As President Donald Trump guts the federal government, there’s a greater need than ever for nonprofit organizations to step up and fill the void. But there’s a Trump-shaped fundraising problem looming over the nonprofit sector.

Fearful of Trump’s penchant for targeting his perceived political enemies, some nonprofit leaders say the large donors who help subsidize their operations are pulling back. Even though the Trump administration has said it will not move forward with a series of rumored executive actions targeting nonprofits, this retreat by large donors poses a critical problem — especially as the federal government has slashed grants and issued stop-work orders already restricting key services.

“It’s kind of a perfect storm of the federal cuts happening and philanthropy not moving as quickly as one would hope,” said Lynn English, president and co-founder of English Hudson Consulting, a development and consulting firm that works with dozens of nonprofits across the United States, including groups that have been outspoken against Trump. “Anyone who has federal money is cutting expenses, cutting staff, and trying to figure out where they can possibly make up the gap.”

Threats from senior administration officials to foundations and nonprofits’ tax-exempt status have heightened donors’ concerns about giving to causes that might be perceived as opposing Trump and singled out for retribution — like law firms, universities, and news organizations, leaders of nonprofits told The Intercept.

The consequences are being felt at nonprofits that focus on climate, transgender rights, racial justice, and gender equality.

Both Trump and Vice President JD Vance have made no secret of their animosity toward certain nonprofits and major funders. In his 2021 Senate campaign, Vance argued that major foundations and academic institutions should lose their tax-exempt status. “The Ford Foundation, the Gates Foundation, the Harvard University endowment, these are fundamentally cancers on American society, but they pretend to be charities so they benefit from preferential tax treatment,” Vance told Tucker Carlson during a 2021 Fox News interview.

More recently, Trump has publicly threatened to revoke Harvard University’s tax-exempt status, while implying broader risks to other nonprofit organizations and foundations. “Tax-exempt status, it’s a privilege. It’s really a privilege. And it’s been abused by a lot more than Harvard,” Trump told reporters last Thursday. Last week, the administration cut billions of dollars in federal funding to the university for research purposes, though its tax-exempt status for now remains unchanged.

At the Thursday news conference, Trump also threatened specific nonprofit organizations, namely Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a government watchdog organization that has repeatedly sued the Trump administration. “It’s supposed to be a charitable organization,” Trump told reporters. “The only charity they had is going after Donald Trump. So, we’re looking at that. We’re looking at a lot of things.”