This news outlet is leading the fight against Trump’s foreign aid funding freeze

Going toe-to-toe with the United States government is not easy. But one news outlet is fighting to get the government to pay up.

An executive order signed by Donald Trump on January 20 froze international aid funding, including more than $268 million that Congress had already allocated to independent media organizations worldwide. The freeze has thrown parts of the international news scene into chaos; the U.S. government had been the largest source of funding for global independent media.

On February 10, nonprofit advocacy organization Public Citizen sued the Trump administration on behalf of the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition (AVAC) and the Journalism Development Network (JDN), challenging the legality of the January 20 executive order.

JDN is home to the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), an international nonprofit news outlet and network of investigative journalists behind projects like the Panama Papers.

“We’ve worked in autocratic regimes our whole life. Keeping your head down doesn’t work,” OCCRP co-founder Drew Sullivan said of the decision to sue. “You have to fight these things when they’re unfair, when they’re illegal, and you have to fight them aggressively.

“The government will attack, prosecute, and smear news organizations that write about crime and corruption, and that’s going to be a huge problem in the United States,” he added. “I don’t think American journalists understand how aggressive this will be and how destructive it will be.”

OCCRP’s editorial operation is headquartered in Amsterdam, with a staff of more than 150 across the globe. For 2025, OCCRP was slated to receive around $6.6 million from the U.S. government, including 11 grants from United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the Department of State, and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) used to support and train smaller investigative outlets around the world.

Of those 11 grants, two USAID grants and two State Department grants have been terminated. OCCRP had four grants from NED, but NED’s funding has been frozen. Another three grants worth $4.2 million from the State Department are still under review. The deadline for the government’s 90-day review period of foreign aid funding was on April 20, but the review window has reportedly been extended another 30 days.

So far, the government has paid OCCRP $1.4 million — about 23% of what it expected to receive in 2025, according to Sullivan. On February 13, a district court granted a temporary restraining order and required the U.S. government to halt the funding freeze and release $2 billion in payments owed to all grantees and contractors by February 26 while the lawsuit proceeds. After the Supreme Court rejected a request from the Trump administration to overturn that order, OCCRP received about $1 million (via wire transfer) on March 13 for work completed on its terminated grants between November 2024 and February 2025. It received an additional $358,000 on March 14.

Government funding made up 38% ($7 million) of OCCRP’s total budget ($17.5 million) in 2024. OCCRP’s main revenue streams are philanthropy funding, individual donors, paid memberships, and government grants.

“This is a completely fundamental shift in the global media environment from what we’ve had throughout the post-Cold War era,” Scott Anderson, a Brookings Institution Governance Studies fellow and Lawfare senior editor, said. “These groups are hard to fund, and they’re often not profitable. That’s why they rely upon support like this, and it’s going away. Maybe the courts will force the administration to bring it back for the short term, but this administration is so intent on cutting these funds that it seems like even if you get these funds in the short-term, you can’t be too confident you’re going to keep them very long.”

The executive order to halt all the grant-funded work — and the implication that OCCRP wouldn’t get the money it was previously promised — threw OCCRP into chaos.

The organization laid off 20% of its staff — then about 200 people — in the week following the executive order. In trying to spare OCCRP’s investigative reporting, layoffs impacted social media producers, program managers, translators, and others. Most of the staff took 20% pay cuts and non-managers were shifted to a four-day workweek.

The organization operated at a deficit of $25,000 per day for nearly two months, Sullivan said. And because of the staffing upheaval at the government agencies administering the grants, OCCRP couldn’t get in touch with anyone to answer its growing list of questions.

“[The government] would send a message saying, ‘your grant has been approved to continue’ and then an hour later they would send ‘no, we made a mistake. It’s been canceled,’” Sullivan said. “We were in a period where we didn’t know what was going on, we couldn’t really spend any money because we’re not sure if it will be approved or if we can get that money back. We closed a bunch of programs, we stopped all travel, and we charged everything we could onto other grants that we had.”

Getting nearly 40% of your news outlet’s budget from the U.S. government isn’t ideal, Sullivan said, but most of the funding was used to provide journalistic training and resources in countries where the government wanted to see accountability and democracy grow. “If we had been a U.S. news organization, we would not have taken U.S. money. But we’re working abroad and don’t use U.S. money locally,” Sullivan said.

In the wake of the funding freeze, OCCRP’s supporters stepped in. The organization received $375,000 in small-dollar donations, Sullivan said. Major grantors have also pledged to provide $3 million to help weather the uncertainty. That support has made up about half the deficit for 2025, Sullivan said, but OCCRP isn’t bringing back the laid off employees because there’s still a sizable budget gap. The organization will have to reconfigure its finances for 2026, but it’s shifting its focus to growing revenue from donations and its membership program fees, which had previously only brought in around $1 million.

When Trump was elected again, Sullivan said the organization saw the writing on the wall and wanted to figure out an off-ramp from government funding. He said they just thought they would have more time.

“The U.S. government liked what we were doing and wanted to continue to see it happen. We were both on the same side of that issue,” Sullivan said. “In the end, it’s a lesson on over-reliance on a single donor.”