The House Just Made it Easier to Target Climate Groups

On Thursday, the House passed a bill that could hand the Trump administration near-unilateral power to strip nonprofit status from organizations—including climate and environmental groups, news outlets, and even universities. H.R. 9495, or the Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act, contains the language of a measure that quietly passed through the House last spring as part of a package of bills rushed through with bipartisan support after Iran carried out retaliatory strikes on Israel. Only 11 Democrats voted against that bill, H.R. 6408, in April—although it then stalled in the Senate. This week, however, the vast majority of Democrats voted against H.R. 9495. Just 15 Democrats voted in favor, joining nearly unanimous support from Republicans. The bill, which grants the Treasury Department a new power to designate nonprofits as “terrorist supporting organizations” and revoke their tax-exempt status accordingly, could head to the Senate before the end of the year.

What changed between April and now is that Donald Trump has been elected president. Trump has vowed repeatedly to take revenge on his political enemies. Those include high-profile Democrats who’ve led legal proceedings against him—like Adam Schiff and New York Attorney General Letitia James—as well as a wide spectrum of actors that he and other Republicans refer to as “the left.” At a rally in October, Trump called the “crazy lunatics that we have—the fascists, the Marxists, the Communists” an “enemy from within,” who are “more dangerous … than Russia and China.”

As the more than 300 civil society organizations opposed to the bill’s passage noted in a letter sent to House leaders earlier this week, the executive branch could use the authorities granted by this bill to target their “political opponents and use the fear of crippling legal fees, the stigma of the designation, and donors fleeing controversy to stifle dissent and chill speech and advocacy.” All the Treasury Department would need in order to declare a nonprofit a “terrorist supporting organization” would be evidence—however flimsy—that the organization in question offered “material support” to a designated foreign terrorist organization, a list maintained by the State Department and vulnerable to politicization. 

It is already strictly illegal for organizations and individuals to provide material support to foreign terrorist organizations. The executive branch enjoys broad discretion to determine both which groups are included on that list and what constitutes “material support.” The novelty of H.R. 9495 is that it would give the Treasury the ability to seriously penalize organizations based on those definitions.

Kia Hamadanchy, senior policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, explains that there’s no standard of proof for the Treasury to designate “terrorist supporting organizations.” Targeted groups also have very little recourse to challenge that determination, which carries potentially devastating consequences. “If you’ve been publicly labeled a supporter of terrorism, your donors aren’t going to want anything to do with you. Banks aren’t going to want to transact with you. Then there’s all the legal fees involved,” he says. “A lot of organizations wouldn’t be able to get to their day in court.” Stripped of their nonprofit status, targeted groups would need to start paying corporate income taxes too.

It’s easy to imagine that the definition of who is a terrorist and what it means to materially support them could become far broader in a Trump administration, particularly given how eager the right has long been to apply that definition to environmentalists. Nineteen states have significantly enhanced penalties for protesters challenging pipelines and other “critical infrastructure.” Dozens of people opposing a law enforcement training facility known as Cop City—construction of which would raze part of Atlanta’s Weelaunee Forest—have been charged under Georgia’s domestic terrorism law.

Trump’s pick to become secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has warned in recent years that members of Extinction Rebellion—the climate group started in the U.K.—would enter the country in order to commit “violence and terrorist acts.” In a June 2023 letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Rubio urged them to prevent Extinction Rebellion members from entering the country. “It should be obvious,” he wrote, “that foreign nationals who are members of violent extremist organizations should not be allowed into the country.”

Civil liberties organizations and pro-Palestine groups—those most explicitly targeted by H.R. 6408—were among a relatively small number of groups to raise alarm bells when it first came up for a vote and courted broad bipartisan support; following a rapid-fire push by those groups to stop it from coming up for a vote in the Senate, the bill lost steam. More than 100 organizations joined onto a letter from the ACLU to Congress in September, opposing H.R. 6408’s revival. The signatories included many climate and environmental groups, like the Sierra Club, Earthjustice Action, and the Natural Resources Defense Council. Republicans once again revived the push for this bill after Trump’s election, when a broader swath of resistance groups that had mobilized against Trump in 2016 urged their members to call their members of Congress to oppose it. Over the last week, groups opposed to the bill focused their efforts on the 52 Democrats who voted for H.R. 9495 in a failed attempt to pass the bill last week. (The bill was put to a House vote initially under a suspension of procedural rules, a relatively common practice which means that Republicans would’ve needed a two-thirds majority to pass it and it couldn’t be amended; they fell just short.)

That so many Democrats voted for that bill can be explained partially by the speed with which it was introduced; the package it was a part of was introduced and then put to a vote practically overnight using a fast-track process. But its passage also relied on more widespread support within the Democratic caucus for more hawkish foreign policy measures, as well as strong support from American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, and the Anti-Defamation League, ADL. 

Congressional Progressive Caucus leaders Pramila Jayapal, Mark Pocan, and Greg Casar—who’ve been outspoken on climate and environmental matters—all voted for H.R. 6408 in April. None responded to my requests for comment for a story on that at the time. CPC deputy whip Ro Khanna, who also initially voted for H.R. 6408, said at the time that he did so to “ensure we curtail foreign terrorist organizations that, if unchecked, jeopardize our national security and could entangle us in another endless war. I wish that protections for climate, peace, and other nonprofits had been included to protect their work and will push for that.” Jaypal, Pocan, Casar, and Khanna all voted against H.R. 9495 this week and last week, with Jayapal speaking out against it on the floor Thursday.

This isn’t the first time that environmental groups have been caught in the crosshairs of bipartisan support for Israel’s war on Palestine and efforts to criminalize those who oppose it. Backlash to the the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions campaign launched in 2005 in solidarity with Palestinian civil society groups, for example, has led in some odd directions in recent years. Specifically, bills passed in Texas to punish companies the state believes to be participating in the BDS campaign now serve as models for conservative efforts to blacklist financial institutions “discriminating” against oil and gas producers by using environmental, social, and governance-based, or ESG, investment criteria. Like anti-BDS measures, Texas’s “Energy Discrimination Elimination Act” bars the state from entering into contracts with companies that are deemed to be “boycotting” fossil fuel firms. 

While anti-ESG efforts are plainly partisan, Politico reported this week that the Environmental Protection Agency—still controlled by Democrats—may be withholding a $50 million grant to the Climate Justice Alliance over that coalition’s outspoken position on Gaza. That Democrats would join in on civil liberties crackdowns in order to back Israel isn’t all that surprising; HuffPost revealed this week that the White House accused senators voting to block additional arms transfers to Israel of supporting Hamas. 

The House vote this week—and, specifically, the drop in support for the “nonprofit killer” bill since April—shows that Democrats are starting to understand some of the consequences of  this kind of unreflective hawkery. But it shouldn’t have taken this long. Those who claim to support climate and environmental causes ought to pay close attention to measures designed to punish Palestinians and those who support them, regardless of who’s in the White House. These kinds of illiberal policies can be expected to punish others too.