22-05-2025
- Politics
- San Francisco Chronicle
‘System collapse:' Trump budget cuts threaten AAPI nonprofits in Bay Area
Growing up low-income in the Mission District in the 2000s, Gina Gutierrez never felt going to college was an option.
But in her junior year, Gutierrez met a college adviser from the Japanese Community Youth Council who made her believe she could become the first in her family to attend college. He helped her secure a full ride to San Francisco State, where she graduated in 2011.
'I don't think I would have gone to college if it wasn't for my JCYC adviser intentionally supporting me,' said Gutierrez, now the program director for JCYC's college access programs.
But that program — along with many services run by Asian American organizations in the Bay Area — could be eliminated now that federal funds that pay for it are at risk. The Trump administration has aggressively pursued federal budget downsizing.
Millions of dollars in federal funds awarded in grants and contracts to Asian American nonprofits in the Bay Area have been cut already or are at risk. Money to help older Asian American adults learn to use digital technology, combat anti-Asian hate and advise low-income tenants facing eviction funding are just some of the funds being slashed.
At least five AAPI-serving organizations based in San Francisco have already been notified of at least $5.6 million in federal grant terminations or slated cuts based on Trump's proposed budget.
That includes a $2 million grant that the Department of Justice terminated last month for Stop AAPI Hate, the nonprofit formed in the aftermath of the pandemic, which comprised a third of its 2026-27 budget, said Rose Lee, a spokesperson for the group. Lee called the termination a 'direct attack on our ability to fight anti-AAPI hate and serve our communities.'
Trump boasted in a White House press release that his proposed budget, released May 2, reduced non-defense discretionary spending by 23% from 2025, while increasing the Department of Homeland Security's budget by 65% for 'repelling the invasion of our border.'
Congress decides on discretionary spending each year while mandatory spending is dictated by laws and includes outlays for Social Security and Medicare programs.
Trump administration officials justified the cuts as saving taxpayer money through defunding 'the harmful, woke Marxist agenda.'
'For decades, the biggest complaint about the Federal Budget was wasteful spending and bloated bureaucracy,' said Russ Vought, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget. 'But over the last four years, Government spending aggressively turned against the American people and trillions of our dollars were used to fund cultural Marxism, radical Green New Scams, and even our own invasion.'
But nonprofits that have relied on federal grants and funding to maintain a social safety net said the federal government is cutting essential services.
Cally Wong, executive director of the API Council, a 57-member coalition of nonprofit organizations in San Francisco, said the situation is 'scary,' and she is taking stock of how many members have already experienced cuts or are expecting cuts given the congressional budget proposals.
'I think you're going to see a system that's going to collapse,' she said.
California Senators Adam Schiff and Alex Padilla both said they are 'using every tool' to fight back against the Trump administration's proposed reduction in services.
'Unfortunately, the Trump administration has prioritized funding cuts across federal agencies specifically meant to uplift historically marginalized groups like the AAPI community,' Padilla said. Democrats have argued that Trump's budget cuts are funding tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans while Trump said it would reduce taxes for all Americans.
Malcolm Yeung, executive director of Chinatown Community Development Center, which owns and manages about 3,600 units of affordable housing for 6,000 people across the city, said the federal government has withheld about $85,000 of what's called 'continuum of care' HUD funding to support services for formerly homeless people at one building. To get the funding, San Francisco must agree to federal demands on immigration and diversity, equity and inclusion. City Attorney David Chiu has filed a lawsuit to challenge the move, which he called 'illegal' demands.
Yeung said the nonprofit is drawing from its financial reserves to make up for the cuts but that solution is 'not sustainable if the cuts scale up.'
Under Trump's proposed budget, the nonprofit is also expecting to lose about $530,000 in community development block grants, which paid for youth job readiness training, services for single-room occupancy hotel residents and tenants at Chinatown's Ping Yuen public housing complex as well as housing counselling to help tenants facing eviction or hazardous housing conditions.
Trump officials justified a $3.3 billion reduction in block grant funding by saying it is 'poorly targeted' and 'used for a variety of projects that the Federal Government should not be funding, such as improvement projects at a brewery, a plaza for concerts, and skateboard parks,' according to a budget document.
Yeung is most concerned about potentially losing a significant chunk of the $35 million it receives annually in U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development rental housing operating subsidies.
'I think we're in a bigger moment of change than is being discussed,' Yeung said. 'For real people out there, they built their lives around a form of federal government invested in social safety nets that help people to live.'
Chinese Culture Center, a legacy institution in San Francisco Chinatown, was notified in April that the National Endowment for the Humanities was terminating a $115,000 grant to document Chinatown's cultural heritage, executive director Jenny Leung said. Leung said the project would have recorded Chinatown's intangible cultural assets, such as local Cantonese opera groups, hobby artists, and oral storytelling, that often aren't preserved in formal archives.
The termination letter said that the project 'no longer effectuates the agency's needs and priorities,' Leung said. The nonprofit also was told that an almost $200,000 Institute of Museum and Library Services grant for training workers and a $50,000 grant for an Artists in Residence program were being revoked, the result of a Trump executive order to reduce federal bureaucracy that Trump 'deems unnecessary.' Twenty one states sued over the order. Although the grants were technically reinstated due to a preliminary injunction this week, the Trump administration is appealing and Leung said she isn't counting on the funds being actually disbursed.
Leung said she is adjusting to a new reality where federal grants — which comprised up to 30% of the nonprofit's funding — may be gone.
'I'm anticipating half of the nonprofits in the next three to five years will not be there,' she said. 'I think it'll have a very devastating effect on the API community.'
Winnie Yu, chief programs officer at the nonprofit Self Help for the Elderly, said she thinks the federal government has signaled it does not prioritize funding services for older adults.
'What we fear is that more cuts are coming,' Yu said. Her nonprofit, which is about 22% federally funded, already lost a grant for $200,000 annually for four years to help low-income Asian American older adults learn to use digital technology.
Japanese Community Youth Council will lose $2.6 million in funding from the Department of Education under President Trump's current proposed budget.
That money funds about 30 staff who provide college advising and preparation services for about 3,000 San Francisco public school students annually, a majority of whom are low-income youth who will be the first in their families to graduate from college.
Gutierrez, the program director for JCYC's college access programs, said that the program she now runs made her success possible. Right as she was starting her junior year in high school, her mom died. One of her brothers was in prison and the other was suffering from bipolar disorder. She was taken in by an aunt. She imagined she'd have to start work right out of high school. Instead, she went to college thanks to the help she got in writing her scholarship application essay.
'We really do change students' lives,' Gutierrez said. 'Programs like these are truly valuable. They are a force to be reckoned with and if we lose something like that, it's going to drastically affect the community, students and possibly generations ahead.'
