The Trump administration wants to abolish the National Endowment for Democracy, which has funded Cuban democracy activists for more than four decades.
The administration accuses NED of pushing “propaganda against right-leaning domestic politicians, including President Trump,” and blacklisting conservative media outlets.
The federal government abruptly cut off NED’s congressionally appropriated funds in early 2025. NED sued, saying the funding freeze endangered the lives of the nonprofit’s undercover democracy activists and forced the suspension of nearly 1,300 grant programs.
A surreal high-stakes showdown between the NED and the U.S. government followed. A few examples to highlight the weirdness:
- For years, Havana has denounced NED as a CIA front. Right-wing Trump supporters came to nearly the same conclusion. Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought’s Center for Renewing America called NED “an irredeemably corrupt organization that operates as a front for the State Department and Central Intelligence Agency and serves as the tip of the proverbial iceberg for a sprawling censorship industrial complex.” In political science, it’s called the horseshoe theory: As left- and right-wing ideologies become increasingly radical, they converge.
- On April 24, 2025, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, emailed NED executives, demanding to meet the next morning. DOGE wanted to “onboard” the NED’s team into the Executive Branch and threatened to penalize them if they refused. There was just one problem: NED is a private, independent corporation, not a government agency. DOGE had zero legal jurisdiction. Told they couldn’t absorb a private nonprofit into the government, DOGE backed down, sending a hasty “clarifying email.”
- NED’s lawsuit names Secretary of State Marco Rubio as the lead defendant trying to destroy the organization. At the same time, NED sent Rubio a letter in May 2025 pleading for his help against the budget freezes. As a senator, Rubio had praised NED’s “courageous grantees.” He sat on the board of the International Republican Institute, one of NED’s core branches. He championed NED for years. Now he was forced to defend his administration’s campaign to kill it.
Beyond the quirks and contradictions of the case, the Trump administration’s reckless crusade has exposed the peril that NED grant recipients face in such countries as Cuba, the organization’s president Damon M. Wilson said after the government cut off funding in 2025.
“NED’s inability to access its funding has led to a freeze in NED financial support for independent activists, journalists, and pro-democracy groups,” he said. “Cuban authorities could easily correlate these groups’ shrinking or closing operations at this moment to the funding freeze, allowing them to identify and target these partners.”
U.S. District Court Judge Dabney L. Friedrich agreed. In an Aug. 11, 2025 opinion, she said the funding freeze caused irreversible “irreparable harm” because it threatened to blow activists’ cover, “inviting reprisals from authoritarian governments.”
That same day, in retaliation for losing in court, the State Department notified the NED that it was launching a sweeping “programmatic and financial audit” of the nonprofit and its four core institutes to make sure they were aligned with administration priorities.
In September 2025, the NED handed over more than 22,000 pages of compliance records to satisfy the audit. U.S. officials didn’t respond. The following month, they froze $105 million in NED funding that Congress had appropriated.
NED said the funding freeze was illegal and prevented them from conducting critical planning for fast-moving political openings and crises in Cuba, Venezuela and Iran.
NED was founded in 1983 and operates in more than 90 countries.
On Feb. 2, 2025, Elon Musk baselessly posted on X that it’s an “evil organization” that “needs to be dissolved.”
“NED is a SCAM,” he said in another post. “RIFE with CORRUPTION!!”
The Trump administration claims the nonprofit supports “a vast network of leftist non-governmental organizations.” It cites the nonprofit’s past support for the Global Disinformation Index. The UK-based foundation created the Global Disinformation Index, which warned that some American conservative media outlets were “high risk” and “maximum risk” for disinformation.
In February 2023, journalists revealed that the NED helped finance the index. The nonprofit immediately launched an internal investigation and severed all ties with the GDI.
After suing the U.S. government in 2025, the NED produced records showing that its past $545,000 grant to the GDI was narrowly restricted to tracking how authoritarian regimes—like the Chinese Communist Party—weaponize disinformation beyond their borders. NED had no control over GDI’s domestic U.S. media blacklisting operation, which was funded entirely by George Soros’s Open Society Foundations and other donors.
The Trump administration also accused NED of failing to coordinate with the State Department. Wilson denied that, saying NED had “met, corresponded or spoken with State counterparts over 22 times covering Venezuela, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Mexico, Cuba, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala.”
“In March and April 2025, NED leadership initiated direct outreach to senior State Department officials to establish consultations on priority regional portfolios,” Wilson said. “For example, on April 14 and 15, 2025, I reached out to the leadership of State’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs (WHA) to request a meeting to discuss NED’s programming in Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, and China’s influence in Latin America. This outreach was followed by a formal letter on April 17 outlining NED’s work in Cuba and offering further engagement.”
The Trump administration ignored the overtures, according to NED.
The administration “has manufactured one spurious rationale after another to diminish or delay the funding that the Endowment needs to carry out its work,” the nonprofit stated.
In March 2026, the State Department tried to permanently block the NED’s $315 million budget. They accused the NGO of “gravely undermining the safety and prosperity of the United States.” Judge Friedrich ordered the government to provide sworn declarations to back their dramatic accusations and scheduled an immediate evidentiary hearing. The administration folded overnight and quickly released the $315 million.
After losing in court, officials asked that the case be dismissed. NED opposes dismissal because the government is still trying to abolish the nonprofit. It says only Congress, not the president, has such power.
NED describes itself as “the first U.S. donor to fund organizations directly on the island. The Endowment has built a robust democracy program that empowers Cubans to advocate for their freedom.”
When the federal government’s crusade against the NED began, the State Department was funding the nonprofit’s $6 million Cuba program using what’s known as Title III foreign aid. Officials eliminated that funding on Feb. 26, 2025.
Marco Rubio, along with Cuban-American lawmakers María Elvira Salazar and Carlos Giménez, lobbied to carve out “safe harbors” for Cuba democracy projects.
The NED restructured its Caribbean portfolio, absorbing Cuba projects into its core operation. Once its $315 million budget was released, the NED restored the cash flow to 46 projects in Cuba.
The NED spends $6.6 million on Cuba, more than anywhere else in Latin America. The nonprofit’s Cuba projects cover five areas:
- Independent Journalism and Uncensored News, including support for investigative reporting, digital safety training and hidden information dissemination systems designed to create a “critically minded citizenry” on the island. This includes long-term support for legacy exile networks such as CubaNet.
- Legal Aid and Support for Political Prisoners, providing direct financial, logistical and legal lifelines to Cubans facing state persecution. Key recipients include legal monitoring organizations like Cubalex.
- Freedom of Expression and Artistic Dissidence, including support for performance artists, independent musicians and underground writers who use public art to challenge the regime’s authority. NED cites as examples the winners of the nonprofit’s 2026 Democracy Award for freedom of speech, including Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, rapper Maykel “Osorbo” Castillo and veteran opposition leader Félix Navarro.
- Human Rights Documentation and International Advocacy, including the maintenance of secure, anonymous databases to catalog physical abuses, surveillance tactics and prison camp locations.
- Coordination and Training for Independent Social Actors, financing independent civic collectives, including farmers, neighborhood association planners, and labor organizers.
The NED used to publish complete lists of its grantees in Cuba and other countries. In 2022, foreign intelligence intercepts showed that NED grantees were placed on Russian government “kill and capture” lists right before the invasion of Ukraine. To protect those individuals, the nonprofit temporarily took down its public grant archives.
In April 2025, the nonprofit stopped publishing grantee lists entirely, citing the need to protect them from arrest or violence. Later, in its lawsuit against the government, NED provided evidence, including statements filed under seal because disclosure would expose grantees to “persecution, arrests, or even assassination.”
Lawmakers won’t vote on the government’s fiscal 2027 budget until after the Nov. 3 midterm elections.
The National Security, Department of State, and Related Programs Appropriations Act, also known as House bill H.R. 8595, sets aside $35 million for Cuba democracy programs. Separately, the bill allocates $291.1 million for NED, a decrease of $18.9 million from the previous year.
The Trump administration insists on eliminating the NED entirely, calling it “opaque” and “ideologically captured.”
The Federal Harms Tracker contends that the administration’s “chaotic and haphazard approach” has lowered productivity, left agencies understaffed and undermined economic competitiveness and innovation. The tracker estimates the total cumulative cost of these disruptions at $165,626,742,154.29, or $1,028.74 per taxpayer.
Trump supporters call the estimate exaggerated, unscientific and politically motivated.
Gemini, Google’s AI tool, rates this article as accurate. See fact check.
Battle amongst thieves.