How the US government let support for democracy unravel

When the U.S. Agency for International Development began to crumble, democracy promotion was the first thing to fall apart. Almost immediately, every program within the country’s global election monitoring system was canceled. The National Endowment for Democracy, which supports the core of U.S. democracy efforts, was blocked from all its funding. The U.S. Agency for Global Media, which promotes independent journalism across the world, was deemed “unnecessary.” And the country’s most impactful pro-democracy organizations — including the International Republican Institute, a GOP-backed group once championed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio — have been left hanging by a thread. “The Nicaraguan dictatorship is happy about everything that is happening,” said Juan Lorenzo Holmann, the general manager of the Nicaraguan newspaper La Prensa, which received support from the International Republican Institute, or IRI, until earlier this year. “Why? Because something they were not able to do is being done by somebody else.” Across the world, journalists, activists, and civil society groups are feeling the same. In Venezuela, a newspaper was forced to freeze its investigative activities, while in Côte d’Ivoire, a program working to defuse tensions around the nation’s upcoming elections was canceled. The terminations have come amid years of democratic backsliding across the world. Violence, conflict, and the spread of authoritarianism contributed to the 19th consecutive year of declining freedom, according to the latest report from Freedom House, a nonprofit that tracks democracy, political freedom, and human rights across the world. Autocrats, on the other hand, were thrilled. “Cutting this so-called aid isn’t just beneficial for the United States; it’s also a big win for the rest of the world,” tweeted Nayib Bukele, El Salvador’s strongman president, in the early days of USAID’s dismantling. As the weeks went by, the cancellations of some programs — including those focused on lifesaving humanitarian assistance — were reversed. But for the most part, the U.S. government’s democracy programs have remained shuttered. It’s a sharp break for a sector that, for decades, has been buoyed by bipartisan support, leading to the unraveling of a government-wide apparatus that has long underpinned the country’s democracy efforts. “We’re accomplishing what 40 years of efforts by dictators could not accomplish, which is to take [the United States] off the field,” Dan Twining, IRI’s president, told Devex. The rise of America’s global democracy work In 1982, then-U.S. President Ronald Reagan stood before the British Parliament with a proposal. He wanted to create a new initiative, he told lawmakers — one that would “foster the infrastructure of democracy” and boost “free press, unions, political parties, [and] universities” across the world. “Let us ask ourselves: What kind of people do we think we are?” said Reagan. “And let us answer: free people, worthy of freedom, and determined not only to remain so but to help others gain their freedom as well.” At the time, the Berlin Wall still stood firmly in place, and it would be another nine years until the Cold War came to an end. Increasingly, Washington had begun to view democracy promotion as a tool to counter the Soviet Union, and as a way to stabilize nations that mattered to the U.S. “I believe the renewed strength of the democratic movement, complemented by a global campaign for freedom, will strengthen the prospects for arms control and a world at peace,” Reagan said. The president’s words sped up a global democracy effort already in motion — and by the following year, the National Endowment for Democracy, or the NED, was born. Congress created the grantmaking institution to advance democratic values across the world, funneling support into four core institutions: the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute, or NDI, the Center for International Private Enterprise, or CIPE, and the Solidarity Center. “We have cleared the field for America’s authoritarian adversaries in key countries and regions. Respectfully, what is the plan?” --— Dan Twining, president, International Republican Institute Around the same time, the State Department, USAID, and the entire U.S. government began to expand their democracy efforts globally. After the Soviet Union fell, Congress passed the Freedom Support Act to support the 12 newly independent states in the region; in 1995, the government created the Consortium for Elections and Political Process Strengthening, or CEPPS, which worked with USAID and others to support democratic election processes. Democracy promotion seeped into more traditional diplomatic efforts, too. The Democratic Clinton administration made “democratic enlargement” one of its central foreign policy concepts, while the Republican Bush administration pushed forward a “freedom agenda” in the wake of 9/11. By that time, democracy efforts had spread far beyond USAID and the State Department. The Millennium Challenge Corporation, for example, began offering aid to countries with both good economic policies and human rights records; the Department of Labor, for another, funded workers’ rights activities across the world. "It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world,” said President George W. Bush, speaking at his inaugural address in 2005. Over the past several years, Congress has appropriated some $3 billion toward democracy programs through the State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs appropriations bills, a recent report from the Congressional Research Service found, with the vast majority of those funds coordinated through the USAID and the Department of State. NED funds multiplied, too: in 2014, Congress allocated just over $117 million to the endowment; ten years later, that figure had jumped to $315 million. “U.S. law declares the promotion and protection of democracy, human rights, and fundamental freedoms to be ‘principal’ and ‘fundamental’ goals of U.S. foreign policy,” reads the report, which was published in January 2025. Despite that, not everyone was on board with the trajectory. Cracks in the foundation Some criticisms of U.S. democracy work were expected: China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, for example, has said NED acts as the U.S. government’s “‘white gloves’ in carrying out subversion, infiltration and sabotage across the world.” The Hungarian Conservative magazine has described NED as “a political weapon” of the “ruling elite.” Other criticism came from closer to home. As early as 1993, NED was accused of being a “foreign policy loose cannon” by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank based in Washington, D.C. “[NED’s] ‘democracy promoting’ activities, which have ranged from extraneous to perplexing to counterproductive,” were “unimpressive,” wrote Cato’s Barbara Conry, adding that the NED was a “slush fund for politicians.” But after President Donald Trump came to power the first time, those reproaches took on a different tone. Some pro-democracy experts spoke of Trump as an accelerant to the U.S.’s “democratic decline;” others said the United States should “focus its efforts and resources on the health of its own democracy” before promoting that work abroad. On Jan. 6, 2021, thousands of Trump supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol — invading a congressional meeting meant to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election. Trump had spent weeks falsely claiming the election was stolen, and urged his supporters to “fight like hell” going forward. One day later, an opinion piece appeared on Foreign Policy’s website with a weary title: “America Can’t Promote Democracy Abroad. It Can’t Even Protect It at Home.” Criticism from pro-democracy voices may have sharpened frustrations among Trump's allies. In a report published last summer, the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation — which published Project 2025, a blueprint largely seen as the leading force behind Trump 2.0 — argued that despite NED’s bipartisan board, the organization was “led and staffed almost entirely by Democrats.” Tim Meisburger, USAID’s former director of democracy and governance under Trump’s first term, noted that only one of the NED’s Republican board members donated to Trump’s reelection campaign in 2020. “The National Endowment for Democracy is required by law to be bipartisan, but it discriminates against Republicans and conservatives in its hiring practices,” wrote Meisburger, who is now the assistant to the administrator at USAID’s Bureau for Humanitarian Affairs. “The NED duplicates functions and capacities already present in government agencies and departments and should be defunded.” By February, Elon Musk — the billionaire Trump ally and then-head of the Department of Government Efficiency — began echoing the same. In early February, Musk tweeted out that NED was both a “scam” and “RIFE with CORRUPTION!!” and asked his followers to reply to a post “listing all the evil things that NED has done.” By then, the Trump administration had already halted U.S. foreign aid. Days later, the program terminations began — and the government singled out democracy promotion as one of seven categories deemed not to be in the “national interest of the United States,” along with climate change, diversity, and “operational expenses and/or general waste.” Soon after, NED was blocked from accessing its own pot of cash, which sits in a separate bucket from U.S. foreign assistance. That held up $239 million, the majority of which was already obligated by Congress. “NED is facing an unprecedented cash flow crisis,” the organization wrote in a legal document, which was filed after NED sued the Trump administration in early March. “NED partners are hemorrhaging resources and employees and consultants.” The fallout Before Trump’s return to office, IRI, NDI, CIPE, and the Solidarity Center received between 30%-60% of their support from NED. Most of the remainder came from the State Department, USAID, and in the case of the Solidarity Center, the Department of Labor. That meant by February, the cash flow at all four institutions was nearly entirely frozen. NED was blocked from accessing its funds, while the State Department and USAID were subject to Trump’s foreign aid freeze and terminations. By March, DOGE had also slashed all of the Department of Labor’s programs through the Bureau of International Labor Affairs, hollowing out the largest funder of workers’ rights work globally. “@USDOL just saved taxpayers $30M by eliminating ‘America Last’ programs in foreign countries like Indonesia, Colombia, Guatemala, Chile and Brazil,” tweeted Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, referring to several Solidarity Center programs. “Under @POTUS, the American Worker ALWAYS comes First.” The cancellations kept coming. In North Korea, that meant the suspension of support for democracy activists; in Moldova, it meant the loss of programs focused on independent media. Virtually every CEPPS program was shuttered, with election monitoring initiatives in Ethiopia, Haiti, Sudan, and beyond canceled days into USAID’s overhaul. <blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-dnt="true" align="center"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">.<a href="https://twitter.com/USDOL?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@USDOL</a> was funding over $38 MILLION in America Last programs, including millions for “enhancing transparency” in Uzbekistan’s cotton industry. <br><br>But not anymore. We will reinvest your tax dollars back in the American workforce! 🇺🇸<a href="https://twitter.com/DOGE?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@DOGE</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/DOGE_DOL?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@DOGE_DOL</a> <a href="https://t.co/4o2v3Q79pn">pic.twitter.com/4o2v3Q79pn</a></p>&mdash; Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer (@SecretaryLCD) <a href="https://twitter.com/SecretaryLCD/status/1903136157493244078?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 21, 2025</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script> By mid-March, NED’s success in court led to some of the organization’s funding being restored. But even so, nearly every one of the core organizations’ State Department, USAID, and Labor Department programs remains canceled. And in Trump’s latest budget proposal, the president recommended zeroing out the NED entirely — all $315 million of it. In the budget document, the White House accused the organization of attacking Vice President J.D. Vance and others as “foreign propagandists of the Russian Federation,” and calling for the “prosecutions of allies of the President,” allegations that have been refuted by NED. “We are navigating an evolving budget environment, and our focus remains on getting support to those on the frontlines of advancing freedom,” Damon Wilson, NED’s president, told Devex. “NED was mandated by Congress, and we are committed to staying true to that bipartisan mission, while being transparent and responsible in how we operate.” Today, the Solidarity Center has lost all of its awards from USAID, the Department of State, and the Department of Labor, leading them to cut half their staff — some 200 people — and close 10 offices. CIPE has also lost all its USAID grants, and while 80% of its previously canceled State Department awards were restored, they are now under review by the White House’s budget office. At the height of the cuts, CIPE laid off or furloughed 83% of its staff. Though the organization is now undergoing a restructuring, CIPE expects to recover only about 40% of its original workforce if NED funds are fully restored, according to someone familiar with the organization’s operations. “If at a future date, the country decides that it wants to restart these types of programs, we will have lost a lot of our experience and capacity on this,” they added. “Should we change direction again, we'll be starting almost from scratch because we will have destroyed the industry so thoroughly.” NDI has lost all but four of its 97 USAID and State Department awards, while IRI has lost all but five of its 95, including those focused on countering Iran, Cuba, and China. That’s resulted in massive layoffs and office closures at both institutions, with NDI cutting three-quarters of their field offices and staff — 44 and 900, respectively. “There was no award-by-award review,” said Tamara Cofman Wittes, the head of NDI. “We were not asked for any information.” At IRI, it’s been much the same. The organization cut 80% of its workforce, counting more than 700 people, and has gone from a presence in 64 countries to approximately 10. And even for the programs that have survived the Trump administration’s foreign aid cull, IRI — like so many others across the sector — is still owed money from work completed in January and February of this year. That means those programs cannot go forward, even with approval from the government. And that’s despite the fact that Marco Rubio — the former Republican senator who for years, served on IRI’s board — has overseen every one of those cuts as secretary of state. “I think we would all be supportive of democracy promotion. But at some point, these programs have to prove that they are actually promoting democracy,” Rubio told Republican Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart, who asked about the future of democracy programming in a hearing earlier this week. “When you’ve been promoting democracy in some society for 20 years and have made no advances, you have to ask yourself, at least at a minimum, are we spending money on the right thing, with the right people, and in the right way?” But for democracy advocates, the clock is ticking — and as the days go by, the stakes are only getting higher. “If there was a better way to support democracy overseas, we've always been supportive of the Secretary to articulate that," Twining told Devex, in comments made before Rubio addressed Congress. “But we're almost to June and there are no alternative programs to replace the ones cut. We have cleared the field for America’s authoritarian adversaries in key countries and regions. Respectfully, what is the plan?”