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
Electronic Frontier Foundation : 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
USAGM CEO Michael Pack, installed by the Trump administration, replaced the Open Technology Fund's president and board, and the EFF plus 17 allied advocacy organizations are asking a US court to declare the move illegal. Their argument frames OTF as an independent grant-maker that a democracy cannot simply capture by appointing its overseers.
The stakes were visible within weeks: reporting showed the administration withholding $20M Congress had appropriated for OTF, forcing the fund to halt 49 of 60 internet-freedom projects. By October, a DC court ruled Pack's board replacement unauthorized, validating the coalition's core claim.
First-order effects
- OTF's ousted president and board regain standing only if the court accepts the EFF-led coalition's argument, while the Pack-installed board faces invalidation of every action it has taken.
- OTF grantees are directly exposed: with $20M in appropriated funds withheld, 49 of 60 internet-freedom projects have already been halted pending resolution.
Second-order effects
- USAGM under Michael Pack holds the purse strings, so even a favorable ruling for the old board forces a fight over restoring disbursed funding rather than merely restoring personnel.
- Other federally chartered media and grant-making bodies under USAGM's umbrella face pressure to assert legal independence from their agency CEO before they are reconstituted the same way OTF was.
Third-order effects
- If courts consistently treat political takeover of quasi-independent institutions' boards as unauthorized, it establishes a structural guardrail separating civil-society fund administration from executive patronage power.
- The episode feeds a longer EFF litigation pattern — from the DMCA anti-tinkering lawsuit to the TikTok ban constitutional brief — positioning advocacy coalitions as the recurring legal counterweight when administrations move against internet-freedom infrastructure.
The trend: Governance of state-funded internet-freedom institutions is shifting from administrative discretion to contested legal territory, with courts and advocacy coalitions arbitrating who controls their boards and money.