DOGE’s Best First Target: the National Endowment for Democracy

The new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) should seriously consider the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) for its high priority list of federal cost cutting measures in 2025.

It’s not only a sinkhole of American taxpayer dollars—over $1 billion in congressional appropriations from 2020, 2021, 2022 to 2023—but NED’s mission to “promote freedom around the world” has over the decades translated into countless cases of counterproductive meddling that puts truly organic “people-powered” movements at risk by fomenting regime change and revolution for Washington’s political aims and purposes.

“If [Elon] Musk and [Vivek] Ramaswamy are really serious about this idea of taking a hatchet to government spending, they should do so by starting with the programs that are most detrimental to the world and U.S. interests and are least likely to hurt ordinary Americans when cut,” said Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic, who wrote about NED when the first Trump administration slashed the organization’s budget. The Washington establishment greeted that move with the ritual gnashing of teeth and rending of clothes over the “assault” on democracy.

“On balance,” Marcetic told The American Conservative, “the NED has been a detrimental force that would not be missed if it disappeared tomorrow.”

The quasi-government agency—“quasi” meaning that it is technically an independent non-profit but it gets the greater part of its funding by far from annual government grants—was first instituted in 1983 to make overt the covert programs of the CIA in foreign countries. This isn’t some anti-imperialist smear, as NED has tried to suggest. Records from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library archives show it was the brainchild of then-CIA Director William Casey and William Raymond Jr., who worked for the CIA’s propaganda office before moving to the National Security Council.

Allen Weinstein, former president of NED, told Washington Post columnist David Ignatius in 1991, “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA. The biggest difference is that when such activities are done overtly, the flap potential is close to zero. Openness is its own protection.”

The true “protection” is twofold. Operating in a heavily layered ecosystem where it is seeding organizations here and in other countries, NED operates under the radar; most American taxpayers have no idea that more than $362 million of its taxpayer dollars went to NED in 2023 or anything that the organization really does. Its own website is immensely vague and no longer provides a database for its grants. But researchers have catalogued or archived some of it, and it is available here, and here. 

Second, its mission statement sounds anodyne enough: “[NED] is dedicated to the growth and strengthening of democratic institutions around the world.” Often you will hear that NED helped to nurture the Solidarity movement in Poland and the anti-Apartheid movement in South Africa. It helps to empower women-led enterprises in traditionally patriarchal societies in Africa, rainforest protection in Brazil, and monitor human rights violations and extra-judicial killings in war-ravaged places like Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

But mounting evidence over the last 40 years has suggested that NED funding has been also used to promote preferred U.S. policies in politically and/or militarily fragile states where the U.S. has a clear strategic interest in seeing tensions boil over into a power shift.

“This is particularly controversial in countries where the U.S. has strategic interests, as the NED’s support for opposition movements is often an attempt to interfere in the internal affairs of sovereign nations, exacerbating internal conflicts and undermining the sovereignty of these nations—see Venezuela, Russia, and Cuba,” the retired State Department official (and TAC contributing editor) Peter Van Buren told TAC. 

Back in 2002, reflecting bipartisan U.S. desires back in Washington, NED funded a whopping $877,000 to help oust the left-wing Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez through various schemes, culminating in a failed coup. The funding and fomenting continued to at least 2010, according to this report. Chavez went on to win his third election before dying in 2013, when the torch was then passed to Nicolas Maduro. The money has continued to flow through the rest of the decade as U.S. and other Western governments lobbied for opposition leader Juan Guaido (another failure). As democracy movements pushed, the U.S. continued to promote crushing sanctions on the country; these have only hurt Venezuela’s already impoverished people, not the apparently ever-secure Maduro, who, by hook or crook, just won his latest election in a (disputed) landslide.

Similar narratives have played out in Nicaragua, where NED money went to pro-Contra opponents of the leftwing Sandinista government in the 1980s, and Haiti (via the International Republican Institute, which is accused of helping to overthrow President Bertrand Aristide in 2004).

In 2003, then-Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) blasted the existence of NED:

The NED injects “soft money” into the domestic elections of foreign countries in favor of one party or the other. Imagine what a couple of hundred thousand dollars will do to assist a politician or political party in a relatively poor country abroad. It is particularly Orwellian to call U.S. manipulation of foreign elections “promoting democracy.” How would Americans feel if the Chinese arrived with millions of dollars to support certain candidates deemed friendly to China? Would this be viewed as a democratic development?

We actually know what the U.S. would do if China dumped big money into the American political bloodstream. Washington calls it “malicious” “meddling” trying to “destabilize America from within.”

More recently, NED and its grantees have led efforts against propaganda and online misinformation in Russia, China, and Brazil, pushing back against Kremlin influence in Georgia (via a grantee, the International Republican Institute), promoting democracy through LGBTQI+ rights in Taiwan (via another major grantee, the National Democratic Institute), and building “support for greater integration of Ukraine into Western political and economic structures” via the Institute for Euro Atlantic Partnership. 

Possibly the most effective NED actions in recent times were in helping to tip the political balance in favor of Western-approved governments in Ukraine. You can literally chart NED grants from before, during, and after the Orange revolution, through the Maidan revolution, and post-Russia invasion, today.

“It was NED-funded groups that led the Maidan revolution that bitterly divided the country and led to the toppling of its elected president, setting both Ukraine and the world on the course that’s led to this current crisis,” charged Marcetic. “The fact that Elliott Abrams (convicted in the Contra affair) was on its board for years and that its current president and CEO (Damon Wilson) is a longtime NATO-enlargement enthusiast who backed Ukrainian ‘democratization’ and U.S. military entanglement in the country tells you a lot.”

Meanwhile, according to Declassified UK, NED is supporting UK “press freedom” and investigative outlets like Bellingcat (2020 annual report here and policy plan here), which cut its teeth on investigating Kremlin crimes, propaganda, and election influence, has ties to the UK government, and gets pretty close to American politics. For the last eight years, Bellingcat has been absorbed in Russiagate, disinformation tracking, and seeing U.S. policy through the prism of democracies vs. autocracies, especially in Europe. No surprise that Anne Applebaum, Cold War warrior and author of Autocracy Inc.: The Dictators who want to Run the World, is on NED’s Board of Directors. 

It seems almost natural then that NED’s “democracy promotion” would fit into the burgeoning misinformation/disinformation industrial complex. For example, a Washington Examiner report revealed in 2023 that NED had been part of a pantheon of grantmaking entities supporting the Global Disinformation Index, a UK outfit that rates websites, news sources, and internet advertising in order to mitigate the “financial incentives” for disinformation. Turns out, according to the Examiner, GDI had a bias, with the “worst” purveyors being conservative, right leaning news sources and websites—including U.S.-based outlets like the New York Post, RealClearPolitics, Reason, and yes, TAC. 

The Examiner’s Gabe Kaminsky called it “part of a stealth operation blacklisting and trying to defund conservative media, likely costing the news companies large sums in advertising dollars.”

Shortly after the story, NED pulled its support for the GDI. At the time, the NED’s vice president of communications, Leslie Aun, told the Examiner that the group’s “mandate is to work around the world and not in the United States.”

“Recently, we became aware that one of our grantees, the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), was engaged in an initiative, funded by a different donor, that focused on specific U.S. media outlets,” Aun continued. “Given our commitment to avoid the perception that NED is engaged in any work domestically, directly or indirectly, we will no longer provide financial support to GDI.”

It is apparent that all of these criticisms get under NEDs skin, especially the original sin of its creation, conceived by CIA Director Casey and the NSC’s Reynolds and delivered by an act of Congress, which funds NED through annual appropriations to this day. The organization publicly hit back in 2010 when ProPublica reported on a NED-funded “independent” media outlet in Burma. 

“The charge that NED was established to take over the CIA’s covert propaganda efforts is ludicrous and totally unfounded. This kind of reckless and irresponsible name-calling is generally confined to the political fringe,” charged NED Director of Public Affairs Jane Riley Jacobsen.

Aun herself volunteered to debate the Grayzone founder and editor Max Blumenthal after the media outlet called NED a CIA cut-out in May 2023. And they did, in a 40-minute video found here. She took umbrage with several of Grayzone’s assertions about NED. When Blumenthal asked, “How is it pro–democracy to support mobilizations that seek to remove elected leaders?” 

She retorted, “Isn’t that sort of what democracy is?” 

If that is not what the American people think democracy is, then the DOGE can act. If not, Congress can act, it has the power of the purse, after all.

“The NED acts as a tool of a proven-unsuccessful interventionist foreign policy,” said Van Buren. “Like with most of the old CIA-inspired Cold Warriors, it is time to retire the NED.”

Kelley Beaucar Vlahos is the Editorial Director of Responsible Statecraft and Senior Advisor at the Quincy Institute. Kelley was the executive editor and remains a contributing editor at The American Conservative. Follow her on Twitter @KelleyBVlahos.