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.