Galina Timchenko, publisher and chief executive of the research newsroom Meduza, thought she was ready for anything. The Latvian-based site, known for its fearless reports of Vladimir V. Putin's regime, was preparing for cyberattacks, legal threats and even reporters' addiction.
One thing she didn't expect was a refund from the US government.
Meduza, which received about 15% of its annual budget from a US government-funded program, has entered the financial crisis after the Trump administration suddenly halted all foreign aid from US international development and other federal agencies this month.
“USAID or the State Department, usually they fulfill their duties. They follow their rules,” Timchenko said. “Now, it's a kind of broken world.”
Meduza has previously benefited at least $180 million in annual funding to support journalism and media development from government-funded nonprofits USAID, the State Department and the Democratic State Fund. The decision has already forced many independent newsroom cuts, layoffs and long-term uncertainty.
“It's really a blood bath,” said Anya Shiffrin, a senior lecturer at Columbia University, specializing in international nonprofit media and research reporting. “These are the only journalists who account for government in many parts of the world, and without US support, many other money is unavailable.”
The US government has been the world's largest supporter of independent foreign media, mainly through USAID, since the early 1980s. The funding aims to promote democracy through transparency. This has helped fund some of the most consequential investigative journalism of the past decade, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Panama Paper, which discovered international money laundering, and the Finsen file, which showed that banks promoted corruption around the world.
However, financial support – less than three percent of America's overall foreign aid budget – has been criticized by some conservatives in recent years. They support President Trump's move to freeze almost all foreign aid and are now suing in court.
“These agencies take the norm in ways that humans can't,” said Mike Benz, the first Trump administration official, called the main voice, called the international effort to censor freedom of speech through foreign aid. “It was too long because I was accountable,” he added.
Benz's views have been amplified this month in right-wing media, including a lengthy recent interview with Joe Logan, Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump Jr. podcasts. Elon Musk says that “USAID is paying media organizations to publish propaganda.”
Global Newsroom Refunds are the latest battle in an increasingly hostile war between the Trump administration and the media. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Kerr ordered an investigation into PBS, NPR and Comcast. Government agencies have suspended subscriptions to news outlets. Trump himself has restricted access to the Associated Press by amplifying unfounded conspiracy theories that politics were funded by the federal government and refusing to use the names of the US Gulf and not the Gulf of Mexico.
The resulting funding crunch for the international press was particularly severe in war-torn Ukraine, where nine of the 10 media members received grants, said Clayton Weimers, executive director of the nonprofit Borderless Reporter. One such group, Slidstvo, has lost almost 80% of its support and is currently trying to fill the budget shortfall with crowdfunding.
However, the problem is not limited to one country. The outlet focused on accountability in Cyprus and Moldova lost three-quarters of its budget overnight, but among the only independent outlets covering the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific, the detailed Solomon lost 100%. A $144,000 grant to the Daphne Foundation, a Maltese investigative journalism effort, has been cancelled.
“We're talking about the exiled Iranian media,” Weimers said. “We are talking about Syrian and Lebanon organisations that cover our own conflicts.”
Drew Sullivan, co-founder and publisher of the Amsterdam-based Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, known as the OCCRP, has pushed back funding criticism from Trump's allies. His outlet says an investigation by the OCCRP has resulted in more than $10 billion in fines, more than 730 arrests and more than 100 resignations of civil servants from dozens of countries since it was founded in 2006.
“This is a boon for dictators and dictators around the world,” said Sullivan, who said 38% of his budget (nearly $7 million) comes from the United States. The cut forced him to lay off 43 people and cut the remaining staff time by 20%.
In particular, OCCRP is a target for critics, among them, Benz brands the state-run media business he used to undermine Trump by digging out dirt that could be used against him.
Sullivan is calling wild conspiracy theory on charges. “OCCRP's work is not political,” he said.
His organization sued the government this month, attempting to recover the USAID and the State Department's funds. On Tuesday, a federal judge set a late-night deadline to resume foreign aid funds late on Wednesday. The government immediately appealed the order.
Some other countries, including Germany and Norway, contribute to independent media, but are small compared to US funding. At the same time, many traditional media supporters are pulling back.
Open Society Foundations, a huge grant maker founded by billionaire George Soros, has abandoned much of its media funds after the 2023 restructuring. Meanwhile, groups like the Knight Foundation and the Ford Foundation have refocused many of their contributions to local US press.
Last week, the Global Forum for Media Development, a network of Brussels-based agencies supporting journalism, issued a letter calling on donors to support struggling outlets.
“We urge governments, donors and stakeholders to take immediate action to deal with this crisis,” read a letter signed by over 100 press freedom and media development organisations.
For Luis Villaherrera, it's not clear that support will be faster enough.
In 2016 he founded Tracoda. Tracoda uses technology to help journalists sift through government data to find corruption. The nonprofit, which was founded in El Salvador and expanded to Panama, has a budget of around $500,000, all of which came from the National Fund of Democracy and the USAID, he said.
On February 3, Villaherrera received an email saying that his funds had been frozen and that he had ordered him to stop all activities. Without other options, he was forced to fire 15 and seven part-time contractors out of his 16 full-time employees.
“We stopped almost everything,” Villa Herrera said. “We're trying to turn on the lights, and it's really, really hard,” he said.
