A week after the Ted Cruz show, Representative Lance Gooden proposed the “Think Tank and Non-Profit Foreign Influence Disclosure Act,” which would force every charity that receives more than $10,000 from a foreign “government or political party” (read, China) to itemize those donations in a public Treasury database.
The measure’s authors say the goal is transparency, but paired with the Senate talk of expanded Foreign Agents Registration Act enforcement, it would give the Trump administration a ready list of groups to investigate, penalize, or simply target with memes.
The MAGA lawmakers have not hidden how they would use these powers if they get their proposals passed. As ever, to see the logical conclusion to the illogical, look to Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Also in June, Greene opened an Oversight Committee probe into Planned Parenthood, accusing the organization of “harvesting organs” and demanding a decade of financial records.
The investigation leans on the same logic Cruz and Gooden want to apply to climate and racial-justice groups: if public money mixes with progressive advocacy, the nonprofit’s exemption is on the chopping block.
A little further back into the timeline, we can see how the blueprint was in place right after the election. In November 2024 House Republicans passed H.R. 9495, the “Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act,” which empowered the Treasury Department to strip the tax-exempt status of any nonprofit it decides is “terrorist-supporting.”
That bill was marketed as a humanitarian gesture, but the fine print turned the Internal Revenue Code into a national-security cudgel.
From here, the fossil-fuels-as-national-security fanfic writes itself.
The Treasury Secretary could label Energy Foundation China (or any U.S. group with non-U.S. staff) a “foreign political proxy,” which would trigger an automatic loss of 501(c)(3) status until the targeted group can prove otherwise; state attorneys general could cite the proxy designation as an excuse to freeze assets; donors, wary of subpoenas, flee; and all of this without any proof that a single dollar came with any actual foreign influence or instructions attached.
Devil’s advocate!
Wouldn’t the evidence suggest that this particular Chinese Plot to End America is one of the least successful Chinese plots ever, since oil and gas production hit record highs last year, imports of Chinese solar panels fell, and the consequences of the climate crisis continue to ravage U.S. communities? Or, perhaps, the plot is, in fact, working exactly as planned because China has achieved energy supremacy by cornering the global market on low-cost renewables while the U.S. is tripling down on catastrophically destructive high cost fossil fuels! IS THE REPUBLICAN PARTY A CHINESE OP?!?!
Anyways, the danger from all this isn’t limited to just tree-huggers and hippies. The legal architecture Republicans are assembling is broad enough to ensnare any group receiving funds from abroad or even just advocating a position someone in Washington deems “aligned” with a hostile power (Israel and Russia excepted).
A relief agency working in Gaza, a democracy-promotion nonprofit supported by European governments, a church with its headquarters outside the U.S., or a farmworkers’ clinic that takes a Canadian grant — they all could find themselves cast as foreign agents and stripped of their exemptions.
