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.
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