There’s budgeting in a downturn—and then there’s budgeting in a political maelstrom.

Since January, the Trump administration and its allies in Congress have moved quickly and deliberately to implement a flurry of executive orders, new regulations, and laws that target nonprofit organizations whose missions or values aren’t in line with those of the White House.

As 2025 unfolds, nonprofit leaders are not simply planning around inflation, donor fatigue, or rising program costs. They’re operating in a landscape where federal support is unstable by design: funding cuts, shutdowns, targeted investigations, threats to strip nonaligned nonprofits of their status—all are being used by ideological operatives in the halls of power to attempt to cripple our sector.

Yet nonprofit leaders must do what they must always do: Attempt to create and implement strategic budgets that will allow their organizations to survive and carry out their missions.

How to do so—what to know about the current environment, how to assess new risks, and what new tools may need to be put to use to make it through—involves profound questions to which we at NPQ aim to provide some insight.

Assessing the Challenging Nonprofit Budgeting Landscape

The waves of funding cuts already implemented since January 2025 have left the nonprofit sector reeling.

United Way Worldwide described the moment as “a difficult funding environment” that has now become “even more perilous,” as shutdown delays compound the earlier rescission of roughly $425 billion in federal funds across multiple sectors.

The Urban Institute surveyed nearly 3,000 nonprofit leaders about their top concerns for 2025. Their findings are stark:

  • 55 percent of leaders said their organization’s financial health was their biggest concern.
  • Of those, 92 percent cited financial uncertainty to be the cause of worry, not a specific funding stream.
  • 65 percent specifically named general revenue as their primary anxiety.

In short: The issue is not only that funding is shrinking—it’s that leaders can’t predict anything.

Read the full article about nonprofit budgeting by Isaiah Thompson at Nonprofit Quarterly.