The fall of Bashar Assad’s tyranny in Syria is a reminder of the universal yearning for freedom and of how brittle even the most entrenched dictatorships can turn out to be. In such a moment, it’s tone-deaf and self-defeating for the bean-counters in the Trump transition to be targeting for cuts the one government agency that aims explicitly to promote freedom, democracy, and rule of law.

Yet there are some troubling signs that that is what is happening to the National Endowment for Democracy. That small treasure within the federal government has been one of the most efficient investments taxpayers have made and one that holds the promise of toppling other dictatorships. 

A December 3 piece in the New Criterion by James Piereson reports that the National Endowment for Democracy is “near the top of the list” of the “programs and agencies to be cut or severely reduced in scale” by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s Department of Government Efficiency. It lists seven arguments against the organization and concludes that “it is highly unlikely…that the NED can continue in its present form for very long after inauguration day.”

An August 2024 backgrounder from the Heritage Foundation, the think tank whose “Project 2025” Trump disavowed, also asserts “the NED duplicates functions and capacities already present in government agencies and departments and should be defunded.” Heritage’s recent turn away from Reaganite internationalism toward Soros-style isolationism has been a source of concern among national security hawks on the right. 

Far from being duplicative, the work that NED does helping grassroots activists in Communist China, Russia, Iran, Burma, North Korea, and other closed societies is unique. If President-elect Trump, and Messrs. Musk and Ramaswamy shut it down, they’ll be cutting off American allies as dramatically as the Biden-Harris administration did when it evacuated Kabul and let the Taliban take over. 

The idea sometimes mentioned of moving the functions to the United States Agency for International Development, which handles humanitarian relief, or to the CIA, which is a spy agency, is nonsensical. In the context of the roughly $7 trillion budget, the $300 million or so appropriated for NED is miniscule. If it avoids even one war or prevents a military deployment by turning a country from a hostile enemy to a friendly ally, it’ll have paid for itself many times over.

NED’s support for Solidarity in Poland, in cooperation with Lane Kirkland’s AFL-CIO and Albert Shanker’s American Federation of Teachers, helped to defeat the Soviet Union and win the Cold War. It saved America trillions in military spending and contributed to trillions more in economic growth by freeing the economies of the Warsaw Pact. If NED can help achieve a similar feat against Iran, Communist China, or Cuba, the juice would be well worth the squeeze.

President Reagan proposed the National Endowment for Democracy in a June 1982 address to Parliament that has become known as the Westminster Speech. The Gipper spoke of “the fighting in Lebanon”—sound familiar?— and “the scourge of terrorism that in the Middle East makes war an ever-present threat”—still so, alas.

“Democracy is not a fragile flower. Still it needs cultivating. If the rest of this century is to witness the gradual growth of freedom and democratic ideals, we must take actions to assist the campaign for democracy,” Reagan said. “It is time that we committed ourselves as a nation — in both the public and private sectors — to assisting democratic development.”

Reagan described “a plan and a hope for the long term — the march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people.”

With Assad’s regime in Syria now added to the ash-heap, now is the wrong time for America to reduce its investment in an organization that has the opportunity to help add to the pile the Islamic regime in Iran and the Communist one in China. 

As Reagan said, “While we must be cautious about forcing the pace of change, we must not hesitate to declare our ultimate objectives and to take concrete actions to move toward them. We must be staunch in our conviction that freedom is not the sole prerogative of a lucky few, but the inalienable and universal right of all human beings.”