In 1983, under the guidance of Ronald Reagan, Congress created the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) to “foster the infrastructure of democracy.” Reagan had used the phrase a year before in an address to Parliament to describe the building blocks of liberty: a free press, unions, political parties, and universities. The president’s stated aim was noble, even high-minded—to advance democratic norms without the blunt instruments that had characterized earlier Cold War interventions.

The institutional form chosen to achieve this aim, however, was peculiar from the start. The NED was conceived as a government-organized non-government organization—a GONGO—deliberately positioned at arm’s length from formal diplomacy while remaining entirely dependent on congressional appropriations. This structure allowed U.S. officials to exert political influence abroad while maintaining a veneer of non-intervention and plausible deniability. The result was not independence, but ambiguity: foreign policy without clear accountability to either Congress or the president.

That ambiguity was not accidental. Early funding allocations made clear that the NED was intended to function as a soft-power instrument parallel to earlier intelligence and State Department efforts. The initial legislation included substantial support for the Free Trade Union Institute, which was closely aligned with the AFL-CIO, reflecting a continuation of the late Cold War strategy of cultivating ideologically “friendly” movements abroad as an alternative to Soviet-aligned leftism. In this respect, the NED was less a break from prior practice than a bureaucratic refinement of it.

Over time, this model hardened into a permanent apparatus. Today, the NED operates in more than 90 countries, funding political actors, media organizations, and civil-society groups that frequently define themselves in opposition to their own governments. The justification is familiar: such activity is said to advance democracy. Yet in practice, it often produces the opposite effect—undermining domestic legitimacy, inflaming internal divisions, and entrenching a professionalized activist class accountable primarily to foreign donors rather than to local constituencies.

The U.S. role in Ukraine after 2013 offers a telling illustration. NED-supported networks were deeply entangled in the political upheaval that culminated in the removal of President Viktor Yanukovych, a process widely celebrated in Washington as democratic renewal and widely perceived elsewhere as externally orchestrated regime change. Whatever one’s judgment of Yanukovych himself, the episode exposed a deeper contradiction: a democracy-promotion apparatus that relies on destabilization, elite NGO mediation, and permanent political agitation.

This contradiction is not merely strategic; it is philosophical. As Curtis Yarvin, writing as Mencius Moldbug, once observed, “[E]veryone loves democracy, yet everyone hates politics.” The NED embodies this tension. While claiming to empower human agency, it systematically bypasses the slow, organic processes by which political legitimacy is actually formed. It offers abstraction in place of order, procedure in place of authority, and moral intent in place of durable institutions.

The problem, then, is not that the National Endowment for Democracy has failed to live up to its ideals. It is that those ideals—conceived in a very different geopolitical and civilizational moment—no longer correspond to reality. By perpetuating an outdated theory of influence, the NED does not merely waste resources. It actively prevents the emergence of a foreign-aid and engagement strategy suited to a multipolar world in which stability, sovereignty, and civilizational continuity matter more than managerial notions of democratization.

Accountability, Accountability

At its core, the problem with the National Endowment for Democracy is not ideological excess but institutional disorder. NED occupies a gray zone in the American constitutional system: funded by Congress, operationally adjacent to the United States Department of State, yet insulated from meaningful executive control. This ambiguity has allowed it to exercise influence abroad while evading the forms of oversight that normally constrain instruments of U.S. foreign policy.

In constitutional terms, this is not a minor defect. Foreign policy is not a free-floating activity delegated to semi-private actors; it is an executive function, subject to congressional appropriation and statutory limits, but ultimately unified in the president. Congress may fund programs, but it cannot constitutionally create parallel diplomatic authorities that operate beyond executive supervision. Yet this is precisely what the NED has become.

Defenders of the NED often respond that it is “independent by design.” This is true—but independence from what, exactly? Independence from day-to-day diplomacy is one thing. Independence from executive authority, statutory reporting requirements, and lawful oversight is another. The latter is not independence; it is exemption. And exemptions, once normalized, metastasize into unaccountable power.

This tension has become especially visible during the Trump Administration. The NED’s leadership has increasingly behaved not as a neutral instrument of U.S. policy but as a self-directing actor aligned with a particular ideological consensus within Washington. Administrations change, but the NED remains in power. An organization that conditions its cooperation on the ideological compatibility of the sitting president is no longer serving the state—it is attempting to outlast it.

Transparency failures compound this problem. Despite receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in public funds, the NED has repeatedly resisted meaningful disclosure regarding grantees, operational decision-making, and coordination with other arms of government. Reporting is often formal rather than substantive, satisfying the letter of appropriations language while evading its spirit. This is not merely bad governance practice—it violates the premise under which Congress may appropriate funds at all.

If the law were applied consistently, Congress would face a clear choice. Either the NED must be brought firmly back within a framework of executive coordination, statutory transparency, and enforceable limits, or it must be defunded and dissolved. What cannot continue is the present arrangement, in which a quasi-governmental body exercises real political power abroad while answering fully to no one.

Metaphysics of Bureaucracy

The deepest flaw of the National Endowment for Democracy is not procedural but conceptual. It operates on a theory of democracy that confuses mechanism with legitimacy and process with order. That theory may have appeared plausible at the end of the Cold War. In the present era, it is a liability.

At the heart of NED’s model lies a simple assumption: that democracy can be midwifed through the cultivation of formal institutions—elections, NGOs, media platforms, activist networks—largely independent of cultural cohesion, historical continuity, or sovereign capacity. According to this view, once the “infrastructure” is in place, political legitimacy will follow. Experience has shown the reverse.

Long before the modern administrative state, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that democratic forms depend on habits, mores, and shared moral understandings that cannot be engineered from above. Democracy is not a technical system to be installed; it is the political expression of an already ordered society. When the form precedes the substance, elections become flashpoints, the media becomes factional, and civil society becomes a battleground rather than a mediator.

NED’s operational practice reverses this order. It elevates NGO professionals over churches, families, local authorities, and regional institutions—actors with social fluency but little organic mandate. These intermediaries are then presented as representatives of “the people” despite lacking durable legitimacy. The predictable result is backlash: democratic procedure without democratic consent.

In a multipolar world, this failure becomes strategic. Where NED undermines order, rivals exploit the vacuum. China offers contracts. Russia offers security. The United States offers procedural demands detached from local realities—and is then surprised when its influence collapses.

The Path Forward

The recent House vote to sustain $315 million in NED funding—despite an effort to defund it—reveals the limits of congressional reform alone. Appropriations inertia protects legacy institutions even when they contradict stated executive priorities. This is not a defeat; it is a signal.

Under existing law, the Office of Management and Budget possesses lawful mechanisms through the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 to defer or rescind funds that conflict with executive foreign policy determinations. The OMB’s FY 2026 request to zero out NED funding was therefore not symbolic. It was constitutionally grounded.

Procedural defunding is not a concession. It is a reaffirmation of constitutional order: Congress appropriates with conditions while the executive refuses to implement incoherent policy. Used properly, the OMB becomes a check on institutional drift rather than an adversary of legislative authority.

If the National Endowment for Democracy is obsolete, the question is not whether something should replace it, but what principles should govern that replacement. A post-liberal foreign aid regime would begin from sovereign primacy, organic political development, and order before ideology. It would privilege durable institutions over activist intermediaries and clarity over abstraction.

The NED was born in a moment when ideology seemed destiny and procedure seemed sufficient. That moment has passed. The task now is not to preserve its machinery, but to replace it with an approach capable of engaging the world as it is rather than as it once appeared from the closing years of the Cold War.