The National Endowment for Democracy was created in 1983. The purpose was to promote democracy around the world. The money allocated to NED was divided three ways—to the Republican Party, the Democrat Party and the AFL-CIO. It was to be spent overseas, helping elect advocates of democracy, manipulate the press and run the global union movement. Instead it became an enemy of Democracy—used to promote hate, violence and totalitarian nations. It is time to defund NED.
“The NED, as I wrote for The New Criterion on December 3, was established in 1983 as a Cold War operation in order, in President Reagan’s words, “to foster the infrastructure of democracy—the system of free press, unions, political parties, universities.” Most of the NED’s funds in that era flowed to dissident groups in Soviet-controlled countries in Eastern Europe, or to anti-communist organizations operating elsewhere. Allen Weinstein, a noted historian and one of the founders of the NED, said in 1991, “A lot of what we do today was done covertly twenty-five years ago by the CIA.”
With the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the NED adjusted its mission to support democratic reforms in countries in non-communist countries with authoritarian governments, many of which were never adversaries of the United States in the first place. Over the years, the NED adopted a view of democracy that held that nationalist and populist leaders campaigning for office around the world were in fact authoritarians, and a threat to democracy. Many foreign leaders were tossed into that bucket—not only Russia’s Vladimir Putin, but also Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, Poland’s Mateusz Morawiecki, and others. Many of these leaders were popularly elected but were nevertheless branded by the NED as authoritarians. It surprised no one when NED officials deemed Donald Trump, too, an authoritarian, lumping him together with these leaders.”
Yup, this Federally funded agency came after President Trump—with your tax dollars. No need to give it another dime.
The DOGE team zeroes out the National Endowment for Democracy
By James Piereson, New Criterion, 2/14/25 https://newcriterion.com/dispatch/the-doge-team-zeroes-out-the-national-endowment-for-democracy/?fbclid=IwY2xjawIfX9hleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHRMPV6IRCdPSbQTggN1qioe7a3PGGUq9M-4ht2Mb9B1jv46BBoj7UbfuQQ_aem_g8zjZyk77r5QgXcDiopSKQ
Elon Musk and his DOGE team are busy shuttering departments and exposing waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal budget. They have (mostly) shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development, exposing wasteful spending and its underlying political agenda, and are now targeting the Department of Education. An attack on the federal establishment has never been attempted before on this scale or with this level of forensic sophistication. It required a genius like Musk, backed by the president, to bring it off.
The DOGE team has now taken the step, reported earlier this week, of freezing government payments to the National Endowment for Democracy, a private organization that in 2023 received a $315 million appropriation from Congress, paid via the State Department. That is big news in Washington because the NED, a nongovernmental organization that depends on federal funds, has survived numerous attempts over the years to close it down and up to now has maintained a bipartisan consensus to keep it in business. The move to cut off the organization’s funding suggests that its bipartisan support has at last broken down.
The order from DOGE to freeze further disbursements to the NED has paralyzed the organization, according to news reports. “It’s been a bloodbath,” one NED staffer said. “We have not been able to meet payroll and pay basic overhead expenses.” It sounds as if what happened to USAID last week has now happened to the NED.
Some are already lamenting the demise of the NED, perhaps in the hope that Congress will step in to restore the appropriation. As one foreign-policy expert put it, the “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.” That is a highly debatable statement, both with regard to the substance of the NED’s programs and the foreign-policy goals of the Trump administration.
The NED, as I wrote for The New Criterion on December 3, was established in 1983 as a Cold War operation in order, in President Reagan’s words, “to foster the infrastructure of democracy—the system of free press, unions, political parties, universities.” Most of the NED’s funds in that era flowed to dissident groups in Soviet-controlled countries in Eastern Europe, or to anti-communist organizations operating elsewhere. Allen Weinstein, a noted historian and one of the founders of the NED, said in 1991, “A lot of what we do today was done covertly twenty-five years ago by the CIA.”
With the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the NED adjusted its mission to support democratic reforms in countries in non-communist countries with authoritarian governments, many of which were never adversaries of the United States in the first place. Over the years, the NED adopted a view of democracy that held that nationalist and populist leaders campaigning for office around the world were in fact authoritarians, and a threat to democracy. Many foreign leaders were tossed into that bucket—not only Russia’s Vladimir Putin, but also Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, Poland’s Mateusz Morawiecki, and others. Many of these leaders were popularly elected but were nevertheless branded by the NED as authoritarians. It surprised no one when NED officials deemed Donald Trump, too, an authoritarian, lumping him together with these leaders.
The NED was originally set up as a bipartisan operation, but in recent years moved in a highly partisan direction, no doubt related to Trump’s election to the presidency in 2016. At that moment, according to a former director, the NED launched a relentless attack on Donald Trump and the Republican party. During the 2016 campaign, Carl Gershman, the NED’s former president, published an article in The Washington Post endorsing the claim that Trump worked with Putin to win the election. Afterwards, he contributed to a symposium in that paper on the theme that, following Trump’s victory, American democracy was somehow “broken.” Others at the NED have followed along that partisan path.
Anne Applebaum, a member of the NED’s board of directors, recently published a book presenting Donald Trump as a shady, near-authoritarian figure who is not unlike Putin, Orbán, Aleksandr Lukashenko of Belarus, and so on. She repeated these claims several times in the course of the 2024 election campaign and published an article three weeks before the election titled, “Trump Is Speaking Like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini.” Robert Kagan, an advisor to the NED and a member of the editorial board of Journal of Democracy (an NED publication, not to be confused with Democracy journal), in 2023 published an article in The Washington Post under the title “A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable.” He published his own book last year claiming that Donald Trump, along with his voters, is out to destroy American democracy and the nation’s constitutional order. He resigned from his role as an editor at the Post when its publisher refused to endorse Kamala Harris in the presidential election.
Larry Diamond, listed as an advisor to the NED and one of the editors of Journal of Democracy, wrote a post-election column claiming that Trump’s victory represented a setback for democracy here and around the globe. Earlier, in 2019, he published a book titled Ill Winds arguing that Trump had steered the United States in the direction of authoritarianism. Rachel Kleinfeld, another member of the NED’s board of directors, has said that the Republican party, under Trump’s leadership, is an antidemocratic operation. Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way, two of NED’s designated experts, wrote in 2022 that the Republican Party “has radicalized into an extremist, antidemocratic force that imperils the U.S. constitutional order.” The NED’s trustees and experts have made it clear that they opposed Donald Trump’s campaign for president. One cannot possibly expect the organization to work with a Trump administration. Is it any surprise that the DOGE team has moved to close it down?
In truth, the NED has been running its own renegade foreign policy under the guise of promoting democracy. That policy is often at odds with President Trump’s approach. Regarding the Russia–Ukraine war, President Trump has said that he wants to see a negotiated settlement that would end the fighting and stop the drain on America’s resources. The NED has taken a different view, in line with the Biden approach, that the war should continue until Putin withdraws his forces.
Victoria Nuland, who is Kagan’s wife, recently left a governmental post as undersecretary of state for political affairs during President Biden’s tenure, to join the NED’s board of directors. While in the State Department, Nuland helped to coordinate some of the NED’s operations abroad, and was involved in the 2014 campaign to bring regime change to Ukraine that led to the ouster of the country’s pro-Russian president and to the eventual installation of Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s current pro-Western president. Nuland, by some accounts, tried to scuttle the Minsk accords that sought to bring about a negotiated settlement between Ukraine and Russia over the contested Donbas region in Ukraine.
There are some who suggest that these events led directly to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Elon Musk, for example, has written, “Nobody is pushing this war more than Nuland.” Perhaps in response to this comment, one of the NED’s experts claimed that Elon Musk is a greater threat to America’s national security than Putin and Russia. There is no doubt that the NED and the new president are on different wavelengths when it comes to the conflict in Ukraine.
Worse still, the NED has evolved into a facet of the so-called censorship-information complex through its leadership and some of the grants it has made. In this sense, it operates very much in tandem with USAID. Gabe Kaminsky of the Washington Examiner reported last year that the NED awarded $230,000 to support the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), a British-based outfit that compiles lists of media outlets that it claims circulate misinformation. The list was peddled in turn to corporations that were urged to withdraw advertising and other forms of support for these platforms. GDI’s chief executive, according to the story, has boasted that the blacklist has had significant effects on advertising revenue raised by these platforms. It turns out that the Washington Examiner itself landed on GDI’s list, along with several other conservative-leaning and pro-Trump sites, including RealClearPolitics, Reason, the New York Post, Blaze Media, The Daily Wire, The Federalist, The American Conservative, The American Spectator, Newsmax, and others. Editors at these publications have confirmed that advertising revenue has taken a hit after being placed on GDI’s blacklist. Editors at The Federalist have filed a lawsuit against the State Department seeking compensation for the financial damage the publication has incurred.
These censorship initiatives flow directly from the attachments of some of the NED’s leaders. Applebaum, for example, has served on GDI’s advisory board. Scott Carpenter, another NED board member, is the managing director of “Jigsaw,” an internet tool created by Google to target online hate speech and disinformation. Damon Wilson, currently the NED’s president, was previously the vice president of The Atlantic Council, where he developed the Digital Forensic Research Laboratory. The DFRL, according to its website, “is dedicated to identifying foreign malign influence and information manipulation targeting the 2024 U.S. election.” It is part of the Election Integrity Partnership, a consortium of organizations targeting misinformation, which, per a congressional report, was set up to “monitor and censor Americans’ online speech in advance of the 2020 election.” The report goes on to say that the “Election Integrity Network provided a way for the federal government to launder its censorship activities in hopes of bypassing both the First Amendment and public scrutiny.” Continuing along the same lines, the NED recently issued a report titled “Digital Trust Initiatives: Seeking to Reward Journalistic Ethics Online,” which called for the creation of online tools to help consumers distinguish between trusted sources of news and those that peddle rumors, falsehoods, and misinformation.
It was once believed by those at the NED that the free flow of speech and information tended to support democratic institutions. That is no longer the case. Leaders at the NED, like those at USAID, now believe that free speech and open debate may have undesirable consequences. They may lead to the election of someone like Donald Trump.
The NED’s supporters claim that it has been successful in promoting democracy abroad, though it would be difficult for anyone to prove that, because it conceals its operations in opaque reports that are impossible to interpret. The NED claims that it
operates with a high degree of transparency and accountability reflecting our founders’ belief that democracy promotion overseas should be conducted openly. We post information about our grants and are subject to multiple layers of oversight by the U.S. Congress, the Department of State, and independent financial audit.
That is not quite true. As a tax-exempt organization, the NED is required to submit tax returns to the IRS, which contain useful information about the recipients of grants—for example, the name of the organization, its location, and the amount of the grant. NED’s 2023 tax return lists 2,329 grants awarded in that year, but it is impossible to determine from the return who received those funds, because the recipients are never named. Instead, we get a long list of disbursements identified only by their general region and purpose, never giving a specific recipient.
It would require Musk’s forensic team to go into the NED’s computers to figure out where those funds actually went. But it may not be necessary to go through that exercise, since the NED is a private operation. All that is required is for the president to cut out the appropriation in his budget.
It is thus highly questionable that, in recent years, the NED actually has promoted democracy around the world or is an asset for U.S. foreign policy. The NED’s attacks on populists and nationalists abroad undermine that claim, as do its attacks on Donald Trump and the Republican Party, and its partnership with other groups in the global censorship network. NED officials bet on a victory last year for Kamala Harris and the Democrats, and a defeat for Donald Trump—a bet that they lost. They must have known on election day that the NED’s days were numbered.
Now, DOGE has gotten around to the NED and is bringing to an end a four-decade-long experiment in promoting democracy abroad, which, like other operations in Washington, eventually went off the rails by embracing a partisan interpretation of its mission.
