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 into jeopardy internet freedoms around the world.
Managed by the US state department and the US Agency for Global Media, the programme – 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 $500m (£370m) in the past decade, according to an analysis by the Guardian, including $94m in 2024.
Then came Doge, Donald 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 (OTF), 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.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration this January withdrew from the Freedom Online Coalition, a global alliance set up by the US to defend digital rights.
The cuts risk curtailing technologies that helped Iranians to coordinate during recent anti-government protests, and that allowed videos and images of massacres to reach the outside world. They could have a major impact in other nations too; the efforts of groups in Myanmar to get past the junta’s “digital iron curtain”, and the ability of users in China to avoid surveillance.
“The programme was effectively gutted,” said a former US official. “They didn’t issue any grants this year.”
“I would like to live in a world where a single US programme is not such a linchpin, such a load-bearing programme, but it has been. It’s hard to deny it has been,” said one digital rights expert based in Europe who has worked on a number of projects for Internet Freedom.
To report this story, the Guardian spoke to 10 people with knowledge of Internet Freedom, including six of its grantees, and reviewed documents related to its operations and budget.
The US Department of State has been approached for comment. The OTF declined to comment.
The purpose of the programme was to make it extremely difficult to do what North Korea has accomplished through decades of censorship efforts, and what Iran succeeded in doing this January during a bloody crackdown on anti-government protests: cut an entire population off from the global internet.
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