The National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a US-funded organization that meddles in elections and pushes regime change around the world in the name of spreading democracy, has confirmed reports that its funding from the US government has been frozen, forcing it to suspend operations.

“The [NED] is currently unable to access its Congressionally appropriated funds, which sustain nearly all of its grantmaking and operations. As a result, for the first time in the organization’s four-decade history, it has been unable to meet its obligations and has been forced to suspend support for nearly 2,000 partners worldwide,” the NED said in a statement on Tuesday.

While the NED presents itself as an “independent” organization, it is nearly entirely funded by the US government, which it acknowledged in the statement. The NED claimed that its funding should have been exempt from the Trump administration’s pause on foreign aid.

“Ninety-five percent of NED’s funding is directly appropriated by Congress and is not considered foreign assistance. This funding therefore was not subject to the executive order freezing foreign assistance for a ninety-day review. However, despite being exempt, access to these funds has been inexplicably cut off, forcing NED to halt all partner support and furlough the majority of its staff,” the NED said.

The NED, which was founded during the Cold War in 1983, received $315 million from the US government for the 2025 fiscal year. In 1991, Allen Weinstein, a co-founder of NED, acknowledged to The Washington Post that a lot of what the organization did was done “covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”