Civil society in the US has experienced several waves of turbulence after the inauguration of the second Trump administration. Some are related to funding cuts and freezes; others are related to a charged political climate in which some nonprofits find themselves under threat of potential investigation for violating the administration’s priorities or under attack from public officials. This brief explores how those disruptions might reshape the support system for charitable and philanthropic giving, or the giving infrastructure. 

Why This Matters 

This brief outlines the ways in which current disruptions to civil society might lead to short- and longer-term changes to the giving infrastructure. Civil society organizations’ experience of these disruptions has amplified preexisting vulnerabilities and created new ones that have fueled the need to fill gaps produced by funding cuts and freezes, as well as to reimagine and reconstruct the infrastructure itself in light of those disruptions. Those dual aims to stabilize and transform—sometimes complementary, sometimes in tension—underscore the core missions of the giving infrastructure more generally, ones that will define the future of civil society.

What We Found

Following are four ways in which new policies and practices are disrupting the social sector and how they might reshape civil society and the giving infrastructure that serves it: 

1. The emergence of systems of triage to support nonprofits and individuals after federal funding cuts or freezes. One example of a triage organization is Project Resource Optimization (PRO), which was created in response to the dismantling of USAID and billions of dollars in cuts to foreign assistance programs. PRO compiled a “Urgent and Vetted” list of some 80 charities after reviewing all of the foreign aid programs that USAID had been funding and determining which programs were the most cost-effective and could save the most lives. The drive toward charitable triage and emergency gap filling has at times been coupled with a seemingly contrary impulse to transform rather than just to stabilize, possibly deepening the allure of using cost-effectiveness as a lodestar for giving decisions.
2. The drive to recover and protect public datasets removed or altered by the Trump administration. A host of philanthropic actors have taken up the charge of promoting data resilience by incorporating public datasets more firmly into the private domains of the social sector infrastructure. As with the gap giving in response to funding reductions, these efforts have often involved leveraging the disruption to rethink data infrastructure more generally, including encouraging states and cities to construct parallel data systems and fostering communities to create their own local health data ecosystems.
3. The increased importance of providing security to organizations and individuals who fear being targeted for their work. Many nonprofits, including smaller organizations with minimal excess capacity to spare, have seen their legal, cybersecurity, and data-safety needs skyrocket over the last year in response to the possibility of administrative, congressional, and state-level subpoenas, investigations, oversight demands, or audits, as well as hacking attempts from hostile private actors. Given these needs, the provision of security has become an important form of charitable and philanthropic currency and has resulted in the creation of novel associations and networks, as well as of the growth of collaboration, coordination, and solidarity among nonprofits.
4. The changes in philanthropic funding flowing into and out of the US. In October 2025, the UK-headquartered Children’s Investment Fund Foundation announced that it was pausing its funding of US-based nonprofits because of the political uncertainty. If the fear that fuels these capital flows continues to intensify, and philanthropic cross-border capital flows are disrupted even further, they may result in overseas “safe harbor” entities and overseas offices becoming permanent fixtures of the US giving infrastructure. 

Two themes thread throughout these four examples of disruption to the giving infrastructure: the dynamic between the drive to stabilize and to transform as complementary and at times competing reactions to the disruptions; and, relatedly, the interplay between short-term reactions and longer-term changes to civil society and the giving infrastructure.