An effort to empower President Trump to target his ideological enemies in the nonprofit sector stalled when Trump’s sprawling, agenda-setting megabill faced opposition from far-right Republicans in the House.
Now, with an amended version of the longer bill inching toward approval, the push to target nonprofits appeared to suffer a major setback.
“For now it’s not in the text of the bill, and that’s an improvement from where we were at last week.”
The latest draft of the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” which passed the House Budget Committee on Sunday night, no longer includes a provision that critics have dubbed the “nonprofit killer.”
The measure, which has surfaced in several different forms over the past two years, would grant the secretary of the Treasury Department broad powers to strip nonprofits’ tax-exempt status by labeling them as a “terrorist supporting organization” — with little in the way of due process or evidentiary standards.
It was not immediately clear why the provision was absent from the latest draft of the bill, but a Democratic congressional aide said the removal was indeed a deliberate move by the GOP.
“Apparently Republican staffers removed it after hearing about it from stakeholders and working with leadership on a solution, but I’m not sure what the solution is,” the source told The Intercept.
The removal of the clause prompted cautious optimism from civil-society advocates, according to Kia Hamadanchy, senior policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union.
“It’s possible they took it out to rewrite it in some way, because we know that this package is going to be amended,” Hamadanchy told The Intercept. “But for now it’s not in the text of the bill, and that’s an improvement from where we were at last week.”
Fits and Starts
The latest push to get the nonprofit-killer clause into law appeared on page 380 of a 389-page bundle of amendments put forward by the GOP-controlled House Ways and Means Committee last week and passed out of committee intact.
After far-right Republicans opposed to government spending stalled the megabill, the section on nonprofits appears to have been removed from an updated version put out Monday by the House Committee on Rules.
Proponents of the provision have been trying for well over a year to make it law, an effort that critics have described as an assault on free speech aimed in particular at pro-Palestine groups. First introduced in late 2023, an initial version of the bill passed the House with overwhelming support from Democrats and Republicans alike.
In the wake of Trump’s reelection victory, however, and in the face of a concerted campaign by the ACLU and other civil-society groups, many Democrats changed their tune.
When the last version of the bill, H.R. 9495, was introduced in November, Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas, marshaled opposition to the measure and even managed to vote it down in one floor vote.
The Republican-controlled House, however, pressed on and the bill eventually passed with near-unanimous GOP support — and with the help of a handful of Democrats — but ultimately stalled in the Senate without becoming law.
The Big Beautiful Bill passed a major hurdle over the weekend after an initial attempt by four hardline conservatives to block the package.
Opponents of the nonprofit killer clause are not counting it out just yet, Hamadanchy said.
“We are continuing to track things,” he said, “in case this thing comes back from the dead as it has numerous times.”
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