Press Releases

Statement By NCRP Executive Director Rick Cohen on

Nonprofits' Victory over OPM's Misguided CFC Terrorist Watch List

Earlier this week, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) posted their final regulation in the Federal Register, stating that it will no longer require list-checking among Combined Federal Campaign (CFC) participants. The regulation states: "Under the final rule, effective for 2006 and subsequent campaigns, OPM does not mandate that applicants check the Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) List or the Terrorist Exclusion List (TEL)."

We applaud both the OPM staff and the hundreds of nonprofits that rose up to challenge the list-checking requirement for their success in making an important regulatory change in favor of core nonprofit free speech and free association rights In this case, a broad array of nonprofits came together in recognition of how much there was to lose by acquiescing to the CFC requirement of nonprofits' assuming the burden of checking multiple, highly inaccurate, often contradictory lists of thousands of unverified and unverifiable names, most of them inaccurate transliterations from Arabic and Asian languages.

The victory achieved in the revised regulations of the Combined Federal Campaign is extremely important and all too infrequent. Although the CFC regulatory modification is laudatory, the fight isn't over. Nonprofit free speech and free association rights are broadly under attack due to a number of legislative and regulatory impingements, some under the guise of the nation's war on terrorism, some more explicit offensives against the particular messages or affiliations of specific nonprofits. There are private corporate workplace fundraising campaigns and others that, without the compulsion of the CFC regulation, have devised list-checking and other requirements for nonprofits that are equally if not more onerous than the CFC requirement that the coalition of nonprofits fought so successfully. Nonprofits must continue to be vigilant of the frequent attempts to constrain or limit nonprofit advocacy rights elsewhere in federal legislation or in the private sector.