The Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) announced that 29% of its funding has been lost following the US government’s decision to freeze USAID funding.
In an appeal published earlier this morning, OCCRP notified its members that it has come under fire from the Trump administration, joining a growing list of media outlets who are being targeted as part of a wider conspiracy against the free press.
The terrifying tempo of the early days of the Trump administration has caused chaos among its own rank and file. USAID is one of the first entities to be targeted by the administration’s slash and burn approach against its own federal government.
In an attempt to justify its decision to freeze USAID funding for investigative journalism, the Trump administration claimed that OCCRP and other major US outlets like the Associated Press and POLITICO received millions of dollars from USAID to give the Democratic Party better news coverage while conspiring to secure Trump’s impeachment.
In its appeal to members, OCCRP noted that it has also been accused of directly attempting to overthrow Trump during his first term in 2019.
“We wrote a simple story in 2019 about how Rudy Giuliani (Trump’s personal attorney at the time) went to Ukraine for some opposition research and ended up working with people connected to organized crime who misled him. Unbeknownst to us, a whistleblower found the story online and added it to a complaint that was the basis of President Trump’s first impeachment,” the appeal reads.
Noting the increased volume of attacks against its reporting from a variety of bad actors, the investigative platform further explained the implications of losing nearly a third of its funding.
“This includes 82% of the money we give to newsrooms in our network, many of which operate in places where no one else will support them. This money did not only fund groundbreaking, prize-winning collaborative journalism but it also trained young investigative reporters to expose wrongdoing,” the statement said.
“It’s money that kept journalists safe from physical and digital attacks and supported those in exile who continued to report on crooks and dictators back in their home countries. OCCRP now has 43 less journalists and staff to do our work,” the statement continues.
The appeal to OCCRP’s members follows another statement published a day beforehand.
Maltese journalism was a direct beneficiary of OCCRP’s efforts to share resources and generate high-quality, high-impact investigations.
Among its most notable contributions were its collaborations with local newsrooms like Times of Malta and The Shift News, work which was also supported by the Daphne Foundation.
Through the kind of collaborative work that the Trump administration is directly jeopardising, journalists exposed how the fraudsters behind the hospitals concession funded a luxurious lifestyle for themselves while our hospitals rotted, disgraced former prime minister Joseph Muscat’s financial link to the same ‘consulting’ firm used to siphon those payments, and Steward Healthcare’s aggressive smear campaign against disgraced former health minister Chris Fearne, to name a few.
On a broader front, the Trump administration’s USAID freeze poses a threat that goes far beyond the direct blow that has been dealt to investigative journalism efforts across the globe.
The decision to gut the USAID programme – which has been traditionally seen as a means for the US to project soft diplomatic power and generate goodwill among recipient states – has sent shockwaves everywhere because of how many people depend on it.
Among many other lifesaving initiatives, the programme provided funding for war-torn Ukraine, development funding for the Western Balkans, and money that was meant for healthcare organisations in Cambodia.
Trump’s executioner of choice is billionaire Elon Musk, who is currently leading the newly-created Department of Government Efficiency in its efforts to dismantle federal government agencies like USAID.
The freeze is currently being challenged by a landslide of litigation from federal employees facing job cuts across the board. Though the plan was temporarily blocked by a judge, it remains to be seen whether American democracy will be able to withstand the presidency’s unconstitutional manoeuvres.