We Are The Bad Guys Now.

Democracy assistance is not just zeroed out. America's budget now supports autocrats, kleptocrats and dictators.

The Trump Administration’s FY2026 budget is not just bad for international aid, “it is catastrophic.”

Read Career Pivot's analysis of 32 programs that will be defunded in the FY26 budget - from UN programs, to IBRD, to OAS, and of course, USAID.

And for democracy assistance it's even worse than catastrophic. It eliminates everything related to democracy or democracy assistance: it zeroes out the Democracy Fund, the National Endowment for Democracy, Transition Initiatives, and the Complex Crisis Fund, as well as the US Institute for Peace, East-West Center, Asia Foundation, Wilson Center and virtually every other initiative that supported research and programming related to democracy, rights and international engagement. All gone. Poof.

These efforts have been part of American foreign policy in one form or another since the 1980s. Like any policy, they haven’t always been perfect; they haven’t always worked; they have at times been justified by unrealistic idealism and other times (or even at the same time) used as tools of cynical statecraft. But they have been part of America’s identity in the world. They are part of our arsenal of values and tools in projecting power and winning influence. They have helped to define how we behave and what we seek to accomplish in bi-lateral diplomacy, multi-lateral organizations and development assistance.

Today, democracy advocates are scrambling to save what little remains and look for alternative sources of funding and support, but the emerging reality is that the Administration is not just eliminating democracy assistance, the emerging policy is clearly on the side of autocrats, dictators and kleptocrats. American taxpayer funds and America’s international influence will now actively support illiberal, anti-democratic and authoritarian regimes around the world.

The democracy fund is not being zeroed out. It is being pushed into negative numbers, below zero, as democracy and rights activists around the world will need to expend resources to defend themselves from America’s support for authoritarian regimes.

The evidence for this is all around us. This budget comes together with a proposed State Department re-organization, that, as Bama Arethraya wrote over the weekend, “reverses decades of hard-won gains to prevent conflict, mass atrocities, and human trafficking and to protect human rights.”

Instead of celebrating the American constitutional ideal of separation of powers and the need for effective legislative institutions, the State Department is devoting resources to tenacious arguments that the US Congress has no role in shaping or overseeing foreign policy.

New guidance on human rights reporting eliminates references to corruption in Trump allies like Hungary, and atrocious prison conditions in El Salvador, instead focusing on the specious grievances of religious minorities in Western Europe.

Vice President JD Vance has criticized the Europe Union for efforts to protect member states from Russian electoral interference and “censoring” extremist politics. Earlier this month a young Trump appointee at the State Department echoed argument that Europe had “devolved into a hotbed of digital censorship, mass migration, restrictions on religious freedom, and numerous other assaults on democratic self-governance.” Those claims have bewildered European officials, who note the Trump administration itself has been accused of breaching democratic norms by cracking down on free speech and not complying with court orders. Over the weekend, the Administration used all of its informal power to influence the victory of an illiberal Polish presidential candidate.

While democratic countries are criticized for imaginary offenses against the MAGA ideology, the Administration routinely praises autocrats and monarchs in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt, Turkey and elsewhere. During his tour of the Middle East this month, Trump told an audience in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, that the United States would end its “lectures” about those regimes’s limits on free speech and political expression… while ramping up the “lectures” on democratic regimes.

Replacing the commitment to democracy that has been built up over the decades is a $2.9 billion for a new America First Opportunity Fund (A1OF) for “strategic investments that make America safer, stronger, and more prosperous.” This is the slush fund for supporting anti-democratic political allies and Christian nationalism that Pete Marocco promised his Hungarian allies while he was still in power.

This is not just a bureaucratic reshuffling in the name of “efficiency” or budget cuts. It is a foundational principle and lodestone objective in both domestic and foreign policy. Domestically, many of the anti-democratic policies – illegal deportations, sidelining of Congress, attacks on the judiciary, media and universities – have at least occasionally been identified and contested by what remains of America’s independent media and political opposition.

The international dimensions of the anti-democratic policy have not received as much domestic political attention, but are at least as significant for America’s role in the world. With virtually no debate or discussion, the Trump administration is rollback of U.S. democracy assistance and dismantling a global support infrastructure built painstakingly over forty years. The pace and scale of this reversal—rooted in ideological animus, strategic realignment, and executive overreach—may prove to be one of the most consequential ruptures in U.S. international engagement since the Cold War.