Sam Brownback’s right-wing “Kansas experiment” caused huge budget shortfalls and led to draconian service cuts
The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is a CIA offshoot that was founded in the 1980s for the purpose of spreading political propaganda and supporting “civil society” groups in countries targeted by the U.S. for regime change.
In late January, the NED announced the appointment of a new Board member: Sam Brownback, the former Kansas governor (2011-2018), who signed into law one of the largest tax cuts in Kansas history, known as the “Kansas experiment.”
Driven by the interests of the billionaire Koch brothers, Brownback’s largest political donors who made their fortune in the oil pipeline business, the Kansas experiment proved to be a miserable failure.[1]
It caused state revenues to fall by hundreds of millions of dollars and created large budget shortfalls that prompted sweeping cuts in education, public transportation and other public services, along with a downgrading of Kansas’ credit rating.[2]
Private sector job growth also did not expand as was envisioned and, from 2012 to 2017, was lower in Kansas than all of its neighboring states except Oklahoma (which had advanced its own version of the Kansas experiment under Republican Governor Mary Fallin).
In addition to passing the largest income tax cuts in state history, Brownback’s Kansas experiment made it easier to carry guns in public buildings, turned over management of Medicaid to private insurance companies, imposed cuts on welfare programs, made it more difficult to get an abortion, and made it harder to qualify for public assistance.
In June 2017, the Kansas Legislature repealed Brownback’s tax cuts, overrode Brownback’s veto of the repeal, and enacted tax increases. The next year, Brownback left office—having been appointed by President Donald Trump as Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom—as one of the least popular governors in the United States.
Jim Ward, the Democratic leader of the Kansas State House told The New York Times that Brownback had left the “state in carnage and destruction.”
John B. Judis wrote in The New Republic that Brownback had tried to create a “conservative utopia” but, instead, “created a conservative hell.”
Brownback’s political extremism was apparent when, as an intern for Robert Dole in 1979, he became involved with the Fellowship, a secret group that fused political conservatism with fervent Christian belief.
The Fellowship’s founder, Abraham Vereide, considered union leader Harry Bridges, who organized the famous 1934 San Francisco dockworkers’ strike, to be “Satanic” and a Soviet agent.”[3]
Selective Support for Religious Freedom and Other Human Rights Abuses
The NED’s press release emphasized Brownback’s role from 2018 to 2021 as U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom, where he is said to have “worked across regions and faith communities to confront persecution and advocate for the rights of believers facing state repression.”
This work dovetails with the NED’s practice of publicizing religious persecution—both real and imagined—in countries targeted by the U.S. for regime change in an attempt to vilify the existing government and turn public opinion against it.
An example was the NED’s granting its annual Democracy Award last year to Chinese Pastor Wang Yi, who was arrested after he failed to register his church in Chengdu, and Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, the 11th Panchen Lama, Tibet’s abducted spiritual leader.[4]
A supporter of the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising and critic of Chinese Premier Xi Jinping who met with President George W. Bush in 2006,[5] Wang Yi was sentenced to nine years in prison for allegedly “inciting subversion of state power” and “illegal business activity.”[6]
The NED Democracy Award event also featured a speech from Grace Jin Drexel, whose father, Pastor Ezra Jin, was detained by the Chinese government.
While I am in sympathy with anyone who is being persecuted for their religious beliefs, the NED selectively invokes countries’ religious persecution when it serves U.S. geostrategic objectives.
In the case of China, the objectives center on discrediting, weakening and trying to destabilize the People’s Republic of China (PRC), a threat to U.S. control over the Asia-Pacific region, which is challenging U.S. global economic supremacy through its One Belt, One Road initiative.
If the NED were genuinely committed to advancing religious freedom, it would address the religious persecution being carried out by the Ukrainian government which, in 2024, passed a law banning religious organizations linked to the Russian Orthodox Church.
Andrii Telizhenko, a former Ukrainian diplomat and parliamentary aide, told the Uncontrolled Opposition radio program that the Ukrainian police have been robbing Russian Orthodox churches of their icons, closing them down and putting their clergymen in prison when they protest.
Telizhenko also noted that Ukraine has more than 20,000 political prisoners—whose plight goes unacknowledged by the NED.
Syria is another country where Christians are facing serious religious persecution under the al-Qaeda-led government that was installed with U.S. backing in a CIA-backed regime-change operation for which the NED helped set the groundwork.
The al-Qaeda-linked government in Syria has, additionally, carried out an ethnic-cleansing operation targeting Shia Alawites who supported the former Assad government that the U.S. succeeded in overthrowing in December 2024 after years of subversion.[7]
Whether in Syria, Ukraine or other U.S. client states, religious persecution and other human rights abuses generally go ignored by the NED when they might make the U.S. look bad.
The dissidents that the NED champions are also in some cases violent insurrectionists or advocates for crippling sanctions and war on their own countries.
One example is Leopoldo López, who coordinated violent Guarimba uprisings in Venezuela with the intent of overthrowing Venezuela’s socialist government; another is Vladimir Kara-Murza, a pallbearer at John McCain’s funeral who lobbied Congress for sanctions on Russia with a billionaire con man who was convicted of corporate crimes and championed the war in Ukraine.[8]
Additional Appointment of a China Hawk and Director of Think Tank Named After Legendary Cold War Hawk
Brownback’s appointment to the NED board follows that of John Moolenaar (R-MI), Chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), a descendant from the McCarthy era that has advanced a Sinophobic discourse and hardline anti-China foreign policy.
A supporter of Trump’s bombing operations and trillion-dollar military budget, Moolenaar boasts on his website about adding anti-China measures to the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act, and of his support for the persecution of Chinese scientists at the University of Michigan who were deported back to China.[9]
The NED also announced in January the appointment to its board of Carrie Filipetti, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Cuba and Venezuela in the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs and the Deputy Special Representative for Venezuela at the U.S. Department of State from 2019 to 2021 when she helped advance U.S. regime-change efforts.
Filipetti’s pro-imperialist views were on display in an article she wrote days after Nicolás Maduro’s kidnapping in Providence magazine in which she stated that January 3 was a day “our adversaries should fear” since it was the day that the U.S. captured Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega in 1990, killed Iranian revolutionary commander Qassem Soleimani in 2020, and “flawlessly” captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, whom Filipetti said was “finally preparing to face justice in the United States after years of crimes against humanity, stolen elections, extrajudicial killings, and drug trafficking.”
Filipetti went on to claim that Maduro’s successor Delcy Rodríguez “lacked qualifications or legitimacy to run Venezuela” and that the U.S. should instead help elevate Nobel Peace Prize laureate María Corina Machado, an extreme right-winger with limited actual support within Venezuela, whom she said had “single-handedly united the Venezuelan opposition into one movement.”
Filipetti currently serves as Executive Director of the Vandenberg Coalition, a foreign policy think tank that advocates for a “strong” and “proud” (i.e., hawkish and imperialist) foreign policy.
A briefing on the Vandenberg Coalition’s website characterized the Maduro kidnapping as a “stunning success” designed to “stop the flow of drugs and illegal migration from Venezuela,” “build economic partnership, particularly around access to oil, and ensure a ‘safe, proper and judicious transition in government [i.e., regime change].’”[10]
Another briefing blames Hamas for launching a “barbaric attack” on Israel on October 7, 2023, and presents the U.S. Israeli war on the people of Gaza as a success that “degraded the threat posed by Hamas and other Iranian proxies.”[11]
The Vandenberg Coalition is named in honor of Senator Arthur Vandenberg, a Republican senator from Michigan (1928-1951) who changed from being a staunch isolationist in the 1930s to a staunch hawk and proponent of an aggressive foreign policy during World War II and the early Cold War when he served as Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.[12]
In this latter capacity, Vandenberg was considered to be a chief legislative architect for the Truman Doctrine, Marshall Plan and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
Under the Truman Doctrine, the U.S. provided millions of dollars in assistance and military and police support to a fascist-leaning government in Greece that waged a dirty war against leftists who had fought against fascism and advocated for sweeping land reform, nationalized industry and a fair economy.[13]
When President Truman expressed concern about public support for the Truman Doctrine, Vandenberg advised him that he had to “scare the hell out of the American people”—by greatly inflating the communist threat.
The Vandenberg Coalition continues to follow Arthur’s advice today, for example, by running a podcast series called “Red Shadows” that warns of China’s supposed pernicious “influence operations” around the world.
One video for the series falsely blamed China for inducing “multiple attacks against the U.S. homeland” from “the 2023 spy balloon, to inciting the fentanyl crisis, to influencing our students and children in schools and online.”[14]
The Vandenberg Coalition’s advisory board includes CIA agents, such as Elliott Abrams, an Iran-Contra felon, and Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former director of the Project for a New American Century’s Middle East Initiative and CIA case officer in the Middle East.[15]
Additionally, there are NED-associated people on the advisory board, such as Dan Twining, President of the NED-affiliated International Republican Institute (IRI), which provides financing to conservative political parties around the world; Juan Zarate, a counter-terrorism czar under George W. Bush, who supported extraordinary rendition and drone assassinations; and Paula Dobriansky, a former high-level State Department official from an extreme right-wing Ukrainian family.
NED’s appointment of a Vandenberg Coalition director to its board is appropriate, considering NED’s continued advancement of a Cold War mentality and efforts to “scare the hell out of the American people” about “threats” coming from “authoritarian governments” that are really singled out because they challenge U.S. global hegemony.
NED—A Key Player in Operation Absolute Resolve
The NED’s priorities were apparent when it formally congratulated María Corina Machado, who had been involved in multiple right-wing coup attempts and violent insurrections in Venezuela, on its website.
The NED also highlighted how, in 2025, it provided $5.5 million to 42 different NGOs in Venezuela, emphasizing that its “portfolio focuse[d] on strengthening the civic infrastructure that allows citizens to defend their rights, hold officials accountable, and participate safely in public life.”
Some of the groups that the NED funded were media outlets that advanced right-wing, anti-Maduro propaganda in an attempt to delegitimize Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution.
The NED also financed student and other groups that staged protests during elections and human rights NGOs that documented alleged abuses by the Maduro government and tried to uncover alleged ties to transnational criminal networks, including “narcotrafficking routes and illicit financing operations involving organizations such as Hezbollah and Colombian armed groups.”
This latter focus shows the clear politicized nature of NED-funded organizations, which helped lay the groundwork for Operation Absolute Resolve in which Maduro was kidnapped.
The fixation with Hezbollah and “Colombian Armed groups” (i.e., leftist guerrillas such as Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia-FARC) reflects the bias since the principal drug gangs in Colombia have long been affiliated with right-wing paramilitary groups that have carried out gruesome human rights atrocities in waging war on FARC.
The lack of concern for the latter human rights abuses shows the complete phoniness of the NED, which uses human rights and accusations of drug trafficking as a weapon to try to delegitimize and then overthrow socialist governments that aim to establish control over their own natural resources.
For more on the Koch brothers, see Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (New York: Doubleday, 2016). Fred Koch, father of Charles and David Koch, was a founder of the extreme right-wing John Birch Society, which was also financed by Donald Trump’s father Fred. Brownback was advised by Arthur Laffer, the godfather of supply-side economics and key architect of the so-called Reagan Revolution who described the Kansas experiment as a “revolution in a cornfield.” ↑
The education cuts resulted in the early shutdown of the school year, elimination of school programs, cutting of maintenance, phasing out teaching positions, enlarging class sizes, increasing fees for kindergarten and cutting librarians and book orders. ↑
See Ian Munro, “Secrets of a Powerful Family,” The Sydney Morning Herald, June 14, 2008. After Brownback gained election to Congress in 1994, he positioned himself to the right even of Newt Gingrich (R-GA), who led a right-wing revolution in Congress. ↑
According to the NED, the 11th Panchen Lama Gedhun Choekyi Nyima was recognized by His Holiness the Dalai Lama as the reincarnation of the 10th Panchen Lama, the second-highest authority in Tibetan Buddhism, in 1995 when he was just six years old. Just three days later, Chinese authorities abducted him, making him the world’s youngest political prisoner. Some 30 years later, his fate remains unknown. ↑
Radio Free Asia reported that the administration of President Xi Jinping “regards Christianity as a dangerous foreign import, with officials warning last year against the ‘infiltration of Western hostile forces’ in the form of religion.” ↑
According to The New York Times, the illegal business activity involved publishing books and CDs not approved by the Chinese government. ↑
See Jeremy Kuzmarov and Dan Kovalik, Syria: Anatomy of Regime Change (Montreal: Baraka Books, 2025). ↑
See Jeremy Kuzmarov, “National Endowment For Democracy Continues to Weaponize Human Rights,” CovertAction Magazine, May 20, 2024; Jeremy Kuzmarov, “Senate Foreign Relations Committee Cravenly Rubber Stamps CIA Plan for More Coups, Assassinations, Drone Strikes, Kidnappings and Torture to Save America from Fabricated Foreign Enemies,” CovertAction Magazine, April 10, 2023. Kara-Murza is linked with the Free Russia Foundation, which has been accused of being a front for Western intelligence agency efforts to destabilize Russia and promote regime change under the guise of democracy promotion. In October 2017, Kara-Murza authored an article in the NED’s Journal of Democracy comparing Putin to Mussolini, falsely claiming that the Bolsheviks seized power in November 1917 in a coup d’état, and advocating for a color revolution in Russia modeled after ones supported by Western intelligence agencies in Serbia, Georgia and Ukraine. A mentor of Juan Guaidó, a right-winger recognized by Donald Trump as Venezuela’s leader despite his holding no official position, López was part of one of the three families that tried to orchestrate a coup against socialist leader Hugo Chávez in 2002. He was barred from running for mayoral re-election in Caracas’s Chacao district in 2008 for allegedly misusing public funds.See Jeremy Kuzmarov, “CIA Cutout Pushes for War with China,” CovertAction Magazine, December 2, 2025. ↑
The briefing actually professed to be against regime change but claimed that Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s successor, was illegitimate because she had served under Maduro. ↑
Never mind the genocide and hundreds of thousands of Gazans killed, injured and displaced; they are non-entities who go unmentioned. ↑
In a famous speech in January 1945 announcing his move away from isolationism, Vandenberg argued that, rather than retreating inward after World War II, the U.S. needed to embrace its new status as a great power and exercise global leadership to secure its enlightened self-interest. ↑
See Peter Murtagh, The Rape of Greece: The King, The Colonels and The Resistance (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994); Lawrence Wittner, American Intervention in Greece, 1943-1949: A Study in Counterrevolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). ↑
The spy balloon incident was a complete hoax and most of the fentanyl entering the U.S. was produced by Mexican drug cartels—with China having among the strictest drug prohibition laws in the world. The claim about influencing students in schools and online follows from Sinophobic attacks on Confucius Institutes and Chinese exchange programs on campuses and on TikTok because it was Chinese-owned. ↑
According to the Militarist Monitor, Gerecht was long an advocate for bombing Iran. ↑
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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 “Uncontrolled Opposition.”
He is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and is the author of six 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), Warmonger. How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden (Clarity Press, 2023); and with Dan Kovalik, Syria: Anatomy of Regime Change (Baraka Books, 2025).
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.
