As Donald Trump and Elon Musk pushed through plans to temporarily shut down the US Agency for International Development this week, across the world some of the state department’s biggest critics were crowing.
For years, strongmen including Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán have sought to crack down on their countries’ independent news outlets — many supported by USAID grants — through draconian media laws and criminal cases.
Now many of those media organisations are struggling to stay afloat after Musk announced plans to put the $40bn USAID “into the wood chipper”, with most of the organisation’s 10,000 employees placed on leave and a three-month freeze imposed on spending.
“There is so much irony in it,” said Derk Sauer, founder of the Moscow Times, one of the few independent Russian news outlets that do not receive USAID funding. “Putin has been trying to kill independent media for God knows how many years now. Ironically the country that has this free speech is now about to give [it] the death blow.”
The deputy chair of the Russian security council, Dmitry Medvedev, who served as prime minister and president of Russia in rotation with Putin, praised Musk’s “smart move . . . to plug USAID’s deep throat”. Balázs Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister’s political director, described the freeze as “refreshing”. Latin American strongmen who have long accused USAID of propping up their opponents also felt vindicated by the move.
The 2025 foreign aid budget included $268mn allocated by Congress to support “independent media and the free flow of information” around the world, according to Reporters Without Borders, citing data that has since been removed from the US government website.
Jeanne Cavelier, head of Reporters Without Borders’ eastern Europe & Central Asia Desk, warned that the freeze would be “catastrophic” for many independent outlets in the former Soviet space, including in Ukraine, where most outlets rely on US grants. Of Belarus’s remaining independent news outlets — all of which are now in exile — at least six reported a complete cessation of funding, Cavelier said.
In Russia, one of the biggest independent outlets, Meduza, was due to hold a management board meeting on Friday to discuss its future. Other media had already begun implementing staff and salary cuts, said Sauer.
Created by President John F Kennedy to counter Soviet influence during the height of the cold war, USAID is best known for its work responding to the world’s worst humanitarian emergencies, with much of its current resources devoted to the crises in Gaza and Ukraine. The agency has also been a notable backer of organisations promoting democracy and independent news outlets, many in the former Soviet space.
In Georgia, the Russia-leaning ruling party has long criticised alleged US involvement in backing the pro-European opposition, which held large-scale protests against the country sliding back into Moscow’s orbit.
“The fact that American money was funding evil is now openly acknowledged by Trump and his administration”, said Mamuka Mdinaradze, head of the ruling Georgia Dream parliamentary faction.
Some of the USAID-funded projects were focused on countering and debunking Russian propaganda, which is spreading on social media despite western sanctions on propaganda outlets including RIA Novosti and Russia Today.
One fake video that has become viral in recent days purports to show Reporters Without Borders celebrating news of the freeze for Ukrainian outlets. Elsewhere on social media, conspiracy theories claim that mainstream news outlets, such as Politico, had been reliant on USAID funding and would be subject to the funding cuts.
Trump on Thursday amplified those theories, posting on his social media Truth Social: “LOOKS LIKE BILLIONS OF DOLLARS HAVE BEEN STOLLEN [sic] AT USAID, AND OTHER AGENCIES, MUCH OF IT GOING TO THE FAKE NEWS MEDIA AS A ‘PAYOFF’ FOR CREATING GOOD STORIES ABOUT THE DEMOCRATS.”
While the US government spends money on media subscriptions including Politico and the Associated Press, it does not fund those organisations. The BBC, which has also been accused of receiving USAID funding, only does so via the BBC Media Action, a charity that supports local media around the world. US grants made up roughly 8 per cent of its income last year.
Paul Radu, co-founder at the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), a global network of investigative journalists, said the cuts would affect more than a quarter of its budget this year. The OCCRP has worked on investigations such as the Panama Papers, Cyprus Confidential and probes into dirty money from Russian and eastern European countries.
“The short-term impact is really brutal. Like others, we are trying to find alternative sources of funding. Many will find it difficult to survive,” Radu said.
In Latin America, El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele welcomed the freeze, claiming that just 10 per cent of the USAID money “reaches real projects that help people in need”, while the rest “is used to fuel dissent, finance protests, and undermine administrations that refuse to align with the globalist agenda”.
The authoritarian socialist government of Venezuela has made similar claims, with President Nicolás Maduro having accused the US agency of funding Juan Guaidó as part of a bid to topple the government.
Colombian President Gustavo Petro — a leftist former guerrilla group member — on Tuesday said that USAID funding was “poison” and that the South American country should finance its own government programmes. Colombia has been the largest recipient of USAID funds in the western hemisphere, receiving about $400mn annually in development funding.
USAID had announced its return to central Europe in 2022 after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, with a programme designed to “strengthen democratic institutions, civil society, and independent media — the pillars of resilient democratic societies”.
One beneficiary was the Hungarian investigative reporting web site Átlátszó, which received up to 15 per cent of its operating budget from USAID programmes, according to its founding director, Tamás Bodoky.
“We got money to research the ownership structure of Hungary’s secretive private equity funds,” he said. Bodoky added that he hoped other donors, especially the EU, might be able to step in to make up for the shortfall.
András Pethő, editor of local Hungarian investigative outlet Direkt36, which as a OCCRP partner benefited indirectly from USAID funding, said the Washington-based agency had played an “instrumental” role with “digital security, training, equipment, technical data and research help”.
Hungarian outlets have developed a subscription model in the past decade, partly in response to Orbán’s crackdown on independent media. “But the further east you go, the less societies can support the media this way,” Pethő said. “There, the outlets and journalists depend on foreign support far more.”
USAID funding totalled $3.5mn in Hungary in 2023, the last year data was available, dwarfed by Ukraine’s $1.7bn or Moldova’s $309mn. Russian programs received little over $100mn that year.
One US official close to USAID said he believed that the organisation would not be completely dismantled and that some funding would resume after the 90-day review.
However, independent media observers said that might be too late.
“We’ve been told to stop working, we cannot spend any money, there is no cash coming in,” said one official working in the Balkans. “We can keep up contacts but we can’t plan any activities, especially none involving money.”
In New York, a group of half a dozen young Russian journalists studying on a USAID-backed grant said they were expected to lose their housing and living stipends starting next week.
Across their circle of colleagues and friends — journalists and activists, exiles from Russia but also other authoritarian countries around the world — the picture was the same.
“We’re all so tired,” said one of the journalists, who asked to remain anonymous because negotiations with their funding programme were ongoing. “First, you get expelled by Putin. Then this.”
Additional reporting by Polina Ivanova in Berlin, Daniel Thomas in London, Joe Daniels in Bogotá and Christine Murray in Mexico City
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