In 1983, under the guidance of Ronald Reagan, Congress created the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) to “foster the infrastructure of democracy.” Reagan had used the phrase a year before in an address to Parliament to describe the building blocks of liberty: a free press, unions, political parties, and universities. The president’s stated aim was noble, even high-minded—to advance democratic norms without the blunt instruments that had characterized earlier Cold War interventions.
The institutional form chosen to achieve this aim, however, was peculiar from the start. The NED was conceived as a government-organized non-government organization—a GONGO—deliberately positioned at arm’s length from formal diplomacy while remaining entirely dependent on congressional appropriations. This structure allowed U.S. officials to exert political influence abroad while maintaining a veneer of non-intervention and plausible deniability. The result was not independence, but ambiguity: foreign policy without clear accountability to either Congress or the president.
