Reuters Institute

03/07/2025

The freeze of USAID funding is the most recent blow for donor-funded journalism but not the only one. The National Endowment for Democracy, an organisation established by the US Congress in 1983, is now unable to access its own funds and has been forced to suspend support for nearly 2,000 partners worldwide.

Earlier this year Meta announced the end of its US fact-checking program me and many fear the company will soon withdraw funding from its partners in other countries too.

Funding from American philanthropic organisations is also drying up. According to four sources consulted for this piece, the Open Society Foundations (OSF), which funded dozens of independent news organisations for many years, won’t be funding them from now on.

Experts now fear that other American foundations follow suit and redirect some of their funding to newsrooms inside the country or entirely away from journalism to cover for cuts in healthcare projects or scientific research. Even governments like the UK, Norway or Germany, which have funded independent media in the past, may retreat from the field as they cut their foreign aid budgets to ramp up defence spending in the face of geopolitical risks.