SUMMARY
- The US-funded Atlantic Council is pushing the EU to finance organizations that help enforce its digital censorship laws against American technology companies.
- The Council received at least $10.8 million in disclosed US government support during 2019–2024, including millions from the State and Defense departments.
- DFRLab’s report, developed through workshops with the Global Disinformation Index, calls for long-term grants, shared compliance data and a litigation fund under AgoraEU.
- Its initial €500 million endowment proposal has expanded to €1 billion, with investment returns intended to sustain the sector beyond recurring budget negotiations.
- EU governments are targeting a political budget agreement by the end of 2026. The funding campaign would strengthen an enforcement network already supplying evidence against American platforms such as X.
The Atlantic Council has received at least $10.8 million in disclosed US government support during 2019–2024. It is now urging the European Union to fund organizations that help enforce its digital censorship laws against American technology companies.
Its Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) is backing the EU’s proposed €8.6 billion AgoraEU program while demanding new grants, litigation funding and an endowment for the “democratic resilience” sector. The campaign comes as EU governments seek a political agreement on the bloc’s 2028–2034 budget by the end of this year.
Long-term grants and a €1 billion endowment
In The Case for Supporting Democratic Resilience, published on April 29, DFRLab senior fellow Mark Scott argues that Europe’s digital laws require a better-funded network of outside organizations to monitor and enforce them. He names the Digital Services Act (DSA), Digital Markets Act and Artificial Intelligence Act. The report describes their enforcement as “outsourced to a civil society community running on a 12–36 month grant cycle.”
The report draws on workshops held by the Atlantic Council’s Democracy + Tech Initiative and the Global Disinformation Index (GDI). National ministries, philanthropic funders, researchers and civil-society organizations participated under the Chatham House Rule, which prevents attribution of participants’ remarks.
GDI’s advertising exclusion lists targeted right-leaning American publications, including the Federalist, Daily Wire and New York Post. As FFO previously reported, GDI received US support through the National Endowment for Democracy and reported to that funder on its success in reducing advertising revenues for blacklisted publishers.
AgoraEU would combine funding for culture, media and civil society over seven years. The report divides its proposed €8.6 billion budget into €1.8 billion for culture, €3.2 billion for MEDIA+ and €3.6 billion for CERV+, covering citizens, equality, rights and values. The Council of the EU adopted a partial negotiating position on the program on May 12, leaving the financial settlement to the wider budget negotiations. EU leaders are aiming for a political deal by the end of 2026, followed by formal adoption of the budget and its programs in 2027.
Scott wants the EU to protect existing multi-year operating grants in AgoraEU’s implementing regulation and reserve a minimum share of CERV+ funding for them. He also wants eligibility widened to national organizations, including groups in Central and Eastern Europe, and nonacademic organizations allowed to lead funded research coalitions.
He proposes paying disinformation organizations’ running costs through five-to-seven-year grants, renewable once, with no requirement for recipients to provide matching funds. The grants would pay for staff, monitoring systems, datasets and funding passed on to national partners.
He also wants EU-funded compliance contractors required to share data with civil-society grant recipients under agreements keeping it out of the public domain. The report calls for a strategic litigation fund offering three-to-seven-year grants for cases before national courts, European regulators and the EU Court of Justice.
Separate grants would pay for monitoring “Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference,” or FIMI, and for audits of platforms’ and regulators’ compliance with EU digital laws. Scott also proposes election-monitoring grants beginning 24 months before a scheduled vote and continuing until six months afterward, with single-country applicants eligible.
Recipients would track regulatory actions and parliamentary inquiries citing their research in an “impact ledger.” The report proposes using those records to defend their funding during future budget negotiations.
Scott also proposes an endowment of at least €500 million. Its investment returns would fund the organizations indefinitely, and civil-society groups would have binding rights to nominate members of its governing board. The report explicitly seeks to insulate their funding from future political renegotiation.
By September 14, the proposed endowment had doubled. In a follow-up paper, Scott and GDI’s Richard Woods call for a €1 billion “European Democracy Stack Endowment Fund.” They calculate that a 4.5 percent annual payout would provide approximately €45 million each year.
They propose raising €400 million from the EU budget, €400 million from member states and €200 million from European institutional investors. The paper describes the organizations’ collective annual operating budget as approximately €144 million and says US government and philanthropic sources together supplied 56 percent of their income in 2024. The authors want Europe to provide a permanent funding floor as outside support shrinks.
Millions from US government departments
The Quincy Institute’s Think Tank Funding Tracker records a minimum of $10,796,001 in US government contributions for the available 2019–2024 period, including $4.25 million from the State Department and $3.5 million from the Defense Department.
The Council’s 2023 and 2024 donor rolls each place both departments in the $1 million-plus category. Those disclosures alone establish at least $4 million from State and Defense across the two years. Its 2024 roll also lists the Energy and Housing and Urban Development departments in the $250,000–$499,999 category.
FFO’s investigation of US-funded organizations involved in the EU’s censorship system identified a $300,000 State Department grant to the Atlantic Council to develop a transatlantic response to disinformation. The associated record referred to a June 2022 conference, when the Council and the EU’s US delegation hosted discussions of the EU-US digital policy agenda.
That FFO investigation identified 23 US-funded organizations involved in the EU’s disinformation code or digital-observatory network. Together, they had received $15.44 million in US government grants and awards.
In 2020, DFRLab joined the Election Integrity Partnership alongside the Stanford Internet Observatory, Graphika and the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public. DFRLab described the partnership as a means of exchanging information between researchers, election officials, government agencies and social-media platforms. FFO has documented how the coalition used that access to fast-track censorship requests to major technology companies during the 2020 election.
As FFO previously documented, Ofcom appointed Scott to its Online Information Advisory Committee in April 2025. The committee was created under Britain’s Online Safety Act to advise on misinformation, disinformation and the online information environment.
EU penalties against American companies
FFO’s previous coverage of the European Democracy Shield documented plans for a DSA crisis protocol, expanded election and content monitoring through the European Digital Media Observatory, and a new European Centre for Democratic Resilience. Scott’s report seeks longer-term financing for organizations doing that monitoring and enforcement work.
Under the DSA, the European Commission can impose fines of up to 6 percent of a provider’s global annual turnover. Its enforcement guidance lists changes to recommender systems and increased monitoring of keywords or hashtags among possible interim measures.
On December 5, 2025, the Commission fined X €120 million over its paid checkmark system, advertising repository and access to public data for researchers. The decision penalized restrictions on researchers’ ability to collect platform data, including through scraping.
FFO subsequently obtained recordings in which EU DisinfoLab credited civil-society organizations with supplying evidence used in the action against X. At the same event, the group urged funding through AgoraEU to fill gaps left by withdrawn American support.
‘Civil Society’ Takes Credit For Role in $140M EU Fine Against X
FFO’s coverage of an Effort News investigation detailed €56.76 million in related EU contracts and grants, covering compliance monitoring, research and technical support. Separately, the law makes the largest platforms pay annual supervisory fees. Scott’s proposals would add years of operating grants for disinformation organizations to that spending.
The pressure reaches American users through the platforms’ moderation policies. Research groups gather evidence for EU investigations, and the Commission can demand changes to how platforms rank and moderate content. When companies apply those changes across their global services, foreign rules restrict what Americans can see and say.
