(Dave DeCamp, Antiwar.com) The National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a US-funded organization that meddles in elections and pushes regime change around the world in the name of spreading democracy, has confirmed reports that its funding from the US government has been frozen, forcing it to suspend operations.
“The [NED] is currently unable to access its Congressionally appropriated funds, which sustain nearly all of its grantmaking and operations. As a result, for the first time in the organization’s four-decade history, it has been unable to meet its obligations and has been forced to suspend support for nearly 2,000 partners worldwide,” the NED said in a statement on Tuesday.
While the NED presents itself as an “independent” organization, it is nearly entirely funded by the US government, which it acknowledged in the statement. The NED claimed that its funding should have been exempt from the Trump administration’s pause on foreign aid.
“Ninety-five percent of NED’s funding is directly appropriated by Congress and is not considered foreign assistance. This funding therefore was not subject to the executive order freezing foreign assistance for a ninety-day review. However, despite being exempt, access to these funds has been inexplicably cut off, forcing NED to halt all partner support and furlough the majority of its staff,” the NED said.
The NED, which was founded during the Cold War in 1983, received $315 million from the US government for the 2025 fiscal year. In 1991, Allen Weinstein, a co-founder of NED, acknowledged to The Washington Post that a lot of what the organization did was done “covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”
In the 1991 article, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius listed some examples of the NED’s “overt” action that was previously done by the CIA, including “providing money and moral support for pro-democracy groups, training resistance fighters, working to subvert communist rule.”
The NED has been targeted by Elon Musk, who asked his followers in a recent post on X to list “all the evil things that NED has done.” Jim Bovard, a senior fellow at the Libertarian Institute, replied with an article about how he has been critical of the organization for 40 years.
In a 2009 article for the Future Freedom Foundation, Bovard said the NED is “based on the notion that its meddling in foreign elections is automatically pro-democracy because the US government is the incarnation of democracy. NED has always operated on the principle that ‘what’s good for the US government is good for democracy.’”
In a 2006 piece for The American Conservative, Bovard detailed NED’s efforts to push for regime change in Latin America. “In 2001, NED quadrupled its aid to Venezuelan opponents of elected president Hugo Chavez, and NED heavily funded some organizations involved in a bloody military coup that temporarily removed Chavez from power in April 2002. After Chavez retook control, NED and the State Department responded by pouring even more money into groups seeking his ouster,” he wrote.
Bovard continued, “The International Republican Institute, one of the largest NED grant recipients, played a key role both in the Chavez coup and also in the overthrow of Haiti’s elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. In February 2004, an array of NED-aided groups and individuals helped spur an uprising that left 100 people dead and toppled Aristide.”
This article originally appeared at Antiwar.com.
