By ERIC TUCKER, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Department of Justice wants to interview Jeffrey Epstein’s former girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted of helping the financier sexually abuse underage girls and is now serving a lengthy prison sentence, a senior official said Tuesday.

If Maxwell “has information about anyone who has committed crimes against victims, the FBI and the DOJ will hear what she has to say,” Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a post on X, adding that President Donald Trump ”has told us to release all credible evidence.” A lawyer for Maxwell confirmed there were discussions with the government.

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The overture to attorneys for Maxwell, who in 2022 was sentenced to 20 years in prison, is part of an ongoing Justice Department effort to cast itself as transparent following fierce backlash from parts of Trump’s base over an earlier refusal to release additional records in the Epstein investigation.

As part of that effort, the Justice Department, acting at the direction of the Republican president, last week asked a judge to unseal grand jury transcripts from the case. That decision is ultimately up to the judge.

Epstein, who killed himself in his New York jail cell in 2019 while awaiting trial, sexually abused children hundreds of times over more than a decade, exploiting vulnerable girls as young as 14, authorities say. He couldn’t have done so without the help of Maxwell, his longtime companion, prosecutors say.

The Justice Department had said in a two-page memo this month that it had not uncovered evidence to charge anyone else in connection with Epstein’s abuse. But Blanche said in his social media post that the Justice Department “does not shy away from uncomfortable truths, nor from the responsibility to pursue justice wherever the facts may lead.”

He said in his post that, at the direction of Attorney General Pam Bondi, he has “communicated with counsel for Ms. Maxwell to determine whether she would be willing to speak with prosecutors from the Department.” He said he anticipated meeting with Maxwell in the coming days.

A lawyer for Maxwell, David Oscar Markus, said Tuesday in a statement: “I can confirm that we are in discussions with the government and that Ghislaine will always testify truthfully. We are grateful to President Trump for his commitment to uncovering the truth in this case.”

Earlier this month, the right-wing president of the United States wrote a pointed letter to the left-wing president of Brazil. With typical brio, Donald Trump threatened to impose steep tariffs as punishment for, among other sins, the prosecution of Jair Bolsonaro, the former president who is facing criminal charges for his attempt to hold on to power after his electoral defeat in 2022. “This Trial should not be taking place,” Trump wrote. “It is a Witch Hunt that should end IMMEDIATELY!”

It caused quite a stir. Yet lost amid the fracas was a much quieter, potentially more consequential document signed just a few days earlier in Brazil: an agreement between Chinese and Brazilian state-backed companies to begin the first steps toward building a rail line that would connect Brazil’s Atlantic coast to a Chinese-built deepwater port on Peru’s Pacific coast. If built, the roughly 2,800-mile line could transform large parts of Brazil and its neighbors, speeding goods to and from Asian markets.

It was a neat illustration of the contrasting approaches China and the United States have taken to their growing rivalry. China offers countries help building a new rail line; Trump bullies them and meddles in their politics.

The surreal first six months of Trump’s second stint as president have offered up endless drama, danger and intrigue. By that standard his tussle with Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s president, seems like small beer. But it was a revealing moment, illuminating how Trump’s recklessness compounds America’s central foreign policy problem of the past two decades: How should the United States execute an elegant dismount from its increasingly unsustainable place atop a crumbling global order? And how can it midwife a new order that protects American interests and prestige without bearing the cost, in blood and treasure, of military and economic primacy?

These are difficult, thorny questions. Yet instead of answers, Trump offers threats, tantrums and tariffs, to the profound detriment of American interests.

China’s astonishing economic rise, coupled with its turn toward deeper authoritarianism under Xi Jinping, has made answering these challenges more difficult. China now seems to most of the American foreign policy establishment, and even more so to Trump, too powerful to be left unconfronted by the United States. But this line of thinking risks missing America’s best and most easily leveraged asset in the tussle for global dominance with China: Most countries don’t want to choose sides between hegemons. They prefer a world of benign and open competition in which the United States plays an important, if less dominant, role.

Nowhere is that truer, perhaps, than Brazil. A vast nation, bigger than the contiguous United States, it is a good stand-in for many of the world’s middle powers. Contrary to the famous quip that Brazil is the country of the future and always will be, it has managed to become the world’s 10th-largest economy, just a whisker smaller than Canada. It has a long tradition of hedging its relationships with a range of big powers — the United States, China and the European Union — while trying to advance its ambition to be a key player in world affairs.

As the United States’ position as the sole superpower has waned and Brazilian leaders have vied to shape an increasingly multipolar landscape, those efforts have picked up. That has involved, unquestionably, a deepening of its economic and diplomatic relationship with China, its biggest trading partner. Lula traveled to Beijing in May for his third bilateral meeting with Xi since returning to the presidency in 2023, declaring that “our relationship with China will be indestructible.”

The two countries are founding members of the BRICS group, a bloc of mostly developing middle-income countries that includes a number of American antagonists — Russia and, more recently, Iran. American officials have long been wary of BRICS, which has sought in various, mostly marginal ways to thwart American power. But Trump has been outright antagonistic. This month, as Lula played host to the BRICS summit, Trump blasted off a social media post threatening to slap additional tariffs on any nation “aligning themselves with the Anti-American policies of BRICS.”

Some countries within BRICS would like the organization to be more forthrightly antagonistic to the United States, but Brazil, along with India and South Africa, has been resolutely opposed to turning it into an anti-American or anti-Western bloc. “Brazil knows that China is indispensable and the United States is irreplaceable,” Hussein Kalout, a Brazilian political scientist who previously served as the country’s special secretary for strategic affairs, told me. “Brazil will never make a binary choice. That is not an option.”

Indeed, Brazil has much to lose in alienating the United States, and its growing ties with China are as much a symptom of American vinegar as Chinese honey. It does a huge amount of business with the United States, running a trade surplus in America’s favor of about $7 billion last year. America is Brazil’s largest source of foreign direct investment, rising steadily over the past decade in everything from green energy to manufacturing. Lula and Trump may be ideological opposites, but if they were ever to meet, they would have plenty of pragmatic reasons to get along.

Instead, Trump has chosen antagonism. Part of his calculation, clearly, is political. But if Trump thought he was helping Bolsonaro’s right-wing supporters win back power by undermining Lula, his letter appears to have had the opposite effect. Lula, once one of the world’s most popular and celebrated leaders, won a very narrow victory in 2023. His popularity has sagged as he struggles to deliver on his election promise to bring down prices and improve the economy. Thanks to Trump’s attacks, Brazilians are rallying around their president.

But the spat shows something deeper and more important. For many rising powers, China’s supposedly revisionist designs on reshaping the globe pale in comparison to Trump’s shocking use of tariffs, sanctions and military firepower. “From a Brazilian perspective, the country firmly seeking to change the underlying dynamics of the global order is the United States,” Oliver Stuenkel, a Brazilian German political scientist who has written extensively about BRICS, told me. America, not China, is the wrecker.

This is a shock to the world, and a terrible shame for America. Trump is missing an opportunity that his two predecessors — Barack Obama and Joe Biden — let slip through their fingers: to use America’s waning dominance to shape a new, more egalitarian multipolar order that preserves American influence and power while making room for others to rise. This would be no easy task, requiring painful choices about core American values and commitments.

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Even as Trump pledged to avoid foreign wars and entanglements, his vision of peace seems predicated on a form of “America first” dominance that invites the chaos he promises to avoid. This stance makes violent confrontation with China, the only real rival to American primacy, seem almost inevitable — and the return of the grim contestation that characterized the Cold War more likely, whether China desires it or not.

What is certain is that many countries — rich and poor, declining and rising — definitely do not want this.

Lydia Polgreen writes a column for the New York Times.

We forget what we don’t want to remember. While I understand that impulse, there are dangers embedded in our forgetfulness. This is especially true for anyone living in Flash Flood Alley, or what we like to call the Hill Country (a concept that softens the nature of this flood-sculpted and -scoured terrain). So I have come to believe after nearly thirty years of thinking, researching, and writing about the September 1921 flood which ravaged Central and South Texas; it killed at least 224 people, and, in its devastated epicenter, San Antonio, 80 or more perished. Yet those who survived that flood were surprised to learn that the Alamo City endured an even larger-in-size (though less fatal) inundation in 1819. There was little to no public memory. People did not die solely because of forgetfulness but because this amnesia allowed succeeding generations to erase the past and their responsibilities to the future. When they could have enacted post-flood, life-saving interventions, they chose not to act on their progeny’s behalf.

Here’s hoping that does not hold true for the most recent disaster, the swift and punishing rise of the Guadalupe River over the July Fourth weekend. It swept away well more than 100 children and adults, a horrific tally which may never be known in full. As with the 1921 flood, when public officials admitted that some bodies might not be recovered, interred as they were beneath tons of silt, gravel, rock, and other debris, so, too, with the Guadalupe. “We don’t know where they are,” Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly acknowledged. We don’t know how many we’ve lost.” That uncertainty intensifies the anguish even as it testifies to this flood’s catastrophic impact. (Mercifully, the official missing persons count was reduced over the past weekend from around 100 to three largely due to individuals being confirmed safe.)

But there is nothing unknown about what triggered the brutal 2025 flood and so many others dating back to the nineteenth century (when the first, if spotty, records were kept). Some of the explanation results from where the Guadalupe—like the Colorado and San Gabriel rivers to its north, and the San Antonio to its south—originate. Their tributaries rise in the rugged Edwards Plateau, the massive landform whose 24-million acres dominate and define Central Texas. Although the plateau’s elevation is modest, with its eastern sectors varying from 800 to 1200 feet above sea level, this range in height is less important than its relation to the very gulf waters against which the plateau is measured. 

Put a pin next to the source of your local (or favorite) watershed, then follow it as it streams south and east on its run to the Gulf of Mexico. Find the nearest beach, put your feet in the water. If it feels like a hot tub, you are in the right place. In mid-July, for instance, water temperatures at Port Aransas measured between 82-84°F. This heat index becomes the second datapoint essential to understanding the thunderous storms that have blown up over the Edwards for millennia. 

The third is the prevailing breezes that capture the steamy moisture rising off the gulf and, in counter-flow to the rivers, sweep north and west slowly rising with the coastal plain. It is a relatively gentle climb—San Antonio sits 650 feet above sea level, New Braunfels at 630, and Austin at 489. But almost immediately to the northwest, gentle turns steep. That’s because this wet air hits the Balcones Escarpment, a geological structure of faults that curves northeast from Del Rio to Waco. It marks a sharp increase in elevation: Though they have the Guadalupe River in common, Kerrville is 1,000 feet higher than New Braunfels. 

And what a difference the upcountry makes. As that moisture-packed airflow swirls aloft, it hits cooler temperatures and begins to condense and fall, then reheat and rise again, a cycle of convection that as it repeats can generate thunderheads. Should this volatile mixture collide with a cold front, the whole might explode. That’s how C. Terrell Bartlett, a San Antonio-based engineer, explained the 1921 flood to the annual conference of the American Society of Civil Engineers one month after it tore through South and Central Texas: “It has long been recognized that in many cases the sudden rise at the Balcones Escarpment causes intense precipitation along and just above its margin.” What they knew then, we must recall now.

United States Army soldiers assisting with search-and-rescue operations using a pontoon boat on Saint Mary’s Street by the Gunter Hotel following the 1921 flood (Coates Library Digital Collections, Trinity University, San Antonio)

We also need to recollect that the atmospheric-disturbing escarpment is key to why the Hill Country is so flood-prone. Every storm—whatever its size and power—has dumped rain that over thousands of years has carved channels into the limestone bedrock to sluice water downhill, an erosive force that has created some of the very aesthetic features—braided riverbeds, steep-walled canyons, and breathtaking views—that have drawn so many to this rough terrain. Farther downstream, the alluvial actions of these riparian systems, even at normal flow, have carried critical nutrients downstream. At flood-stage, these biotic riches have been dispersed across and built up floodplains, reenergized wetlands, and nurtured habitats. Rivers’ sustaining pulse, their dynamic and regenerative influences, are key to James Scott’s brilliant and posthumously published In Praise of Floods (2025). Its opening sentence—“Rivers, on a long view, are alive”—testifies that they are as well the life-source for all species. 

The Indigenous people of what is now Texas understood this concept full well. They knew that the dangers we associate with Flash Flood Alley were indistinguishable from the manifold benefits floodwaters bore. They were just smarter about how to live within a river’s embrace, siting their communities near springs and adjacent to fertile floodplains but always above historic high-water levels. Missing that long-lived insight were Spanish, and later Mexican and American, colonists, whether Canary Islanders, German émigrés, or white enslavers. These settlers depended on sedentary agriculture that led them to plow and dig their communities into the flood zones of the San Antonio, Guadalupe, and Colorado rivers.

Controlling floods, not shifting the pattern of settlement to safer ground, became the ambition every time San Antonio was inundated. Beginning in the 1850s, local engineers and a handful of public officials urged the construction of a flood-retention dam to bottle up the city’s eponymous river north of the downtown core. It would take seventy years and countless deadly floods for that structure to gain taxpayer approval in 1921; it would take until the 1970s, and a lot of grassroots protests on the city’s vulnerable West Side, a sector that the 1921 flood destroyed, to gain protective infrastructure. 

Austin was faster off the mark. In 1893, after years of enduring a rain-swollen Colorado jumping its banks and ravaging the community, the city, using its municipal tax and bond powers, built a sixty-foot high, 1900-foot-long, granite-block dam. The structure took advantage of the river’s historic path. “The Colorado above Austin follows in a deep cut or canyon worn in the limestone rock,” wrote UT-Austin geologist Thomas U. Taylor. “It is skirted by limestone bluffs rising often to the height of 150 feet above the bed of the river, broken by the erosion of tributary streams. No extensive meadow or bottom lands exist. This situation permits the construction of a high dam with but little damage to private property.” Under ordinary circumstances, the Colorado occupied only a small part of the channel, but in “great floods the river spreads from bluff to bluff.” In 1900, after a series of massive storms, the Colorado slammed into the structure, overtopping and undercutting it, killing dozens. Its spectacular failure, Taylor asserted, was due to ignorance of the site’s geology, poor engineering, and political interference, and one other factor: silt. The river carried so much grit downstream that it acted as a gigantic sandblaster, and the structure broke before the churning onslaught.

William L. Bray, one of Taylor’s university colleagues, wondered whether there was a human component to the speed and debris-packed floodwaters. A botanist, Bray received a contract from the U.S. Bureau of Forestry to report on the “Timber of the Edwards Plateau of Texas” (1904). Before you yawn, note that the report’s subtitle offered a more ecological analysis of woody vegetation’s “Relations to Climate, Water Supply, and Soil.” With that encompassing objective, Bray roamed the Balcones Escarpment and the wider plateau and paid close attention to how people were using axe and animals to eke out their living in the thin-soiled landscape. 

Cedar choppers were hard at work harvesting for fencing and fuel; sheep, goat, and cattle were grazing on what grasses were available. These economic activities came with considerable environmental costs, Bray argued after studying two canyons linked to the Colorado River. One of them retained its thicket of vegetation; the other had been stripped clean. Unlike the first, which acted like a sponge during rain events, the denuded slopes of the other did little to restrain precipitation from racing downhill, “to pour down as from a steep roof converging into swift streamlets which erode every vestige of organic soil.” This load, along with other heavier debris, then crashed into already roiling tributaries, the whole becoming a “mountain torrent.” The Colorado floodwaters, with their anthropogenic and natural sources, continued to run free until the 1940 completion of Austin’s Tom Miller Dam. Its funding, not incidentally, came from the New Deal’s Public Works Administration, a $2.3 million gift that the Hill Country’s native son, then-Representative Lyndon B. Johnson, had secured. 

To date, that initial investment and subsequent infrastructure projects that the Lower Colorado River Authority manages have protected communities within the larger watershed under most conditions. But what just happened on the Guadalupe—and had occurred on the San Antonio in 1921—was not “most conditions.” Let’s return then to the Gulf of Mexico and its simmering saltwater. Add to its hot-to-the-touch condition an atmosphere containing elevated levels of humidity and crucially the absence of strong, shearing winds. Overhead powerful thunderstorms might begin to form. As they do, they suck up more warm moisture into a spiraling system. The pressure begins to drop which pulls in more wind, and if these conditions hold a tropical depression might morph into a tropical storm or hurricane. Recent research connects the dots between this formative process and ocean surface temperatures: “warmer waters,” NOAA notes, “fuel more energetic storms.”

The surface and lower depths of the Gulf were not nearly as hot a century ago as they are today, a difference attributable to climate-disrupting, planetary warming; climate change is an accelerant, boosting and intensifying a pre-existing weather pattern. One of those earlier storms, a strong tropical depression that formed in the gulf in early September 1921, slowly spun towards northern Mexico, and on September 7th it came ashore south of Tampico. Over the next three days, it cycled across the Rio Grande into Webb County, then drifted along the Balcones Escarpment to rain down over Bexar, Comal, Hays, and Travis counties before pounding Williamson, Bell, and Milam. The U.S. Weather Bureau could not formally verify “the distribution of the pressure” that directed the storm’s path, yet it insisted that “the shifting winds, the progressive northeastward extension of the rainfall area, and the profound agitation of the atmosphere as evidenced by violent squalls and thunderstorms over the stricken section can hardly be ascribed to any other cause.”

San Pedro Creek near Commerce Street following the 1921 flood (Coates Library Digital Collections, Trinity University, San Antonio)

Contemporaries recorded two significant results of the 1921 deluge. Because San Antonio was the “most densely populated and most highly developed community affected by the flood,” it received “the most widespread notice in the press.” Yet its attention-grabbing devastation needed context, C.E. Ellsworth, a USGS researcher, averred. If the “rainfall in the basin of San Antonio River had been as heavy as it was in much of the basin of Little River, in Bell, Milam, and Williamson counties, the destruction at San Antonio would have been so great as to make that actually suffered there seem insignificant.” That’s why the “aggregate loss of both life and property in other areas far exceeded that at San Antonio,” though who died in the various flood zones was consistent. Most were “Mexicans who lived in poorly constructed houses, built along the low banks of the streams. Undoubtedly many others were drowned who were never reported missing,” Ellsworth wrote, and along the “Little and San Gabriel rivers bodies were found six months or more after the flood.”

Some of this analysis is hauntingly familiar. The pile-driving origin of the 2025 inundation in Kerr County was yet another tropical disturbance—dubbed Barry—that made landfall in northern Mexico and headed across the border where later it slammed into already saturated skies whirling above the Edwards Plateau. As with the 1921 storm, during which record-setting whiteout downpours hit the upper reaches of the San Antonio River and the middle stretches of the San Gabriel—39 inches fell at Thrall—some parts of the Guadalupe watershed had more than 15 inches hammer down so fast that the river itself rose 26 feet within less than an hour. That’s a predictable result of the tight confines through which escarpment rivers squeeze. 

As foreseeable, alas, is the disaster that results if this torrent powers into urban streets or a rural camp called Mystic. 

Neither flood could have been prevented. It is a river’s nature to flood. But the human-made disasters that resulted could have been mitigated. The Dallas Morning News spoke to this in a September 13, 1921, editorial, “Flood Yet to Come,” observing that “the most distressing feature of San Antonio’s disastrous flood experiences is the probability that they were avoidable. It does not seem unreasonable that foresight could have prevented the great loss of life and property” and proof that it was “preventable will come in the decision to take steps at once to prevent the recurrence of the catastrophe.” Solutions could have been proactively implemented. The state was duly forewarned: “Scarcely is there a city of any size in Texas,” the News continued, “but has within its confines one or more placid water course potentially as murderous as the beautiful San Antonio River.”

The post The San Antonio Flood of 1921 Held Lessons We Refuse to Learn appeared first on The Texas Observer.

By THALIA BEATY, Associated Press

Dawn Price signs rent checks worth about $160,000 every month for 79 people that her nonprofit helps house in Laguna Beach, California.

Usually, she logs into an online portal to withdraw enough from an account funded by a grant from the federal housing agency. But in February, she couldn’t. Access had been temporarily cut off for many housing organizations as part of the Trump administration’s cuts and funding freezes.

“That was just a sea change for us for those dollars to be so immediately at risk,” said Price, the executive director of Friendship Shelter, which started in 1987 as a community organization. Access was eventually restored but the episode took a toll.

“Government moves slowly usually, and I think what was so disorienting early on was government was moving really fast,” she said.

In the early days of his second term, President Donald Trump froze, cut or threatened to cut a huge range of social services programs from public safety to early childhood education to food assistance and services for refugee resettlement. Staffing cuts to federal agencies have also contributed to delays and uncertainty around future grant funds. Altogether, his policies are poised to upend decades of partnerships the federal government has built with nonprofits to help people in their communities.

This vast and interconnected set of programs funded by taxpayers has been significantly dismantled in just months, nonprofit leaders, researchers and funders say. And even deeper, permanent cuts are still possible. That uncertainty is also taking a toll on their staff and communities, the leaders said.

James Carey, housing director for the Friendship Shelter, gives a tour of the one of the apartments that the organization provides for homeless people, Monday, July 7, 2025, in San Clemente, Calif. (AP Photo/Denis Poroy)

In response to questions about the cuts to grant funding, White House spokesperson Kush Desai said, “Instead of government largesse that’s often riddled with corruption, waste, fraud, and abuse, the Trump administration is focused on unleashing America’s economic resurgence to fuel Americans’ individual generosity.”

He pointed to a new deduction for charitable giving included in the recently passed tax and spending law that he said encourages Americans’ “innate altruism.”

But experts say private donations will not be enough to meet the needs.

In 2021, $267 billion was granted to nonprofits from all levels of government, according to an analysis by the Urban Institute published in February. While the data includes tax-exempt organizations like local food pantries as well as universities and nonprofit hospitals, it underestimates the total funding that nonprofits receive from the government. It includes grants, but not contracts for services nor reimbursements from programs like Medicare. It also excludes the smallest nonprofits, which file a different, abbreviated tax form.

However, the figure does give a sense of the scale of the historic — and, until now, solid — relationship between the public sector and nonprofits over the last 50 years. Now, this system is at risk and leaders like Price say the cost of undoing it will be “catastrophic.”

Government funding to nonprofits reaches far and wide

The Urban Institute’s analysis shows more than half of nonprofits in every state received government grants in 2021.

In the vast majority of the country, the typical nonprofit would run a deficit without government funding. Only in two Congressional districts — one including parts of Orange County, California, and another in the suburbs west of Atlanta — would a typical nonprofit not be in the red if they lost all of their public grant funding, the analysis found.

But in Orange County, famous for its stunning beaches, mansions and extraordinary wealth, funders, nonprofits and researchers said that finding surprised them. In part, that’s because of major economic inequalities in the county and its high cost of living.

Taryn Palumbo, executive director of Orange County Grantmakers, said nonprofits are not as optimistic about their resiliency.

“They are seeing their budgets getting slashed by 50% or 40%,” she said. “Or they’re having to look to restructure programs that they are running or how they’re serving or the number of people that they’re serving.”

Last year, the local Samueli Foundation commissioned a study of nonprofit needs in part because they were significantly increasing their grantmaking from $18.8 million in 2022 to an estimated $125 million in 2025. They found local nonprofits reported problems maintaining staff, a deep lack of investment in their operations and a dearth of flexible reserve funds.

The foundation responded by opening applications for both unrestricted grants and to support investments in buildings or land. Against this $10 million in potential awards, they received 1,242 applications for more than $250 million, said Lindsey Spindle, the foundation’s president.

President of Samueli Family Philanthropies Lindsey Spindle speaks with cofounder Henry Samueli at the foundation’s offices in Corona Del Mar, Calif., Monday, July 7, 2025. (AP Photo/Zoë Meyers)

“It tells a really stark picture of how unbelievably deep and broad the need is,” Spindle said. “There is not a single part of the nonprofit sector that has not responded to these funds. Every topic you can think of: poverty, animal welfare, arts and culture, civil rights, domestic abuse… They’re telling us loud and clear that they are struggling to stay alive.”

Charitable organizations have held a special role in the U.S.

One of the founding stories of the United States is the importance of the voluntary sector, of neighbors helping neighbors and of individuals solving social problems. While other liberal democracies built strong welfare states, the U.S. has preferred to look to the charitable sector to provide a substantial part of social services.

Since the 1960s, the federal government has largely funded those social services by giving money to nonprofits, universities, hospitals and companies. Several new policies converged at that time to create this system, including the expansion of the federal income tax during World War II and the codification of tax-exempt charitable organizations in 1954. Then, the Kennedy and Johnson administrations started to fund nonprofits directly with federal money as part of urban renewal and Great Society programs.

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“It was a key approach of midcentury liberalism of addressing issues of poverty, sort of making a reference to civil rights and racial inequality, but not growing the size of government,” said Claire Dunning, an assistant professor of public policy at the University of Maryland, College Park. Conservatives also tended to support working through local, private, nonprofit organizations, though for different reasons than liberals, she said.

With various expansions and cuts during different presidencies, the federal government has continued to fund nonprofits at significant levels, essentially hiding the government in plain sight, Dunning said. The size and importance of the nonprofit apparatus became suddenly visible in January when the Trump administration sought to freeze federal grants and loans.

Dunning said the speed, hostility and scale of the proposed cuts broke with the long legacy of bipartisan support for nonprofits.

“People had no idea that the public health information or services they are receiving, their Meals on Wheels program, their afterschool tutoring program, the local park cleanup were actually enabled by public government dollars,” she said.

A coalition of nonprofits challenged the freeze in court in a case that is ongoing, but in the six months since, the administration has cut, paused or discontinued a vast array of programs and grants. The impacts of some of those policy changes have been felt immediately, but many will not hit the ground until current grant funding runs out, which could be in months or years depending on the programs.

Private donations can’t replace scale of government support

Friendship Shelter in Laguna Beach has an annual budget of about $15 million, $11.5 million of which comes from government sources. Price said the government funding is “braided” in complex ways to house and support 330 people. They’ve already lost a rental reimbursement grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. But the Samueli Foundation stepped in to backfill those lost funds for three years.

That kind of support is extremely unusual, she said.

“We don’t know of any large-scale private philanthropy response to keeping people housed because it’s a forever commitment,” Price said. “That person is in housing and is going to need the subsidy for the rest of their lives. These are seriously disabled people with multiple issues that they’re facing that they need help with.”

She also believes that even in a wealthy place like Orange County, private donors are not prepared to give five, six or eight times as much as they do currently. Donors already subsidize their government grants, which she said pay for 69% of the actual program costs.

“We are providing this service to our government at a loss, at a business loss, and then making up that loss with these Medicaid dollars and also the private fundraising,” she said.

She said her organization has discussed having to put people out of housing back on to the streets if the government funding is cut further.

“That would be, I think, a signal to me that something is deeply, deeply wrong with how we’re looking at these issues,” said Price, adding, “If I was placing a bet, I would bet that we have enough good still in government to prevent that.”

Associated Press coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.