Updated February 18, 2025 at 01:35 AM ET
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Trump administration has stopped funding practically all U.S. government work supporting democracy, human rights and press freedom around the globe.
President Trump issued an executive order last month halting congressionally appropriated foreign assistance, pending a review of the programs funded. That effectively shut down the work of the U.S. Agency for International Development.
In addition, the National Endowment for Democracy — which says the vast majority of its funding is not categorized as foreign assistance — says it can't access its accounts at the Treasury Department, where Elon Musk has deployed staff from his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) entity. NPR reached out to the Treasury for comment but didn't receive a response.
The endowment, which was created by Congress and is known as the NED, has had to furlough staff and suspend grants to about 1,800 partners in more than 100 countries.
Its sister organizations, the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute, have furloughed two-thirds of their Washington-based work forces and are closing down offices overseas, according to officials with the organizations.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said he wants to make sure U.S. assistance is aligned with the president's "America First" agenda.
"We owe the American people the assurances that every dollar we are spending abroad is being spent on something that furthers our national interest," Rubio said.
"This is having a devastating impact"
No other country invests as much in democracy and human rights work around the world as the United States. Scott Busby, who served as a high-ranking human rights official in the State Department in both Republican and Democratic administrations, says the across-the-board funding freeze is unprecedented.
"This is having a devastating impact on the many organizations fighting for human rights, advocating for democracy, working on independent journalism, and promoting rule of law overseas," said Busby, who is also a senior adviser to Human Rights First, a nonprofit group. "Many of these organizations live on a shoestring."
One of those organizations is Manushya, a human rights foundation in Thailand. Manushya has used USAID funding to support nine safe houses that protect environmental activists and opposition politicians from neighboring authoritarian states such as Laos and Cambodia.
After Trump's executive order cut off funding, Manushya began closing its safe houses, which were home to 35 activists and their family members.
Once regarded as a safe haven, Thailand has become increasingly dangerous for those fleeing dictators in the region. Last month, a member of a banned Cambodian political party was shot to death in Bangkok.
Another opposition party member had been living in a Manushya safe house with his wife and their three children. When Manushya recently told him they had to leave, he was stunned.
"I think my heart is broken," the man told NPR from Bangkok, asking that his name not be used because he fears for his and his family's safety. "My soul is out of my body."
The safe house is in a building equipped with surveillance cameras and private security. The man is now hunting for a much cheaper apartment. He worries that without comparable security measures, he could be arrested by Thai police as a colleague was recently.
Members of the Trump administration have attacked USAID. Musk has – without evidence – called the agency "a viper's nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America," "evil" and "a criminal organization."
Manushya says those claims are absurd.
"We are well aware that Trump and Musk are trying to destroy USAID," says Emilie Palamy Pradichit, Manushya's founder and executive director. "We are not corrupt, we are actually working to save lives."
Musk also criticized the National Endowment for Democracy, which he has called — again, without evidence — "a scam" and an "evil organization."The Center for Renewing America, a conservative think tank, says the NED is a "partisan political weapon" that meddles in the internal affairs of other countries and creates turmoil. The Chinese government has accused the NED of trying to destabilize the country by supporting Tibetan, Uyghur and Hong Kong human rights activists.
Dismantling the "infrastructure of democracy"
Congress created the NED and its sister organizations in the early 1980s to strengthen democratic institutions around the world, extend American soft power and counter Soviet influence. Support was bipartisan. President Ronald Reagan laid the rhetorical foundations for the initiative in a 1982 speech to the British Parliament.
"If the rest of this century is to witness the gradual growth of freedom and democratic ideals, we must take actions to assist the campaign for democracy," Reagan said. "The objective I propose is quite simple to state: to foster the infrastructure of democracy."
The Trump administration is now making moves that would dismantle that infrastructure.
In contrast to its critics, the NED says it fights for democracy, the rule of law and press freedom in the world's most authoritarian countries, including Russia, Iran and Venezuela. Among the programs the NED supports is the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, a global investigative journalism organization.
Dozens of the project's reporters helped with the investigation known as the Panama Papers, which showed how the wealthy and powerful hide assets overseas. The organization's website features several thousand stories from more than 100 countries. Among its featured work is a Russian asset tracker, an investigation into a crackdown on independent journalists in Kyrgyzstan and coverage of Chinese influence efforts in the Western Pacific.
Drew Sullivan, the co-founder and publisher, says the U.S. government has accounted for nearly 40% of the project's budget, including money from the NED. Since the funding freeze, the organization has had to lay off about a quarter of its nearly 200 journalists and support staff.
Sullivan says the reporting project will survive, but he thinks the biggest beneficiaries of those layoffs are bad actors of all stripes.
"If you don't have organizations like ours, fewer people will be looking at dark-money flows that go around the world," Sullivan told NPR. "There aren't people looking at which politician is bribing whom or which country is funding an extremist group in another country."
The investigative project has been the target of conspiracy theories. Mike Benz, who was briefly a State Department official during the first Trump administration, has claimed on X that USAID paid the project $20 million to "dig up dirt on Rudy Giuliani" as a basis to impeach Trump in 2019.
The project denies it and says Benz is the "#1 purveyor of 'deep state' conspiracy theories used to justify the closure of USAID." Musk has reposted and commented on Benz's claims about USAID on numerous occasions, according to a Washington Post analysis.
The reporting project is among a number of USAID recipients that have sued the government over Trump's order halting foreign aid. Last week, a federal judge ordered the administration to lift the funding freeze temporarily. The judge told the government to report by Tuesday how it has complied with that order.
Democrats and Republicans have supported America's overseas democracy work for decades. Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., has served on the board of the NED, and Rubio sat on the board of the International Republican Institute (IRI). Last year, Rubio handed out the IRI's Freedom Award on behalf of a Catholic bishop who has been an outspoken critic of the authoritarian regime in Nicaragua.
But since Trump's funding freeze, neither Rubio nor Stefanik have spoken publicly to defend the institutions they once helped oversee. Stefanik is Trump's choice to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
Busby, the former State Department human rights official, says he thinks Trump and Musk have cowed some Republicans into silence while handing a victory to dictators.
"Authoritarian leaders and regimes around the world clearly welcome this development because they view these organizations as a threat to their power," Busby said. "I never imagined seeing this."
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