The US Treasury Department, led by Secretary Scott Bessent, is gearing up to strip left-wing NGOs linked to George Soros, such as the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Open Society Foundation, of their 501(c) tax-exempt nonprofit statuses, the New York Post reports based on information from anonymous sources inside the Trump administration.
In the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, President Trump issued a national security memorandum titled Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence in September 2025. In it, he directs the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) commissioner to ‘ensure that no tax-exempt entities are directly or indirectly financing political violence or domestic terrorism.’
According to the Post, the IRS and the Treasury Department are getting ready to act on that directive. However, the Trump administration is already being sued on the issue by the left-wing legal advocacy group Protect Democracy, which alleges that President Trump is illegally using the tax code to come after his political opponents.
One of the Post’s sources shared that Treasury Department officials were ‘like a dog with a bone’ and believed that many of the groups and their donors could be ‘on borrowed time’.
The New York paper also names the Council on American–Islamic Relations, the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, and the left-wing media watchdog group MediaJustice as the non-profits likely to be targeted by the IRS, on top of the aforementioned Southern Poverty Law Center and Open Society Foundations linked to the Hungarian American billionaire progressive activist Soros.
Of these organizations, the SPLC has already received a high level of scrutiny from the Trump administration after a federal grand jury indicted them on 11 counts of wire fraud in April 2026. According to the FBI and the Department of Justice, the leaders of the advocacy group actually funded some extremist groups with millions of dollars in order to solicit support for their causes.
Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida has responded to the Post’s report about the supposedly upcoming crackdown on left-wing nonprofits. He lauded the efforts and added: ‘We’ve designated CAIR, named an unindicted co-conspirator in the largest terror financing trial in history, as a foreign terrorist organization. All states should follow suit. We’ve also removed Soros-backed DAs who refuse to honour their oaths to enforce the law.’
The three sources told the Post that there is strong pressure within the administration to have ‘a good chunk of the crackdown’ completed before the midterm elections this November. However, others have advocated postponing formal enforcement until later in the administration’s term, arguing that doing so could prevent a series of lengthy and potentially disruptive legal battles.
According to the sources, officials are concerned that targeting prominent domestic political organizations such as the SPLC and Soros’s network could unleash a wave of lawsuits. Such litigation could ultimately slow efforts to maintain momentum against foreign terror-linked organizations, including CAIR.
Formally revoking a group’s 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status is a notoriously lengthy process that can take years, involving extensive IRS audits, administrative appeals, and almost inevitable litigation in federal tax court.
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