State Department Carrying Out Secret Projects Using the NED

Biden’s State Department, run by Antony Blinken, has been running secret operations, much along the lines of the CIA, using an organization that hardly makes any headlines. In a report called a bombshell by independent conservative journalists, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) has been revealed to carry out secret projects for the State Department using taxpayer money.

The report “Black Box: Global Censorship Hub NED Reached Agreement with State Department to Conceal Government Grants from the Public” was published on November 18 by the free speech watchdog Foundation for Freedom Online (FFO). It pointed to lack of transparency in the operations of NED since the organization, which gets some $300 million annually from the State Department’s congressional appropriations, has failed to publish any grant project information since 2021, the year the Biden administration took the White House, violating the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act.

The FFO report wrote:

This cloud of secrecy obscures the operations of a government cutout that is deeply involved in government-backed censorship operations, and has long been characterized as a successor to the CIA of the 1960s and 70s. Indeed, according to its own founder, NED performs the same regime-change and foreign influence operations that were once the purview of the CIA. 

Created in 1983 by the Reagan administration, NED has been known to act like a wing of the deep state mainly below the radar of the news machinery or congressional oversight. The FFO also called it a “$315 Million Black Hole of Federal Funding.” The report cited NED’s grounds for avoiding such transparency – getting special status from the State Department to keep details of where its grant money goes from the public eye. As cited in the report:

NED management has since reached an agreement with our DOS Grants Officer to designate NED’s annual appropriation award as “sensitive” and therefore not subject to the annual FFATA reporting requirements.

NED’s secret political operations, including regime change in select countries, was highlighted in Redacted News (November 22), which is produced by independent conservative journalists Clayton and Natali Morris. Natali Morris pointed to the recent hiring of Victoria Nuland – the long-time Obama-Biden operative who is infamously known for her role in overthrowing Ukraine’s elected government in 2014 and ultimately leading to Ukraine’s current situation. NED hired Nuland in September to join its Board of Directors.

Media propaganda along the lines of leftist-globalist agenda appears to have a central role in the operations of NED. In early 2022, Declassifieduk.org called NED “CIA sidekick” as it reported on £2.6 million ($3.3 million) it gave to UK-based media groups. The story cited CIA whistleblower Philip Agee as:

“Nowadays, instead of having just the CIA going around behind the scenes and trying to manipulate the process secretly by inserting money here and instructions there and so forth, they have now a sidekick, which is this National Endowment for Democracy.”

A recent example of NED’s anti-conservative propaganda can be seen in the post titled “The Power of Liberal Nationalism” by M. Steven Fish published in the NED-run Journal of Democracy (October 2024). Among other things, the post calls Brazil’s conservative and anti-globalist former President Jair Bolsonaro “the gravest threat to democracy in Brazil since the end of military rule in the 1980s.”

The Amazon description of Fish’s recent book Comeback: Routing Trumpism, Reclaiming the Nation, and Restoring Democracy’s Edge (2024) calls Democrats “loyal to American values” while stating that Republicans “betray the nation and shred American values.” In his interview with UC Berkley News, Fish described Trump as:

“He’s sexist and abusive and bellicose and arrogant and everything else we hate.”

Writing for The American Conservative (November 29), Kelley Beaucar Vlahos suggested that the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) – suggested by Trump in his upcoming administration– should seriously consider NED for “its high priority list of federal cost cutting measures in 2025.”