Galina Timchenko, publisher and chief executive of the investigative newsroom Meduza, thought she was ready for anything. The site, based in Latvia and known for its fearless reporting on Vladimir V. Putin’s regime, had prepared for cyberattacks, legal threats and even poisonings of its reporters.
One thing she hadn’t anticipated: defunding by the U.S. government.
Meduza, which had received roughly 15 percent of its annual budget from programs funded by the U.S. government, has been thrust into a financial crisis after the Trump administration abruptly stopped all foreign assistance from the United States Agency for International Development and other federal agencies this month.
“U.S.A.I.D. or the State Department, usually they fulfill their obligations. They follow their rules,” Ms. Timchenko said. “Now, it’s some kind of a broken world.”
Meduza is one of hundreds of newsrooms in dozens of countries that until now benefited from at least $180 million in annual funding to support journalism and media development from U.S.A.I.D., the State Department and the National Endowment for Democracy, a government-funded nonprofit. The decision has already forced cutbacks, layoffs and long-term uncertainty for many independent newsrooms.
“It’s really a blood bath,” said Anya Schiffrin, a senior lecturer at Columbia University specializing in international nonprofit media and investigative reporting. “These are the only journalists who are holding governments to account in many parts of the world, and without U.S. support there’s just not a lot of other money available.”
The U.S. government has been the world’s largest supporter of independent foreign media, principally through U.S.A.I.D., since the early 1980s. The funding is meant to foster democracy through transparency, as part of the country’s larger portfolio of soft power efforts. It has helped finance some of the most consequential investigative journalism of the past decade, including the Panama Papers, which won a Pulitzer Prize for uncovering international money laundering, and the FinCEN Files, which showed how banks facilitated corruption around the world.
But the financial support — less than three-tenths of 1 percent of America’s overall foreign aid budget — has been criticized in recent years by some conservatives, who argue that it is little more than paid propaganda for U.S. interests. They have cheered President Trump’s move to freeze nearly all foreign aid, which is now being litigated in court.
“These institutions have taken their existence for granted in a way that mortals cannot,” said Mike Benz, an official in the first Trump administration who has become a leading voice against what he calls an international effort to censor free speech through foreign aid. “It’s been too long since they had any accountability,” he added.
Mr. Benz’s views have been amplified in the right-wing media, including lengthy recent interviews on the podcasts of Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump Jr. This month, Elon Musk reposted one of Mr. Benz’s posts on X, stating that “U.S.A.I.D. has been paying media organizations to publish their propaganda.”
The defunding of global newsrooms is the latest fight in an increasingly hostile war between the Trump administration and the press. The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, has ordered investigations into PBS, NPR and Comcast. Government agencies have suspended subscriptions to news outlets. Mr. Trump himself has amplified a baseless conspiracy theory that Politico was funded by the federal government, and has restricted The Associated Press’s access because of its refusal to use the name Gulf of America rather than Gulf of Mexico.
The resulting funding crunch for the international news organizations has been particularly acute in war-torn Ukraine, where nine in 10 media outlets receive grants, said Clayton Weimers, the executive director of Reporters Without Borders U.S.A., a nonprofit. One such group, Slidstvo, lost almost 80 percent of its support and is now trying to fill the budget shortfall by crowdfunding.
But the issue isn’t limited to one country. Accountability-focused outlets in Cyprus and Moldova lost upward of three-quarters of their budgets overnight, while In-depth Solomons, among the only independent outlets covering the South Pacific’s Solomon Islands, lost 100 percent. A $144,000 grant to the Daphne Foundation, an investigative journalism endeavor in Malta, was canceled.
“We’re talking about exiled Iranian media,” Mr. Weimers said. “We’re talking about Syrian and Lebanese organizations that are covering the conflicts in their countries.”
Drew Sullivan, a co-founder and the publisher of the Amsterdam-based Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, known as O.C.C.R.P., pushed back on the criticism of the funding from Mr. Trump’s allies. His outlet states that investigations by the O.C.C.R.P. have led to more than $10 billion in fines, over 730 arrests and more than 100 resignations of public officials in dozens of countries since it was founded in 2006.
“This is a boon to dictators and autocrats around the world,” said Mr. Sullivan, who noted that 38 percent of his budget, or nearly $7 million, comes from the United States. The cuts forced him to lay off 43 people and cut back hours for the rest of his staff by 20 percent.
O.C.C.R.P., in particular, has been a target of critics, among them Mr. Benz, who brand it a state media operation used to undermine Mr. Trump by digging up dirt that can be used against him.
Mr. Sullivan calls the charges wild conspiracy theories. “O.C.C.R.P.’s work is not political,” he said.
His organization sued the government this month, seeking to restore U.S.A.I.D. and State Department funding. On Tuesday, a federal judge set a deadline of Wednesday at midnight for agencies to restart foreign aid funding. The government immediately appealed that order.
Although some other countries, including Germany and Norway, contribute to independent media, it’s tiny in comparison with American funding. At the same time, many traditional media supporters are pulling back.
Open Society Foundations, the giant grant maker founded by the billionaire George Soros, abandoned much of its media funding after a 2023 restructuring, while groups like the Knight Foundation and the Ford Foundation have refocused much of their giving on local news outlets in the United States.
Last week, the Global Forum for Media Development, a Brussels-based network of institutions that support journalism, published a letter calling on donors to help struggling outlets.
“We urge governments, donors and stakeholders to take immediate action to address this crisis,” read the letter, which was signed by more than 100 press freedom and media development organizations.
For Luis Villaherrera, it is not clear that support will come fast enough.
In 2016, he founded Tracoda, which uses technology to help journalists sift through government data to find corruption. The nonprofit, which was founded in El Salvador and has expanded to Panama, has a budget of about $500,000, all of which came from the National Endowment for Democracy and U.S.A.I.D., he said.
On Feb. 3, Mr. Villaherrera received emails saying his funding was frozen and ordering him to cease all activities. With no other options, he was forced to lay off 15 of his 16 full-time employees as well as seven part-time contractors.
“We stopped mostly everything,” said Mr. Villaherrera, who said he was now trying to scratch up money from European governments or private donors. “We are trying to keep the lights on, but it’s getting really, really hard,” he said.
