US to slash nearly all funding for overseas pro-democracy initiatives: Report
The US State Department has been advised to cut nearly $1.3bn in grants for global pro-democracy initiatives, according to a report in The Guardian on Thursday.
The move would cut approximately 80 percent of programmes that sit under the Bureau for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labour (DRL), except for two programmes that operate in China and Yemen. The State Department oversees the DRL.
The overhaul was reportedly outlined in a foreign assistance review produced by the Office of Management and Budget and would impact 391 active grants. The review was seen by three State Department officials, who were sourced by The Guardian.
Such programmes fund pro-democracy activists or communities overseas in places like Cuba and Venezuela, with little information on these initiatives available, as the State Department fears it will put involved individuals in danger.
According to the State Department website, DRL was created in 1977 to “help advance individual liberty and democratic freedoms around the world” and supports people who wish “to live in freedom and under democratic governments as a means of combating terrorism and the spread of authoritarianism”.
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The report went on to say that a new senior adviser to DRL recommended using funds earmarked by Congress to cover key administration projects, such as the resettlement of white South African refugees to the US, and to support the legal defence of right-wing French politician Marine Le Pen. It is currently unclear whether DRL will follow the recommendations.
The senior adviser providing the recommendations, as outlined in a DRL white paper, is a recent college graduate named Samuel Samson, according to the report. Samson is one of a number of young people to rise under the Trump administration, and his recommendations reflect a change in how the US is approaching foreign intervention.
Samson recently wrote a controversial post on the State Department’s Substack page, titled “The Need for Civilizational Allies in Europe”, in which he criticises Europe for having “developed into a hotbed of digital censorship, mass migration, restrictions on religious freedom and numerous other assaults on democratic self-governance”.
State Department cuts
In April, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced he was restructuring the State Department by cutting jobs and scaling back human rights offices.
"The Department is bloated, bureaucratic and unable to perform its essential diplomatic mission in this new era of great-power competition," Rubio said in a statement, referring to the US rivalry with China.
"The sprawling bureaucracy created a system more beholden to radical political ideology than advancing America's core national interests."
One key change will be the elimination of a division in charge of "civilian security, democracy and human rights", the statement went on to say.
It will be replaced by a new office of "coordination for foreign assistance and humanitarian affairs" that will absorb the functions of the US Agency for International Development (USAID). The agency was gutted by the newly minted Department of Government Efficiency at the start of the Trump administration.
The cuts at USAID eliminated more than 80 percent of programmes.
The new office will oversee a bureau on democracy, human rights and religious freedom - a shift from the current democracy, human rights and labour bureau, which included advocacy for workers' rights overseas.
In an opinion piece, Rubio aired grievances about previous work within the bureau, including its unsuccessful internal push to restrict weapons sales to Israel on human rights grounds.
"The Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor became a platform for left-wing activists to wage vendettas against 'anti-woke' leaders in nations such as Poland, Hungary and Brazil, and to transform their hatred of Israel into concrete policies such as arms embargoes," he wrote in the piece on Substack.
Almost 3,400 employees are set to be laid off any time now.
Withering US soft power
Since President Donald Trump took office, he has been eroding the traditional pillars of American diplomacy and soft power worldwide.
Middle East Eye reported on the impact of the initial USAID cuts on 1.8 million Sudanese experiencing famine. Food boxes sent by the US were rotting in warehouses because the agency no longer provided the necessary funds for actual distribution.
Since 1946, the Middle East and North Africa have been the biggest recipients of US financial assistance. Between April 2023 and April 2024, Congress appropriated approximately $9bn for the region.
While most of the aid went towards military assistance, a portion was funnelled into democracy programmes via USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy, a quasi-autonomous agency funded largely by the US Congress.
MEE reported in May that the Trump cuts to USAID have already impacted human rights defenders in the region who were reliant on the small grants to relocate and resettle abroad.
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