In the Washington Post yesterday, Jackson Diehl had a column on the failure of the State Department to provide funding to something called the Global Internet Freedom Consortium, a collection of providers of gizmos that can circumvent firewalls constructed on the Internet by repressive regimes. Diehl, an articulate commentator on the democracy agenda and democracy promotion, took the current and previous administrations to task for failing to deliver millions of dollars in funding that was earmarked for the State Department to spend on promoting global Internet freedom.  

As was reported in May in the same paper, this is the latest volley in a long and sordid tale. In the past four years, Congress has given the State Department around $50 million dollars for efforts to promote global Internet freedom. The first earmark, $15 million in 2007, was obtained by the aforementioned Consortium through a concerted lobbying effort.  To be clear: Without this lobbying effort on the part of the Consortium, there would have been no money for this purpose in that year’s bill.  Although the funding bill did not specify a “hard” earmark for the Consortium, the State Department was well aware of the legislative background of where the money came from but disregarded this intent and gave the money to other groups, which have so far spent it on a nice report (approximately $1.5 million to Freedom House), and, well, nothing ($13 million to Internews — the journalist training organization Diehl alludes to but does not name in his editorial).  As Diehl correctly notes, the Obama/Clinton State Department has done precious little with the remaining $35 million appropriated in subsequent years.