USAID collapse amplifies smear against Asia's rights groups

MANILA, Philippines — Thousands of civilians in Myanmar's conflict zones got their only warning of incoming airstrikes from a daily shortwave radio broadcast. Internet shutdowns and power disruptions meant that, for years, people learned when to run only through radio.

In early 2025, Burma News International (BNI), a network of media organizations within and outside Myanmar, won approval for a USAID grant to fund that broadcast. Then the Trump administration froze all foreign aid, and the project to set up a daily shortwave radio broadcast came to an abrupt halt.

"Access to information for them is only through shortwave radio," Tin Tin Nyo, BNI's managing director, told Philstar.com. "These are people mostly located in active conflict zones."

The Trump administration justified its freeze on all foreign aid as a move to cut waste, a move carried out without congressional approval. 

But a cross-border investigation by Philstar.com, PressOne.PH, Malaysiakini found that the policy rode an orchestrated online campaign that used USAID's own funding disclosures and program descriptions to frame the agency's work as corrupt and its grantees as instruments of foreign interference. 

Nearly 300 posts, many by Elon Musk, former head of the Department of Government Efficiency, reached billions of views within days.

That charge — that foreign-funded groups are really foreign agents — is one that rights organizations across Asia have faced from their own governments for years. The difference, organization leaders told Philstar.com, is that now the accusation was coming from Washington too. 

Funding cuts' domino effect

The shortwave project was not BNI's only loss. The freeze left the media network with a funding gap of 17 to 20%, Tin Tin Nyo said. About 60 independent media outlets operate in Myanmar, and most of them relied on US funding.

Worse, Tin Tin Nyo shared that Sweden announced it would pull out its funding too. The Swedish development agency Sida, the second-largest funder of Myanmar's independent media, will stop all grants by June 2026, she told Philstar.com.

"After the US funding cut, we could not find other donors or other countries who can actually step up and support that gap," Tin Tin Nyo said.

Organizations that apply for or receive grants have never hidden where these funds come from, Tin Tin Nyo said. Most importantly, she said the funding has never come with editorial strings. 

"As long as they don't influence our editorial policy, we accept that funding," she said. "Foreign influence was not the case for Myanmar independent media."

Some outlets that once competed against each other have started sharing resources and security plans. Others are trying to earn money from digital platforms, work most of them had not done before.

"We realized that we media have to work more closely together," she said. "2026 will be harder."
  
The impact stretched well beyond Myanmar and across other parts of Asia. Forum Asia, a Bangkok-based network of 86 human rights organizations across Asia, said every one of its members took a hit in varying degrees. No organization reported shutting down entirely.

Groups with diverse donors simply trimmed their projects, but those with fewer funding sources had to let go of staff and cancel programs.

Cornelius Damar Hanung, a Forum Asia programme manager, told Philstar.com the US pullout also knocked out a crucial safety net for rights defenders across the region: the Lifeline Embattled CSO Assistance Fund. 

Run by a consortium of seven NGOs led by Freedom House — with Forum Asia among them — and backed by 22 government and foundation donors, the fund paid for lawyers when activists were slapped with trumped up charges, covered medical expenses and arranged for temporary relocations of harassed rights defenders. This was suspended after US funding was cut.

Forum Asia's own emergency assistance has also taken a hit. Hanung said the number of defenders asking for help — legal fees after being charged, relocation money after being threatened, support for families left without income — has gone up while the budget to respond has shrunk.

"Emergency protection is supposed to be really fast," Hanung told Philstar.com. "But because of this, we have to be really extra careful in giving the funding." 

The funding cuts come as demand for support is rising. Forum Asia reported an increase in judicial harassment of activists across the region in 2025, with more criminal charges filed against rights defenders and more cases brought to court.

Hanung said many of those facing charges are their families’ main income earners. Court proceedings often keep them from working and earning a living.

More than 85% of the population in Asia-Pacific lives in countries where civic space is rated "repressed" or "closed," according to a 2025 report by global civil society alliance CIVICUS. Only Japan and Taiwan were rated "open." The Philippines was rated "repressed."

Between repression and funding loss

Few organizations know what it is like to be hit from both directions — political repression and loss of funding — as well as the Cambodian Center for Independent Media.

CCIM ran Voice of Democracy, one of Cambodia's last independent news outlets, from 2003 until February 2023, when then-Prime Minister Hun Sen revoked its license over a single story. 

VOD had reported that Hun Sen's son, Hun Manet, appeared to have overstepped his authority by signing off on a $100,000 aid package to Turkey. Hun Sen announced the shutdown on Facebook and told VOD's staff to "find a new job." The Cambodia Daily had already been forced to close in 2017 over a disputed tax bill. The Phnom Penh Post was sold to a government-aligned owner the year after.

With VOD gone, CCIM continued its other work by training citizen journalists across the country to report on local issues that no other outlet would cover, such as labor abuse, land grabs and corruption.

Then in January 2025, CCIM found itself adrift again after an email from USAID headquarters in Washington informing executive director Chhan Sokunthea that all USAID programs had been frozen.  

Eventually, Sokunthea said CCIM had lost half its total budget.

"We were very shocked," Sokunthea told Philstar.com. "Not only myself, but everybody." 

Some of the Cambodian civil society groups she reached out to had it worse, she said. A number of them had received 100% of their funding from USAID or US-based foundations. They worked on media, human rights, elections, digital rights, environmental protection. Sokunthea organized an ad hoc committee of 12 of these groups and led a three-month rapid assessment of the damage across the sector.

She said she met with EU officials, UN agencies, private foundations and embassies, at the national and regional level, asking for emergency support. Some donors came through with small grants, she said, noting that even this was not enough to replace what was lost.

At CCIM, she negotiated a 50% rent reduction with her landlord. She drew up three contingency plans, one of which included cutting her own salary.

The organization's training program for 480 citizen journalists switched from in-person sessions to ones delivered via mobile phones, she said.

"While the funding is the constraint, our staff member has more commitment," Sokunthea said. "We try to focus."

The government has always branded groups like CCIM as foreign-backed, Sokunthea said. She pointed out that the Cambodian government itself takes foreign money — from China, from multilateral lenders, from bilateral donors — and nobody calls that interference.

"The government also receives the funding — like from China and other aid too," she said. "But for us, we implement our mission, our vision, our goal. They're not [a form of] interference."

'It already happened before'

The foreign agent accusation did not begin with Trump or Musk. Hanung traced it back to at least 2016, when conservative groups in Indonesia attacked the LGBTQ rights movement as a Western import and cast human rights itself as a foreign idea that did not belong in Asia. 

But he said 2019 and 2020 were the years the tactic spread most visibly across the region. During the Hong Kong protests, Beijing used foreign collusion laws to shut down independent media, leading to the closure of three outlets.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, governments across Asia seized on border closures and health emergencies to brand any critical reporting on the pandemic as foreign-driven disinformation.

"The narrative of foreign interference and foreign agent narrative have been increasingly used since 2019," Hanung told Philstar.com.

Hanung said the accusation works because governments can easily use laws to punish free speech and brand anyone a foreign agent. There are no consequences, too, when they spread disinformation themselves. More than that, he said, labeling someone a foreign agent strips them of their rights as a citizen. 

"When they say that this is a foreign agent, meaning that we don't have to protect them, then it's okay to criminalize them," he said.

What worries the rights network is not just the funding gap after USAID's dissolution. It is that organizations will quietly stop seeking foreign assistance because the political price has gotten too heavy, and that the foreign agent label will go unchallenged until it becomes accepted fact.

"If we decided, 'oh, it's hard to get foreign funding now because of the regulations,' then it will be just normalized eventually," he said.

Sokunthea said independent media and civil society exist because people in places like Cambodia have no other way to raise their concerns. Take those organizations away, she said, and the people they serve go silent.

"We are the voice of the people," she told Philstar.com. — with reports from Ian Laqui