In a recent essay, Stanford University political theorist Francis Fukuyama makes the following observation about the importance of American soft power:

The United States since 1945 has supported a liberal world order built around norms like not using military force to change borders, and formal agreements for mutual defence like NATO and the security treaties with Japan and South Korea. This system has been spectacularly successful at promoting peace, prosperity, and democracy. The United States has used its soft power through instruments like the National Endowment for Democracy to support like-minded democracy proponents to resist authoritarian power from countries like China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea.

Most Americans probably have not heard of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), and many of those who have heard of it may have only a vague idea of what it is and what it does. But for the past 41 years, Congress has funded the non-profit and its efforts to promote democracy abroad with strong bi-partisan support. In pursuit of that remit, the NED has provided financial support to groups fighting for democratic freedoms in dictatorships, especially during the Cold War years when it funded dissident organisations bravely attempting to undermine Soviet-ruled satellites in Eastern Europe.

The Ultimate Betrayal

America just switched sides in the Ukraine war.

QuilletteFrancis Fukuyama

But now that the Trump administration has decided to join rather than oppose the world’s authoritarian bloc, the Treasury Department has told the NED that it will no longer provide it with funds for dispersal. The NED has therefore been forced to inform its grantees that it can no longer support their work: “Once you run out of money,” it said in a statement obtained by POLITICO, “consider your agreement with our organization suspended.”

This cost-cutting is part of a campaign led by Elon Musk’s newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to slash allegedly wasteful federal spending. And as POLITICO’s report noted, the NED’s crisis “shows it is hitting institutions beloved by Republicans, without much pushback.” Democratic Congressman Rep. Joaquin Castro from Texas has urged Republicans to join his party in opposing these cuts because the Trump administration is undermining “one of our most powerful tools for supporting freedom around the world.” As Fukuyama quips in his Persuasion essay, the NED “may well be reborn as the National Endowment for Dictatorship.”

The administration’s decision to end NED funding was first reported in the Free Press by security journalist Eli Lake, who pointed out that this “would symbolize a major change in U.S. foreign policy, undercutting the notion that democratic ideals foster U.S. global strength and influence.” This would amount to a disavowal of the longstanding American belief and policy that “promoting democracy around the globe is in the national interest.”

In a new article for the Free Press, Lake reports that the NED board has taken legal action, “asking [a court] to overrule the DOGE order that has ground the endowment to a halt.” It wants the Trump administration to release the US$239 million that Congress had earmarked for the NED in 2025. They are arguing that, unlike agencies such as USAID, the NED is an independent grant-making institution funded directly by Congress. “The Executive Branch,” the board contends, therefore “lacks statutory authority or discretion to deny the Endowment its congressionally appropriated funds.” Peter Roskam, a former Republican Congressman and current NED chairman, told Lake that “it became clear to us that if we did nothing, NED would completely collapse.”

These cuts are even counterproductive to Trump’s own America First agenda, since the groups that the NED assists generally represent pockets of pro-American feeling in otherwise anti-American states. The administration waves this criticism away by saying that it wants to refocus attention on the threat posed by the Chinese communist regime. But China’s propaganda apparatus has been vigorously attacking NED and its work for years, so Musk’s crew is really doing the regime a favour. China’s hatred of the NED is hardly surprising, since the organisation has funded activists monitoring the regime’s persecution of the Uyghur community and its own political opponents. If Trump wants to put the screws to Chinese communism, this is a very strange way to go about it.