The US president’s spending cut reportedly leaves the organization unable to pay staff and grantees
US President Donald Trump’s administration has frozen all funding to the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), several media outlets reported on Wednesday. The move is said to have caused a “bloodbath” within the organization, leaving it unable to pay staff or fulfill financial commitments.
The NED, established in 1983, is officially a nonprofit organization that provides grants to support democratic initiatives worldwide. However, over the years, it has faced allegations of covertly influencing political outcomes, with critics arguing that it has taken over covert functions previously handled by the CIA, particularly those aimed at overthrowing foreign governments.
Earlier this month, Elon Musk, who heads Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and has been in charge of finding ways to cut federal spending, singled out NED, calling it a ”scam” and an “evil organization” that needs to be dissolved. Since then, the organization has reportedly been “under siege” from Musk’s DOGE, according to Free Press.
“It’s been a bloodbath,” one NED worker told the outlet, explaining that the organization has been unable to meet payroll and pay basic overhead expenses.
The NED has faced longstanding criticism over its role in supporting political movements to undermine sovereign governments. 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, accusing the NED of acting as the “tip of the proverbial spear for heightened CIA and State Department efforts to foster political revolution in Ukraine.”
The report claimed that the NED had funneled tens of millions of dollars to a myriad of Ukrainian political entities and anti-Russian interests and “advanced both the ‘Orange Revolution’ and ‘Maidan Revolution’ that paved the way for the current Ukraine-Russia war.”
The NED has also faced accusations of sponsoring “color revolutions” in Georgia and Kyrgyzstan and of funding opposition groups in Belarus, Serbia, and Egypt.
“The reasons for defunding NED are as numerous as they are imperative,” Vought’s think tank wrote, listing things like “Ukraine warmongering” and “Middle East meddling” as the most clear and pressing rationales for dismantling the agency.
The NED funding freeze comes as part of broader measures by the Trump administration to cut foreign spending. This has already included a crackdown on the US Agency for International Development (USAID), Washington’s primary vehicle for funding political projects abroad. Trump earlier called for the agency to be shut down, claiming it is run by “radical lunatics.”
