The Trump administration wants to defund the unconstitutional, left-wing, foreign-meddling National Endowment for Democracy (NED). So what did House Republicans just do? They voted to give the agency $315 million.
According to the Daily Caller:
In May, the Trump administration’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) recommended eliminating federal funding for the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), citing the organization’s pattern of partisan advocacy and hostility towards Republicans. However, the House Appropriations Subcommittee on National Security, Department of State and Related Programs advanced a bill on July 23 that would allocate $315 million to the organization for the upcoming fiscal year.
“It might be a dealbreaker,” a senior administration official told the Daily Caller News Foundation regarding the NED funding included in the bill.
Created in 1983, the NED is a nominally private organization — though almost all its funding comes from American taxpayers — tasked with advancing “democracy” around the world. It is ostensibly nonpartisan and claims it “does not engage in domestic political activity.”
Given that the Left considers anything that impedes the socialist-globalist agenda a threat to democracy, it’s no surprise that the NED has decided that promoting democracy means opposing President Donald Trump and any foreign leaders who obstruct that agenda.
The administration laid out its case against the NED in May:
Under the Biden Administration and at the start of the Russia/Ukraine war, the NED blocked public access to its grant details after having never provided disclosure in the manner required by Federal law. In March 2025, it was discovered that NED funded the Ukraine disinformation organization that doxed U.S. journalists[,] called for prosecutions of allies of the President, and attacked the Vice President, [National Counterterrorism Center Director] Joe Kent, and others as “foreign propagandists of the Russian Federation.” NED also funded the now-infamous Disinformation Index Foundation [aka the Global Disinformation Index (GDI)] that targeted and blacklisted conservative media outlets.
Conveniently, the GDI is located in the United Kingdom, so the NED could still claim not to be engaging in “domestic political activity” even as the group listed 10 U.S.-based outlets — all of them either conservative or libertarian — as the “riskiest” for disinformation.
In addition, the NED has been quite busy engaging in foreign political activity, wrote the Daily Caller:
Critics have also accused the NED of straying from its congressional mandate and engaging in geopolitical meddling and nation-building through the millions of dollars in grants it administers abroad each year. The Center for Renewing America [CRA], a think tank launched by OMB Director Russell Vought, described the NED in February as “the tip of the proverbial spear” in U.S. efforts to engineer political change in Ukraine, for example, arguing it helped pave the way for the current conflict with Russia.
Indeed, one of the prime movers in the whole Ukraine debacle, Victoria Nuland, sits on the NED’s board of directors. Nuland’s involvement dates back to her days in the Obama administration, when she helped orchestrate the overthrow of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, whose offense against “democracy” was choosing closer relations with Russia over membership in the European Union. As the CRA observed, that incident led to Ukraine’s war with Russia.
Nuland, whose husband is neocon never-Trumper Robert Kagan, was also one of the major pushers of the now-discredited Steele dossier — proving that she, at least, is not above participating in domestic political activity to advance the globalist cause.
Other NED leaders, including those claiming to be Republicans, have been similarly critical of Trump, noted the Daily Caller:
“I am a Republican and I would rather the Republicans win, but more importantly, I would rather my country not go down the fascist route,” Jendayi Frazer, NED secretary, said during the 2016 election. Fellow board member Victor Cha co-signed a letter with other former Republican national security officials endorsing Joe Biden for president in 2020, stating it was “in the best interest of our nation.”
NED President Damon Wilson, too, has had harsh words for the 45th and 47th president.
Upon hearing that some House Republicans had voted to restore the NED’s funding, former State Department official Mike Benz posted on X:
Ouch, this one hurts. After hundreds of scandals and documented abuses, NED comes out the other side completely unscathed in its budget. GOP fully funded the loaded political shotgun pointed straight at Trump’s agenda and supporters.
In a May interview with Tucker Carlson, Benz called the NED “the worst of the worst” of federal agencies. Wilson, he pointed out, had previously worked at the globalist Atlantic Council’s “disinformation” center.
“[The Atlantic Council] wanted to censor or call disinformation [on] Trump’s attempt to present his own case around Russiagate, and they provoked journalists to hold up Atlantic Council-sponsored placards with the world ‘bulls — t’ on it,” he said.
Despite all this, Representative Mario Díaz-Balart (R-Fla.), chairman of the House subcommittee that passed the NED-funding measure, defended it as “aggressively advanc[ing] President Trump’s America First agenda.”
He told the Daily Caller:
Through the strategic use of NED, this bill doubles down on confronting hostile adversaries such as Communist China and Iran, two of President Trump’s highest national security priorities. The underlying principles that guided the formation of this bill are what is best for American national security and for the American taxpayer.
Under those principles — not to mention the Constitution — the subcommittee should have taken Trump’s advice and shuttered the NED.