The Legal Services Corp., created in 1974 under the signature of President Richard Nixon, is once again on the chopping block as another Republican president—Donald Trump— proposes to zero out its funding in his first budget. The group’s 2017 budget request was $502 million.
The largest single funder of civil legal aid for low-income Americans, the LSC has been a budget-cutting target of Republican administrations and members of Congress almost since its inception. The organization faced perhaps its greatest crisis in the 1980s, when President Ronald Reagan and his supporters attempted to disband the agency. The Reagan administration viewed LSC lawyers as misusing government funds to advance a liberal agenda through test cases filed as class actions in welfare, immigration, abortion and other areas.
