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Tag Archives: Congress
June 19, 2012, 9:22 am
Washington State National-Service Leader to Head AmeriCorps
William C. Basl, executive director of the Washington Commission for National and Community Service, has been named director of AmeriCorps, the national-service program.
He will succeed John Gomperts, who left to take a job as chief executive of America’s Promise Alliance, a children’s-advocacy network.
Mr. Basl has headed the commission, which manages AmeriCorps programs in the State of Washington, for 18 years. Before that, he founded the Washington Service Corps, a state youth-service program.
Mr. Basl will report to Wendy Spencer, the new head of the Corporation for National and Community Service. He joins AmeriCorps at a time when its future is uncertain because of Congressional budget battles.
See a Chronicle article about those and other challenges facing AmeriCorps.
Send an e-mail to Suzanne Perry.
May 9, 2012, 9:55 pm
Congressional Hearing to Examine Nonprofit Tax Issues
A Congressional hearing has been scheduled next week to examine various tax issues affecting nonprofits, including Internal Revenue Service oversight of universities and nonprofit hospitals.
Rep. Charles Boustany Jr., a Louisiana Republican, called the hearing. He told The Chronicle this winter he was concerned the tax agency had not been aggressive enough in monitoring charity abuses.
The event, which will take place May 16 at 10 a.m., will be the first in a series of hearings on tax-exempt organizations planned by the oversight subcommittee of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee.
Mr. Boustany, the subcommittee chairman, said in a statement that the hearing would allow nonprofits to weigh in on certain questions he had raised in a letter he sent to the IRS last October.
They include IRS audits of universities in areas including excessive compensation and unrelated …
February 9, 2012, 8:48 am
Prominent Democrat No Longer Up for National-Service Board
President Obama has withdrawn the nomination of a high-profile pick for a seat on the Corporation for National and Community Service board—John Podesta, a prominent Democrat who was President Clinton’s chief of staff and co-chair of Mr. Obama’s transition team.
Mr. Podesta, founder of the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank with close ties to the White House, was among seven people that the president nominated in June 2010 to fill vacancies on the national-service board. The nominations were approved by a Senate committee in July but have still not been confirmed by the full Senate.
Andrea Purse, vice president for communications at the Center for American Progress, said in a statement: “Like many of Mr. Obama’s other nominees, Mr. Podesta got tired of waiting for the Senate to act and got busy with other projects and asked for his nomination to be withdrawn. 
February 7, 2012, 5:48 pm
Preserving Charity Tax Breaks Won’t Be Main Goal of Nonprofit Coalition
Independent Sector, a coalition of nonprofits and foundations that has waged a vigorous campaign against proposals to limit the charitable deduction for wealthy people, has now decided to devote more attention to other aspects of budget and tax policy that could harm poor people.
Critics have accused Independent Sector and other nonprofit advocates of spending a disproportionate amount of energy protecting the charitable tax break, given other critical issues facing the nation, especially those affecting vulnerable people.
Diana Aviv, the group’s chief executive, said Independent Sector’s board “sympathized with that point of view.” It adopted a series of “guiding principles” last week, saying it plans to promote policies to cut the nation’s deficit and overhaul the tax code that do not “exacerbate income inequality or increase poverty.”
The principles, which were sent to the or…
February 3, 2012, 10:48 am
‘Buffett Rule’ Tax Bill Would Preserve Charitable Deduction
Senate Democrats have introduced legislation to require the richest Americans to pay a minimum share of their income in taxes, but allow them to continue claiming a deduction for charitable giving.
The bill, introduced by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, aims to put into effect the so-called “Buffett Rule” that was championed by President Obama in his State of the Union address.
It would require taxpayers with adjusted gross incomes of more than $2-million, including capital gains and dividends, to pay at least 30 percent in federal taxes. The minimum tax would be phased in for people earning more than $1-million but less than $2-million under a formula that is spelled out in the legislation.
Donors would be able to deduct their charitable gifts from their adjusted gross incomes to lower their tax bills, thus preserving a giving incentive that has been fiercely defended …
January 18, 2012, 8:57 am
Charities Ask Supreme Court to Uphold Health-Care Law
A raft of health charities and patient-advocacy groups have filed briefs urging the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold the new health-care overhaul law, which has been challenged as unconstitutional for requiring most Americans to buy health insurance or face a penalty.
The groups told the court, which is set to hear oral arguments on the case in March, that the health-insurance provision, known as the “individual mandate,” is critical to making the new law work effectively.
“Without that requirement, healthy people tend to avoid buying insurance until they need it, leaving insurance plans to cover a sicker population and driving up costs for everyone in the health care system,” said the American Cancer Society, the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network, the American Diabetes Association, and American Heart Association, which filed a “friend of the court” brief last week.
They…
January 12, 2012, 8:32 am
Budget Cut Could Curtail Oversight of National-Service Programs
The inspector general’s office at the Corporation for National and Community Service has warned Congress it will have to lay off at least three-fourths of its 33 staff members and sharply curtail its activities because of a “severe and damaging” budget cut.
Congress cut the office’s budget from $7.7-million to $4-million in the 2012 spending bill it approved last month.
“This budget reduction caught me and my executive staff by surprise,” Kenneth C. Bach, the corporation’s deputy inspector general, wrote in a letter this week to more than a dozen House and Senate members.
He said the 48-percent cut was in “stark contrast” to the 3-percent reduction in the corporation’s overall budget—and “will substantially inhibit me from performing my duties.”
The inspector general’s office monitors federal volunteer and national-service programs, including AmeriCorps, Senior Corps, and…
November 18, 2011, 10:40 am
Secretive ‘Super Committee’ Gives Nonprofits a Super Headache
The Congressional “super committee” that is seeking ways to close the federal budget deficit is giving the nonprofit world a super headache.
Nonprofit advocates have waged a fierce lobbying campaign to convince the committee, which is supposed to make its recommendations next week, not to limit the value of the charitable deduction in its quest for more revenue. But despite their entreaties, they have not been able to get the 12 members of the secretive panel to spill the beans about what’s under consideration.
“They’re all saying, ‘We’re not making any comments,’ ” says David L. Thompson, vice president for public policy at the National Council of Nonprofits, which has mobilized an army of nonprofit activists across the country to contact super-committee members and other members of Congress.
Republicans have reportedly floated the idea of limiting charitable deductions an…
September 19, 2011, 9:27 am
Former Key Senate Aide to Help Foundations Navigate Capitol Hill
M. Jeff Hamond was a top aide to Sen. Charles Schumer, Democrat of New York, for more than six years. Not once, he says, did any of New York’s many major foundations drop by to talk to him about their policy work.
Mr. Hamond—who left Mr. Schumer’s office this summer and started a new job as a consultant last week—says that experience taught him that grant makers need to learn more about how Capitol Hill works.
“You have all these very, very large foundations that are making massive, massive investments in whatever their policy area of interest is—whether it’s economic mobility or opportunity, whether it’s climate change or the environment, whether it’s education or whether it’s health care,” he says.
“Part of the mission of these organizations is to inform or affect public policy in some way.” Yet, he says, “They are completely disengaged from the key staffers and the key …
September 2, 2011, 3:09 pm
Campaign Urges Obama to Include Nonprofits in Jobs Plan
Many people will be listening next Thursday when President Obama presents a plan to Congress aimed at creating new jobs. But some will be listening for one word in particular: “nonprofit.”
Independent Sector, a coalition of nonprofits and foundations, has started a petition campaign to persuade the president to include measures that would increase nonprofit employment as part of his proposal to boost the economy.
The campaign encourages supporters to post messages on Twitter using the hashtag “#nonprofits.” The goal is to persuade the White House to make sure that nonprofit groups receive the same federal incentives as businesses for creating new jobs.
“Ask that any provisions that encourage job creation by for-profit companies be made available to nonprofit employers—including new-hire tax credits, tax credits for hiring veterans, government-backed loans, subsidies for…
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