The EFF and 17 other advocacy organizations urge US court to rule that Trump's appointee to the OTF violated the law by ousting OTF's president and the board
Government Attempts Takeover of Private, Independent Nonprofit Protecting Internet Freedom — San Francisco—The Electronic … Tweets: @eff Tweets: @eff : In a democracy, the state can't take over private organizations and replace their boards with political appointees. That's what the administration wants to do to the Open Technology Fund. EFF and partners told a court today: that's illegal, don't let it. https://www.eff.org/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The Open Technology Fund sits at the center of a governance fight: Trump's USAGM appointee removed the fund's independent president and board, and the EFF plus 17 allied organizations went to court arguing the takeover of a private nonprofit by political appointees is illegal. The filing extends EFF's litigation playbook, which already includes its 2016 suit over the DMCA's anti-tinkering clause.
The stakes were immediately material: within days the administration was reported to be withholding $20M Congress had approved, forcing OTF to halt 49 of 60 internet-freedom projects. By October, a DC court ruled the board replacement unauthorized and invalidated the new board's actions, vindicating the coalition's legal theory.
First-order effects
- OTF's ousted president and original board get a judicial ruling that the replacement under USAGM CEO Michael Pack was unauthorized, invalidating decisions made by Pack's installed board.
- OTF grantees face frozen funding in the interim, with the withheld $20M having already forced cancellation of most of the fund's active internet-freedom projects.
Second-order effects
- Other congressionally funded but nominally independent nonprofits must now treat board composition as a legal battleground rather than an administrative detail, since the administration demonstrated both the will and a mechanism to install loyalists.
- Advocacy coalitions like EFF's gain a template: coordinated filings that pair a governance lawsuit with public framing ('the state can't take over private organizations') to raise the political cost of further takeovers.
Third-order effects
- If courts consistently hold that agency chiefs cannot legally reconstitute the boards of chartered nonprofits, the independence of government-funded civil-society infrastructure becomes enforceable by litigation rather than dependent on each administration's restraint — though enforcement ultimately depends on rulings holding across successive disputes.
The trend: Government-funded independent institutions are being pulled between congressional charter autonomy and executive-branch control, with courts and advocacy coalitions becoming the decisive arbiters.