Trump Officials Want to Use Human Rights Aid to Advocate for White South Africans and Right-Wing Causes in Europe

For decades, the U.S. Department of State gave money to groups protecting free speech, human rights and persecuted minorities in poor and authoritarian countries. To decide what to fund, staffers with deep expertise typically pored over reams of information on abuses under the most repressive regimes and held an open competition to fund groups to work in those countries. This year, Trump administration officials presented State Department workers with their own list of organizations that should be funded. To the shock of many staffers and lawmakers, they proposed at least a dozen grants that would bypass the normal open bidding process. They also sought to give taxpayer dollars to groups aligned with conservative and anti-immigration movements in Europe as well as advocates for white South