The Trump administration’s swift demolition of key governmental and government-funded institutions promoting democracy abroad is a clear attack not just on important institutions but also on American values. Support for international democracy and human rights are prominent casualties in the destructive swath that President Donald Trump and former advisor Elon Musk’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ (DOGE) have cut through the US foreign policy infrastructure since January 2025. Ideals that once characterized the Republican Party’s support of human rights and democracy as a hallmark of its approach to the world have been abandoned.
Nobody should have failed to see this coming. As this writer put it just prior to the 2020 US election:
The administration’s cuts to the Department of State and the US Agency for International Development (USAID), as well as to billions in foreign aid, has also harmed US funded non-governmental organizations (NGOs), American and foreign, that do important international rights and democracy work, including in the Middle East. This compounds the damage to the reputation and influence of the United States and makes life harder for all democracy and human rights defenders around the world—something that no doubt is a feature, not a bug, of Trump’s strategy.
First Strike: A Brief Recap
Trump’s dismantlement of the US government’s democracy and human rights enterprise began with an Executive Order on January 20—Inauguration Day—that froze most US foreign aid (and about 90 percent of USAID’s total grants) for an initial period of 90 days while DOGE was supposedly reevaluating programs for ‘realignment’ with Trump’s priorities. But in Trump’s Potemkin “review,” most funding was summarily terminated, and USAID was dismantled, before 90 days. Despite a flurry of litigation winding its way through the courts to challenge the legality of the cancellation of funds and massive layoffs of USAID staff, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who was named interim head of what little remains of the agency, has continued to implement the foreign aid cuts. While the biggest blows fell on food and health initiatives that fed and treated millions of people worldwide, Trump has also nearly zeroed out funding for important democracy and human rights promotion initiatives. The remaining shreds of USAID are being folded into the Department of State, where Rubio plans to shrink the staff and budget and to drastically reorganize the institution, including by cutting and downgrading the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor (DRL), which previously enjoyed bipartisan support, including from Rubio himself.
Critical Pro-Democracy NGOs Crippled or Destroyed
Perhaps a lesser known story, however, is the effect of all this turmoil on the international democracy and human rights promotion ecosystem, which extends far beyond US government agencies, hitting prominent NGOs in Washington that received some funding from the American government, as well as the groups and activists they have supported around the world.
Early this spring, prominent, bipartisan Washington institutions funded largely or partly with federal funding and associated with a values-based US role in the world were early victims of the administration’s campaign to dramatically scale back US global engagement.
Bipartisan Washington institutions associated with a values-based US role in the world were early victims of Trump’s policies.
The United States Institute of Peace (USIP), a congressionally-chartered organization (its creation signed into law by former President Ronald Reagan) was founded to identify root causes of conflicts worldwide and advance non-violent solutions, providing scholarships, grant funding, training, and policy research. In the Middle East, USIP was involved in peace-building and good governance promotion in Israel and the Palestinian territories, Iraq, Syria, and Tunisia, among other places. But in March 2025, DOGE employees invaded USIP headquarters in Washington, DC with the help of armed local police, ousted its president and most of its staff, took over the building (which is owned by the organization, not the US government), and attempted to transfer its assets.
All of this was ruled illegal in May by a federal judge, and the organization’s leadership has regained control of USIP’s headquarters. But it is unclear whether and how USIP will be able to stand up cancelled programs and resume support of peace-building and human rights protection worldwide. The personal, and personnel, consequences are destructive. Even if Trump’s efforts to dismantle the work of such groups ultimately are legal failures, considerable—and intended—damage has been done.
The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, founded under Republican president Richard Nixon, was designed to fight back against authoritarian governments in the Soviet bloc through the dissemination of ideas and knowledge that would put America first in the global war of ideas. The center was dismembered in April 2025, with much of its staff placed on leave, despite its congressional charter and mainly private funding. It had been important in supporting human rights in the Middle East through its first-class research and its Middle East Track II Dialogues Initiative. One of its prominent scholars, Haleh Esfandiari, who has written extensively on human rights issues in Iran, was unjustly detained by the Iranian government in 2007.
DOGE also attacked the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the flagship of American international democracy promotion efforts. This institution, created through Ronald Reagan and Democratic lawmakers to serve as a bulwark against autocracy worldwide, was nearly gutted by Trump administration actions to impound its funding, which includes $300 million in grants for democracy and human rights activists in some 100 countries annually. NED was forced to furlough about 75 percent of its staff and some 1,800 projects worldwide remain in limbo. In the Middle East, where NED maintained a robust program under very difficult circumstances, 305 projects in 15 countries to the tune of $31.7 million are at stake. The organization successfully sued the Trump administration to regain access to some $167 million dollars of frozen congressionally appropriated funding. Some staff have returned, and there are encouraging signs that all of the appropriated monies will be restored. But the battle is far from over, as Trump wants Congress to eliminate NED funding in the Fiscal Year 2026 (FY26) budget.
Another lesser-known casualty of Trump’s war against foreign aid and democratic values promotion is the Millennium Challenge Corporation, signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2004. This organization, its website explains, invested “in growth and poverty reduction, but only in relatively well-governed countries…This means that MCC is selective in where it works and that support for just and democratic governance is built into the agency’s DNA.” In the Middle East, MCC had relationships with important military/counterterrorism partners Jordan and Morocco. But DOGE has targeted the MCC for cuts, and Trump’s foreign aid funding recissions and his FY26 budget proposal to Congress would slash federal support for the organization, killing an institution that another Republican president had built with bipartisan support and that was widely seen as important to encourage more effective governance though strategic investment.
Ripple Effects on International Civil Society
The trashing of USAID, parts of State, foreign aid providers, and important values-oriented institutions has also had a detrimental effect on the pro-democracy community in Washington and beyond.
Take, for example, NED’s four core grantees, who together have received about half of NED’s total grants. They are the American Center for International Labor Solidarity, the Center for International Private Enterprise, the National Democratic Institute (NDI), and the International Republican Institute (IRI). Major funding cuts to NED will deeply damage these groups’ ability to carry out the promotion of rights and freedoms in the Middle East and elsewhere. NDI has been forced to terminate 93 of its 97 awards, close most of its offices and fire 1,000 staff members. IRI did much the same, ending 92 of its 95 programs, closing all 64 offices overseas, and letting 85 percent of its staff go.
Trump has broadcast to the world that the US will no longer support activists who are not advancing MAGA goals.
Politically and diplomatically, Trump’s assault on US democracy and human rights promotion has broadcast to the world that the United States will no longer support activists who are not seen as advancing “Make America Great Again” goals. This author has personal experience as the former director of Middle East programs at Freedom House of how much that support means to activists in that region. Freedom House implemented cultural programs in Iran that had to be run like covert operations to evade security authorities. In Tunisia, Freedom House helped an emerging democracy run free and fair elections. In Egypt, we worked with activists who sought to inculcate democratic and civil society practices in a country that briefly emerged from autocracy. (Forty-three of us from different organizations were unjustly prosecuted by Egyptian authorities in the infamous Case 173 on foreign funding, but our felony convictions were later vacated by Egypt’s highest court.) According to a Freedom House fact sheet, the US foreign aid freeze forced the “termination of more than 80 percent of Freedom House’s programs and activities in more than 140 countries—including projects that supported, directly and indirectly, lifesaving measures for human rights defenders and political prisoners.” Major staff layoffs were an inevitable consequence.
Without the lifeline of financial and moral support from organizations such as NDI, IRI, Freedom House and others, the ecosystem of US democracy and human rights promotion is badly weakened. Without support from the United States government, many activists feel exposed. Repressive governments in the region no longer have to fear even the mildest criticism of their abuses.
Trump Makes It All Clear
The Trump administration’s abandonment of the US human rights agenda was made plain in his speech to assembled Arab leaders in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on May 2025. He reiterated virtually the words he used, also in Riyadh, in 2017, telling the gathering that the United States would no longer be “giving you lectures on how to live or how to govern your own affairs,” earning enthusiastic applause, and added that America stands behind their efforts to create “your own destinies in your own way….[building] the most prosperous, most successful nations” along the way. He said other things too about “the gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi” (two places known for extreme repression) and scorning the “interventionists” from outside who “wrecked far more nations than they built.” The speech only briefly mentioned Gaza, where the death toll from Israel’s genocide against Palestinians is reported to be nearly 54,000, and where Israel is implementing an evident starvation strategy. Trump blamed Hamas and Iran for the disaster there and moved on.
The defining theme of the trip was business: ostensibly, America’s, but more likely, Trump’s. The White House announced $600 billion in business deals for various US corporations amassed during the tour (albeit through some dubious accounting). The Trump family deals are too numerous to mention, and many were reached during visits by the president’s family members prior to the Gulf swing. But they include the “gift” from Qatar of a $400 million luxury Boeing 747 to serve as Trump’s personal Air Force One, likely in violation of the US Constitution’s Emoluments Clause, supposedly to be donated to his presidential library after his term ends.
The overall message seems clear. The United States, it appears, is finished with anything other than making money in the Middle East, especially money for Trump, his family, and his friends. The US promotion of human rights, democracy promotion, and civic and political liberties will not continue at any level. Corporate and government interests (possibly indistinguishable) will reign. The US government will no longer even pay lip service to abuses and other repression by MENA governments, or to Israel’s mass slaughter of Palestinians. Interventions of any type by the United States will need to be bought and paid for in advance by those requesting them, if they take place at all.
This may well be a sustainable policy in the short term, and might even appear hard-headed, realistic, and useful to American advantage. But it has risks. Abandoning the principles that undergird America’s political “brand” worldwide will make the United States less distinguishable from its chief rivals, namely China and Russia, opening new roads of influence for those two countries in Africa, the Middle East, and elsewhere. And when mass pro-democracy protests in the region erupt again, as is likely to occur eventually with or without US support, the United States will be in a far less influential position. The Trump approach has been good news for dictatorships around the globe, terrible news for human rights defenders, and dark tidings for millions of Americans who value their own freedoms as well as their country’s global image and influence.
The views expressed in this publication are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the position of Arab Center Washington DC, its staff, or its Board of Directors.
Featured image credit: Shutterstock/Philip Yabut
