President Donald Trump’s weekend
shutdown of the US Agency for Global Media has among its casualties a small — but influential — fund that helps internet users worldwide combat censorship from oppressive regimes.
The Open Technology Fund, which gets $40 million a year from Congress, has contributed to technologies like the encrypted messaging app Signal, the anonymous browser Tor and an open-source tool built by
Psiphon Inc. that helped more than a million Cubans circumvent a social media blackout in 2021.
The grant fund was one of many victims of a Friday night
executive order that “eliminated to the maximum extent” seven government agencies — including the US Agency for Global Media, which funds OTF.
“The immediate consequence is that if this holds, over 45 million people will lose access to trusted and secure VPNs,” said OTF President
Laura Cunningham, referring to virtual private networks that provide proxies to evade efforts by governments to block websites.
That, she said, “will embolden dictators and eliminate the US government’s ability to reach audiences trapped behind authoritarian firewalls.”
The Open Technology Fund has enjoyed bipartisan support since it grew out of Radio Free Asia in 2011.
Former House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican, in 2020
called it a “lifeline for people living under oppressive regimes.” GOP Senator John Curtis of Utah five years ago
called it “a vital part of helping journalists and democracy activists around the world.”
“Every once in a while a government program acts exactly as intended,” Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee boasted in 2021, calling its anti-censorship tools “amazing.”
None of those members, all Republicans, responded to requests for comment on Trump’s action over the weekend.
The program also had critics. Saying the OTF was pushing a “leftist social agenda,” Representative Andrew Ogles introduced a bill in 2023 to defund the project. The effort got only seven Republican co-sponsors and never received a hearing in committee.
Though lesser known than the US Agency for Global Media’s flagship
Voice of America, the Open Technology Fund often played a crucial role in getting US programming into repressive regimes.
One growing area of concern is China. A
report last year for the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission noted that the Chinese Communist Party has begun using artificial intelligence to block images as well as keywords, and that China “has partnered with like-minded authoritarian states such as Russia and Iran” to control the Internet at an intergovernmental level.
OTF is a nonprofit organization established by Congress that employs about 40 people. Its federal funding is administered through the US Agency for Global Media, which also funds programs like Radio Free Europe and similar networks for Cuban, Chinese and Iranian audiences. USAGM has a budget of almost $900 million and employs about 1,600 full-time equivalent employees.
Trump’s Friday night executive order also all but eliminated the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness, the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund and the Minority Business Development Agency.
