SUMMARY
- 81 Republican members of the House of Representatives voted with 210 Democrats to re-fund the National Endowment for Democracy (NED)
- NED is a nonprofit created by Congress in the 1980s, which has been a major source of U.S. soft power abroad.
- Originally tasked with supporting anti-Soviet movements during the Cold War, NED repurposed itself after 2016 to promote the global “counter-disinformation” industry that resulted in the censorship of American speech.
- It funded the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), a foreign entity that worked to financially blacklist conservative American media.
- In a missive to NED, GDI reported approvingly that it had been credited with reducing President Trump’s reach on social media.
- NED’s current president and CEO, Damon Wilson, was executive director of the Atlantic Council during President Trump’s first term, at a time when the organization played a pivotal role in building the online censorship machine which overwhelmingly targeted domestic American conservative voices, including the President himself.
- NED has also bankrolled efforts to establish foreign censorship regimes, including in Brazil and the European Union.
- These foreign regimes are now the primary source of censorship pressure against Americans and American platforms like X and Elon Musk, who one longtime NED employee described as “a more proximate threat” to overseas democracy than China or Russia.
On January 14-15, 2026, the U.S. House of Representatives considered a government funding package (part of ongoing appropriations to avoid a shutdown). Republican Rep. Eli Crane (R-AZ) proposed an amendment to defund the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a congressionally funded nonprofit that has long been seen as an arm of U.S. overseas regime change and political influence efforts, and played a major role in the rise of online censorship.
Rep. Crane’s amendment to defund the organization was defeated 127-291, with 81 Republican members joining with 210 Democrats to preserve NED’s more than $300 million annual budget, a black box of spending that is shrouded in secrecy thanks to NED’s long-running refusal to publicly disclose how its taxpayer-funded war chest is spent.
The secrecy is not unexpected, given NED’s reputation as a second CIA. In a 1991 Washington Post interview, its own founder admitted “a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.” The New York Times in 1997 described NED’s role as “influencing domestic politics abroad” and “do[ing] n the open what the Central Intelligence Agency has done surreptitiously for decades.”
The CIA also had a direct hand in NED’s creation. As highlighted by FFO founder and executive director Mike Benz, the head of the CIA wrote to the head of the Department of Justice, urging the latter to support the creation of NED in the 1980s. In the letter, the head of the CIA also noted the importance of concealing the Agency’s involvement in NED’s creation.
The first decade of NED’s work was what you might expect of a second CIA. It worked to undermine America’s communist adversaries in the Warsaw Pact, supporting many of the nascent democracy movements of the 1980s that would lead uprisings in various communist nations, including Russia itself.
Following the first election of Donald Trump in 2016, however, NED’s activities turned to a more troubling objective — containing the rise of right-wing populism around the world, and supporting the global “counter-disinformation” industry. These efforts directly blow back on Americans, by undermining their ability to speak freely online, and by harming American technology companies.
Targeting Donald Trump
As an ostensibly nonpartisan foreign-facing organization whose funds are managed by the U.S. State Department, NED (much like the CIA) is not supposed to involve itself in domestic U.S. politics. It is certainly not allowed to do so in a partisan manner, or fund any efforts aimed at undermining particular elected officials.
And yet, in a quarterly report to NED, the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), a British “counter-disinformation” org that received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the U.S. taxpayer via NED, bragged that its efforts had led to the censoring of Donald Trump on social media — while the President was still in office, during his first term.
It has also emerged that the GDI isn’t merely a foreign entity — it’s like to the UK’s Ministry of Defence. Researchers on X have uncovered that a longtime GDI employee, who briefly served as the organization’s Chief Technology Officer, was also Senior Principal Scientist at UK’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory from 2022 onwards, overlapping with her work at GDI. During the 1990s, Linkedin records show she worked for the Defence Research Agency at the UK Ministry of Defence, then the country’s largest science and technology organization.
While there are many examples in this report of NED dollars funding censorship, its funding of the GDI, a foreign entity that directly targeted a sitting U.S. president for censorship, is the most eye-opening. It shows NED went well beyond its remit to spread American influence abroad, recklessly funding a foreign organization that directly intervened in domestic American politics.
It goes further. The current president and CEO of NED, Damon Wilson was appointed during Joe Biden’s term, in 2021. Before that, from 2011 to 2021, he was Executive Vice President at the Atlantic Council, at a time when the nonprofit was knee-deep in anti-Trump activities, including the infamous election integrity partnership, which drove censorship of pro-Trump voices as well as the President himself during the 2020 election.
Wilson took a particular interest in the “counter-disinformation” agenda, personally overseeing a 2019 conference focused on the issue in London, where Trump tweets were displayed to attendees as examples of disinformation.
One of the most active “counter-disinformation” researchers, Dean Jackson, who worked at NED throughout Trump’s first term in office, has admitted in live interviews that it was Trump’s election which spurred his own work in the burgeoning field of censorship operations.
He would go on to undermine the earliest justifications for counter-disinformation operations, the claim that it was purely a mechanism to counter foreign adversaries, instead claiming that it was “hyper partisan” and “conservative” media that were doing a “tremendous amount of damage to American democracy.”
These are the words of a NED counter-disinformation expert who conducted his work for the organization during the first Trump administration: domestic speech, not foreign, was the real threat to be contained.
Building the Advertiser Boycott Machine
The Global Disinformation Index didn’t just target Trump, of course. Its primary aim, as widely documented in the media, was to convince advertisers to withdraw funding from disfavored (and overwhelmingly conservative) news websites.
Infamously, its blacklist of news websites labeled “most risky” for advertisers encompassed virtually the entire conservative media in the United States: American Spectator, Newsmax, the Federalist, the American Conservative, One America News, the Blaze, the Daily Wire, RealClearPolitics, Reason, and the New York Post. Its “least risky” list, which included Steele Dossier publishers BuzzFeed news, included just one marginally conservative publication, the Wall Street Journal.
In its 2021 report to NED, GDI reported that its activities had caused a C$100 ($70m) drop in revenue to targeted news sites. It also boasted of its influence inside the advertising industry, noting that its “white paper on disinformation” had been published the “main US advertising agency trade body.”
GDI was backed not only by NED, but also by the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, which was shuttered by the Trump administration. While NED’s funding was also frozen by the Trump administration, via DOGE, its funding ultimately rests in the hands of Congress.
NED’s support for GDI wasn’t its only foray into the world of advertiser boycotts, a critical tool in the arsenal of online censorship that uses a critical revenue stream for online platforms and publishers to secure censorship concessions.
In its 2021 “Digital Directions” report, NED called for regulations around the world (regulations that would be unconstitutional in the U.S.) to force advertisers and brands to cut off disfavored online media, as well as “coordinated, interjurisdictional” lawfare to “demonetize disinformation.”
Supporting Foreign Censorship Regimes
Foreign censorship laws and regulations have emerged in 2025 as the top threat to American tech platforms seeking to preserve free expression for American users. The EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA) and the ongoing efforts of the Brazilian judiciary to punish American tech companies for allowing free speech are among the key global factors forcing U.S. tech platforms to preserve their political censorship apparatus.
NED-funded proxies directly supported these foreign initiatives. As FFO has documented, two NED-funded organizations – Reporters Without Borders, and the Global Disinformation Index signed on to an early effort to promote EU-wide regulations against “disinformation.” This would eventually evolve into the Digital Services Act.
A third organization, Bellingcat (established with over $100,000 in NED funding), is directly involved in the enforcement of the EU’s censorship regime by acting as a “digital media observer,” tasked with monitoring the web for disfavored online narratives.
Censorship industry pro Dean Jackson, who worked at NED for seven years, appeared on a panel alongside Katie Harbath, a fellow NED alumni, in 2024. Jackson personally lamented the changes made by Elon Musk at X, warning that alongside Republican investigations of online censorship, it could “jeopardize their relationships between government, researchers and [tech] platforms.”
On the same panel, a participant expressed her hopes that pressure from the European Union and its Digital Services Act would preserve the censorship apparatus at U.S. tech companies:
The panelist got her wish – X became the first platform to be investigated and fined under the DSA, for alleged refusal to open its data up to “disinformation researchers” like herself and NED-alumni Jackson.
It’s not just the EU. Arms of NED have been actively pushing censorship in Brazil, too.
The National Democratic Institute (NDI), is the Democrat-aligned wing of NED. It runs the Design for Democracy (D4D) initiative, which includes the International Republican Institute (IRI) the Republican-aligned NED wing, as a steering committee member.
One of D4D’s founding members is Marco Aurelio Ruediger, a Brazilian academic who has spent the last half-decade relentlessly advocating for Brazil to clamp down on free speech on U.S. tech platforms, particularly WhatsApp.
Ruediger has called for suppressing the “international exchange of ideas” between supporters of Donald Trump in the US and supporters of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil.
In a special edition of its newsletter dated November 18, 2022, D4D stated that Musk’s takeover “harms the future of Twitter,” and – just days into the platform’s new ownership – speculated about potential billion-dollar FTC fines against the company.
Though strong, D4D’s statement pales in comparison to the anti-Musk invective of Dean Jackson, an individual who, as previously mentioned, spent a large chunk of his career at NED.
Per Jackson’s LinkedIn, Jackson worked for over eight years at NED, where he focused on the “challenges that disinformation, media manipulation, and emerging technologies pose to democratic norms and institutions worldwide.”
Per his bio, Jackson also served as a staffer on the highly partisan January 6th commission in 2022.
Most importantly, Jackson was also project manager of the Influence Operation Research Guild at the State Department-funded Carnegie Endowment, the same institution that Marco Ruediger belongs to. Jackson’s tenure as project manager overlapped with the peak of online censorship in Brazil (2021 – 2023). Although he is no longer project manager, Jackson still produces research on “disinformation” for the Carnegie Endowment.
Jackson has not attempted to conceal his viewpoints. In April 2024, he published an article calling Elon Musk a “malign influence in Brazil” and a “more proximate threat” to Brazilian and American democracy than Putin’s Russia or Communist China.
In the article, Jackson stresses that he uses the term “malign influence” specifically because it is the term used by the US government to identify election threats.
The hyperlink in Jackson’s article leads to an FBI announcement in 2018 of a new program to combat “foreign influence operations.”
