Trump’s Cuts to Democracy Promotion Like the NED Already Hit Asian Organizations Hard

Among the many reductions in U.S. foreign assistance that the Trump administration has put into place,  the White House and key advisor Elon Musk seem to disdain programs focused on promoting democracy, rights, the rule of law, and civil society. The exact reasons for the anger towards these programs remain somewhat unclear. However, it is likely due to Trump's transactional view of the world, making deals with both autocrats and democrats, his lack of interest in human rights, and Congress's historical support and funding for democracy promotion programs now being weakened. This allows the White House to steamroll these programs. (Of course, everything remains in the air, with challenges to various Trump/Musk reductions and other policies mounting by the day in the court system, and almost sure to get to the Supreme Court soon.)

One of the key targets has been the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a historically bipartisan organization with strong congressional support that primarily provides grants to organizations working on issues like the rule of law, judiciaries, promoting democratic reform, media freedoms, online freedom, and other similar issues. (A quick look at NED’s board shows its bipartisan nature.)

NED’s vast store of grants spanned the world and historically had played important roles in keeping some degree of freedom alive in places like Cambodia and Myanmar in Southeast Asia, as well as in many other regions—grants provided in over 100 countries some years, with a sum of the grants usually around $300 million or so.  

While some now claim that the NED is an arm of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), it is not linked to the CIA. One could argue that it promotes democracy and rights in ways the CIA sometimes tried to do covertly in the past. However, the NED operates transparently, with annual audited financial statements, and is not covert.

In addition, the idea that the NED is pushing pro-U.S. propaganda is just false. It supports two thousand organizations dealing with rights, press freedom, rule of law, and democracy around the world, and quite a few of these groups are not enamored with the United States. For instance, the organization funds groups in places like Thailand that, while committed to pushing for reform of lèse-majesté laws, press and online freedom, and truly free elections, have many younger members agnostic toward or disdainful of the United States.

The drastic drawdown of NED grants and other democracy promotion support has already had major implications in Southeast Asia and other regions, sometimes in places, like Myanmar, where anti-junta forces are desperately trying to depose the junta and return to some kind of democracy. The cutoff of funds to groups providing aid to people who have fled Myanmar into Thailand is causing havoc and further destabilization along the border and within Myanmar.

And since so few foreign reporters visit Myanmar, which is turning into a failed state with many armed groups battling each other and becoming a global hub of organized crime, exiled media with close contacts in the country are critical to understanding the state of the civil war in a land of strategic importance to China, India, and certainly the United States. U.S. funding for one of the most important media organizations providing accurate information on Myanmar, The Irrawaddy, has been slashed, meaning the outlet will shrink and Myanmar will become even harder to follow, despite its strategic importance. Several other independent or semi-independent news outlets in authoritarian Southeast Asian states—often the only credible media voices left—are going to be battered or forced to close by the end of democracy aid.

Similarly, as National Public Radio notes, the collapse of funding is already destroying Thai NGOs that had been working to make semi-democratic Thailand safer for dissidents from neighboring authoritarian states. Mainland Southeast Asia has, in recent years, become a hub of transnational repression, in which dissidents from one autocratic country travel to another and often disappear or wind up dead.

NPR notes: “One of those organizations [that is suffering as democracy-related funds have vanished] is Manushya, a human rights foundation in Thailand. Manushya has used [U.S. government aid] to support nine safe houses that protect environmental activists and opposition politicians from neighboring authoritarian states such as Laos and Cambodia. After Trump's executive order cut off funding, Manushya began closing its safe houses, which were home to thirty-five activists and their family members.”

It also notes that the NED had backed the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, a worldwide group that does investigative journalism, exposing many types of corruption. It dug deeply into corruption in parts of the region where the local news media has been weakened by many factors. For instance, in Australia, where the local media is struggling, it tracked down a major criminal target of the Australian government—a man with links to China and Chinese influence in Australia—and found him involved in businesses in Fiji. The group also highlighted the continuing massive use of bribery in Malaysia, a country that has developed economically and had a peaceful change of power at the ballot box but still struggles with a political and business climate where bribery is the norm.