On 24 February, Serbian police conducted raids on four civil society organisations (CSO) in Belgrade as part of a crackdown on corruption and money laundering. One was the Centre for Research Transparency and Accountability (CRTA), which advocates for civic activism and democracy in Serbia. The Public Prosecutor’s Office cited tweets by President Donals Trump and Elon Musk about USAID in its warrant.

Early 2025 has seen the slashing of international development spending, most evidently by the US, previously the world’s largest development spender, which has gutted the USAID. The UK, Switzerland, Netherlands, Sweden and Australia have all cut aid budgets in recent months. 

The humanitarian and geopolitical implications are palpable. The New York Times  countered Musk’s recent assertions that ‘no one has died’ from such cuts by projecting the catastrophic effects of one year without USAID. It includes an estimation that the lack of aid could lead to as many as 1.65 million deaths from HIV alone. Cuts also hand the developmental reins to geopolitical rivals. As Mississippi’s Republican senator, Roger Wicker, explained, USAID was America’s ‘way to combat the Belt and Road Initiative.’ Western aid cuts will probably force countries like Jordan — which relies on US aid for 3% of its budget — to reconsider their allegiances and shelters, opening the door to overtures from China and other prospective providers.

There are, however, less tangible consequences of these reductions, with significant implications for already threatened CSOs around the world, and particularly in Russia’s sphere of influence. This largely stems from the rhetoric employed by proponents of aid cuts such as Trump and Musk. The president has made public both his disdain for USAID and his desire to bring criminal referrals against many of its employees. Musk has parroted these views, calling USAID a ‘criminal organisation’ and tweeting that it was ‘time for it to die.’

Meanwhile, CSOs around the world have come under increasing fire. The Serbian police crackdown comes weeks after both the Serbian and Bosnian Serb parliaments reintroduced the so-called ‘foreign agents bill’ which seeks to control and regulate government-critical and foreign-funded CSOs such as the CRTA. Such legislation already exists in Russia, Georgia and Hungary, with similar proposals in Slovakia and Kyrgyzstan. Opponents have denounced them as attempts to intimidate and silence domestic critics including democracy and rule of law advocacy groups.

Last week Azerbaijan arrested two such critics — Bashir Suleymanli who heads the Azerbaijani Civil Rights Institute, and Alpay Mammadzada, who leads the Election Observation Alliance — on charges of forgery, money laundering and illegal business activities. Before Baku suspended its relations with the USAID in January, it was the principal donor to both groups. Both men are reportedly implicated in government investigations surrounding USAID.

These are not anomalies. Such incidents are increasingly common throughout Moscow’s sphere of influence with CSOs in Hungary, Georgia, Moldova, Belarus, Slovakia and Armenia all under fire. Hungary Prime Minister Viktor Orban welcomed the fall of USAID, and called to make the existence of these supposedly anti-Hungarian organisations ‘legally impossible.’

As the Serbian Public Prosecutor’s Office warrant demonstrates, the correlation between the Administration’s attacks on USAID and those on CSOs is not a coincidence. The discontinuation of American funding has decapitated many organisations which relied heavily on foreign money to counter domestic and Russian-funded state organisations and media outlets. In many of these countries, foreign funding was vital in maintaining a balanced media landscape and 40% of the USAID’s 2023 budget went to Eastern Europe.

However, the implications run deeper than this. Musk and Trump’s characterisation of USAID as a criminal organisation dovetails with the narrative employed by authoritarian regimes for decades which have denounced NGOs and CSOs as corrupt and subversive. This has eroded the legitimacy of NGOs that receive government and foreign funding whilst maintaining the right to openly criticise governments, and has provided illiberal and authoritarian regimes with the pretext with which to silence them.

The withdrawal of support for CSOs lends US credibility to such claims that were once dismissed as the conspiratorial accusations of authoritarian regimes. The Kremlin, which expelled USAID on such grounds in 2012, and other regimes can now declare that their longstanding suspicions about foreign investment, and attacks on civil society, were entirely justified. In Bosnia, the Republika Srpska President, Milorad Dodik, described his foreign agents’ bill as ‘on the train of what is now official US policy.’ Azerbaijan’s President  Ilham Aliyev parroted the Trump-Musk line on 13 March when, at the Global Baku Forum, he decried  the  ‘illegal activity of USAID.’ There is a clear link between the Trump Administration’s rhetoric and the actions of these regimes against  NGOs that are critical. 

The tangible consequences of cuts to international development, particularly through USAID, are plain to see. These events, however, underscore the wide-reaching normative impacts of American domestic rhetoric. By aligning themselves, purposefully or not, with the narratives of authoritarian regimes, figures like Trump and Musk in their attacks on USAID have not only cut development budgets but have challenged norms surrounding civil society, legitimacy, democracy, and freedom of opinion and expression. 

It remains to be seen how societies in these countries will respond. The current withdrawal of  American and Western support is likely to further embolden authoritarian regimes in their crackdown against civil society. There have been, however, outbursts of popular anger with significant protests, many of them anti-Russian, in Georgia, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Bosnia & Herzegovina and Serbia, which culminated in the resignation of Serbia’s Prime Minister Miloš Vučević in January.

Guest Blog by Martin Christopherson who is a postgraduate student studying Political Science at the University of Amsterdam.