SUMMARY
- The National Endowment for Democracy is a grantmaking organization that receives substantially all of its $300 million annual budget from the State Department’s congressional appropriations.
- In recent years, investigators and watchdog groups like FFO have faced difficulty locating NED’s grantees and projects, despite NED having a federal mandate to operate openly and share grantee information with the public.
- Audits of the NED for FY 2021, 2022, and 2023 reveal NED continuously failed to publish grant project information publicly, violating the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act.
- NED entered an unusual agreement with their Department of State Grants Officer to label the entirety of their $315 million congressional appropriation for 2024 “sensitive,” allowing them to hide all U.S. taxpayer-funded NED grantee information and activities from the public.
- NED rebuffed an offer from the State Department to review its subgrantees on a case-by-case basis, removing another layer of democratic oversight from its activities.
- It expect to never be subject to ordinary transparency requirements again, with taxpayers almost completely in the dark about how its $300-million budget – which has been used in the past to advance a global regime of online censorship with blowback against Americans – is spent