State Department human rights awards draw scrutiny over $176.9m funding plan

The State Department reportedly obligated funds for a disputed slate of human rights awards in Washington on September 30, hours before a fiscal deadline. The Guardian said 43 awards totaling $176.9 million were at issue. A department official said the programs remained in active deliberation, leaving the status of individual awards unclear.

The dispute concerns most of the $205 million appropriated for the Human Rights and Democracy Fund. The Guardian reviewed a sample of grant documents but did not publish a complete award list. Its account of the September 30 obligation came from a source familiar with negotiations; the department declined to confirm specifically whether it had obligated the funds.

Which human rights awards are at issue?

The largest award listed by The Guardian was $40 million for a consortium led by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. A State Department vetting document reviewed by the newspaper recorded $96,997 in department contracts with the foundation during the preceding five years, all in fiscal 2022. That history gives a sense of the proposed award’s scale, but does not establish whether the foundation has received the new money.

Another proposed award, worth $1 million, was titled ‘Countering Lawfare and Censorship in Brazil’. According to The Guardian, it would support civil society groups opposing what the proposal described as judicial overreach and censorship by Brazil’s supreme court. That description reflects the proposal’s stated purpose, rather than an independent finding about the court.

In Britain, The Guardian identified a proposed $3 million no-bid award to the Jobs Foundation for a project called ‘Countering Overregulation to Advance American Investment’. The group is run by Matthew Elliott, who led the Vote Leave campaign. The project would promote a pro-business policy index and policies intended to encourage American investment.

The list also changed before the deadline. A proposed $5 million no-bid award to the Free Speech Union was marked ‘withdrawn’ in the document reviewed by The Guardian. Its founder, Toby Young, said in July that the group had neither applied for nor received US government funding. A separate $7 million proposal for the British thinktank 878 was abandoned in July after congressional pushback, The Guardian reported.

Why lawmakers objected to the funding plan

Senator Jeanne Shaheen, the senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said Congress had appropriated the fund on a bipartisan basis to help human rights defenders and victims of violations, and to support democracy abroad. She criticised the proposed awards as support for far-right organisations and programmes in established democracies, saying they would undermine relations with allies.

A Democratic congressional aide told The Guardian that Shaheen maintained 10 holds covering $22 million in awards concerning Brazil, South Africa, Nigeria, Britain and Europe. The aide also said Secretary of State Marco Rubio signed a memo to disregard those holds. The available account attributes that memo claim to the aide; it does not include an independently reviewed copy of the memo.

The department offered a different account of its priorities. An official quoted by The Guardian said its Europe programmes aimed to advance political liberty and free speech, and to support allies’ sovereignty and ‘civilizational self-confidence’. The official said awardees would have to meet federal grant guidelines and programmes would undergo standard vetting. The department did not comment on individual grants.

What changed from the earlier grant proposals?

ProPublica reported in July, after reviewing internal records and conducting interviews, that Trump administration officials had proposed grants for conservative causes in Europe and for advocates of white South Africans. Its reporting described a shift from the department’s past practice of open competitions supporting human rights work in poorer and authoritarian countries. Some proposed grants would bypass that usual competition, it reported.

The September account adds a much larger total for awards under discussion and a claim that funds were obligated before the deadline. The earlier NewsJaws report on Trump officials’ effort to redirect human rights funding covered the proposals before this reported deadline decision. ProPublica’s July findings provide context for the change in priorities; they do not verify what happened to each award on September 30.

What remains unresolved about the awards?

The Guardian’s source said the department obligated the funds on September 30 despite congressional concerns. The department, however, told the newspaper that programmes were still in active deliberation and declined to answer its specific question about obligation. Those statements leave the final status of the listed individual awards unconfirmed in the public account. The available reporting also does not establish when, or whether, money would be disbursed to each proposed recipient.