For nonprofits, the freeze is mostly over. The worry is just beginning.
Last week, the Trump administration briefly froze all federal grant spending, cutting off funding to nonprofit groups that do work under a government contract. It lasted all of two days. Then the memo that announced the freeze was rescinded, and two federal judges blocked it, for good measure.
But this week, many nonprofit groups said they still felt frozen, or at least chilled.
For some, that was because their funding actually remained blocked into this week, despite what the administration and the judges had said. Those groups laid off staff and cut back on services — canceling job training in West Virginia, immigrant services in Wisconsin and help for disabled children in Vermont.
For the lucky others whose access to the funds was renewed, the episode demonstrated how easily the government could break their finances, by canceling contracts that previous administrations had agreed to. This vulnerability has forced them to slow spending, hand out pink slips and scrub websites of content that the new administration might deem too “woke.”
None of them knew if it was enough to inoculate them from further pain.
“It just injects such a significant element of uncertainty,” said Sharon Content, the executive director of Children of Promise, NYC. Her group relies on federal funding for a program that allows 6- to 18-year-old children to visit, call and write letters to their parents and siblings in prison.
On Monday, she said the money remained frozen, without an explanation. But the next day, she was finally able to access the funding. “How do we plan, long term?” she said.
The Office of Management and Budget, which ordered and then rescinded last week’s freeze, did not respond to a request for comment. Its freeze was separate from the State Department’s 90-day pause in foreign aid, which remains in place.
The freeze highlighted a hidden side of the charity sector. Most U.S. nonprofits rely on private sources of funding. But about 10 percent of them — more than 35,000 groups — get more than half of their funding from state, local or federal governments, according to the nonprofit data organization Candid.
The nonprofits whose funding remained blocked included several that focus on issues President Trump has targeted with his executive orders, like climate change, diversity and sexuality. They said they had not been told why their money was still frozen, and were left to wonder if this was a glitch or if they had been permanently locked out, which would appear to defy the federal judge’s order. The agencies that funded them did not answer questions sent by The New York Times.
In many cases, the nonprofits are federal contractors, hired to do a job. They plant trees, or counsel young mothers, or feed children, and can seek reimbursement from a government portal that looks like a banking website.
Then last week, they could not.
“It was just devastating,” said Meredith Pride, executive director of the Appalachian Center for Independent Living in Charleston, W.Va. Her group gets about 70 percent of its funding from the Department of Health and Human Services, which it uses to help people with disabilities live independently.
Ms. Pride said she had to tell a young man with disabilities that the group would not be able to provide him training to begin his new job at a Goodwill store because the trainer was one of the three — out of a staff of five — she had initially laid off in response to the freeze. She also had to cancel a food pantry order that would have fed 75 people. Ms. Pride said she had scrambled over the weekend to find other funding and was able to bring back two of the three employees, but she still did not have a staff member to provide the promised job training.
Ms. Pride said her group hoped to regain access to funding on Tuesday.
The Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to a request for comment.
In Wisconsin, the United Migrant Opportunity Service closed a unit that helped people — primarily those working in landscaping and other manual labor jobs — navigate how to apply online for unemployment assistance, according to three former employees. Without assistance, a former staffer said, some people could soon be evicted.
And in Vermont, another nonprofit was unable to distribute checks to families of children with disabilities. Some of the families had been waiting for weeks for the funds to help defray the costs of specialized equipment and medical procedures, which are not covered by health insurance, said Karen Price, the organization’s director of family support.
Among those affected was a family with a child who dangerously wanders at night and who had been approved to receive a specialized safety bed.
“It puts already vulnerable families further at risk,” Ms. Price said. She added that while she was able to draw down all the federal money by Tuesday, she worried about the group’s future funding.
“Going forward, we still fear that we won’t have money to support families,” said Ms. Price.
Trey Wenger, an astrophysicist, relies on a postdoctoral fellowship from the National Science Foundation to pay rent and support his family as he studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Last week, the National Science Foundation, an independent federal agency, cut off his stipend — in essence, his paycheck — but restored it on Tuesday after a federal court ruling.
Still, in a public notice that many researchers have interpreted ominously, the agency said it was reviewing all its grants to comply with Mr. Trump’s executive orders.
“It’s pretty stressful,” Mr. Wenger said. The National Science Foundation declined to comment further.
Other nonprofits said they had regained access to their grant funding over the weekend or on Monday. But they remained concerned that the Trump administration could cancel their grants altogether.
The Trump administration said last week that it was continuing to review a wide range of federal grants to make sure they did not violate the president’s executive orders banning diversity, equity and inclusion programs and other liberal priorities.
Aram Gavoor, a law professor at George Washington University, said that many federal contracts have a clause that allows the government to terminate them unilaterally.
“Reasons need not even be given,” Mr. Gavoor said.
He said that such clauses might only require that the government pay the nonprofit for work it had already done.
Staff members at many nonprofits have spent time reading President Trump’s executive orders and trying to figure out what the White House might find objectionable about their work.
“I have never seen existing, legally binding federal contracts not honored. No one expected that,” said Jeff Allen, whose Oregon-based nonprofit, Forth, seeks to make it easier for Americans to use electric vehicles.
He joked that his group had spent a lot of time trying to get charging stations installed in less-expensive apartment buildings, figuring that rich condo owners could take care of themselves. Was that wrong now?
“Does that mean we’re now required to spend more time talking to million-dollar condo owners?” Mr. Allen said. “I have no idea.”
At the National Coalition of S.T.D. Directors, a membership organization of state officials focused on sexually transmitted diseases, the end of the freeze was a reprieve after three grants from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had been halted, leaving them worried about making payroll.
Now, like other federal grant recipients, they have been told to comply with an executive order targeting “gender ideology extremism.” That is a challenging task for an organization that aims to help people at high risk of sexually transmitted infections, including transgender men and women.
“They haven’t given guidance, the memos just tell us we have to comply,” said Elizabeth Finley, the organization’s director of communications. “We don’t know what promoting gender ideology means. We don’t know what gender ideology means to them.”.
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