President Trump paused federal grants and froze funding for many nonprofit organizations on Jan. 28. The next day, the decision was reversed, reinstating federal funding while conducting reviews of grantees.

OPB “Weekend Edition” host Lillian Karabaic spoke with one of the community organizations affected by the executive order.

The following transcript has been edited for clarity and length.

Lillian Karabaic: The order sparked widespread confusion and left many Oregon organizations and the people who run them concerned about funding. One of those people is Melissa Erlbaum, the director of Clackamas Women’s Services, which gets about 73% of their funding from government sources. Thanks for joining me.

Melissa Erlbaum: Happy to be here.

Karabaic: Okay. First of all, can you tell us what Clackamas Women’s Services does?

Erlbaum: Clackamas Women’s Services, our mission is to break the isolation of domestic and sexual violence, and we offer a broad range of services. We provide support for survivors of domestic and sexual violence, human trafficking, elder abuse, stalking. And that comes in the form of emergency shelter. We have a housing program. We provide counseling services and legal advocacy. We’re also out in the community providing support groups and art-based therapy and camp for kids. And we do a wide range of work in the schools to provide prevention services and advocacy for youth as well.

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Karabaic: It sounds like you do a lot of things. How does this federal funding pause affect Clackamas Women’s Services and the survivors that you serve?

Erlbaum: Yeah, so let’s start with the survivors that we serve. It was really stunning to us yesterday how many folks reached out to us and asked if we would still be available for their counseling appointment. Will we still be available to assist with the rent that is due on the first of the month and another couple of days here? And just a lot of fear around whether or not we would be available when they needed us. And that to me was heartbreaking.

And in addition to that, we also know that whenever things like this come up, it can become a tactic for abusers to keep people in an abusive relationship. So that fear of “nobody’s going to be available when you call or if you leave, they might help you with housing, but look at the funding will be gone tomorrow.” So those type of things occur, which can be very concerning.

Karabaic: If survivors are worried about continuity of care, what plans do you have to sustain operations if federal funding is frozen again?

Erlbaum: We do have a small rainy day fund. We are very committed to staying open and staying available for survivors and ensuring that we have the assistance that they need. But I will share with folks: nonprofits, we don’t sit on a lot of money. We turn that money around immediately into services and assistance in the community. So we don’t sit on a stockpile of resources to deploy any moment. We would access our small rainy day fund and then continue to work on acquiring other resources to mitigate any gaps.

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Karabaic: What services are at highest risk of being reduced or cut?

Erlbaum: Funding from the government, and particularly the federal government, can touch multiple areas. So for us, it touches a part of our work in the Camp Hope program and providing art-based therapy for children. It also touches our support groups, our emergency shelter services that we provide. We have over 400 households that we serve — families that we serve in our housing program — a year. And these are just a few examples. I hope that illustrates how there is just tentacles that reach throughout the organization and throughout the work that we do. Reduction in funding will have an impact in destabilizing any one of those services, depending on what it is. But I think all of the services that we offer at risk with a federal funding cut or freeze.

Karabaic: The way that it works typically is that you provide services and then later you get reimbursed by the federal government through these grants. Are you concerned about this back-and-forth without clear guidance is going to hurt your organization’s finances in the long-term with this uncertainty?

Erlbaum: Yes. I think that’s probably one of the biggest concerns and what was most stunning and quite disheartening yesterday was to find out that with the immediate action that occurred yesterday, we were in the process of submitting for our reimbursements for October through December expenses. So you mentioned the reimbursement piece. All of our federal grant contracts work this way. We provide the service and then we bill for it to do that. So usually that’s quarterly. So this is the time of year that we’re putting in all of those reimbursements and we’re not able to access those yesterday and not knowing when and if we would be able to access them. And so to have this yanked away without warning or cause or guidance was incredibly damaging to our ability to manage cashflow and to manage what was happening next. When we apply for federal grants, it’s a very rigorous process.

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It’s a competitive process and monitoring and audits and all kinds of compliance and requirements. And I share all that to say that it’s a very vetted process. And so it tends to be funding that is somewhat reliable, because that work that’s done on the front-end.

And to then sort of dismantle programs and services with just overnight is not only incredibly damaging and hard for the folks that we serve, but also it’s impossible to just rebuild them overnight. They’ve taken days, months, weeks, years in many cases to put into place, but asking us to stop and start really core services is untenable. And we are really kind of at the mercy of being able to rely on the commitments that our government partners have made to provide care to our community.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2025/01/29/clackamas-womens-services-federal-grant-freeze/