In a resignation email sent to an OTF mailing list, Libby Liu, the inaugural OTF CEO, mentioned that the Trump administration had recently sworn in Michael Peck as the new head of the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM), which is the OTF's grantor.

At the same time she became aware of lobbying efforts to push money to closed-source tools.

"As you all know, OTF's flexible, transparent, and competitive funding model has been essential to our success in supporting the most secure and effective internet freedom technologies and innovative projects available.  have become aware of lobbying efforts to convince the new USAGM [US Agency for Global Media] CEO to interfere with the current FY2020 OTF funding stream and redirect some of our resources to a few closed-source circumvention tools."

OTF funding goes into many different projects. "Coded, deployed, research, paying for training from everything from journalists in Syria to activists in Russia. If it goes towards four projects in China it's kinda game over for a lot of this type of stuff." Motherboard granted the source anonymity to speak more candidly about the news.