How much of USAID’s US$ 40 billion yearly investing and the National Endowment for Democracy’s and other government agencies ‘ budgets financed the assistance of journalists around the world?
When payments to so-called generous foundations are tallied up, the virtually$ 270 million in payoffs to “independent media” in the 2025 federal funds, which is a shocking amounts in comparison to the editorial budgets of the world’s news organizations, may be a small portion of the total subsidy.
The sum total was in the billions, and the Soros mom’s Open Society Foundations, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and other private organizations provided the same funding.
One of the main goals of USAID money is to procure media support for the US-supported Ukraine conflict efforts. Up until the Trump management turned off the faucet earlier this month, the company managed to fund nine out of ten media sources in Ukraine.
One Soros-allied” charity”, the East-West Management Institute, received$ 278 million from the US state, according to the established site usaspending. state:
Politico, owned by Germany’s Springer Verlag, received at least$ 34 million in funding from various US government agencies, according to the federal government’s website.
Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency ( DOGE ), which attempted to eliminate government waste, was able to uncover the largest covert operation in West history, surpassing earlier US intelligence operations like the Congress for Cultural Freedom from the Cold War.
However, the enemy, which cost hundreds of millions and maybe billions of dollars, was local political rivals in friendly nations rather than the Soviet Union.
And the plan was no military success, but a political and cultural change of the West itself: The so-called green agenda, variety, open borders, the removal of standard notions of gender and the ascent of globalist institutions at the expense of national sovereignty.
Few if any significant news organizations may escape the most severe problem controversy in the history of media. ” The skeletons just keep tumbling out of the closet”, tweeted Hungarian government official Zoltan Kovacs February 13, claiming$ 9 million of US Defense Department obligations to Reuters, the country’s largest news agency, for research on “large-scale social fraud”  , activities.
The payments are listed on the national government’s site, a picture is above.
How centered is the “independent” press on USAID and related money? According to Reporters Sans Frontieres, a Paris-based media freedom lobbying group, the expulsion of USAID help” throws media around the world into chaos”.
The media firm complained in a new blog that the Trump president’s freeze of USAID payments “has plunged NGOs, media outlets, and journalists doing important work into turbulent uncertainty”. RS F’s executive director Clayton Weimers added:
More than 30 countries support independent media through USAID programs, but it’s difficult to fully assess the harm the global media has caused. Many organizations are reluctant to make a statement out of concern for the potential for long-term funding or political unrest.
According to a USAID fact sheet which has since been taken offline, in 2023, the agency funded training and support for 6, 200 journalists, assisted 707 non-state news outlets, and supported 279 media-sector civil society organizations dedicated to strengthening independent media. The 2025 foreign aid budget included ,$ 268, 376, 000 allocated by Congress to support ‘ independent media and the free flow of information.
Reporters sans Frontieres added,” In Ukraine, where , 9 out of 10* outlets rely on subsidies and USAID is the primary donor, several local media have already announced the suspension of their activities and are searching for alternative solutions”.
Other US organizations provide significant funding to international media and non-governmental organizations. The National Endowment for Democracy makes 2, 000 grants per year averaging$ 50, 000 each, or$ 100 million per year.
USAID’s covert operations targeted foreign governments who violated Washington’s war plan in Ukraine. Hungary, a NATO member, has been a vocal critic of US policy in Ukraine, and its prime minister Viktor Orban has given President Trump advice on possible compromises.
A February 12 “flash report” from Hungary’s Sovereign Protection Office states that the scale of USAID funding of anti-government media and related entities is still under investigation. Entitled” The Role of USAID in Exerting Global Political Pressure”, the report states:
The United States Agency for International Development ( USAID ) has been a component of the US government’s implementation of its national security strategy since its establishment in 1961. The organization complements the work of the secret services by using covert and overt pressure to provide grants and aid. It uses a global network, which it has already helped to set up, as a tool for this purpose. The pressure network operates by taking over the civil, economic, political and media sectors in each country”.
The Hungarian Sovereign Protection Office further stated that” an essential component of the organization of the network maintained by USAID is conceal the origin and the true extent of the resources used by the actors” by citing direct USAID funding of several prominent organizations in the political option.
The Macedonian newspaper Republika reported,” Media outlets in Macedonia are publishing reports on USAID spending in the country, on politicized, left-wing programs and media outlets”.
Aleksandar Vucic, the president of Serbia, claimed last week in a television interview that the US government has spent more than$ 3 billion in an effort to undermine his government over the past ten years.
Biden’s USAID administrator Samantha Power, a senior National Security Council official in the Obama administration, stridently defended the agency in a February 6 New York Times op-ed. ” U. S. A. I. D. has become America’s superpower in a world defined by threats that cross borders and amid growing strategic competition”, Power said, accusing her critics of doing the bidding of” Moscow and Beijing”.
Former USAID officials have established numerous foundations that serve as buffers for the organization’s goals. Jeanne Bourgault is currently in charge of Internews Network, which she founded after two stints with USAID in Moscow and Kosovo. Internews received$ 418 million from USAID, according to the usaspending. gov website, “whose mission is to empower local media and the free flow of information worldwide”, in the foundation’s self-description.
According to medium.com,” This funding has enabled the NGO to establish a sprawling global footprint, working with 4, 291 media outlets, producing 4, 799 hours of broadcasts in a single year and training over 9, 000 journalists — all under the banner of promoting press freedom. However, critics claim that these initiatives are merely an extension of US foreign policy and shape narratives to fit Western geopolitical interests. Bourgault is paid$ 491, 000 a year.
In addition to putting pressure on advertisers to withhold funding from media outlets that report breaking news, USAID opposes Bourgault’s plan. We must collaborate with the global advertising sector because a lot of money goes to producing pretty bad content, she said at the World Economic Forum in Davos last year. And so you can work really hard on inclusion lists and exclusion lists, and really try to concentrate on ad dollars and challenge the global advertising industry to concentrate on the good news and information everywhere.
Liberal billionaires, meanwhile, subsidize major media directly. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation donated$ 5, 437, 294 to Germany’s Der Spiegel, the country’s top left-wing news outlet.
MintPress reported in 2021,” The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation ( BMGF ) has made over$ 300 million worth of donations to fund media projects. Recipients of this cash include many of America’s most important news outlets, including , CNN,  , NBC, NPR,  , PBS, and The Atlantic”.
” Gates also sponsors a myriad of influential foreign organizations, including the , BBC,  , The Guardian,  , The Financial Times, and The Daily Telegraph , in the United Kingdom, prominent European newspapers such as , Le Monde , ( France ),  , Der Spiegel , ( Germany ) and , El País , ( Spain ), as well as big global broadcasters like , Al-Jazeera”, the MintPress report said.
Asia Times was unable to independently verify the nature or scope of the” sponsorship” given to each individual media outlet.