The Trump administration’s civil rights agenda is becoming clearer. Earlier this month, the Treasury Department and the IRS proposed a rule that would revoke tax-exempt status from private schools—everything from elementary schools to universities—that offer “targeted support to Black or other minority students.” This isn’t just a ban on explicit racial preferences or quotas. It’s a ban on any help offered specifically to minority students, down to minority student clubs and mentoring programs, which the administration apparently considers an offense against that most victimized minority in America: white men.
Aside from the nefarious goal of this rule change, we should be concerned about how the administration is using the IRS to impose it. The politicization of the IRS’s nonprofit rules has implications that go far beyond college admission policies. It is a way to gain direct presidential control over civil society.
Bob Jones Strikes Back
The IRS decision explicitly cites a decision from the 1970s in which the IRS denied tax-exempt status to Bob Jones University for its explicitly segregationist policy against interracial dating. There is a certain wing of the right that has seethed about this ever since, regarding it as a use of state power to suppress dissent against a “progressive” agenda (which in this case means anyone who is against segregation). This is their chance to seize back that power for their own ends.
But this is also part of a wider war against the universities. Going back at least to William F. Buckley’s God and Man at Yale, which decried universities as the leading edge of secularism, conservatives have regarded higher education as the ultimate source of the erosion of traditional values and therefore as a citadel to be stormed and taken over—or razed to the ground. Attempts to train and promote a new wave of conservative academics have largely failed, so the Trump administration is making a last-ditch effort to impose right-wing ideology on the universities by brute force.
That explains Donald Trump’s threat last year to take away Harvard’s tax-exempt status, at the same time that he tried to block billions in federal research grants to the school to force it into a settlement that would have given the administration sweeping control over hiring, admissions, and curriculum—a clear attempt to use the power of the state to seize control of the university. The academic rebound that conservatives could not achieve under their own power, they would simply impose on the universities by coercing them into a settlement—or, in the case of another group of universities, a “compact”—that would surrender the citadels of higher education to the right.
The effort against Harvard was rejected by the university’s administration, and the courts then blocked Trump from withholding its research grants because the move so blatantly targeted a specific university for political purposes. This latest attempt repackages that goal in the form of a more universal policy, but it has the same effect of trying to bring the universities to heel by choking off their funding. Universities are not profit-making enterprises, though if they were stripped of their tax-exempt status they would pay taxes on earnings from their endowments and could take a surprisingly big hit from state and local property taxes. But the biggest impact would be on their fundraising, since donors could no longer write off their gifts as a tax deduction.
What makes this possible is that Congress and the courts have for decades ceded to the executive vague powers and areas of arbitrary discretion. When he first threatened to take away Harvard’s tax-exempt status last year, Donald Trump declared, “Tax Exempt Status is totally contingent on acting in the PUBLIC INTEREST!” Similarly, a New York Times report on the proposed rules notes that the old Bob Jones University decision was upheld in 1983 by the Supreme Court, which “found an organization could not receive tax-exempt status if it was in opposition to a ‘fundamental public policy.’ … But what counts as a fundamental public policy has otherwise been left largely undefined.”
Even if we agree with the Bob Jones University decision, we can see the danger of basing it on broad and undefined criteria. Vague terms like “fundamental public policy” and “the public interest”—also used by Trump’s FCC as an excuse for threatening broadcast licenses—are a recipe for mischief, and this won’t be the last example.
The Bullies and Their Pulpit
We can see the wider goal of the Trump administration’s policies by contrasting its treatment of universities with its treatment of churches, for which it has tried to relax IRS rules to allow them to engage in overt political activity.
The most basic distinction in the nonprofit world is between philanthropic and educational organizations recognized under Section 501(c)(3) of the tax code, where donations can be claimed on their supporters’ returns as a tax deduction, and organizations that engage in political advocacy (often under Section 501(c)(4)), where donations are not tax deductible. In effect, the government wants to encourage philanthropy but not to give any special advantage to political activism. A 1954 law called the Johnson Amendment codified these restrictions, barring churches and other charitable organizations from officially endorsing candidates or campaigning for them.
The Trump administration’s IRS is trying to loosen that rule, reinterpreting the Johnson Amendment to allow a church to endorse candidates “through its usual channels of communication on matters of faith.”
This has long been sought by the religious right as a way to increase its political influence. We can also see how it would appeal to Donald Trump, who would not have won two presidential elections without overwhelming support from evangelical Christians, a demographic that would be easier to mobilize for political campaigns. As one expert explained to The New York Times:
“It basically tells churches of all denominations and sects that you’re free to support candidates from the pulpit,” said Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame who has studied regulation of political activity by churches. “It also says to all candidates and parties, ‘Hey, time to recruit some churches.’”
There is also proposed legislation that would loosen the Johnson Amendment for all nonprofits, including secular educational charities, that the National Council of Nonprofits opposes on the grounds that it would politicize the nonprofit sector. The IRS’s interpretation is even more politicized, because it would apply only to churches, giving religious organizations a special dispensation for tax-exempt political activity that would not be given to … well, universities.
Like the proposed rule targeting universities, this change has yet to take effect. The IRS’s new interpretation of the law was tried first in the form of a proposed settlement of a lawsuit brought by two Texas churches and a Christian broadcaster association that wanted a free hand to engage in politicking. Rather than defend the Johnson Amendment, the IRS decided to grant their demand. But in March, a federal judge refused to approve that proposed settlement and dismissed the case—albeit on narrow procedural grounds rather than the legal merits of the IRS’s position. The case is now on appeal, with the Department of Justice backing the churches. However this ends in the courts, though, the attempt itself is revealing.
Friends and Enemies
Taken together, you can see the pincer move at work here: starve the universities, feed the churches. Exploit a politicized IRS to discourage activity you deem politically unwelcome in institutions you regard as hostile, while you open the floodgates of money and influence for institutions you regard as friendly.
This is not just about churches and universities. The Trump administration has already targeted the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has long dedicated itself to exposing racist organizations, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently made a wider threat to revoke tax-exempt status for left-leaning charitable organizations like the Open Society Foundations.
As Alexis de Tocqueville famously observed, much of American society is driven by private “associations,” and many of those associations are funded under the rules for nonprofit organizations. An IRS that has a free hand to play favorites about who does and doesn’t count as a tax-exempt nonprofit would give the president enormous power to shape civil society.
Most ominous is the legal principle, or lack thereof, that is implicit in these decisions. Today’s authoritarian right has revived and adopted the ideas of the Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt. The central idea of Schmitt’s theory is that no legal doctrine can really be based on universal and neutral liberal principles. Instead, he insisted, the only basic distinction in politics is between friend and enemy. The fundamental political imperative is to reward one’s friends and punish one’s enemies.
Here we see that doctrine put into practice in the nitty-gritty of IRS tax rules, which are now being shaped so that legal arguments and principles will no longer matter. All that will matter is whether you are the administration’s friend or its enemy.
© The UnPopulist, 2026
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