Opinion: The dire threat to nonprofits that serve the people some want to forget

By Frank Schneiger, Neighborhood News Service

As the Trump administration’s demolition of our civic institutions proceeds, there is little attention paid to the human impact these cuts will have on the government workers who are being summarily dismissed.

Having been conditioned for decades to believe that these workers are “faceless bureaucrats” and leeches living off our hard-earned tax dollars, it comes as a bit of surprise to those paying attention that many of them actually do have faces. As well as families. 

And another surprise. A dim, but growing awareness, that these workers possess real skills, ones that we need to keep the country functioning. They include things like enforcing federal environmental regulations, delivering health care to veterans, fostering economic development and providing disaster relief. Maybe not as valuable as running a hedge fund or private equity firm, or having a talk show on right-wing television, but still pretty important.

And still another big surprise: a lot of them work in Milwaukee and Wisconsin, not in Washington, D.C. Who knew? Maybe they are not all leeches.

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Finally, there is the third sector, the least visible one, the nonprofit sector. In many ways, it – and those it serves – are the most vulnerable to the current gutting of the federal government and the assault on the nation’s social programs.

The nonprofit service sector is a sprawling world, one that includes large, established, national organizations and a vast universe of small, often fragile, but invaluable community-based groups. Readers of NNS are familiar with many of them.

The original article explains what is happening in the federal government and how it impacts us locally.

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