge who poses a genuine threat could lead to numerous false positives, with real consequences for people whose accounts are suspended or whose information is shared with authorities based on misread signals.

The second challenge is scale. A therapist sees dozens of patients. AI platforms have hundreds of millions of users. Imposing a duty to monitor and act on worrisome content could create perverse incentives. AI companies might reduce their monitoring to avoid acquiring knowledge that would trigger a legal duty, reasoning that what they do not know cannot make them liable.

The third challenge is identifying who is at risk. In the 1969 case, Poddar had named Tarasoff as a potential victim. But in many AI interactions, violent or self-destructive language is diffuse and doesn’t identify a target. Courts will need to develop clear standards for when a threat is specific enough to trigger a duty to warn, and to whom any warning or protective action should be directed.

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Growing urgency

The AI industry is expanding rapidly, yet the legal rules governing what AI companies owe their users and the public are deeply unclear. Courts are beginning to grapple with questions case by case, such as whether OpenAI bears any responsibility for a gunman accused of killing two students at Florida State University on April 17, 2025. The gunman in that case was armed with a semi-automatic pistol and allegedly had extensive conversations with ChatGPT about how to use the weapon most effectively .

A narrow, carefully defined duty to warn, triggered only when an AI system flags a user’s behavior and it is reviewed by humans, would be a meaningful step forward. And it could focus initially on the most serious and credible threats.

The practice could also shift the conversation away from thorny technical debates about whether AI chatbots are products, services or media, which complicates legal claims, toward a more human question: Did this company know someone was in danger, and did it do enough to warn them and authorities?

Delivering a university commencement address used to simply be a unique kind of honor. Speakers stand before a podium, wearing a traditional graduation cap and robe, and offer graduates life lessons and inspirational words as they enter the next phase of life.

(THE CONVERSATION) — Delivering a university commencement address used to simply be a unique kind of honor. Speakers stand before a podium, wearing a traditional graduation cap and robe, and offer graduates life lessons and inspirational words as they enter the next phase of life.

But today, speaking at a university commencement ceremony carries considerable risk, as Morton Schapiro, former president of Northwestern University, recently found out. Schapiro was scheduled to speak at Georgetown University Law Center’s graduation on May 17, 2026, but announced on May 6 that he would no longer appear at the event.

Some Georgetown law students had protested and petitioned to have Schapiro’s invitation rescinded, citing what they said were Schapiro’s “controversial, Zionist, and harmful opinions.” The students pointed to an op-ed that Schapiro wrote expressing support for Israel and Jewish people a few days after the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, which killed 1,200 people.

Schapiro is in good company. There’s a reason why the free speech advocacy group FIRE calls the lead-up to college commencement’s disinvitation season.

Over the past two decades, colleges and universities across the country have withdrawn invitations to various commencement speakers after students protested their scheduled appearance. Or, in some cases, invited speakers have said they will no longer participate after students spoke out against their upcoming speeches.

As a political scientist who has written about the First Amendment and free speech on college campuses, I think Schapiro’s ill-fated Georgetown commencement invitation – and other instances like this one – show that intolerance for dissenting viewpoints lasts until the last diploma is handed out at graduation.

Some students only want people who hold similar views to address them at their graduation. They exercise what free speech law experts call a “heckler’s veto,” meaning when an audience’s reaction, or anticipated response, stops someone from speaking. Free speech then takes a back seat, and a graduation becomes just a performative moment of political correctness.

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It wasn’t always this way

The first university commencement in the U.S. took place in 1642, when Harvard College held a ceremony to honor its nine graduates. The students were joined by some of the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s most distinguished citizens, including Governor John Winthrop and his deputy, John Endicott, who observed the proceedings.

No one delivered a commencement address.

Instead, each graduate delivered an address and displayed the fruits of their classical education by speaking in Latin and English.

By the middle of the 19th century, university commencements drew well-known outsiders to college campuses to speak.

In 1837, for example, the poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson addressed Harvard’s Phi Beta Kappa graduates and issued a stirring call for American students and scholars to end what he called “our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands.”

In 1881, James Garfield became the first sitting American president to deliver a commencement address, when he spoke at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland.

Twenty-four years later, President Theodore Roosevelt spoke at the first graduation ceremony at Clark University, in Worcester, Massachusetts. He told his audience there, “I have always felt most strongly that it is true of a nation as of the individual that the greatest doer must also be a great dreamer.”

Since then, other presidents have used commencement speeches to announce major policy initiatives and agreements, including on foreign policy.

In 1963, President John F. Kennedy told the graduating seniors at American University that the U.S., the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union would start negotiations to ban the testing of nuclear weapons.

Two years later, President Lyndon Johnson announced at Howard University’s commencement that he would launch a major initiative to address socioeconomic disparities that disadvantaged Black people.

There was no controversy or protest about Kennedy, Johnson or other prominent speakers who delivered commencement addresses before a few decades ago.

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The commencement speaker as a lightning rod

But that was then. Times have changed.

FIRE estimates that between 2000 and 2024, there were 345 attempts to disinvite commencement speakers. Many of the scheduled speakers who faced pressure to not appear at the ceremonies backed out.

Examples of commencement speaker disinvitations have happened at small, private liberal arts colleges, as well as big public universities. Being uninvited from speaking at a graduation is often precipitated by petitions and protests, from both conservative and progressive activists.

For example, in 2019, former Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey, a Democrat, withdrew as the scheduled commencement speaker at Creighton University. This followed the Nebraska Republican Party objecting to Kerry’s pro-abortion rights voting record.

In 2024, Dickinson College rescinded a commencement invitation for Michael Smerconish, an author and television commentator who focuses on politics. This decision came after a student wrote an opinion piece that showed that 20 years earlier, Smerconish said, “in order to keep America safe, the TSA should deliberately target Arabs and Muslims for searches because they look like the perpetrators of past terrorist attacks.”

“Does someone like Mike Smerconish in any way represent the achievements and ambitions of its students? If Dickinson truly loves and values its students, shouldn’t it honor them with someone who reflects that love?” the student asked in the opinion piece.
Protests ensued, and the college president gave in.

In 2025, the noted author Salman Rushdie withdrew as commencement speaker at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California, after members of its Muslim Student Association urged the school to revoke his invitation. They accused Rushdie, a self-described “hardline atheist,” of “disparaging a global religious community” in his writing and public appearances. In a 2015 commencement address at Emory University, he said: “I sometimes think we live in a very credulous age. People seem ready to believe almost anything. God, for example.”

Over the past few years, the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip has led to various commencement controversies and rescinded invitations, based on scheduled speakers’ politics around the conflict.

There have also been various commencement speakers who have delivered controversial addresses that some graduates – and outside observers – found offensive. Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker, for example, spoke at Benedictine College’s commencement in 2024 and encouraged women to become homemakers.

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Commencement and free speech

That brings us back to Schapiro.

“I have presided over 28 commencements as a president and dean,” Schapiro wrote in a note to Georgetown’s law students, “and those ceremonies are about celebrating the graduates and their supporters. I was looking forward to giving a talk about humility and gratitude, but I don’t want my presence to distract from the day’s festivities.”

Humility and gratitude are often missing in disinvitation season.

In 2017, Drew Gilpin Faust, then the president of Harvard University, seemed to understand this absence when she issued a free speech message to graduates in her commencement address. “Silencing ideas or basking in intellectual orthodoxy independent of facts and evidence impedes our access to new and better ideas, and it inhibits a full and considered rejection of bad ones,” Faust warned.

Commencement season puts Faust’s admonitions to the test. “Universities,” she said, “must model a commitment to the notion that truth cannot simply be claimed, but must be established – established through reasoned argument, assessment and even sometimes uncomfortable challenges that provide the foundation for truth.”

The call to change the process for nominating candidates for attorney general and secretary of state is growing louder, with lawmakers introducing a joint resolution on Thursday to change the constitution. 

By Elena Durnbaugh
Gongwer News Service

The call to change the process for nominating candidates for attorney general and secretary of state is growing louder, with lawmakers introducing a joint resolution on Thursday to change the constitution. 

HJR U and SJR I would change the process for selecting partisan candidates for attorney general and secretary of state from a nominating convention with delegates to a primary put before voters. The House resolution is sponsored by Rep. Greg Markkanen, R-Hancock, and Rep. Joe Tate, D-Detroit. The Senate resolution has not yet been formally introduced. 

The resolutions, and proposed constitutional amendment, would also establish new ethics requirements and term limits for board members of Wayne State University, the University of Michigan and Michigan State University. Board members would be appointed by the governor with the advice and consent of the Senate, rather than nominated by partisan conventions before a statewide vote in the general election. The proposed amendment would also add a ninth member to all three boards to focus on alumni representation. 

In recent years, nominating conventions for both the Michigan Republican Party and the Michigan Democratic Party have been contentious. After this year’s Democratic convention, there was much discussion about decorum, as candidates were booed while on stage, and investigations are ongoing regarding problems with accurately counting votes of the delegates. Republicans faced fights and factions at their nominating conventions in previous years under the leadership of former Chair Kristina Karamo. 

“Primaries have become the normal practice for selecting nominees for most offices, and many citizens are surprised there are no primaries for these two important offices,” Sen. Ed McBroom, R-Vulcan, one of the initiative’s sponsors, said in a statement. 
“Voters will get to know the candidates and what they stand for during the primary, and parties will be able to nominate candidates who can handle the rigors of a statewide campaign.” 

The proposed changes to the university board nominating process comes after an MSU board meeting held last Sunday when some trustees refused to sign an ethics pledge which would bar trustees from speaking negatively about board actions to press or the public. The MSU board has also had a history of infighting amongst board members. The nominating process for the University of Michigan Board of Regents also became highly contentious this year between intraparty scuffles and a scandal involving sexually inappropriate messages sent by one regent. 

Former Govs. John Engler and Jim Blanchard issued statements supporting the proposed changes to the university board nominating process. 

“In recent years, we have seen how political parties have fumbled the nominating process by failing to properly vet board candidates,” Engler said in the statement. “When board members are distracted by infighting and petty grievances and ignore their fiduciary responsibilities, they can do irreparable harm to our universities. Talented administrators and faculty are discouraged, and the ability to retain or attract the most highly qualified people becomes impossible. In Michigan, the quality of our 10 appointed university boards is in sharp contrast to our elected boards.” 

Engler, who served a controversial and brief run as MSU president in the immediate aftermath of the Larry Nassar scandal, noted only four states have elected university boards. 

“If the amendment is adopted, the boards of the University of Michigan, Wayne State University and MSU will have to comply,” he said. “The recent embarrassing meeting at MSU saw three board members say that they would not comply with a voluntary ethics code even after it was adopted by a majority of the board. We need to change a broken system.” 

Blanchard was similarly supportive of the measure, saying it was necessary to fix an “increasingly broken status quo.” He also applauded the bipartisan work that has gone into the proposal. 

Jason Cabel Roe, a Republican political strategist with Roe Strategic, LLC, is also working on a bipartisan commission on a narrower proposal. Roe is working alongside Republican political strategist Jamie Roe, former Michigan Democratic Party Chair Lon Johnson and Democratic political strategist Jason Ellenberg. 

Roe said although he had no opposition to the changes to university boards, the proposal he was working on was focused on making changes to the attorney general, secretary of state and lieutenant governor races. 

The more you add to a resolution, the harder it is to get to the necessary threshold of votes, Roe said. 

“It’s about what can get the two-thirds to get on the ballot,” he said. 

Roe said they’ve had conversations with legislative leadership, as well as former governors and other individual lawmakers. Next week during the Detroit Regional Chamber’s Mackinac Policy Conference, Roe said he would be looking to enlist support and raise funds. 

“Given this is constitutional amendment we can’t take anything for granted,” he said. “Ultimately, it’s going to be the Legislature that decides.” 

Not everyone is as supportive of the measures. 

Rep. Matt Maddock, R-Milford, was asked about the proposals during an appearance on WKAR’s “Off the Record.” He said he preferred the convention process. 

“Michigan has open primaries, and the Democrats vote in our primaries … and they vote for the most liberal Republican,” Maddock said. “The convention is a closed primary.” 

He said the resolution was dead on arrival in the Legislature, as he thought it would be unable to get the required two-thirds vote. 

When House Speaker Matt Hall, R-Richland Township, was asked about the proposal during a press conference on Wednesday, he said he had not taken a position on it.

Memorial Day is an apt time to reflect on the long-term consequences of war. Among them are substance use, mental health problems, homelessness and jail time for those who served in the military.

By Jamie Rowen
UMass Amherst

(THE CONVERSATION) — Memorial Day is an apt time to reflect on the long-term consequences of war. Among them are substance use, mental health problems, homelessness and jail time for those who served in the military.

About 8% of all Americans in prisons or jails are veterans, according to the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan think tank. Veterans end up incarcerated largely because of substance use and mental health disorders, both of which also contribute to homelessness.

For more than 15 years, one tool for helping veterans break out of addiction has been Veterans Treatment Courts. These programs help veterans accused or convicted of crimes address the challenges driving their involvement in the criminal legal system.

Veterans Treatment Courts require a dedicated clinician and need to provide access to counseling, housing support and other social services to meet veterans’ needs. For this, they must have funding from the government. As a legal scholar studying the use of criminal law to aid veterans, my research shows that these programs, which exist in every state except Connecticut and Vermont, can be very effective. But they only work when they have the staffing and the resources to support veterans’ complex needs.

However, since 2025, massive staffing losses at the Department of Veteran Affairs as well as cuts to publicly funded healthcare such as Medicaid and Medicare, which are widely used by veterans, are making it harder for veterans to access healthcare.

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What are Veterans Treatment Courts?

Veterans Treatment Courts are a subset of the drug treatment courts that were created by judges and criminal legal reformers beginning in 1988. These courts are an alternative to jail for people arrested or convicted for crimes that may be related to substance use disorders.

The idea was to allow courts to address the root causes of criminal behavior rather than simply punish people who committed crimes. Specialized treatment courts were soon developed to provide support for specific issues, such as mental health, or to groups accused of specific crimes, such as sex work.

In 2008, a judge in Buffalo recognized that veterans in his drug treatment court would benefit from support from other veterans and the comprehensive services from the VA. So he launched a distinct program just for veterans that soon received national media attention. Veterans Treatment Courts now operate in over 745 courthouses.

Eligibility varies across courts, but typically requires that the person have served in the military and that the crime they committed is not considered so serious that it deserves incarceration. While these programs are funded through a variety of sources, such as local and state governments, the federal government offers tens of millions of dollars every year for local courthouses to set up Veterans Treatment Courts.

Veterans Treatment Courts have a variety of requirements for participants. Once admitted to the program, participants must attend a hearing where they talk to the judge about how they are doing. They must also take drug tests and attend therapy appointments. They may also have to show that they have stable housing and employment and that they have performed community service or engaged in other activities that indicate they are connected to their communities and therefore at lower risk for substance use or criminal behavior.

If participants meet program requirements, they graduate. Graduation usually means some sort of legal benefit, such as dropped charges and fines or the termination of probation.

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Resources are key to success

Advocates suggest that Veterans Treatment Courts are more effective than jail or prison in preventing people from committing new crimes, and that treatment courts in general cost less than incarceration. But studies on whether they help veterans more than alternatives such as drug treatment courts or a regular criminal court have been inconclusive.

My research shows that treatment courts, in general, are most effective if they have dedicated staff and access to services to address substance use as well as housing insecurity. That level of support is exactly what the VA provides.

Veterans with VA benefits not only receive outpatient and inpatient substance use treatment, but they are able to access federally funded education and housing support unavailable to most U.S. citizens. Even Veterans Treatment Court participants who are ineligible for VA healthcare benefit from the unique levels of public support and state-funded programs for veterans in the U.S.

All this gives Veterans Treatment Courts the resources to help their participants more than other treatment courts or regular criminal courts can.

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A program under threat

Recognizing the connection between veteran homelessness and incarceration, the federal government has put millions of dollars into the VA to help veterans in the criminal legal system. Congress annually authorizes tens of millions of dollars to support VA clinicians working in Veterans Treatment Courts. In January 2026, Congress even created a new center dedicated to this goal.

However, despite this support, cuts to healthcare that is delivered by VA providers, as well as to publicly funded healthcare such as Medicaid and Medicare, present numerous challenges for Veterans Treatment Courts. Tens of thousands of VA employees have left the agency since President Donald Trump took office. This has led to staffing shortages that undermine care for all veterans.

Staff stability is especially important for these programs’ viability and success. My research shows that funding cuts lead to high turnover and low morale. When the Department of Health and Human Services sent a notice canceling US$2 billion worth of funding in January 2026, treatment courts were scrambling to figure out how they could staff their programs. Though this money was restored, the cancellation showed treatment court staff that their work could end without warning.

Given that the country’s criminal legal system is already overburdened, enabling Veterans Treatment Courts to do their vital work does more than help veterans. In my view, this program also models how comprehensive social services can help people struggling with substance use disorders, mental health problems, housing insecurity and other challenges.

As people recover from past wars and return from ongoing conflicts, they will need the country’s continued investment to reintegrate and thrive.

Social scientists and commentators have for years been expressing concerns about what they call the “authoritarian playbook.” To be clear, no such book exists. But would-be and actual dictators do tend to follow a common set of strategies to consolidate power.

(THE CONVERSATION) — Social scientists and commentators have for years been expressing concerns about what they call the “authoritarian playbook.” To be clear, no such book exists. But would-be and actual dictators do tend to follow a common set of strategies to consolidate power.

Since the 2000s, populist leaders from Russia to Venezuela have used their countries’ own democratic systems to overturn democracy itself. One reason for their success may be the fact that supporters of democratic institutions do not seem to have a defensive playbook to match the authoritarians’ offensive one.

Institutions that support democracy, including many nonprofits and media outlets, have few examples to learn from. And in many countries, their responses have been weak and disorganized.

I am a sociologist who researchers how membership in nonprofits can affect someone’s democratic values and how nonprofits manage to operate in nondemocratic regimes. Because there are many signs that the U.S. government is becoming increasingly autocratic, I’m now studying how U.S. nonprofits are responding to a spate of attacks on their freedom to operate.

I’ve found that many of them have been surprisingly successful.

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Nonprofits under fire

The second Trump administration has cut billions in funding for nonprofits focused on improving access to healthcare and childcare and providing food for low-income people. It’s also slashing aid to developing countries.

Nonprofits that previously had contracts to carry out U.S. foreign aid priorities, such as Oxfam, Save the Children and the International Rescue Committee, have been especially hard hit after the Trump White House dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development.

The Trump administration also restricted the ability of nonprofits to operate free from political interference.

For example, it changed the rules on a program that forgave student loans to employees of nonprofits, barring loan forgiveness to employees of nonprofits that the administration disapproves of. These include nonprofits that help undocumented immigrants, provide gender-appropriate medical care to transgender children, engage or abet what the administration calls “illegal discrimination,” or support political protests that might violate state laws against “trespassing, disorderly conduct, public nuisance, vandalism, and obstruction of highways.”

The Trump administration has also threatened to criminally prosecute nonprofits for doing advocacy work, even though advocacy by nonprofits is legal.

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Congress is playing a role

Congress has added to the pressure on nonprofits by holding hearings that have accused some of them of smuggling undocumented immigrants and alleging that others made improper payments to former Biden administration officials.

At a February 2026 House of Representatives hearing, three Republicans – Jason Smith of Missouri, David Schweikert of Arizona and Tracey Mann of Kansas – accused the nonprofit Future Farmers of America of being connected to the Chinese Communist Party.

But much of this pressure is coming from the executive branch of government.

After the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk on Sept. 10, 2025, Vice President JD Vance pledged to go after a network of nonprofits that he claimed, without evidence, “foments, facilitates and engages in violence.”

Later that month, President Donald Trump issued a national security memo that defined left-wing terrorism in terms so broad that it included protected political speech. The memo pledged to “investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations,” including “non-governmental organizations,” and designate them as “domestic terrorist organizations” if they support views that the administration considers to embody “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, extremism on migration, race and gender, and hostility towards those who hold traditional American beliefs on family, religion, and morality.”

In December 2025, then-Attorney General Pam Bondi issued instructions to field offices telling them to begin prosecutions of the “Antifa-aligned extremists” and “domestic terrorist organizations,” including nonprofits, that were described in the earlier national security memo.

That same month, Rep. David Kustoff, a Tennessee Republican, and Sen. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, introduced a bill that would allow the Secretary of the Treasury to label nonprofits as a “terrorist-supporting organization” and strip them of their tax-exempt status.

The House passed a similar measure in 2024. It did not clear the Senate.

So far, the White House and Congress have followed up on few of those threats. However, the Justice Department indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights nonprofit, on criminal charges in April 2026. The Trump administration accused the organization of fraud, not of having ties to terrorist groups.

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The nonprofit response

In many countries, authoritarian attacks on the nonprofit sector have been met with ineffective resistance. Some nonprofits fought back, but in the end, most nonprofits either compromised with the new reality or were forced to shut down or go into exile.
But in the U.S., many nonprofits and large philanthropic donors are working proactively to unite and protect one another.

An April 2025 Zoom meeting where nonprofit leaders discussed their strategies crashed when more than 11,000 people tried to participate – it only had a capacity for 5,000.

Thousands of nonprofits have signed open letters protesting the Trump administration’s policies.

For example, in September 2025, 3,700 nonprofits signed an open letter protesting the national security memo that called for the prosecution of nonprofits for allegedly being “domestic terrorists.”

On May 20, 2026, the Open Society Foundations, the philanthropy run by the family of billionaire investor George Soros, responded to this threat by pledging US$300 million in legal and financial support to many of the nonprofits that find themselves targeted by the government.

Some large foundations, including the Marguerite Casey Foundation, the McKnight Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, have increased their grants to nonprofits that lost federal funding.

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Bowing to pressure

Of course, not all nonprofits have pushed back.

Many of them have instead changed their mission statements, or the brief descriptions of their activities that they submit to the IRS, dropping references to anything that might displease the White House. One common revision: removing references to any efforts to advance diversity, equity and inclusion for historically disadvantaged groups because of the Trump administration’s efforts to wipe out DEI policies across the country.

Another self-preservation strategy is for nonprofits to change their websites. In February 2025, the National Domestic Violence Hotline removed information and resources for LGBTQ+ victims from its website. By July 2025, 1 in 12 foundations had censored themselves by removing DEI language from their websites.

In many cases, authoritarians come to power in countries where the nonprofit sector is weak. For example, Russia and Hungary had small, young nonprofit sectors that had only come into existence in the 1990s after the fall of communism. In poorer countries such as Bangladesh, Ethiopia and Indonesia, the nonprofit sector is vulnerable because of its dependence on foreign funding, which governments can easily restrict.

But the U.S. nonprofit sector is centuries old, well organized and very established. If successful, its efforts to resist the nation’s democratic backsliding may one day inform efforts in the rest of the world.