US funding for global internet freedom ‘effectively gutted’

For nearly two decades, the US quietly funded a global effort to keep the internet from splintering into fiefdoms run by authoritarian governments. Now that money is seriously threatened, and a large part of it is already gone, putting internet freedoms around the world at risk. Managed by the US state department and the US Agency for Global Media, the program—broadly called Internet Freedom—funds small groups all over the world, from Iran to China to the Philippines, who built grassroots technologies to evade internet controls imposed by governments. It has dispensed well over $500 million in the past decade, including $94 million in 2024. Then came Doge, President Trump’s department of government efficiency, tasked with reducing the size of US government agencies and initiatives. Career employees who staffed Internet Freedom resigned or were sacked in 2025 as part of larger reductions. Many of its programmes were cut permanently; its main granting office issued no money in 2025. The Open Technology Fund, a nonprofit that works with the government to direct roughly half of this money, won a lawsuit to get some of this funding restored in December; the Trump administration is now appealing against that ruling.