The U.S. human rights bureau is redirecting taxpayer dollars to right-wing organizations in Europe and an Afrikaner advocacy group in South Africa.

"It's laughable to suggest that on the African continent, the prime issue of human rights concern is whites in South Africa."

— Former State Department agency official, speaking to ProPublica

For nearly five decades, the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor operated with a relatively consistent mission. The State Department's DRL unit distributed grants to organizations documenting sexual violence in Burma, preventing torture in Tunisia, and combating discrimination against women in Mauritania. It was one of the rare parts of the federal government that enjoyed genuine bipartisan support. Marco Rubio once argued from the Senate floor that safeguarding the freedoms of gay men persecuted in Chechnya was in the national interest.

Then Rubio became secretary of state, and everything changed.

A ProPublica investigation published over the weekend lays out how the bureau has been hollowed out and redirected under Trump administration appointees. The evidence is not circumstantial. Internal documents, private congressional briefings, and interviews with more than a dozen former State Department employees paint a picture of a systematic transformation of a human rights agency into a grantmaking vehicle for right-wing causes.

The architect of this pivot is Samuel Samson, a 27-year-old deputy assistant secretary of state who started at DRL on the day of Trump's second inauguration. Before his government role, Samson worked as a fundraiser for an organization dedicated to recruiting "America first" worldviews into government positions. He previously enrolled in a graduate program at Hillsdale College, a Christian conservative institution.

Samson quickly set about reshaping the bureau's priorities. He traveled to the United Kingdom in March, meeting with anti-abortion protesters and anti-immigration politician Nigel Farage. In an essay on the State Department's own Substack, he attacked the U.K. for arresting anti-abortion demonstrators and criticized Germany for labeling the hard-right Alternative for Germany party as extremist.

Under his direction, DRL staff were ordered to remove references to human rights defenders and marginalized communities from talking points. "We would try to talk about human rights defenders in talking points, only to have them struck," one former bureau employee said.

The bureau's budget was slashed from over $500 million in 2024 to approximately $190 million. Rubio closed most of DRL's offices and published his own Substack post smearing the bureau he had once championed as "a platform for left-wing activists to wage vendettas against 'anti-woke' leaders."

Translation: the person who once funded anti-woke causes in authoritarian regimes decided anti-woke activism was now happening inside his own department.

The grants that Samson and other political appointees are pushing through represent a departure that even conservative experts find extraordinary. Here is what ProPublica uncovered:

A proposed $5 million no-bid grant to the Free Speech Union, a British organization founded to counter "cancel culture." The group has actively fought against the United Kingdom's proposed ban on gay conversion therapy. According to documents reviewed by ProPublica, the grant would fund efforts to combat "digital overregulation," support individuals facing "deplatforming," and advocate against what the proposal calls "restrictive online safety and hate speech laws."

The Free Speech Union's founder, Toby Young, told ProPublica that his organization had "neither applied for nor been awarded a grant from the US State Department or any other branch of the US Government." The organization's website states it is nonpartisan and does not take government funds.

A proposed $7 million sole-source grant to 878, a British American think tank founded earlier this year to focus on "existential threats to Britain, to America, and to our shared Judeo-Christian civilisation." The grant would advance "Anglo-American values" across Europe and allied countries. After pushback from Democratic lawmakers during private briefings, the State Department abandoned this particular proposal.

A $4.9 million competitive grant program for groups working to develop "civilizational self-confidence in Europe." The call for proposals explicitly instructs recipients not to attempt to reform legislative processes in their host countries, despite the program being aimed at wealthy democracies including Germany, where officials have publicly warned against American election interference.

A proposed $1 million grant to fund research into crime and violence against minority populations in South Africa. Internal communications indicate the targeted minority is Afrikaners, the white ethnic group responsible for creating apartheid. Staff were initially told to process an award to Lex Libertas, an organization founded by Ernst Roets, who has publicly called for Afrikaner self-governance. The group is currently fundraising to place 3,000 white crosses on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

A staggering $40 million proposed grant to the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. The foundation's most recent tax forms from 2024 show total assets of approximately $12 million. Four sources familiar with the foundation's previous government-funded work questioned its capacity to manage an award more than triple its entire budget. The connection to Samson: the foundation's board chair, Elizabeth Spalding, is a visiting fellow at the same Hillsdale graduate program where Samson was enrolled. Her husband, Matthew, is the dean.

William Allchorn, a senior research fellow at Anglia Ruskin University who studies radical-right extremism in the U.K., told ProPublica that U.S. government support for these organizations could give them "a layer of legitimacy they wouldn't otherwise have." He described it as "crossing the Rubicon."

The procedural irregularities are as striking as the ideological ones. Federal rules long required open competitive bidding for grants to guard against waste, fraud, and abuse. Sole-source or limited-source awards are permitted in rare circumstances: when only one organization is capable of the work, or when emergency conditions make open competition impossible.

None of those justifications appear to apply, according to contracting experts and former staffers. Political appointees handpicked potential recipients, bypassing the panel of government experts who previously evaluated applicants based on experience and qualifications.

"It's not good governance to have political appointees give grants to individuals for unknown reasons," one former bureau staffer said.

Awarding grants to organizations in high-income countries is so unusual that an internal waiver is typically required. The State Department did not answer whether it had sought waivers for these grants.

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called the proposals "an appalling departure" from standard practice. "These awards suggest that the Department intends to select awardees for federal funding based on their political ideology, not in the interest of American taxpayers or national security."

The South Africa case deserves particular attention because it is not isolated. It is part of a coordinated policy shift. Over the last 18 months, Trump has claimed there is a genocide of white South Africans, using this assertion to justify cutting off U.S. funding for HIV treatment and research through PEPFAR. Even while barring nearly all new refugees from entering the United States, the administration has fast-tracked entry for white South Africans.

Mattie Webb, a professor at the Virginia Military Institute who studies South Africa and U.S. foreign policy, described the shift in priorities. "The U.S. is very clearly shifting its priorities away from aid that would benefit far more people in South Africa to this narrow focus on the white minority."

Former diplomats told ProPublica that this approach risks driving a wedge between the United States and one of its most important African partners. The U.S. relationship with South Africa was built on massive HIV care support that literally saved lives and sustained a working relationship vital to national security and economic interests.

Extensive research has found that white South African farmers are not victims of crime at higher rates than other groups. The genocide claim has been repeatedly fact-checked and debunked. Yet the administration is willing to redirect human rights funding toward organizations that promote this narrative.

The State Department's response to ProPublica's questions was characteristically opaque: "Programs are still in active deliberation and receipt of a grant is not guaranteed to any organization that does not meet all requirement and standards for federal grants."

But the pattern is clear. An agency created to protect the world's most vulnerable populations is being repurposed to fund ideological allies of the administration. The budget has been cut, the expertise has been stripped away, and the remaining resources are being steered toward causes that would have been unthinkable under any previous administration, regardless of party.

The bureau once documented rape and political violence in some of the most oppressive regimes on earth. Now it is being asked to bankroll a British free-speech group that defends conversion therapy, a Judeo-Christian civilizational think tank, and an Afrikaner advocacy organization.

The question is not whether these grants are corrupt. The question is whether anyone outside the State Department had to dig through internal documents to find out what was happening.