Conservative push to defund US democracy org falls flat — for now

When U.S. lawmakers agreed to a $50 billion foreign affairs spending bill last month, they also agreed not to endorse a campaign to defund one of the core pillars of the U.S. government’s international democracy assistance efforts. In both the House of Representatives and the Senate, the National Endowment for Democracy faced back-to-back attempts by conservative lawmakers to pass amendments that would strip away its funding — both of which were defeated. NED is a nongovernmental NGO created under former President Ronald Reagan more than forty years ago, which receives most of its funding from the U.S. government and doles out hundreds of millions of dollars in grants each year to civil society groups in an effort to advance democracy worldwide. But in the last few years, a vocal contingent of the Republican Party has latched onto allegations that NED is actually a central node of a political influence network working outside of public scrutiny to suppress and censor populist and conservative voices around the world. This “censorship industrial complex” — in their telling — has taken aim at prominent figures, including Elon Musk and President Donald Trump, and has sought to undermine right-leaning media. “Although its name suggests a force for good, its mission has drifted far from its Cold War origins,” Eli Crane, an Arizona Republican in the House of Representatives, said on Jan. 14 while introducing his spending-bill amendment to prohibit funding for NED. “This is a classic tactic of the swamp, where bad policy and corruption hide behind a noble title,” he said, using a favorite pejorative among anti-establishment Republicans to describe Washington D.C.’s political class. Crane’s amendment lost by a vote of 291-127. A companion amendment introduced in the Senate by Missouri Republican Eric Schmitt lost in a voice vote without requiring a recorded vote. (The bill itself passed on Tuesday, and Trump has said he will sign it.) “None of these lines of attack against NED are new. What’s new is it’s being repeated on the House floor,” said Elizabeth Hoffman, executive director for North America at ONE, and a former NED staff member. The organization has recently made a series of internal moves that appear aimed at burnishing its bipartisan credentials at a moment when the Republican Party’s position on international democracy assistance has splintered into competing factions. In early January — in the midst of the amendment battle — NED hired Eddy Acevedo, a well-connected Republican foreign aid veteran who served in Trump’s first administration, as its new vice president for policy and government relations. Two weeks later, the organization announced the appointment of two Republican board members, Sam Brownback and Carrie Filipetti, both of whom held high-level diplomatic positions under Trump. Asked how he plans to help NED respond to viral claims that it has been captured by the Democratic Party, supports censorship, and lacks transparency, Acevedo sent a statement on the organization’s behalf. “NED was founded under President Ronald Reagan’s vision to support freedom and democracy efforts where it’s under threat around the world. NED’s Board is chaired by Rep. Peter Roskam, a former six-term fiscal conservative Republican Congressman and the Board is balanced politically between Democrats and Republicans, three of which served previously in President Trump’s administration,” he wrote to Devex. Acevedo also addressed a specific former grantee — the Global Disinformation Index, a U.K.-based nonprofit — which NED’s critics accuse of trying to suppress conservative media outlets inside the United States. NED cut off its funding to the organization in 2023 after its U.S.-related media activities came to light — while clarifying that NED’s funds were never used for these purposes. “No NED funds have been used to target U.S. media outlets, U.S. public discourse, or Americans’ constitutional rights, including freedom of speech,” he wrote, adding that NED claims “over a decade’s worth of clean audits” and provided “over 22,000 pages of documents related to its programming” in response to a State Department request last year. All of that appears to have done little to assuage the organization’s most vehement critics — who, according to Hoffman, may not be interested in hearing NED’s side of the story. “A lot of these members that are offering amendments like this — they’re doing it to send a political message. I doubt they’re asking serious questions,” Hoffman added, describing the attacks as “political theater.”