Leading climate action advocates spoke out Monday against anticipated moves by President Donald Trump’s administration to strip the nonprofit status of groups who have been at the front line of the fight against its rollbacks of environmental protection.

At a news conference, former Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, a Democrat who led his state to pass some of the nation’s most progressive climate legislation, said rumored moves against nonprofit environmental groups would be an illegal use of the IRS as a political weapon.

Activist Bill McKibben, founder of the climate-focused groups 350.org and Third Act, said he saw a greater crime underway. “The crime is trying to stop the energy transition in the midst of the greatest environmental crisis that our species has ever faced,” he said.

Any White House action against environmental nonprofits, he said, would be akin to covering up that crime.

“Now, they’ve got to try and make sure that there’s no functioning alarm system of any kind, because that’s what civil society—that’s what groups like this really are,” McKibben said.

One day before the 55th anniversary of Earth Day, he harkened back to the catastrophic pollution in Ohio and off the coast of California that then galvanized the environmental movement.

“In 1970 … they were sounding the alarm on the Cuyahoga River on fire,” he said. “They were sounding the alarm on Santa Barbara as waters were filling with oil. Now, people are doing their very best to sound the alarm on the even deeper ecological crisis that we’re in.”

Trump himself signaled that his administration was scrutinizing the nonprofit status of environmental groups last week when he was taking questions on the IRS moves to rescind Harvard University’s nonprofit status. But the White House has not provided any further clarification or comment. Meanwhile, environmental groups are in all-hands-on-deck mode, preparing to defend themselves, even as they already are fully engaged in battles over the administration’s rescission of grants, rollback of environmental protections, lack of transparency and cutbacks to federal agencies and vital climate monitoring programs.

Inslee said a potential executive order or IRS scrutiny of environmental groups were “an effort by Donald Trump to turn Earth Day into anti-Earth Day and to abuse the law and the Constitution.” He referenced the organizers of the event, the Rachel Carson Society, named after a pioneer of the environmental movement, and said a Trump administration move against environmental groups would lend a new meaning to Carson’s landmark book, Silent Spring.

It would “silence anyone who has the temerity to say children ought to have clean air and that we ought to not have our cities burning down because of climate-induced fires,” Inslee said. “We cannot, will not be, and must not be silenced.”

“The Trump administration has been systematically attacking every sector of American civil society.”

— Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.)

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, said he and his colleagues had a preview of the current attacks on nonprofits at the end of the last Congress, when the Republican-controlled House passed a bill that would have given the Treasury Department wide power to remove a group’s nonprofit status by declaring it a terrorist organization. That legislation did not advance in the Senate, which was then controlled by Democrats. Even today, such a bill would have a tough time gaining traction in the closely divided Senate, where it would need 60 votes for passage.

However, environmental groups and their allies said they now expect an effort by the White House to go after nonprofits without a change in the law.

“The Trump administration has been systematically attacking every sector of American civil society—the federal workforce, the unions, the universities, the colleges, the philanthropies, you name it,” Raskin said. “So it’s inevitable that they would be coming after environmental organizations.”

Raskin added, “We are going to stand up strong for the environmental not-for-profits, which are engaged in arguably the most long-range, visionary and fundamental charitable and philanthropic work of all, which is preserving the Earth as a habitat for humanity.”

Inslee said he does not believe the courts would allow the administration to target environmental nonprofits and terminate their ability to raise tax-deductible donations.

“The law is—and it’s a very important law—that no president of any party, under any circumstances, has the right to use the IRS as a political instrument,” Inslee said. Taking tax-exempt status from organizations that focus on climate change, he said, “is clearly in violation of the law, but it’s also in violation of the common sense of the American people, who understand the threat of climate change.”

Marianne Lavelle

Bureau Chief, Washington, D.C.

Marianne Lavelle is the Washington, D.C. bureau chief for Inside Climate News. She has covered environment, science, law, and business in Washington, D.C. for more than two decades. She has won the Polk Award, the Investigative Editors and Reporters Award, and numerous other honors. Lavelle spent four years as online energy news editor and writer at National Geographic. She spearheaded a project on climate lobbying for the nonprofit journalism organization, the Center for Public Integrity. She also has worked at U.S. News and World Report magazine and The National Law Journal. While there, she led the award-winning 1992 investigation, “Unequal Protection,” on the disparity in environmental law enforcement against polluters in minority and white communities. Lavelle received her master’s degree from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and is a graduate of Villanova University.

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