A recent opinion piece in The American Conservative calls for the defunding of the Legal Services Corporation (LSC), relying on mischaracterizations and misinformation to attack an institution that plays a crucial role in our justice system. The article not only misrepresents LSC’s mission, impact and scope, but also disregards the real-world consequences of stripping legal aid from those who need it most.
As the country’s largest funder of civil legal aid, LSC provides critical legal representation to low-income Americans—including veterans, families with children and seniors—who are facing life-altering civil legal challenges such as wrongful evictions, domestic violence and consumer fraud. Defunding LSC would not only deny vulnerable individuals access to justice, but would ultimately increase costs for taxpayers.
When someone is accused of a crime and does not have the resources to hire an attorney, state and federal governments provide legal representation. This is not the case when people face civil actions such as custody battles, foreclosure or denial of veterans and social security benefits. To qualify for legal aid, people must meet strict income guidelines: a family of four must earn less than $32,150 a year and an individual must earn less than $15,650.
A well-functioning legal system is fundamental to maintaining order and ensuring justice. LSC provides essential funding for legal aid organizations that assist low-income American workers and families in navigating civil legal disputes. Without this assistance, many would be left without legal recourse, exacerbating instability in communities and overburdening the courts with self-represented litigants.
Conservative lawmakers and policy experts have long championed the idea that people should be able to resolve disputes efficiently and lawfully. LSC helps ensure that contract disputes, landlord-tenant disagreements, family matters and consumer fraud cases do not spiral into crises that erode trust in the legal system. Without legal aid, small business owners could struggle to navigate complex legal proceedings, survivors of natural disasters wouldn’t be able to file the correct paperwork to rebuild their homes leveled by flooding or tornadoes, and many low-income rural Americans, who often lack private legal representation, would be left without any legal assistance at all.
Rather than promoting progressive legal activism, as the misguided article states, LSC and its grantees are bound by strict statutory limitations (imposed by Congress) on the types of cases it can support. LSC grantees cannot engage in class-action lawsuits, lobbying, or political advocacy, and those restrictions apply to funding from any source. In other words, if a grantee accepts so much as $1 from LSC, it must abide by the same conditions that Congress imposed; it cannot raise money from other sources and engage in any prohibited activities. Moreover, extensive, multi-layered oversight mechanisms, including an independent Office of the Inspector General, review and ensure that both LSC and its grantees operate within the scope of these limitations. The idea that civil legal aid is a vehicle for partisan activism is a mischaracterization that ignores the broad restrictions set by Congress.
LSC’s primary function is ensuring that individuals have basic legal representation in civil matters. It is this mission that has forged significant bipartisan support for LSC from Congress, from state supreme court justices, from state attorneys general, from corporate general counsels and from law firms in every state. In fact, many Republican leaders have supported LSC precisely because they recognize its importance in upholding the principles of limited government and self-reliance, not to mention the valuable, sometimes life-saving services that LSC grantees provide to constituents in their districts. When people have access to legal aid, they are better able to resolve disputes efficiently, without requiring costly interventions from the state.
Defunding LSC would have far-reaching consequences, not just for low-income individuals but for the broader community. Studies consistently have shown that every dollar invested in legal aid generates economic benefits by reducing reliance on social safety nets, ensuring people have stable employment and wages, and preventing costly litigation. When individuals cannot access justice, they often turn to emergency government services, increasing public spending in other areas like shelters, crisis centers and emergency rooms.
Additionally, eliminating LSC would create a surge of unrepresented litigants in courts nationwide, slowing down judicial proceedings and increasing costs for all parties involved. Judges across the country, including conservative jurists, have repeatedly emphasized the importance of legal aid in ensuring court efficiency and fair outcomes.
Finally, eliminating funding for civil legal aid removes a critical support function for pro bono services provided by lawyers and law firms. LSC grantees promote and support these services by training private attorneys in areas of the law they otherwise are not used to practicing, by offering co-counseling support and by providing critical administrative and case support. Encouraging and supporting volunteer lawyer programs is an essential function of legal aid programs.
Rather than eliminating LSC, a more constructive approach would be to ensure its funding is used effectively and transparently. Lawmakers should focus, as they have in the past, on strengthening accountability measures while maintaining this critical safety net that aligns with the principles of fairness, efficiency and limited government intervention.
When lawmakers and policymakers look beyond ideological divides, they recognize the practical benefits of maintaining LSC: the senior widow in Florida who needed help after a contractor scammed her out of her life’s savings; the mother who needed protection for herself and her young child when her husband tried to strangle her; the veteran who was wrongfully denied assistance and almost lost his home.
Civil legal aid is not, or at least should not be, a partisan issue but a safeguard of justice for all Americans. And the work of LSC and its grantees to uphold the integrity of our legal system depends on ensuring that all citizens, regardless of income, have access to basic legal representation.
Nathan Hecht & John Malcolm
Former Chief Justice, Texas Supreme Court LSC Board Member
The author replies:
Not surprisingly, many lawyers, judges, and state bar associations are thrilled to have hundreds of millions of LSC federal dollars flowing into their profession, just as so many journalists fight to keep Washington handouts going to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. And as with so many NPR and PBS media people, the values of most legal services lawyers are not in the American mainstream, but are skewed to the “social justice” far left.
In their piece, Chief Justice Hecht and Mr. Malcolm stress LSC’s support for better individual justice: they point to work in actual legal cases (e.g., landlord-tenant lawsuits) and training for private attorneys. Hecht and Malcolm’s policy position is actually the same as Hillary Clinton’s when she was defending LSC in the 1980s against President Ronald Reagan’s effort to abolish it. Clinton always hid the radical agenda, publicly maintaining that LSC’s work was about promoting justice for individual indigents and for ensuring a more efficient legal system.
Hecht and Malcolm assert that, today, Congress has finally succeeded in restricting LSC’s radical mission. Let us for a moment grant that they are correct (which they are not); is it not strange that they see no irony in urging conservatives to accept and embrace Lyndon Johnson’s original Great Society vision of federal funding for private lawsuits? As constitutionalists, conservatives flatly reject the notion that Congress, under any circumstances, should be injecting each year hundreds of millions of dollars into the private practice of law.
Moreover, Hecht and Malcom are whistling by the graveyard if they sincerely believe that Congress has succeeded in stopping LSC from indirectly subsidizing an ecosystem of far-left legal activism. The situation may not be so bad as it was under Clinton, but LSC grantees are still ideologically engaged on a range of partisan issues such as systemic racism, DEI, LGBT, homelessness, and immigration. They inevitably support more welfare rights, nanny-state intervention, and government rule by judicial fiat.
The curious observer can find a cornucopia of leftwing priorities by visiting the LSC website of grantees and drilling down on their activities. For example, the grantee Northwest Justice Project (NJB) in Washington state is today still a rallying point for radical “Black Lives Matter” values packaged into the group’s “Race, Justice, and Equity Initiative.” As the NJP board of directors proclaimed in 2020, and continues to endorse:
We must also acknowledge the consequences of racism in dramatically increasing the tragic toll of the pandemic on the Black community. And we condemn the vicious responses we have seen across the country to demands for basic justice. NJP stands with the protesters who have asserted their constitutional right to assemble and express their outrage at systemic racism and demand change to our institutions and society.
This outrage is not an outlier but typical of the legal services community. The same NJP initiative publicly condemns the White House’s attempt to limit birthright citizenship, applauding the state of Washington’s lawsuit to block the president’s executive order. While Hecht and Malcolm will stress that current LSC restrictions prevent NJP from formally joining that legal action, how confident are they that NJP lawyers are not informally consulting with the state attorney general?
LSC grantees are fully in step with the radical DEI mission and are, for example, collecting client data on “unknown” and “another gender” identities. Texas Rio Grande Legal Aid was typical when it posted on Facebook that “the Supreme Court’s ruling on LGBTQ+ rights in the workplace was a breath of fresh air,” calling on its followers to join with it to discuss “what has changed for LGBTQ+ workers and how we can protect ourselves in the workplace.” Activist lawyers undertaking such “educational work” easily drift into de facto advocacy.
Meanwhile, California Rural Legal Assistance continues to sue state entities, such as the Bakersfield City School District, for not spending enough public money on education. A generation ago, Governor Reagan wondered, as should President Trump today, what business the federal government has in financing private lawsuits against state and local entities. If a majority of Californians seek to change public policy on education, let them win at the ballot box, not in the courthouse in league with an activist judge.
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It is the same with America’s out-of-control homelessness policies, which have been pushed to extremes, ruining much of our country’s urban life. Homelessness is another public policy passion in the legal aid world and judicial activism is the approach that most LSC grantees support. One leading LSC attorney explained:
Over time, I really learned the brokenness of the systems that our clients interact with, and so I really evolved to have much more of a social justice lens than a charity lens to this work. I started to understand that homelessness really isn’t just about an individual’s struggles, it’s rooted in systemic issues like inequality, like lack of affordable housing, like inadequate social services. And so now I really see these broader structural problems as essential to create meaningful and lasting change.
Another legal services priority is farmworker rights, by which they mean migrant rights, a backdoor into the policy world of accommodating illegal immigration. Hecht and Malcolm would point out, rightly, that LSC grantees are restricted in providing legal services to illegal immigrants. But there are loopholes and penumbras in the rules. As the LSC-supported Michigan Immigrant Rights Center explains: “We provide full intakes and legal advice to everyone detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Michigan and consider their cases for full representation if they fit into a place-based or case-based priority.” Without DOGE auditing the financial ledgers, it is hard to document old-fashioned waste, fraud, and abuse, but such malfeasance has been found before (in 2010) as millions pass through the LSC network of some 130 grantees and sub-grantees. Yes, self-interested state bar associations and the American Bar Association will lobby that LSC money is needed for lawyer training, courtroom efficiencies, etc.; that is because they are hooked on the taxpayer subsidy. Cut off the federal money and force all these groups to raise funds from private donors. Start by sending a DOGE team into LSC headquarters.
