US guts Internet Freedom funding pipeline

For two decades, Washington funded a quiet, technically sophisticated effort to keep the internet from becoming a set of national intranets. Now the US is discovering what “values-based” infrastructure looks like when it is financed like a discretionary program.

The Guardian reports that US funding for global “Internet Freedom” — grants administered via the State Department and the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM) — has been “effectively gutted.” The program has disbursed more than $500m over the past decade, including $94m in 2024, backing small teams building tools to evade censorship and surveillance in places such as Iran, China, Myanmar and the Philippines.

Then came “Doge,” the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency. According to the Guardian, career staff who ran the program resigned or were fired during 2025 cuts, many efforts were permanently reduced, and the main granting office issued no money in 2025.

The Open Technology Fund (OTF) — a nonprofit that routes roughly half of this money — won a lawsuit in December to restore some funding, but the Trump administration is appealing, the Guardian says. In parallel, the administration withdrew in January from the Freedom Online Coalition, a US-founded alliance meant to coordinate digital-rights diplomacy.

The immediate risk is not abstract “internet freedom” branding; it is operational decay in specific systems. The Guardian notes support for widely used tools like Signal and Tor, but also for less familiar high-leverage capabilities: satellite datacasting (broadcasting data like a TV signal to bypass mobile network shutdowns), and advanced anti-shutdown and secure-communications tooling used during crackdowns. The story highlights Iran’s January internet cutoff during a violent crackdown and the role circumvention tech plays in getting videos and evidence out.

If your anti-censorship stack depends on US government grant cycles, it is not a neutral civil-liberties project; it is a geopolitical instrument. It can be turned off with an executive decision, a staffing purge, or an appeal notice.

That fragility matters because censorship regimes do not behave like grant programs. They iterate, budget, and scale. When the defensive side is a patchwork of small teams waiting for reimbursement and compliance paperwork, the “open internet” becomes a slogan that expires at the end of the fiscal year.

Censorship resistance must be engineered as a property of the network — not a line item. The Guardian’s reporting shows why: the US built a load-bearing pillar, then treated it as optional. The result is a global user base discovering that their access to uncensored communications was a revocable subsidy.