Perryman in Post Next 50: “People are going to win this fight for our country”
Washington, D.C. – Democracy Forward’s work to push back against authoritarian threats during the first year of the Trump-Vance administration is highlighted in a profile of President & CEO Skye Perryman in the“Post Next 50,” a collection that provides an annual look at the people who are shaping America in 2026.
The story highlights Perryman’s vision and work to expand the size and scope of Democracy Forward to meet the existential challenges facing American democracy with values-based, decisive, and bold leadership and the innovative strategies Democracy Forward employs to not just win in court, but to also win in the court of public opinion. Democracy Forward has emerged as a critical bulwark against the harmful and unlawful actions of the Trump-Vance administration, using a range of legal, education, and advocacy tools to defend people’s rights and build public support for a vibrant, inclusive vision of American democracy for all. The organization is also active in protecting people and communities from abuses of power at the state and local level through its state-based portfolio, which Perryman launched when she joined Democracy Forward as CEO in 2021.
In the Post Next piece, Perryman disputes the talking points touted by the MAGA movement that people in the nation are hopelessly divided. Her work and the work of Democracy Forward has united seemingly unexpected allies to build a stronger pro-democracy coalition. She also encourages powerful institutions who are still sitting on the sidelines to join in the fight against the rising threats of authoritarianism.
“History’s eyes are on all of us,” Perryman says. Throughout the article, she offers a vision to shape and reimagine society in 2026 by continuing to act boldly in the face of a growing autocratic threat, leveraging the power of people, and encouraging those on the sidelines to join the generational work to stop the nation’s democratic backslide and build a reimagined democracy that works for all people.
Read the full article below:
The cost of inaction is perilous to Skye Perryman
The lawyer who is taking on President Donald Trump’s myriad executive orders, every day.
By Marc Fisher
Skye Perryman spent this past year in a whirlwind of courthouse action designed to slow President Donald Trump’s reshaping of American society.
One block from the White House, in offices that look more like a well-funded tech startup than a scrappy activist’s headquarters, Perryman, 43, runs Democracy Forward, a nonprofit that’s part advocacy group, part public interest law firm and part coalition builder. She and her army of lawyers — 84 lawyers and counting after a doubling, a redoubling and then a re-redoubling of her organization— sue and sue and sue.
They are pushing back against Trump’s torrent of shuttered programs, decimated agencies and defunded laboratories. Money has poured in from unions and advocacy groups focused on immigration, abortion rights, consumer protection, health care and civil rights to help finance Perryman’s efforts.
As Trump dramatically expanded his exercise of executive power during the first year of his second presidency, Perryman doubled down on her commitment to the idea that the law can and will protect the nation from presidential abuses. She believes that most Americans remain devoted to the law as the nation’s bedrock. She remains convinced that many Americans are hungry to yell out: “My government did this to me and I’m here to publicly ask that it stop.”
In periods of liberal ascendancy over the past century, legal activism was mainly about expanding rights, going on the offensive for once-excluded people, whether they were poor, disabled, Black, gay or otherwise left outside. Perryman’s mission since the return of Trump has been to switch over to defense, using the federal and state courts – and the court of public opinion – to throw up obstacles to the administration’s efforts to extend the military’s role to domestic expeditions, defy Congress’s spending plans and bring universities and law firms to heel.
“We’re certainly in a moment where the question is not ‘How do we tread new ground?’” Perryman says. “It’s more ‘How do we preserve the hard-won fights of the past?’”
She is under no illusion that lawsuits alone can slam the brakes on Trump. She believes other institutions — big business, the news media, colleges — need to stand up against extremism. “Powerful institutions seem confused about this moment,” she says, wondering, for example, why more universities haven’t sued the government to retain control of their own admissions policies.
“Many institutions continue to underappreciate the cost of inaction,” says Perryman. The American people, in contrast, harbor no such confusion, she adds.
During the early days of the first Trump administration in 2017 — amid his “Muslim ban,” his blizzard of executive orders dubbed shock-and-awe and his pledge to end an era of “American carnage” — Perryman thought about her baby son and the country he would inherit. She left the velvet sanctum of Big Law – she’d launched her legal career at two blue-chip D.C. firms, Covington & Burling and WilmerHale – to join the fledgling Democracy Forward as a litigator. A couple of years later, she moved to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists to advocate for reproductive rights. But then came the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol. When Congress failed to respond effectively to the attack (despite a detailed investigation by the Jan. 6 committee), Perryman says, she saw that the threats to the rule of law were not going away. When Democracy Forward asked her to return as its chief executive, she jumped in.
Raised in Waco, Texas, Perryman was brought up in an academic household (her father was an economist and her mother was his research assistant). Her name is a twist on the Dutch word for “scholar.” But academia was not for her; she had grown up around people who had benefited from the achievements of the two decades before she was born – the integration of public schools, the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act.
“The world was made better because of court decisions and law,” she says.
Although she was raised in a place that was trending well to the right, Perryman resists the notion that the country is hopelessly divided. Throughout the past year, she has seen purportedly opposing forces come together to protect basic rights: For example, she’s welcomed evangelical Christians into an alliance challenging the administration’s contention that law enforcement officers can reach into houses of worship to grab and deport immigrants who arrived in this country illegally.
“The vast majority of people in this country … don’t like people being disappeared in the middle of the night without any process,” she says.
She’s a realist; she knows that wins in the lower courts — such as securing a preliminary injunction to block the Department of Health and Human Services from withholding $12 million in federal public health funding from the American Academy of Pediatrics or blocking DOGE from sharing IRS data with immigration enforcement efforts — face a rough reception on appeal, especially in this Supreme Court, with its three Trump-appointed members in a supermajority sympathetic to the president’s concept of executive authority. So she’s used publicity, civic education and alliances with other interest groups to push the administration to back off some of its more extreme initiatives, such as the “Promoting Patriotic Education” proposal to revise educational curriculums, even without a court ruling.
Perryman acknowledges that Trump and his followers often speak a different language from liberals’ often-legalistic rhetoric. But she’s confident that “over time, people are going to win this fight for our country. It may not be on the time horizon many of us want to see. But eventually …” she says. “History’s eyes are on all of us.”
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