In July, the Financial Times reported that the Trump administration planned to hand out almost $5 million to “MAGA-aligned European groups” to opine on issues like migration and “our common western civilizational heritage.”

However, a review by The Redoubt shows that the State Department has now made more than $7.9 million in such funding available, including a grant worth almost $2 million, offered Aug. 14, for an analysis of how “foreign governments and their proxies weaponize migration.”

While ostensibly nonpartisan — a requirement of federal law on foreign assistance — the “independent journalism” consortium would also produce content with a reactionary appeal. The State Department suggests that U.S.-funded reporters could, among other things, cover the “impact of mass migration on safety and rule of law” and “the role of government policy in contributing to mass migration.” The content would also appear to be slanted against the EU itself, with reporters, as part of their “national sovereignty” coverage, producing work that addresses “attitudes toward national identities vis-a-vis a supra-national ‘European’ identity, and the role and impact of European policies on national-level freedoms and politics.”

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The grant for Trump-aligned media comes after the White House and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency eliminated the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, and froze some $268 million in congressionally-authorized funding for independent media, per Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism. Previous grants had supported independent journalism in authoritarian and war-torn states such as Syria and Myanmar but were deemed not to be “fully aligned with the foreign policy” of the Trump administration.