MIAMI (news agencies) — When President Donald Trump froze foreign assistance for 90 days, he argued that such a drastic step was needed to eliminate waste and block what he derides as “woke” spending that doesn’t align with American interests.
Experts say the suspension has another, far more serious consequence: emboldening authoritarian strongmen. Wrapped into the billions the U.S. spends annually on foreign aid — more than any other nation — are hundreds of grants for grassroots groups dedicated to fighting for democracy in authoritarian countries around the world.
Among the groups that won’t be receiving critical funding is an organization that trained poll workers to detect fraud in Venezuela’s recent presidential vote, pro-democracy activists in Cuba and China and a group of Belarusian exiles behind a campaign to block the country’s strongman from winning a sham election.
“Cutting funding to these essential efforts sends the wrong signal to dictatorships and undermines the brave individuals fighting for freedom,” said Thor Halvorssen, founder of New York-based Human Rights Foundation, which does not receive U.S. government funding. “These particular investments should not just be restored — they should be prioritized.”
Congress budgeted at least $690 million on pro-democracy programs this year to counter authoritarian rule in eight countries considered by experts among the world’s least free: Belarus, China, Cuba, Iran, Nicaragua, North Korea, Russia and Venezuela.
Much of the pro-democracy funding is channeled through the U.S. Agency for International Development, where hundreds of employees were laid off amid attempts by billionaire Elon Musk to shut down the decades-old agency as part of his campaign to slash spending.
Trump, announcing the aid freeze on his first day in office, said all foreign assistance would be evaluated as to whether it makes the United States safer, stronger and more prosperous.
To overhaul USAID, he’s relying on Peter Marocco, a former U.S. marine and conservative activist from Dallas who briefly worked for the agency USAID during the first Trump administration. Marocco didn’t respond to an news agencies request for comment and The White House pointed to Trump’s comments Monday slamming USAID as being run by “radical left lunatics.”
While funding for some of the programs aligned with Trump’s “America First” foreign policy could resume, strongmen throughout the world are already celebrating and doubling down on attacks against opponents.
In Venezuela, Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello, the main enforcer of the ruling socialist party’s security apparatus, boasted last week on state TV that the aid channeled by USAID to the opposition was a “black box of corruption” that he vowed to investigate. Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said on X that he hopes the “notorious Deep State doesn’t swallow” Musk for pulling the plug on the agency.
In Nicaragua, a TV network owned by President Daniel Ortega’s sons declared that “Trump turned off the faucet” for the “terrorists.” Media outlets aligned with the Islamic leadership in Iran joked that the U.S. was treating its allies like “disposable tissues.”
Meanwhile, in Belarus, President Alexander Lukashenko crowed that Trump’s decision to cut funding for the “fugitive opposition” was in response to his government’s calls for a reset of bilateral relations.
Lena Zhivoglod, head of Honest People, which was set up in 2020 to counter Lukashenko’s official narrative and end three decades of his iron-fisted rule, said that she will soon have to lay off 15 staffers and terminate the lease on the group’s office in Warsaw, Poland.
“This isn’t about 15 Belarusian emigrants in Poland being forced to leave their jobs,” said Zhivoglod. “It means losing yet another battle to the propaganda machines of the Lukashenko regime and the Kremlin — machines that bombard Belarusians daily.”
The outlook was similarly bleak in Venezuela.
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