| By Tim Seeman, Big Radio News Staff |
A UW-Madison expert lends her perspective on President Donald Trump’s proposed freeze of federal grant dollars.
Mary Beth Collins, the executive director of UW’s Center for Community and Nonprofit Studies, says the order caught the nonprofit sector off guard because of its unprecedented scope.
“A big theme of this is that the executive order did something novel in freezing existing committed funding,” she said. “Everybody is just trying to take on the burden of sorting out what that means for them, and there’s not a lot of guidance and there’s no prior example.”
She says over the last half century, the relationship between the US government and independent nonprofits has become one of a contractor and subcontractor. The government decides how it wants to spend money on social services, and instead of creating its own program, it disburses money to independent groups to carry out the work.
The Trump order tried to upend that paradigm and also raises a fundamental question about how this country provides social services to people in need.
“Do we want to live in a country where we’re relying on family foundations and private wealth to run essential programs? We do that to some degree already, but do we want to go further in that direction?” she said.
Collins worries that if that is the way Trump and his allies want to go, there simply wouldn’t be enough philanthropic money out there to make up the difference, leaving people in need behind to suffer.
She says nonprofits are accustomed to navigating the political headwinds that come with presidencies and control of Congress changing hands but that a president unilaterally trying to freeze dollars that had already gone out the door is a fundamentally different proposition.
Usually when a new Congress or president takes over and signals a change in priorities, there’s time to plan for those changes. But Trump’s decree left confusion and concern across the country at organizations big and small.
Two judges halted the order. Twenty-two state attorneys general, including Wisconsin’s Josh Kaul, brought one of the cases. That judge ruled the Trump administration could not pause or impede the states’ access to its grant funding.
Because both court stays are temporary, though, Collins says the mood is still one of uncertainty. She hopes the episode can produce a bright side.
“One silver lining of this very difficult situation could be that we could have a bit of an awakening of just how much programming really is happening out there that sometimes we don’t see as visibly because it is through this complicated network of nonprofits and grants.”
