Risk Management

Political scientists who study what’s often called “closing civic space” have documented a remarkably consistent set of tools used across very different regimes. Russia’s 2012 “foreign agents” law required NGOs receiving foreign funding and engaging in loosely defined “political activity” to register under that label, submit to intensive audits, and carry the designation on all public materials; Human Rights Watch has tracked similar foreign agent laws spreading to dozens of other countries since, describing them as a standard item in the authoritarian playbook. Hungary’s 2017 “Lex NGO” imposed similar transparency and registration burdens targeted at organizations critical of the government, while allowing ideologically aligned groups to operate without the same scrutiny. Egypt’s 2017 NGO law restricted foreign funding and political advocacy outright, backed by criminal penalties. Between 2014 and 2016 alone, researchers tracked more than sixty countries imposing new restrictions on civil society funding and assembly.

For many years, nonprofit leaders have thought about the IRS as a civil regulator. The worst-case scenario was an audit, penalties, or in extreme cases,