In a fit of conscience, perhaps, the House of Representatives did the unthinkable and voted to abolish a program. As if fated to make matters worse rather than better, however, the members dropped the budget axe on what aptly has been called one “agency that would make Thomas Jefferson proud.”
This is the National Endowment for Democracy, a small bipartisan grant-giving organization that Ronald Reagan founded, Jimmy Carter praises and the Clinton administration seeks to expand. Even with the proposed large funding increase, NED’s total budget would only reach $48 million-around half of what the House spends in a year on mail.
Often mistakenly portrayed as an anti-communist relic, NED is instead a pioneer of the pro-democracy activism that emerged on every continent in the 1980s. It gives modest material assistance to struggling presses and voter-education groups, to human rights organizations and democratic think tanks and free trade unions and business federations-the infrastructure of civic self-government.
The NED reports to four congressional subcommittees that hold annual hearings; its annual reports and records are available to the public; and its books are reviewed by the Office of Management and Budget, the General Accounting Office and independent auditors. It is fully accountable.
The senators and the Clinton administration, then, should insist on restoring NED’s funding. To neo-isolationist constituents who doubt the endowment’s value, they should reply as Chinese physicist and human rights activist Fang Lizhi does: Dictators who suppress their own people tend also to be untrustworthy in international affairs. Caught up as we are an interdependent world, we work in our own interest as well as that of oppressed people when we seek to advance democracy, step by step, wherever we can.
