This story was originally published by ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power.
By Anna Maria Barry-Jester and Sharon Lerner, ProPublica
For decades, the U.S. Department of State gave money to groups protecting free speech, human rights and persecuted minorities in poor and authoritarian countries. To decide what to fund, staffers with deep expertise typically pored over reams of information on abuses under the most repressive regimes and held an open competition to fund groups to work in those countries.
This year, Trump administration officials presented State Department workers with their own list of organizations that should be funded. To the shock of many staffers and lawmakers, they proposed at least a dozen grants that would bypass the normal open bidding process. They also sought to give taxpayer dollars to groups aligned with conservative and anti-immigration movements in Europe as well as advocates for white South Africans, according to interviews and documents reviewed by ProPublica.
Among the organizations appointees have considered funding in recent months are a British free-speech organization that has fought against bans on “gay conversion therapy” and an Afrikaner group run by a controversial figure who has called for self-governance of the white ethnic minority within South Africa.
This type of giving would mark a stark departure from the traditional aid that helped torture victims and documented rapes, political violence and other abuses in some of the most oppressive countries in the world, according to more than a dozen former State Department employees. One new program with $4.9 million of competitive funding available to groups to develop “civilizational self-confidence in Europe” is slated for “research, conferences, cultural engagements, and support for civil society” in wealthy democracies.
“I’ve never before seen U.S. government funding for such groups,” said William Allchorn, a senior research fellow at Anglia Ruskin University and an expert on radical-right extremism in the United Kingdom. “It’s crossing the Rubicon, isn’t it?”
Strict agency rules have long required an open bidding process whenever possible to guard against waste, fraud and abuse. The situation is all the more concerning, contracting experts and former staffers said, because Trump officials handpicked the potential recipients, decisions previously made by a panel of government experts.
One of the key figures involved in the grants is Samuel Samson, a 27-year-old deputy assistant secretary of state who previously worked as a fundraiser for a group that aims to bring people with an “America first” worldview into government. Over the past 18 months, he has courted far-right leaders in Europe, an area with which he believes the U.S. shares a “common civilizational struggle.”
One group expected to receive a no-bid grant is the Free Speech Union, a British organization founded in 2020 to counter “cancel culture.” The $5 million grant is to be used to combat “digital overregulation,” provide support for individuals facing “deplatforming” and advocate against “restrictive online safety and hate speech laws.”
The largest award the bureau has put forward this year, $40 million, is for the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. The proposed sum is staggering to people familiar with the State Department’s allocation practices and would dwarf the organization’s budget.
Trump officials are also planning to finance at least one organization to research crime and atrocities against minority populations in South Africa. This spring, staff were initially told to begin the process of awarding funds to Lex Libertas, a South African organization founded by a prominent member of the nation’s white Afrikaner movement. Extensive research shows white South African farmers are not victims of crime at higher rates than other groups.
Former diplomats told ProPublica that it makes little sense to focus on the victimization of white South Africans given the enormous suffering elsewhere in the region. “It’s laughable to suggest that on the African continent, the prime issue of human rights concern is whites in South Africa,” one former agency official said.
One of the most controversial grants that officials singled out for funds was recently dropped after Democratic lawmakers raised objections during briefings last week. That grant was to 878, a British American think tank created this year focused on “existential threats to Britain, to America, and to our shared Judeo-Christian civilisation.”
Since creating a bureau to focus on human rights in 1977, the State Department has championed human rights and democracy in more than 100 countries. But after Secretary of State Marco Rubio took office, the fate of the bureau dramatically changed. Trump suspended all foreign aid in his first week in office, and cuts by the Department of Government Efficiency decimated the bureau, which is now working with a severely reduced budget — about $190 million compared with over $500 million in 2024.
“We’re just implementing the agenda of the president as we’ve been directed through the national security strategy and the White House,” a State Department official told ProPublica.
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