What happened at OTF in the spring of 2020
In April 2020, new leadership arrived at the US Agency for Global Media. Within weeks, OTF's board was removed and senior staff were pushed out. Grant applications sat in limbo. Reports began to appear that the agency intended to divert internet-freedom money to a short list of closed-source tools with far less audit history. The Open Technology Fund had suddenly become an example of how fragile working infrastructure can be when it depends on a single political appointment.
The 2020 joint letter this domain hosted was a direct response. It framed the shake-up not as a private organizational issue but as a warning about how internet-freedom funding is structured in general.
Why diverse funding was the letter's core ask
The letter's headline reads awkwardly on purpose: the OTF shake-up highlights the need for diverse funding for internet-freedom projects. That mouthful was the whole point. The signers wanted to move the conversation past a single organization and toward the shape of the funding pipeline itself. If OTF could be dismantled by one round of appointments, so could any single successor. The answer had to be structural.
In the letter's own words, the ecosystem needed more than one solid source of money and more than one place where hard funding decisions could be made. Nothing about that argument was new — grantees had raised it in private for years — but the crisis made it newly urgent.
The problem with a single-funder pipeline
A pipeline with one funder has three well-known failure modes:
- Political capture. A change in leadership can redirect money overnight, as happened at USAGM.
- Fear of the funder. Grantees who cannot afford to lose the only check they receive will avoid work the funder does not want, even if they never say so out loud.
- Fragile projects. A tool used by millions can be starved between two grant cycles if the pipeline pauses. The audit and localization work that keeps tools trustworthy stops first.
None of those failure modes are unique to internet-freedom work. Journalism has learned the same lesson from a decade of platform-dependent revenue. The 2020 letter borrowed the language and applied it to security tooling. Grantees who worked on Tor, Signal, and the wider circumvention stack signed on because they could see the pattern in their own work.
What diverse funding looks like in practice
Diverse funding does not mean a chaotic scramble for small donations. The letter and the debate around it pointed at a few concrete shapes:
| Source | What it can do well |
|---|---|
| Long-term public grants (OTF and equivalents) | Predictable multi-year funding, published audits, open calls. |
| Allied-government programs | Cross-border support that spreads political risk. |
| Private foundations | Faster grants for smaller projects and new areas of work. |
| Individual and corporate donations | Community signal, small tools, urgent gap funding. |
Every source has weak spots. Foundations move slowly on unfashionable topics. Individual donations spike after a crisis and vanish after it. Allied-government programs come and go with their own domestic politics. The point of the letter was not that any one source is right, but that combining them makes each grantee less exposed to any single failure.
Why the 2020 letter still shapes funding conversations
Five years on, the specific crisis at OTF has passed. The structural argument has not. Every time a big donor turns away from a niche or a legislature squeezes a program, funders and grantees come back to the same conversation: how do we spread the risk? The OTF shake-up letter is one of the clearest short summaries of why that question matters.
It is also the reason newer conferences and funder gatherings keep an internet-freedom track on the program. The people who write and receive the checks talk to each other more than they did before 2020, share lists of vetted grantees more openly, and are more willing to co-fund a single audit or fellowship. Not everything about that shift is visible in public. Enough of it is to see that the joint letter changed the room. That is what the joint letter on the OTF shake-up and diverse funding for internet-freedom projects added to the field, and it is why the letter still gets cited today.