As part of its evisceration of government agencies, the Trump administration imposed a funding freeze for the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a CIA offshoot that meddles in elections and pushes regime change around the world in the name of “promoting democracy.”
On February 12, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) issued an order to the U.S. Treasury blocking disbursements of NED funds—which amounted to $315 million for 2025—along with its affiliates.
The Free Press quoted an NED staffer who said that “it’s been a bloodbath. We have not been able to meet payroll and pay basic overhead expenses.”[1]
Though CovertAction Magazine (CAM) takes strong issue with most of DOGE’s operations and the right-wing agenda underlying it, CAM has long sought to expose the nefarious operations of the NED and supports efforts to disband it.
In March 2022, I published a detailed critical history of the NED and its ties to the CIA, which quoted CovertAction Information Bulletin founder Philip Agee who stated in the 1990s that “nowadays, instead of having the CIA going around behind the scenes and trying to manipulate the process by inserting money here and giving instructions secretly and so forth, they have now a sidekick, which is this National Endowment for Democracy, NED.”[2]
A CIA whistleblower who wrote the 1975 book Inside the Company: A CIA Diary, Agee recognized how NED interference in foreign countries was designed to help advance a neo-liberal capitalist democratic order that provided advantages to U.S.-based multinational corporations and allowed for the exploitation of natural resources.
MAGA and conservative libertarian critics of the NED usually neglect the political-economic dimension since they do not critique capitalism as a system.
Nevertheless, some of the rhetoric is similar to critics of NED on the left.
Before DOGE issued the order, Elon Musk wrote on X (formerly Twitter) that the NED was an “evil organization” and asked people to send him information on all the “evil things that the NED had done over the years.”
Musk continued by stating that there were red flags suggesting “areas where NED’s activities might not align with its mission to promote democracy or could be indicative of broader geopolitical strategies rather than pure democratic support.”
The red flags included: a) carrying out the CIA’s covert activities under a different guise; b) influencing election outcomes in countries like Bolivia by funding media and NGOs to highlight alleged election fraud by incumbent governments; and c) funding opposition movements, which could be seen as interference in the domestic politics of foreign countries.
Additionally, Musk contended that the NED has: a) manipulated public opinion by funding media outlets and NGOs that promote narratives favorable to U.S. interests; b) funded anti-government protests like in Ukraine that destabilized countries; and c) supported “color revolutions” that indicated use of democracy promotion for geopolitical gain.
These are all points detailed in my history of the NED and that have been noted by left-wing critics of the NED like Agee, William Blum and Noam Chomsky.
Fostering Political Revolution in Ukraine—Among Other Destabilizing Acts
In early February, the Center for Renewing America, a think tank founded by Russell Vought[3], Donald Trump’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget, released a policy paper that blamed the NED for helping to incite Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Condemning the NED’s war-mongering in Ukraine, the paper stated that a “steady stream of NED grants to myriad Ukrainian political entities and movements advanced both the ‘Orange Revolution’ and ‘Maidan Revolution’ [right-wing coups] that paved the way for the current Ukraine-Russia war.”
The policy paper began by noting the NED’s origins in the 1980s, stating that it had been conceived by CIA Director William Casey and former CIA operative Walter Raymond, Jr.
The paper then went on to note that some of NED’s early activities in the 1980s included bankrolling dissident groups in the Soviet bloc and funding anti-communist organizations in strategic geopolitical locations throughout Europe, Asia and Africa.
The authors believe that the NED achieved some success in the goal of fighting communism. However, they feel that the NED became corrupted following the end of the Cold War when it evolved into a “leading tool for neoconservative nation building exercises.”
These exercises included “training and financing key political movements in Egypt, Yemen and Libya and other nations that sparked the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ in 2011, directly contributing to the geopolitical turmoil that has engulfed the Middle East over the last 13 years.”
The report goes on to suggest that the NED “served as the proverbial tip of the spear for heightened CIA and State Department efforts to foster a political revolution in Ukraine.”
It notes that “before NED turned off its searchable grants feature in 2022, data showed the organization had funneled tens of millions in U.S. dollars to Ukrainian entities and anti-Russian interests in Ukraine with more than 330 unique grants.”
Recipients of the grants included pro-NATO political entities, judicial organizations and the Media Development Foundation, which trains Ukrainians to develop effective anti-Russian propaganda.
At the end of the report, the authors pointed out that the NED’s political skullduggery extended domestically: One $230,000 NED grant financed the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), a British-based outfit that compiles lists of media outlets that supposedly promote disinformation. This list has been peddled to corporations that are encouraged to withdraw advertising dollars and other forms of support.
Digging Its Own Grave by Attacking Donald Trump
A key reason why the NED may have been put at the top of the Trump administration’s chopping block was its increasing dominance by Democratic Party-intelligence operatives and condemnation of Trump as an authoritarian leader cut in the mold of foreign NED adversaries—Vladimir Putin (Russia), Viktor Orbán (Hungary) and Alexander Lukashenko (Belarus).
Originally, the NED was set up as a bipartisan operation and it has had many Republican Party operatives on its Board. However, after the 2016 election, long-time NED President Carl Gershman (1983-2021) published an article in The Washington Post claiming that Trump had worked with Russian President Vladimir Putin to win the election. Subsequently, Gershman began sounding the alarm that Trump was out to destroy democracy in the U.S., with other members of the NED Board of Directors following suit.
NED Board member Anne Applebaum, for example, published a book, Autocracy Inc., with Trump at its center, and titled an Atlantic article three weeks before the 2024 election “Trump Is Speaking Like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini.”
Applebaum’s assessment was similar to NED adviser Robert Kagan, a member of the editorial board of the NED’s in-house Journal of Democracy and husband of NED Board member Victoria Nuland, who wrote a book (Rebellion: How Antiliberalism is Tearing America Apart) claiming that Trump was out to destroy American democracy and the U.S. constitutional order.
Syria Regime Change
The Center for Renewing America report left out the NED”s pivotal role in advancing a deadly regime change operation in Syria that resulted in years of war and the empowerment of an Al-Qaeda offshoot, which has outlawed opposition parties and engaged in ethnic cleansing operations targeting the country’s Shia Alawite population.[4]
An April 2009 cable leaked by Wikileaks described million dollar grants provided by the NED financed International Republican Institute (IRI) to Syrian opposition groups plotting the downfall of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad (2000-2024). Assad had been targeted for regime change because of his nationalistic economic policies and support for the Palestinian cause.
Some of the NED funds were channeled to the Movement For Justice and Development in Syria (MJD), a London-based Islamist group, which set up a TV station, Barada TV, to disseminate anti-Assad propaganda.[5]
According to publicly available records, between 2016 and 2021, the NED spent $5,155,623 on sixty-seven Syria-focused program grants, which were primarily geared towards bolstering the anti-Assad opposition movement and supporting pro-regime change media and right-wing parties that adopted a neoliberal economic program.[6]
Defense of Beleaguered Agency and New York Times Propaganda
After the announcement of the budgetary freeze, NED board member Joaquin Castro (D-TX) expressed outrage at Republicans who were not pushing back against Trump’s attempt to destroy what he called “one of our most powerful tools for supporting freedom around the world.”
The NED’s beleaguered president and CEO, Damon Wilson, said that he was not sure how much Musk “actually knows about [NED].” The NED does not “impose democracy on people who don’t want it;” but “give[s] a lift to people who are fighting the battle.”
On February 16, The New York Times weighed in with an alarmist critique of DOGE’s freeze, which it framed as a “win for China.”[7]
Noting its origins in the Reagan era, the Times article said that the NED nobly funded Chinese non-profit organizations (NGOs) that tracked the imprisonment of Chinese political dissidents and the expansion of state censorship in China.
Other NED-funded NGO’s “speak out for persecuted minority groups like the Uyghurs and Tibetans and helped sustain attention on Beijing’s crackdown of freedom in Hong Kong.”[8]
Without this critical funding, the Times worried, Xi Jinping would extend his authoritarian hold on China and expand its power around the world, undercutting democracies everywhere.
Missing in this assessment is the NED’s weaponization of human rights to advance a larger geopolitical agenda centered on the goal of destabilizing China and trying to foment regime change there.
Using a tried-and-true propaganda technique, the end of the Times article quoted the editor-in-chief of a Chinese Communist Party newspaper who said that he was happy about the NED’s budgetary freeze, and hoped the cuts would be long term and not temporary.[9]
These latter statements are designed to make it clear that Trump’s MAGA followers and other supporters of the NED budget cuts are adopting the same position as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)—and giving strength to its fortunes.
The “Yellow Peril” and McCarthyite inferences are not so subtle.
The NED is unlikely to shut down entirely, as a significant percentage of its budget comes from private donations. It also received funding from Congress and other government agencies that may be unaffected by the DOGE freeze. ↑
Ralph McGehee, another CIA dissident, described the post-1991 activities of the NED as “political action operations targeting China and Cuba,” which “mesh[ed] well with the gears of the globalized-economy machine.” McGehee further noted that “the NED’s hundreds of so-called non-governmental organizations (NGOs), many of them human rights groups, are little more than fronts for the operations of the CIA….Since NED sponsors human rights groups and other NGOs in 80 countries, this creates a massive worldwide mechanism for subversion.” Colin S. Cavell, Exporting ‘Made-in-America’ Democracy: The National Endowment for Democracy & U.S. Foreign Policy (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2002), 108. ↑
Vought is considered to be an architect of Project 2025. ↑
On the latter, see Daniel Kovalik, “Fear and Loathing in the ‘New’ Syria,” CovertAction Magazine, February 15, 2025. ↑
Benjamin Arthur Thompson, “Making Democracy Safe For Empire,” Ph.D. Dissertation, Bowling Green University, 2024, 175, 176. ↑
Thompson, “Making Democracy Safe For Empire,” 205. Exemplifying the NED’s hawkish stance on Syria, Carl Gershman gave a speech at New York University in 2012 criticizing the Obama administration for showing a weak response to the Syrian crisis. Gershman called for a mix of sanctions and military operations to facilitate Bashar al-Assad’s downfall. ↑
David Pierson and Berry Wang, “U.S. Cuts to Rights Groups Are Seen as a Win for China,” The New York Times, February 16, 2025, 4. ↑
According to the Times article, one NED-funded NGO allegedly uncovered a Chinese government disinformation campaign targeting Canada’s former finance minister Chrystia Freeland, a pro-NATO neo-liberal Ukraine hawk who is running to succeed Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. This claim is highly dubious and seems to be disinformation designed to support Freeland’s candidacy by making it seem that foreign powers that she is intent on standing up to are against her. ↑
Wang Yiwei, the director of the Institute of International Affairs at Renmin University in Beijing, was quoted as stating that “China welcomes this [funding freeze], of course, and so do other countries.” ↑
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About the Author
Jeremy Kuzmarov holds a Ph.D. in American history from Brandeis University and has taught at numerous colleges across the United States. He is regularly sought out as an expert on U.S. history and politics for radio and TV programs and co-hosts a radio show on New York Public Radio and on Progressive Radio News Network called “Left on Left.” He is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and is the author of five books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019), The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018), and Warmonger. How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden (Clarity Press, 2023). Besides these books, Kuzmarov has published hundreds of articles and contributed to numerous edited volumes, including one in the prestigious Oxford History of Counterinsurgency . He can be reached at jkuzmarov2@gmail.com and found on substack here.
