DOGE attacks a bastion of Republican internationalism
A mix of MAGA purists and internationalist Republicans staffed Donald Trump’s first administration, with the old establishment generally holding the upper hand. But in his second term the populists are driving policy, and congressional Republicans mostly have stood aside. Consider the muted response to Elon Musk’s attack on the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Unlike some of Mr Musk’s broadsides against spending, this one is more about ideas than budget numbers.
Ronald Reagan and Congress created NED in 1983 primarily to fight the spread of communism. A classic “soft power” organisation, the group backed pro-democracy activists in communist countries. NED’s backers argue it helped bring about an end to the cold war by highlighting the lack of democratic legitimacy in the Soviet Union and its satellite states. More recently the organisation has supported civil-society and pro-democracy groups in a host of countries, such as Iran, China and Cuba.
Since its founding the group has enjoyed bipartisan support, but its strongest fans traditionally have been internationalist Republicans. Robert O’Brien, Mr Trump’s former national security adviser, serves on the NED board; Elise Stefanik, the incoming US ambassador to the United Nations, did so in the past. Its $300m budget is humble by federal standards.
Mr Musk and his team have blocked disbursements to the group, effectively starving it and its grantees of funding. Earlier this month the DOGE boss called Todd Young, a Republican senator, “a deep state puppet” for serving on the NED board. The billionaire later retracted the statement after speaking with Mr Young, but he did not back down from his assault on the group. “That evil organisation needs to be dissolved,” Mr Musk said, adding without evidence that the group had committed “crimes”. Days later the Centre for Renewing America, a think-tank founded by Russell Vought, Mr Trump’s activist budget chief, released a paper arguing that NED grants had “paved the way for the current Ukraine-Russia war” by supporting anti-Russian entities in Ukraine.
Mr Trump’s recent declaration that Ukraine is responsible for being invaded by its bigger neighbour echoes this line and is deeply at odds with how post-war Republicans once tackled international affairs. Conservatives critical of the attack on NED privately rue that Mr Musk and Mr Vought sound like the old left, seeing an American conspiracy at the root of all global conflicts. America’s adversaries. such as China, on the other hand, will welcome the disruption of support for dissidents.
The funding cut-off has had immediate and dramatic effects. The International Republican Institute, a NED grantee that conducts election monitoring and helps with anti-corruption efforts, has furloughed most of its employees and closed offices around the world.
“I fully support the audits and transparency. I think that’s all good, because there is some crazy stuff,” Don Bacon, a Republican congressman from Nebraska, says of DOGE. “I just find that they’re being rash, and then they’re having to backtrack when they realise, ‘Hey, the programme, maybe it was needed.’” Mr Bacon suggests that Republicans will soon enough reassert their power of the purse during the upcoming budget negotiations.
Many Republican lawmakers and their staff make a similar case, but DOGE officials have relatively limited contact with Capitol Hill. As for Republicans’ relative silence about the shutdown of pro-democracy programmes, even foreign-policy hawks simply don’t think NED is a hill worth dying on and prefer to privately push for the restoration of funding.
Fundamentally the fight isn’t about the deficit; at issue is around 0.02% of discretionary spending. It harkens back to a deeper philosophical struggle that has roiled the right for decades. Dan Fried, a NED board member and diplomat during the cold war, recalls the split in the anti-communist camp between realists and pro-democracy officials.
“There was a sense that you were going to wreck detente if you supported Soviet dissidents and that Solidarity and the dissidents inside Poland were either doomed to lose or destabilising, but in no case worth investing in,” Mr Fried explains. “But look what happened…you stand with your democratic ideals that turn out not to be charity, but a very canny and successful policy. And we are, in some sense, back to that debate.” But it takes two sides to have a debate, and for now the only one speaking up is winning.■
Stay on top of American politics with The US in brief, our daily newsletter with fast analysis of the most important political news, and Checks and Balance, a weekly note from our Lexington columnist that examines the state of American democracy and the issues that matter to voters.