From my understanding, TOR was created with the intent of hiding US intelligence communications[0]. From my naive understanding, this only works if 1) no one else can back door it (which is critical since it is presumed you're using it to hide from highly technical state actors) 2) there are a sufficient number of users that are not intelligence actors (so you can hide among them. Otherwise you get "Oh, that person connected to a TOR node, let's go pick them up and grab their computer").
Maybe I'm naive, but it seems like the crypto people and the US government have aligned interests here.
> The stated goal of the fund is to promote democracy in developing countries
With an additional alignment of interests, I think many believe that being able to "talk shit" on your leaders is a key part to democracy. And if you're able to do this without fear of your government coming after you (aka: backdoors), then you will freely acknowledge your dissent, find support, and democracy is the likely outcome. I'm not sure if that's true, but I've definitely heard intelligence people suggest that.
So even if it was controlled by the CIA, would this be an issue? It seems like it is actively in their best interest to use real encryption and no backdoors. You don't want all your potential rebels to get caught. You want them to be able to organize out of the eyes of the government that the CIA is trying to overthrow. Having a backdoor just puts a timebomb on it, and one that isn't going to last very long.
Or I guess there's another answer to this. The CIA is pretty fucking dumb. Which is a reasonable answer that I'll accept too, but I think the people working on this stuff would be well aware (since they're probably experts in hacking similarly encrypted systems)