DOGE has frozen funds to the organization that was instrumental in helping win the Cold War. ‘It’s been a bloodbath.’
It’s hard to keep track of the upheaval in Washington since President Trump’s inauguration, and even harder, amid the media freakout, to distinguish important changes from trivial ones.
But what’s happening at the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is a very big deal, and has not been previously reported.
NED, a key U.S. instrument for supporting grassroots freedom movements around the world, is under siege from Elon Musk’s DOGE. An order from DOGE to the U.S. Treasury that blocked disbursement of NED funds has crippled the organization—which received $315 million for fiscal year 2025—and its affiliates, The Free Press has learned.
“It’s been a bloodbath,” one NED staffer said. “We have not been able to meet payroll and pay basic overhead expenses.”
NED’s dismantling would be far more than a cost-cutting measure. It would symbolize a major change in U.S. foreign policy, undercutting the notion that democratic ideals foster U.S. global strength and influence. Instead, the Trump administration would be signaling that it no longer believes that promoting democracy around the globe is in the national interest.
Created in 1983 with bipartisan support and the backing of President Ronald Reagan, NED was intended to attack the Soviet “empire of evil” at its weakest point: its lack of democratic legitimacy.
It made bespoke grants to activists and labor unions behind the Iron Curtain. “We provided radios and copy machines for Solidarity,” former NED president Carl Gershman told The Free Press, referring to Lech Wałęsa’s independent worker movement in Communist Poland.
After the Cold War, NED expanded its mission beyond the disbanded Soviet bloc, making grants to pro-democracy NGOs in Iran, China, Venezuela, and Cuba—again using a strategy of supporting local citizens opposed to the authoritarian systems that ruled them. NED and its sister organizations, the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute—one for each party—enjoyed bipartisan support.
“Thanks to NED grantees, the world learned about the horrible death of Masih Amini at the hands of the brutal Iranian regime,” the endowment’s current president, Damon Wilson, told The Free Press, referring to a young Iranian woman who died in custody after being arrested for failing to wear a head covering.
Other grantees “documented how the Cuban regime has become a kleptocratic mafia state. NED partners exposed the Uyghur genocide as well as the Chinese Communist Party’s network of overseas police stations bringing their tools and techniques of coercion and repression into free societies, including here in the United States,” Wilson said.
The first Trump administration carried on NED’s work. Several key Trump allies were on its board, such as Elise Stefanik, Trump’s nominee to serve as ambassador to the United Nations. Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas sits on the International Republican Institute’s board.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio served on IRI’s board when he was still a senator from Florida. In fact, he was the keynote speaker at its annual dinner last May.
“Nations around the world and peoples need to see that freedom and democracy are not just something to aspire to as an ideal, but as a practical matter, it works and it works better than totalitarianism,” Rubio said in his speech. “It takes longer, it’s harder, it requires you to listen to people you don’t agree with. It requires you to work with people you think are half-crazy. But the alternative is a small group of people who get to decide what happens and we have no voice or role in it.”
Many Republican NED stalwarts—including Trump’s former national security adviser, Robert O’Brien—have fought behind the scenes to protect NED from the DOGE knife.
But theirs is no longer the consensus view within the GOP coalition. On February 2, Musk posted on X: “NED is a SCAM.” The Center for Renewing America, a think tank founded by Russell Vought, Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, released a policy paper on February 7 that blamed NED for supposedly helping incite Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“A steady stream of NED grants to myriad Ukrainian political entities and movements advanced both the ‘Orange Revolution’ and ‘Maidan Revolution’ that paved the way for the current Ukraine-Russia war,” the paper said.
For the right to turn against civil society groups that stand up to pro-Moscow authoritarians, formerly a proud conservative cause, is stunning. The implication that NED was a puppet master of the Orange and Maidan revolutions is wrong, and it ignores that Ukrainians were responding to threats to their own elections and sovereignty in both those events.
NED does not direct recipients of its grants to organize demonstrations; it trains citizens in such democratic basics as how to prepare for elections.
“We had nothing to do with organizing those protests,” said Gershman, who led NED at the time of the Ukrainian protests. “We supported groups that wanted freedom and democracy. But we didn’t tell them to do this.”
NED has occasionally strayed from its core mission. Case in point: its 2020 grant to a British NGO, the Global Disinformation Index. Two years later, GDI listed ten conservative-leaning American publications, including Reason, the New York Post, and The American Conservative as vectors of disinformation in the U.S. news media. This was an indirect effort to get advertisers to shun them, a form of censorship and an inappropriate, even dangerous, use of U.S. funds.
Wilson said that, as soon as he learned about GDI’s alleged study of the U.S. news media—which was funded by another private donor—NED “severed the relationship.” Management promptly briefed the NED board and Congress, audited its grant portfolio, and tightened procedures to prevent a recurrence.
Tighter controls and audits of NED, to assure it remains strictly dedicated to supporting democracy activists, would be welcome, Wilson said: “We know there are opportunities to make American support more efficient and focused.”
The chaos DOGE caused by the order at the Treasury Department is no way to accomplish this reasonable goal, which suggests that what DOGE really wants is to end NED, not mend it.
This would be shortsighted, as “We support the foreign aid review,” Daniel Twining, the president of IRI, told The Free Press. “Foreign assistance absolutely should support U.S. national interests,” he added. “What we don’t want is for America’s ground game around the world to be taken off the field for long, because America’s adversaries are not pausing. They will fill any vacuums we leave behind, to the detriment of what makes our country strong, prosperous, and secure.”
By Eli Lake
The Free Press
