The Uniparty Coalition Funds an Anti-MAGA, CIA-Adjacent NGO
By An Old Piece Of Leather
Republicans in the House Appropriations Committee have voted out of session to renew full funding for one of the top organizations involved in sabotaging Trump 1.0 and actively involved in undermining Trump 2.0
DOC – NATIONAL SECURITY, DEPARTMENT OF STATE, AND RELATED PROGRAMS APPROPRIATIONS BILL, 2026
The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is a quasi-autonomous NGO that has been described as the “traditional intermediary of the CIA.”
The NED was technically created in 1983 by President Ronald Reagan, but it was really birthed in the office of then CIA director William Casey.
Casey’s goal was to shift covert CIA operations, such as funding anti-communist movements, to an overt organization like NED to avoid the scrutiny faced by the CIA after 1970s intelligence scandals.
The aim, “to foster the infrastructure of democracy”.
Hence, the term “Democracy promotion” became the new buzzword to reframe the subtle, but forced spread of Western hegemony. NED is considered the ”premier CIA cut-out,” a true flag-ship in the massive armada of CIA-controlled NGO’s.
In the early 80s, after the scandals of the 50s, 60s and 70s were being exposed to the public by the Church Committee—and after Admiral Stansfield Turner’s Halloween Massacre purge—the Reagan era foreign policy establishment had to get creative in order to maintain the function that the CIA had played in the more clandestine side of geopolitics.
U.S. Deep State actor and former NED president Carl Gershman once explained,
“It would be terrible for democratic groups around the world to be seen as subsidized by the C.I.A. We saw that in the 60’s, and that’s why it has been discontinued. We have not had the capability of doing this, and that’s why the endowment was created.”
New York Times reporter John Broder, when commenting on the endowment’s purpose, wrote in 1997:
“… to do in the open what the Central Intelligence Agency has done surreptitiously for decades,”
Allen Weinstein, who worked in the same swarm of spook-infested NGO’s, commented about the general situation in an interview by the Washington Post in 1991:
“A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA …”
And CIA whistleblower Philip Agee described the NED as:
“Nowadays, instead of having the CIA going around behind the scenes and trying to manipulate the process by inserting money here and giving instructions secretly and so forth, they have now a sidekick, which is this National Endowment for Democracy, NED”
Frances Stonor Saunders, who researched covert CIA funding of cultural organizations during the Cold War, described it thusly:
“The NED is the umbilical cord of gold that leads directly back to Washington…And by this I’m not only referring to official U.S. government programmes, but to the vast network of clandestine players that plan and enact its information warfare operations. The cultural Cold War has never gone away, it’s just shifted from target to target.”
Upon the establishment of the NED, certain Congressional members deemed it essential to dissociate the NED from the CIA, leading to the inclusion of a rule prohibiting the involvement of any current or former CIA officials.
A Congressional aide who helped write the legislation told Robert Parry:
“one night late in the 1983 session, as the bill was about to go to the House floor, the CIA’s congressional liaison came pounding at the door to the office of Rep. Dante Fascell, a senior Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee and a chief sponsor of the bill.
The frantic CIA official conveyed a single message from CIA Director Casey: the language barring the participation of CIA personnel must be struck from the bill, the aide recalled, noting that Fascell consented to the demand, not fully recognizing its significance.
So, to reiterate, after the CIA was kneecapped in the late 70s, they discovered a much more subversive way to carry out their machinations; the creation of the NED and a swarm of NGOs and GONGOs that would continue to further the goals of the foreign policy establishment.
They would do it in such a way that the average American—and in many cases, foreign governments—would have no idea that the cold, skeletal fingers of Langley were hidden behind the glove of charities, foundation’s and foreign-aid groups.
They call the NED a “Non-governmental organization,” despite the fact that it was funded by the US government, accountable to the US government and staffed by members of the US government; this is a very common practice in the world of NGOs. The technicality of the NGO-designation allowed them to do things out of sight and with plausible deniability, things that even the CIA couldn’t do pre-reformation.
The NED was believed to have been essential in defeating the Soviets during the Cold War. One of the things the endowment did was fund and provide logistical support to revolutionary movements behind the Iron Curtain; this type of work would become the endowment’s bread and butter.
After the Cold War, the same foreign policy establishment and military industrial complex that was built up to fight the Soviets needed a new reason to exist, and so NED took on an expanded global role in assisting the CIA, USAID and the US State Department’s “Democracy promoting” activities around the world.
In the post The Language of Control, we briefly discussed what the term Democracy Promotion really means.
NED should not be looked at as a standalone institution, it is an organ in the body of a sprawling behemoth.
The NED distributes most of its money through four core channels:
The International Republican Institute (IRI) – NED’s Republican arm (IE CIA influence over Republican party)
The Solidarity Center – NED’s Union arm, aligned with the AFL-CIO (IE CIA influence over Unions)
The Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE) – NED’s Chamber of Commerce arm (IE CIA influence over the private sector)
And I’d be remiss not to include the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the money engine that makes this whole apparatus hum.
There are many additional NGOs and think tanks, but these are the institutions that are specifically couched under the NED.
Additional entities that have historically worked with the NED network include: the Open Society Network, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the United States Institute for Peace, the Atlantic Council, the Brookings Institute, and list goes on and on.
After BREXIT and the rise of Donald Trump, U.S. foreign policy focus went from countering communism to countering populism.
With the failure of the globalist “liberal world order,” many nations have started their own national populist movements.
The perceived success of Donald Trump and Nigel Farage caused many similar figures to emerge—individuals like Marine le Pen in France, Victor Orban in Hungary, Mateo Salvini in Italy, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, Jair Bolsanaro in Brazil, Santiago Abascal in Spain, André Ventura in Portugal, Javier Milei in Argentina, Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, Narendra Modi in India, and so many others.
All of these individuals and their supporters are now the target of the same monolithic web of subversive institutions that fought and defeated the Soviets in the Cold War. It’s not out of turn to say that there is an undeclared Cold War against National Populism.
Naturally, Donald Trump is one of the primary targets.
Critics argue that the NED, originally bipartisan, became increasingly partisan after Trump’s 2016 election, with some of its leaders and affiliates openly criticizing him as an authoritarian threat.
For instance, Carl Gershman—who we quoted earlier—published a 2016 Washington Post article suggesting Trump collaborated with Vladimir Putin to win the election, and later claimed Trump’s victory indicated a “broken” American democracy.
Other NED figures, such as board member and notorious neoconservative propagandist Anne Applebaum, have labeled Trump as authoritarian, comparing him to figures like Putin and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán in her book and articles, including one titled, “Trump Is Speaking Like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini” published weeks before the 2024 election.
Similarly, Robert Kagan, co-founder of the disgraced Project for a New American Century and NED advisor, resigned from the Washington Post after it declined to endorse Kamala Harris, having previously called a Trump dictatorship “increasingly inevitable.”
NED advisors like Larry Diamond and Rachel Kleinfeld, along with experts Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way have also criticized Trump and the Republican Party as antidemocratic, with Levitsky and Way describing the GOP as an “extremist, antidemocratic force” in 2022.
These statements suggest a pattern of hostility toward Trump and his supporters, framing them as threats to democratic values, which critics argue aligns the NED with progressive or anti-Trump agendas.
And yet, a House GOP appropriations bill for fiscal year 2026 proposed allocating $315 million to the NED; this comes despite President Trump’s earlier request to allocate $0 to the organization.
In January 2025, the Trump administration, through an executive order, froze foreign assistance funding, including $167 million in congressionally appropriated funds for the NED, causing a cash flow crisis. The NED sued the administration, alleging the freeze violated the Impoundment Control Act of 1974.
By March 10, 2025, the State Department, under Secretary Marco Rubio, began restoring access to these funds following legal pressure.
On August 11, 2025, a federal judge, Dabney L. Friedrich, granted a preliminary injunction, ordering the release of an additional $95 million, ruling that the freeze caused irreparable harm to the NED’s global reputation and programs.
This decision sparked pushback from some Republicans, notably Rep. Eli Crane, who introduced an amendment to defund the NED, aligning with Trump’s stance.
The funding renewal has fueled debates within the GOP.
Critics, including Elon Musk and the Center for Renewing America, have called the NED a “partisan political weapon” or “scam,” alleging it meddles in foreign affairs and supports anti-Trump agendas.
Supporters, including GOP figures like Marco Rubio and former board members like Elise Stefanik, argue that NED’s work aligns with U.S. interests by countering authoritarian regimes.
The funding restoration, despite Trump’s opposition, underscores a divide between traditional Republicans and Trump-aligned populists.
There are many Republicans who feel indebted to the NED for it’s usefulness in the Cold War era; there are also many Chamber of Commerce Republicans who’re doctored into the International Republican Institute (IRI) and Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE) web that is housed in the conservative side of the the NED network.
These politicians and the many companies in the Chamber rely on the heavy hand of the NED to create their markets or to secure favorable legislation or regulations in foreign countries, harvest natural resources, secure contracts and so on.
What I’m describing is the John McCain wing of the Republican Party (McCain actually ran the Republican side of NED, the IRI, for 25 years,) and that wing is unwilling to let go of this weapon that serves so many of their interests.
CEPPS
The Consortium for Elections and Political Process Strengthening (CEPPS) was created in 1995 as a joint venture of three NED-linked nonprofit organizations—the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES), the IRI, and the NDI— that aimed at “advancing democratic practices and institutions globally,” primarily funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
CEPPS was created as part of a broader strategy to influence foreign political processes, but it also played a central role in coordinating internet censorship, the primary vector for the foreign policy establishment to attack the rising tide of national populism.
CEPPS, through its partnership with USAID, has been linked to funding programs aimed at countering “disinformation,” which critics argue often translates to censoring narratives that challenge U.S. foreign policy or specific political agendas.
For instance, USAID has reportedly funneled significant funds—up to $799 million according to some sources—to CEPPS for initiatives that include global censorship platforms.
A key partner, Internews, described as a “senior technical partner” of CEPPS, has shifted from supporting journalists abroad to engaging in efforts to censor content labeled as “disinformation.” This includes suppressing dissenting voices under the guise of “protecting democratic processes.”
RELATED – Internews: A Global Megaphone with Familiar Strings Attached
CEPPS operates in over 140 countries, their “work” includes building censorship infrastructure in nations like Brazil, where it allegedly collaborated with USAID and the State Department to influence digital media environments.
CEPPS’s work, especially in countering disinformation, prioritizes certain political narratives, leading to the suppression of free speech.
With the NED’s grantmaking powers, and CEPPS capacity-built censorship network, you have one of the most effective weapons to fight against MAGA and potentially render Trump 2.0 as harmless as Trump 1.0.
And yet, there is a path to salvation for the NED, despite its checkered past, there will always be a need for soft power projection in a competitive world.
In the same way that Darren Beattie just became the head of the equally odious and Orwellian United States Institute of Peace [USIP], you could have someone who has been vocal about the NED take the reins and lead the reformation.
Like it or not, we need these institutions.
We need the NED, we need USAID, and we need a swarm of satellite NGOs to facilitate operations abroad.
However, the institutions need to be gutted, run in good faith, and every so many years, their activities need to be exposed for public scrutiny to ensure that they are not interfering with the democratic process in other countries, and to ensure that their powers are not being turned inward and used against the American people.
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The main body of this thesis justifies the elimination of the stated organizations yet in the final summary mildly appeals to maintaining their existence.
If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck chances are it’s a duck.
In a utopian, America First world one might somewhat disagree, yet in the real world the chances that utopia would not remain ad inifinitum.
The subject entities must be dismantled and disintegrated. The sociopath/psychopath inhumans would very likely be drawn to the criminal, gluttonous, self-serving benefits if those ‘institutions’ were allowed to continue.
God will punish our enemies. We will arrange the meetings.
Nothing Can Stop What Is Happening
anoldpieceofleather
