Warsaw, 8th April
At the end of January, I received an email from an organization I work with. “Grant suspension” was the subject.
I’ve been working for a progressive NGO called Krytyka Polityczna for 15 years. We have been advocating for democracy, equality, and freedom of speech since 2002. These are not sexy subjects, so there aren’t many people who want to financially support this kind of cause. But fortunately, we found some large foundations and international organizations that have been willing to fund us.
Some of these funds came from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). However, the new American president Donald Trump, suspended this support, or “suspended it for 90 days”, with a single signature back in January. Now we know this support will not be coming back.
I didn’t expect the effects of a decision made by Trump to affect me, my colleagues, and the media organizations I know and value in Europe, so quickly.
The email I read on that memorable Saturday contained a short and laconic message: “I am writing to you today with incredibly difficult news. We are unable to draw down the funding for our work and must pause all our activities funded by US government resources”.
What did that mean in practice? It meant that as I read the lines “suspending your subgrant effective Jan. 24, 2025”, we should have already suspended our work the day before.
I was scared and worried by the “Difficult news”. Did that mean we would only have to shut down one project? Or others as well? I quickly realized that it was just the beginning, and that two days later, on Monday, we would be cutting other activities.
But we had already ordered texts from authors, and we had to pay for them. The texts were then translated, so we also had to pay the translators as well. We couldn’t just suddenly stop fulfilling our obligations. We can’t write to everyone saying: “sorry, Trump stopped supporting us, so you won’t get paid for the work you’ve done”.
On Sunday 26th January, I met up with representatives from several independent media in Europe. They came to Warsaw, where I live and work, we had dinner together, and then on Monday we started intensive work on another international project.
I couldn’t help but talk a lot about Trump’s decision. New information started to flow in. I found out that a colleague’s editorial office in Kyiv had also just lost funding. Another organization was laying people off, and another was suspending a media support program.
The same fear that had paralysed me on Saturday became a motivation to act on Monday. I wrote to the readers and followers of Krytyka Polityczna and told them what was happening. I asked for help.
People responded amazingly. They started donating money to us. We didn’t collect enough to plug the hole in the budget, but it gave me an energy boost.
On the other hand, all hell broke loose on social media. Haters came out of the woodwork. We were accused of “jumping on the US bandwagon”, some of them were happy that we were about to collapse. Even Elon Musk joined the discussion: “greetings”, he wrote, sarcastically. To tell the truth, it gave me even more enthusiasm to work.
“It would be good if Donald Trump’s suspension of USAID revived talks about cultural funding programs in Poland,” wrote a friend of mine, a journalist and editor from Poland, “Or maybe the European Union should consider greater support for independent culture, media, and social organizations?”.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) informs that: “According to a USAID fact sheet which has since been taken offline, in 2023, the agency funded training and support for 6,200 journalists, assisted 707 news outlets, and supported 279 media-sector civil society organizations dedicated to strengthening independent media. The 2025 foreign aid budget included 268,376,000 dollars allocated by Congress to support independent media and the free flow of information.”
In the RSF report, these journalists and media are just numbers. But for me they are colleagues, great writers, fact checkers, amazing editors, dedicated to informing people. Without their work we will be blind.
