The Trump administration is trying to spend $175 million in congressionally approved human rights funding on an anti-communism slush fund, a group advocating for white South Africans, a campaign against Brazil's supreme court, and grants rewarding European governments for protecting what one State Department official called 'civilizational self-confidence.' With hours left before the money legally expires, the White House is racing to get it out the door before anyone can stop them.
What Congress Approved vs. What Trump Actually Spent It On
Congress passed the Human Rights and Democracy Fund on a bipartisan basis. The stated purpose, per the legislation, is to support human rights defenders, assist victims of abuse, and promote democracy abroad. That is what the law says. That is not what is happening.
The Guardian has reviewed a sample of 43 proposed grants totaling $176.9 million, which makes up the bulk of the fund's $205 million appropriation. The list includes programs targeting wealthy, stable democracies in Western Europe, not exactly the frontlines of authoritarian repression most people picture when they hear 'human rights funding.' The grants would support opposition to immigration policy, pushback against what the administration calls 'gender ideology,' and promotion of Brexit-friendly politics. Standard stuff, if you're running the Heritage Foundation. Genuinely unprecedented if you're supposed to be running American foreign policy.
Senator Jeanne Shaheen, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, did not mince words. 'The Trump administration's proposals would use taxpayer funds to promote far-right organizations and programs in established democracies,' she said. 'This is a waste of resources and undermines United States values and relations with democratic partners, including allies in Europe.' She has placed a partial hold on the grants, setting up a last-minute standoff with the State Department.
The $40 Million Anti-Communism Windfall Nobody Asked For
The single largest grant in the package is $40 million directed to a consortium led by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. Forty million dollars. To an organization that, according to a State Department vetting document The Guardian reviewed, received a grand total of $96,997 in federal contracts over the previous five years. Their prior relationship with the department? Tickets to their gala in 2019.
That vetting document also names Andrew Bremberg as a 'senior leader' of the foundation. Bremberg was a domestic policy adviser in Trump's first White House and later served as US ambassador to the UN's European office. Small world.
ProPublica reported in July that the 27-year-old deputy assistant secretary overseeing these grants, Samuel Samson, has documented ties to senior VOC figures through his time at Hillsdale College, the Christian conservative institution beloved by the MAGA movement. A State Department official told ProPublica at the time that the connection had nothing to do with the grant. Sure.
Stephen Miller's Fingerprints Are All Over This
The Guardian reports that the grants were personally lobbied for by senior Trump administration figures, and that they reflect two very recognizable ideological obsessions: JD Vance's apocalyptic warnings about the collapse of Western civilization in Europe, and Stephen Miller's fixation on immigration and protecting white minorities in countries like South Africa.
One grant would provide $2 million to Hungary, Slovakia, Austria, and the Czech Republic to counter migration 'weaponized' by Russia and Belarus. Samuel Samson, the young deputy assistant secretary cutting these checks, toured all four of those countries last December. The same trip, according to The Guardian, during which he criticized NGOs that previous administrations had partnered with for promoting what he called radical concepts, including gender theory and DEI.
Another grant, worth $1 million, is titled 'Countering Lawfare and Censorship in Brazil,' and would fund civil society groups opposing Brazil's supreme court. The Trump administration sanctioned a Brazilian Supreme Court justice last year, so apparently undermining democratic institutions in allied nations is now a line item in the human rights budget.
White Afrikaners, 'Western Civilizational Norms,' and Other Grant Categories
Then there is the grant supporting white Afrikaner rights in South Africa. The Trump administration has already made its feelings about white South Africans abundantly clear, fast-tracking refugee status for Afrikaners earlier this year in what critics called a racially selective asylum process. Now that ideological priority is apparently getting a line in the human rights budget too.
Other grants in the package would fund programs protecting Christian communities and opposing 'gender ideology' across Europe, and reward governments that demonstrate sufficient commitment to what the State Department calls 'western civilisational norms.' The grants are, in other words, a financial loyalty program for the global far right, dressed up in the language of human rights.
The State Department told The Guardian that all programs remain in 'active deliberation,' that awardees would meet federal grant guidelines, and that everything would go through a 'standard and rigorous vetting process.' The same vetting process, presumably, that flagged an organization on the basis of gala tickets and then recommended it receive 400 times its total prior federal funding in a single grant.
The Clock and the Showdown
Here is the structural problem that makes this story more urgent than it might otherwise be. Under the law governing the fund, money that is not obligated by September 30, the end of the fiscal year, simply lapses. It disappears. The administration knows this, and the deadline is why these grants are being pushed through in a frantic last-minute scramble rather than going through anything resembling normal deliberation.
Senator Shaheen's partial hold complicates the math, but holds are not the same as vetoes, and the State Department has shown little appetite for letting congressional Democrats slow down its agenda. ProPublica originally reported that Trump officials had drawn up at least a dozen no-bid grants targeting rightwing causes in Europe and advocates for white South Africans. The Guardian's reporting shows how large a share of the entire fund those grants represent, and which ones have been quietly dropped since the initial exposure.
The administration's position, delivered through a spokesperson, is that its programming 'aims to support our European allies in defending those rights and principles, along with their civilizational self-confidence and sovereignty.' Civilizational self-confidence is doing a lot of work in that sentence. It is not a phrase that appears in the legislation that created the fund.
The Dingo Take
You are supposed to believe that a $40 million check to an organization with less than $100,000 in prior federal contracts is the result of a rigorous, merit-based grant process. You are supposed to believe that a 27-year-old deputy assistant secretary with documented social ties to that organization's leadership had nothing to do with the award. You are supposed to believe that funding campaigns against Brazil's supreme court and rewarding Hungary for its immigration policies is what Congress meant when it passed a human rights bill on a bipartisan basis. Pick whichever one you find least insulting and go with it.
What is actually happening here is not complicated. The Trump administration got its hands on a pool of congressionally mandated money and is trying to convert it into a global MAGA subsidy program before the fiscal year ends and anyone can do anything about it. The money was appropriated for human rights defenders living under authoritarian governments. It is being redirected to people whose primary human rights concern is that European governments are being too nice to immigrants and not sufficiently enthusiastic about Afrikaner land claims.
This is what the project looks like at scale. Not just domestic policy rewired to reward allies and punish enemies, but foreign policy, international funding, and the very definition of human rights itself bent into the shape of a culture war. The word 'human rights' no longer means what it meant. It means whatever Stephen Miller needs it to mean this fiscal year, and right now it means hurry up and sign the checks before midnight.
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