STIC is joining a vast chorus of voices nationwide in passionate opposition to the proposed rule change to the Guidance for Federal Financial Assistance, available for review here: https://www.regulations.gov/document/OMB-2026-0034-0001.
The chorus is vast because the scope of this proposal is breathtaking, and if fully implemented it will utterly transform the relationship of the non-profit sector of the United States economy. This includes (but is not limited to):
· Our universities and research institutions, the intellectual wellsprings of American economic, scientific, and moral power.
· Much of our health care system, that has powered advances in human lifespans and the quality of those lifespans which are nothing short of miraculous.
· Much of our education system, which defines no less than our future.
· The arts and humanities, which reflect our hearts and souls to ourselves and the world.
· Our sprawling network of human services organizations dedicated to perpetuating the observation of Alexis de Tocqueville (apocryphal, but true nonetheless) that “America is great because America is good.”
Since roughly the New Deal, the U.S. government has established and nurtured a symbiotic, cooperative relationship with these institutions. While competing systems in the 20th century, primarily in the Eastern Bloc and parts of Asia, tried to centrally control much of their nations’ economic, civil, and humanitarian programs, the United States created systems that lent support (such as but not limited to funding) to private or quasi-public institutions that performed functions consonant with our national mission. While that support was not entirely without some sensible “strings,” the goal was to let disinterested experts in the civil service exercise oversight with a light touch and let success emerge organically.
To make a long and well-known story short, our system worked better, and it spread throughout most of the world through the alliance system we painstakingly built. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact happened bloodlessly in no small part because of the “soft power” America projected that the Marxist model utterly failed to match, and that soft power came not from government, but from what the first President Bush termed “a thousand points of light” that our limited government wisely let shine in their full brilliance.
STIC, if we may be so bold, is one of those points of light. Our broad mission is to change the world in ways great and small to make it easier for people with disabilities to reach their full potential in the pursuit of happiness. But all these institutions share this general mission, to advance the knowledge and well-being of humanity in the interest of human flourishing. We rely on government funding to do this, indeed most organizations like ours are designed such that we must be reliant on state and federal funding to function as currently constructed, but we do so confident that the government is generally happy to help us pursue these goals, not only because they are humanitarian, but because humanitarianism is a national interest, because America is great because America is good.
This proposed rule, if implemented, will shatter this system. Funding will no longer be granted solely on merit but will be evaluated as to whether the means and ends of the fundee’s mission is in concert with the political goals of the executive branch. Not the nation, the executive branch, which subscribes to the unitary executive branch theory which says that the executive branch is embodied in the president, and only the president. The executive branch will fund those programs and institutions that the president likes, and it will defund those he does not. That is not a republic of limited government powers; it is royalism, or authoritarianism, or totalitarianism; whatever one chooses to call it, it is un-American. This proposal must be defeated and cast onto the ash heap of history along with other thoroughly discredited ideas of the past.
Many others have composed more thorough and detailed delineations of the specifics of this proposal; here are links to a few which, while we may not endorse 100% of the comments, we are in broad alignment:
https://ncil.org/news/announcements/proposed-federal-grant-rule-changes/
https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/the-trump-administrations-existential
https://l4gg.docsend.com/view/y9itn49h2682jjuk#