When the U.S. State Department recently froze nearly all foreign aid, the Center for Victims of Torture was forced to inform more than 430 staffers across Ethiopia, Jordan and Uganda that their jobs were on hold. The furloughs, sidelining 75% of the organization and its clinical therapy for trauma victims, will have impacts far beyond the individual workers, according to directors of the nonprofit, which maintains administrative offices on University Avenue in St. Paul and a therapy center on Dayton Avenue.

“A quarter of our clients at any given time are at risk of suicide, and now their services have been cut out,” said Scott Roehm, the center’s Washington-based director of Global Policy and Advocacy. “We have a minimal presence left in one or two places, but virtually all of our international programming has stopped.”

On St. Paul’s West Side, the nonprofit Neighborhood House hasn’t missed a beat in the social services it provides, which range from food assistance to adult GED classes. Still, the number of adult learners showing up for English as a Second Language classes dropped by as much as two-thirds from December to late January, according to volunteers, who say they can sense palpable fear among the immigrant families they work with.

Meanwhile, federal grant funding for U.S. citizenship test preparation classes has been put on hold mid-stream. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services adult education grant, while relatively small, was supposed to be distributed to Neighborhood House over the course of two years.

“We were told it’s on pause,” said Neighborhood House president Janet Garcia on Monday. “We do not know how long that pause will be. We have not stopped, nor do we have plans to stop that class. But those kinds of cuts add up.”

Those are familiar stories for nonprofits that receive program funds, directly or indirectly, from federal sources. In St. Paul, nonprofit directors say President Donald Trump’s executive orders and other administration efforts to freeze or curtail federal spending on social services, education and international aid have left many of their programs reeling at a time when they’re hard-pressed to increase direct care to the most vulnerable.

A patchwork quilt of uncertainty

It’s unclear how temporary, or even lawful, some of those cuts may be. Legal analysts have said Trump will need Congressional approval to abolish some federal agencies, and it’s Congress — not the president — that establishes federal budgets for the U.S. Department of Education and USAID, which distributes foreign aid. Some of the president’s efforts have already been ordered put on hold by federal judges, though whether the administration will fully comply remains to be seen.

The result is a kind of patchwork quilt of policy changes that may go into effect temporarily, may impact some programs but not others, or may not take effect at all. The Trump administration, for instance, recently included Head Start early learning programs in a roster of agencies and initiatives that would see their federal funding frozen.

The administration quickly rescinded the order for Head Start, but dozens of Head Start agencies in 23 states nonetheless reported in recent days being unable to draw down funds through the online portal where they typically access their federal dollars.

Kelly Martinson, a spokesperson for Kids Count on Us — a coalition of more than 500 community-based childcare centers across the state — said uncertainty about federal support comes at a particularly difficult time for the childcare industry, which has been buffeted especially hard by labor shortages. Across Minnesota, 75% of childcare centers serve at least some children who receive federal childcare assistance. Providers are trying to determine if federal Childcare Development Block Grants will be impacted by the administration’s fiscal scythe.

If so, she said, the public can expect more childcare centers to close.

“We have to prepare for the worst and hope for the best,” Martinson said.

Separating ‘the wheat from the chaff’

Pointing to nonprofit scandals like the ongoing trial of suspects in the “Feeding Our Future” plot, some fiscal watchdogs have applauded the general thrust behind freezing federal funding to nonprofits in advance of federal spending reviews. The goal is to separate “the wheat from the chaff,” said Bill Glahn, policy fellow with the Center of the American Experiment, a Minnesota-based conservative think-tank.

“With the ‘Feeding Our Future” fraud, from the time the state Department of Education figured out who the fraudsters were until the FBI raided them, $250 million went out the door to them,” Glahn said.

“What I perceive is going on at the federal level is what I think should be going on at the state level,” he added. “Minnesota has a fraud problem. It’s mostly nonprofits that have been accused of defrauding government, whether it’s at the state or federal level. … Let’s take a pause and make sure things are going right. And if people are defrauding the federal government or the state, let’s stop paying them.”

Officials with the the International Institute of Minnesota, a refugee resettlement agency, said they had fully expected the president to freeze lawful refugee resettlements into the U.S. after taking office. What came as a shock, according to administrators, was the block on federal funding for initial support to refugees who had already arrived in the country.

Resettlement services like health screenings, housing and food assistance, and help with school registrations are typically distributed for up to 90 days, helping refugees in Minnesota land on their feet before their first job and paycheck. In the 90 days before Trump took office, the St. Paul-based institute welcomed 183 individuals, most of them from Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Guatemala, El Salvador, Sudan, Burma and Afghanistan. Continuing to support them without federal backing has left the institute scrambling for more private donations.

Roehm, of the Center for Victims of Torture, said the White House could have pursued a more balanced, evidence-based approach toward reining in social spending by conducting individual program evaluations before freezing federal funding for support agencies, not afterward.

“You don’t shut them all down on day one and then decide to do reviews,” said Roehm, who said he sees the administration’s blitz-like pummeling of the nonprofit sector as a test of both Congress and the judiciary. “This is all about the Trump administration puffing its chest as much as it can to see how much power it can grab from the other two branches of government … consequences be damned.”

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