Trump administration under pressure to restore funding to groups supporting internet freedom in Iran

By Kylie Atwood, Jennifer Hansler, CNN

(CNN) — The Trump administration is under pressure to step up its efforts to support internet freedom in Iran after it cut funding backing that work last year, as widespread technology blackouts have hampered the efforts of anti-government protesters facing violent crackdowns through Iran.

Experts say the days-long digital blackout, imposed in response to sweeping anti-government protests, may be the most severe in Iran’s history. The Iranian government is accused of cutting off internet access in order hide evidence of its killings and repression of protesters across the country.

Last year, the Trump administration slashed US funding to organizations that work on internet freedom issues amid a dramatic reduction in US foreign assistance across the board and as the State Department eliminated offices working on democracy-building and human rights.

It also cut funding for efforts to provide circumvention tools like VPNs to help Iranians get around government censorship, sources told CNN.

Satellite internet services like Elon Musk’s Starlink have allowed some to break through the blackout and share dispatches and images from inside the country.

US President Donald Trump has threatened action against Iran for killing protesters.

On Monday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that Trump and Musk had discussed the topic of Starlink access in Iran, which provides access to the internet through the use physical terminals and a network of orbiting satellites. But it is unclear if they reached an agreement to provide more access.

The Iranian government has a long history of shutting down access to the internet during times of civil unrest, and every shutdown allows them to become more sophisticated in their approach, experts said. Under the Biden administration, there was a concerted and public effort by the US government to surge support to Iranian anti-government activists and help restore access to the internet when it was blocked during widespread protests in 2022.

At least one organization that worked to provide Starlink terminals to the Iranian people also lost US funding last year.

Some groups still have their US government support intact, but they are wary to discuss the details publicly because they do not want to risk their funding being pulled, said two sources familiar with that ongoing work.

NetFreedom Pioneers (NFP) were able to get about 200 Starlinks into Iran during the 2022 protests, a source from the organization said. But last year, they lost funding from the US government that supported their internet freedom work. That includes efforts to get the Starlink kits into Iran. During the so-called “12-day war” between Israel and Iran last year, the organization pleaded with the administration to restore funding to help their efforts, but their requests went unheeded.

Now, the organization said it has not bothered to make another request, with the source saying, “there is no funding and there is no strategy, it feels like there is nobody running the State Department.”

“We could be doing so much more with their support,” the source said. They have been using private funding efforts to support their work for Starlink terminals.

A State Department spokesperson said the “Trump Administration is committed to helping to preserve and protect the free flow of information by the most effective means to the people of Iran in the face of the Iranian regime’s brutal repression that include the campaign of internet disruptions and censorship dissent.”

And the administration says it is exploring providing technology like Starlink to bolster internet connectivity in Iran.

However, there are reports of government raids on those suspected of using Starlink, as well as reports that the Iranian government is using military-grade technology to jam satellite signals and block Iranian people’s access to the service – actions Freedom House Vice President Adrian Shahbaz calls “unprecedented.” According to Iranian state media, the Iranian government said Monday that the internet will remain restricted until officials determine that full security has been restored.

Even when the Iranian government has not fully shut down the internet, it heavily censors what is available to its citizens. The Trump administration has eliminated funding for work to get around that censorship, multiple sources told CNN.

Victoria Taylor, a former deputy assistant secretary of state for Iran and Iraq, noted that VPNs are “a proven and effective tool to help Iranians access the internet.”

“I would argue that the USG decision to cut funding from VPNs and other internet circumvention tools earlier in 2025 was a mistake and that funding should be redirected to VPNs and other tools that can facilitate access without requiring special equipment,” Taylor, who is now at the Atlantic Council, said in a post on X.

The US government “had a number of implementing partners equipped to support this work prior to the funding cut,” she wrote.

Some former US officials believe that the administration is likely focusing their efforts on Starlink terminals and getting private industry to foot the bill. While the powerful terminals are key to getting around the government’s internet blackout, experts say that the VPNs and other tools that enable peer-to-peer communications are critical to boosting connectivity in Iran during non-blackout times.

“Open-source VPNs remain the most effective tools available. If the US government does not take sustained funding for these programs seriously — and instead diverts attention to impractical private-sector solutions like Starlink — the broader anti-censorship effort in Iran will lose momentum, and abuses will go undocumented,” said a former State Department official familiar with the issue of internet freedom and the grant-giving process.

The drastic reduction in US support overall for these efforts has meant that some of the organizations are still unable to function as robustly as they would like. They have had to lay off employees and are now largely relying on part-time employees due to funding shortfalls.

Shahbaz told CNN that although the funding is more limited now than it was before the cuts, the Trump administration did act “quickly to resume and even ramp up certain programs that Iranians have relied on for access to information,” like Voice of America in Farsi and Radio Farda after they were initially cut last year.

“Where cuts have been made, there have been efforts to ramp that up, and yet, I think the capacity is still minimal, and we need to move away from this reactive approach and towards more consistent funding,” he said.

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