A big reason so many people voted to put President Donald Trump back in the White House was that he promised to drain the Swamp and end wasteful spending, putting Americans first. But as Congress works on passing the appropriations bills for fiscal year 2026, it is spurning many of the president’s proposed spending cuts. Meanwhile, as money is set aside for organizations that reportedly push left-wing propaganda and censor conservative voices, one federal agency continues to use taxpayers’ money to fund risky research. While some Republicans are actively trying to eliminate this type of funding, it seems others are enabling it.
National Endowment for the Swamp
The House recently passed a minibus in which it earmarked $315 million for the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), “a rogue organization that fuels global censorship and domestic propaganda,” according to Republican Rep. Eli Crane of Arizona in an X post. The Copper State lawmaker proposed an amendment to defund the NED, but the bill died on January 14, with the help of 81 Republicans who voted against it. Another 12 didn’t even vote.
To get an idea of why somebody would want to stop funding such an organization, let’s look at some of the NED’s work. Keep in mind, its primary purpose is to promote democracy abroad. One of the ways it apparently tries to serve that mission is by occasionally holding “multi-stakeholder roundtables” that focus on “getting the next generation of activists involved in decision-making on key issues.” It also crafts policy goals, such as “Breaking Barriers: A Whole-of-Society Approach to Gender Equality in Media Development.” Annual lectures are another method the organization uses to spread its idea. Viewers at one in 2022 had the pleasure of listening to historian Anne Applebaum, staff writer at The Atlantic, speak “in utterly predictable and tedious terms about the need for government officials to stand up to people who engage in wrongthink, to prevent authoritarianism,” said journalist Chris Bray on his Substack Tell Me How This Ends.
The NED is supposed to be bipartisan, but its programs, events, and staff are rife with left-leaning activists who seem to have a vendetta against the GOP. Its board members have often “sought to delegitimize the Republican [P]arty,” explained The Heritage Foundation. “Through its grants program, the NED has supported development of the international ‘disinformation industrial complex’—including one grantee that sought to censor and suppress conservative speech in the United States in advance of the 2020 and 2022 elections.”
Other notable funding working its way through Congress includes $207 million each for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The Smithsonian Institution is set to receive $1.1 billion. The US Agency for Global Media, which includes Voice of America, could get $653 million. Appropriators in both the House and the Senate have reached bipartisan agreements on eight of the 12 bills so far, with just under two weeks remaining until the January 30 deadline.
The number of Republicans voting to fund these institutions, programs, and agencies is a little surprising. It’s almost as if some are afraid of another 42-day government shutdown and just want to advance the bills and move on with their lives. “It’s now 2026, and we’re foolish as ever,” Rep. Crane said on X the day after his amendment failed. “The swamp is real, and it’s bipartisan.”
Batty Research
In another attempt to save millions of dollars and protect American interests, Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) and Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) recently wrote a letter to Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), asking him to cancel more than $3 million in taxpayer funding for a live bat facility at Colorado State University (CSU). The grant would go toward researching and breeding bats to study infectious diseases and “zoonotic viruses, including SARS, SARS2 and MERS coronaviruses, and Ebola, Sudan and Marburg viruses,” according to USAspending.gov. Since 2016, the facility has received $12.9 million in federal funding.
