The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) was established 43 years ago this November. Signed into law by President Ronald Reagan on the heels of his 1982 Westminster Address to the British Parliament, the NED was the embodiment of the president’s pledge:
to foster the infrastructure of democracy – the system of a free press, unions, political parties, universities – which allows a people to choose their own way, to develop their own culture, to reconcile their own differences through peaceful means.
As the detente of the 1970s collided with the Soviet Union’s 1979 invasion of Afghanistan and communist inroads in Central America, the NED was a key pillar of the Reagan Doctrine’s more aggressive approach to confronting the Kremlin, ideologically and militarily. Combined with covert support to “freedom fighters” and an expensive arms race, the doctrine ultimately contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union. From the start, the NED enjoyed bipartisan support, emerging from a growing consensus that the West was losing ground in the global battle of ideas.
The fall of the Berlin Wall a generation ago and the integration of Eastern Bloc member countries into the Western European order, including democratic elections and capitalist-style economies, would seem to have validated the NED’s creation but also reduced its urgency. The ideological sway of communism was vanquished and with it the specific threat it once posed to the United States and its allies.
The Cold War may have ended, but it has been replaced by a multipolar array of threats challenging American interests from climate change to a global competition for the natural resources driving the world’s economy. Authoritarian governments, sadly, have persisted, and even seem to be making a comeback, but the political consensus in Washington that once underpinned the projection of American ideals and values in response has not. So whither the NED in 2026 and beyond?
Despite drastic cuts by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to U.S. foreign assistance and the dismantling of much of the institutional architecture behind it, the NED has managed to survive with a 2026 budget of just over $310 million, thanks to supporters in Congress. To neglected communities across the country, this may be an enormous sum, even if just a drop in the bucket of the U.S. government’s overall outlays estimated this year to be $7.4 trillion . But the current NED budget is only a fraction of what the U.S. previously spent annually on supporting democracy and good governance abroad.
To the NED family of organizations, in particular the International Republican Institute (IRI) and the National Democratic Institute (NDI), the impact of DOGE cuts to USAID and State Department funding of democracy promotion was nothing short of catastrophic. IRI, my old organization, terminated 85 percent of its staff worldwide in 2025 and closed most overseas offices, as USAID and State Department funding cuts saw 70 percent of its bottom line wiped out overnight.
It had been argued that NED was duplicative, given the similar mandates and larger budgets of various U.S. government agencies, including USAID. In the wake of DOGE, the sources of external redundancy have arguably been reduced. But what about internal redundancies? One of the more widely spoken critiques of the development sector was that far too high a percentage of “foreign” assistance never left American shores. This was a valid point as it related to organizations operating on a for-profit basis, of which there were many in the sector. NED, a non-profit, was different, but circumstances have now changed.
As the NED core institutes absorbed the impact of DOGE’s cuts in 2025, one consequence has been the increasing percentage of the NED allocation now servicing the rents of the five DC offices and executive salaries of the NED and its independently-operating core institutes, affiliated with the Democratic and Republican parties, the business sector, and organized labor. Such mortgages, reflecting previous times of plenty, come at the expense of the NED’s very mission of “advancing freedom worldwide” since less remains for its intended purpose abroad. There has also been a real human cost in maintaining a structure that may no longer be built for purpose: the pink-slipping of hundreds of staff.
With consensus in Congress and Middle America regarding the value of promoting American values overseas eroding, and with the NED core institutes ever more dependent on a single appropriation from Congress for just their respective Washington, DC-based operations, perhaps it is time for a reset or, at least, a reassessment.
After 43 years, what are the current challenges facing democracy and economic prosperity around the globe and what, if any, is the role of the NED in responding to them? Is its form and function still adequate to the task? Can congressional consensus be revived and the American electorate convinced of NED’s value?
Continuing to fund the NED and its components parts without answering these questions assumes that American taxpayers have unlimited tolerance for how the federal budget is spent or that such taxpayers will fail to notice and question the disconnect between politicians who decry foreign assistance yet continue to appropriate tax dollars for it. It would also assume that NED’s expenditures would be effective in advancing the causes of democracy and human rights abroad in the absence of a supportive U.S. foreign policy framework.
The bottom line is that public engagement on the issues at stake is long past due. That holds for those who believe in the mission of the NED as well as for those who may not know what the NED is (i.e., the majority) but who support the protection of human rights and democracy oversea. It also applies to those in Congress who continue to allocate funding for the NED as if on a 43-year-old autopilot setting. Such engagement would also help answer the more critical question of whether what the NED is ostensibly advancing abroad still reflects the values and ideals that the U.S. government espouses at home.
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Whither the National Endowment for Democracy?
Aggregated summary from an independent source. Read the original at FPIP.