The Free Press
Since Elon Musk’s DOGE froze its funding on January 22, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is nearing complete collapse.
Already, it has had to furlough 75 percent of its workforce. Nearly all the field offices for NED’s sister organizations—the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute—have had to close. And NED itself has frozen all of its current grants due to a shortfall of cash.
So it is taking its case to court and asking to overrule the DOGE order that has ground the endowment to a halt.
NED—which supports grassroots freedom movements around the world—filed a suit yesterday against the Trump administration to begin releasing the $239 million that Congress appropriated to NED for the 2025 fiscal year.
In a court filing obtained by The Free Press, NED argues it has yet to receive any explanation for the funding freeze, and that the federal government lacks the authority for the move. Unlike the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), NED is funded directly by Congress as an outside grantmaking organization. It is overseen by Congress and its funding is not controlled by the executive branch.
The filing says, “No Executive Branch official has provided any explanation for those unprecedented actions. But whatever the purported reason, the Executive Branch lacks statutory authority or discretion to deny the Endowment its congressionally appropriated funds in this manner.”
According to Peter Roskam, a former Republican Congressman and current NED chairman, the organization has had to freeze the 1,800 grants that it administers all over the world. In some cases that has endangered some of the grant recipients. Roskam and Mel Martinez, a former Republican senator and NED board member, were reluctant to get too specific, but they said one grantee in an authoritarian state was identified by the regime because his internet work had suddenly stopped and it coincided with the funding cut off to the organization.
Roskam told The Free Press that the decision to sue the Trump administration was not an easy one.
“It became clear over a period of time that nothing was going to be released,” he said. “We were interacting with the administration, sometimes you get yeah yeah-ed, but it became clear to us that if we did nothing, NED would completely collapse.”
Martinez said that he had counseled against litigation until recently. “I was incredibly reluctant to do this,” he said. “I counseled against it. But at some point we had to do this because either NED disappears or it doesn’t. And I don’t want it to disappear.”
On Wednesday, USAID—another target of DOGE’s cuts—won its lawsuit at the Supreme Court to force the Treasury Department to resume payments to its contractors.
The Free Press was the first to report on DOGE freezing the funds for NED last month, a move that had left the organization unable to meet payroll and basic overhead expenses.
Meanwhile, the move to starve NED is being cheered by America’s enemies. Cuba’s foreign minister, Bruno Rodriguez, posted on X on February 4, “US Government now alarmed by million-dollar corrupt operations of the #NED in various countries with funds from American taxpayers. They should investigate how many in that country have enriched themselves by organizing destabilization and terrorism vs. #Cuba with the support of that organization.”
A Taliban media outlet celebrated the funding cut off to a NED-funded television network, Amu TV, with the headline: “The stoppage of dollars is a wake-up call for evildoers and hostile media!”
Martinez said his hope was that President Donald Trump, who he campaigned for, was unaware that the DOGE-imposed freeze on NED funding was emboldening America’s enemies and crippling groups fighting for freedom. “I hope Trump is not fully aware of what is going on here,” he said. “In order to stand up for those who cannot help themselves, we need to make sure that NED survives.”
Once upon a time, honorable men went to the gulags for refusing to repeat the Kremlin’s lies; now an American president is telling them for free. This week on Breaking History, Eli Lake takes us back to the Cold War and President Reagan’s support of dissidents.