By Derek Vanbuskirk
A Thursday report details how President Donald Trump’s slashing of State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) funding has halted the spread of LGBTQ activism across the globe.
The 80-page report, “Breaking Point: The Urgent Need to Invest in Global LGBTQ Movements,” published by Outright International, surveys 229 organizations across 94 countries and aims to show what it characterizes as harm to these communities following the cuts. (RELATED: African Immigrant Kills Antifa Activist In Gay Bar Hate Crime)
Of the LGBTQ organizations surveyed, 90 percent say that they have lost U.S. taxpayer funding since January 2025. Of those organizations, 49 percent lost more than half their total budget, while another 75 percent lost more than a quarter.
Additionally, 40 percent of the organizations surveyed describe themselves as being at severe or immediate risk of closure, while less than 4 percent report being stable.
Countries in which the LGBTQ community is least accepted were twice as likely to lose funding.
Of the organizations surveyed, more than 50 percent explicitly attributed their loss of U.S. taxpayer subsidies to cuts made within the U.S. government.
The report also lists examples of where the tax dollars were going.
Among them is Diversidad Dominicana, a Dominican Republic organization that claims it is now struggling to keep its lights on. However, during its heyday, the group directed its funds to identify and prepare LGBTQ candidates for elected office, in what the report described as a “pipeline for queer political participation.”
In Hungary, the State Department funded the Háttér Society, which used the funds to train activists to respond to “anti-gender discourse.”
Grants were also used to fund feminist queer collectives in Kyrgyzstan, with community members, including trans sex workers, now pitching in to help fund legal services as the grants have been pulled.
In Turkey, the May 17 Association had to close its trans-led “climate crisis and emergency response program,” close an office, and lay off numerous staff since January 2025, the report said.
Other programs, such as Dignity for All, which distributed funds to unregistered LGBTQ activist groups, also lost funding.
Additional spending items through USAID include $15 million for condoms to the Taliban, $3,315,446 for “being LGBTQ in the Caribbean,” and $1.5 million to promote job opportunities for LGBTQ individuals in Serbia through USAID, according to House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Brian Mast in February 2025.
Mast also said the State Department has spent $20,600 on a drag show in Ecuador, $47,020 for a transgender opera in Colombia, and $32,000 for an LGBTQ-centered comic book in Peru through the State Department.
Reports show that leaders in cultures less open to LGBTQ equality, such as in the Middle East and North Africa, often point to such programs to further radicalize the population against the West and its values, such as freedom of speech, democratization, and rule of law, suggesting that sexual pride and deviation are the natural end result of Western ideals, the Center for Strategic and International Studies reported.
This also allows powers competing with the U.S., such as Russia, to step in and pledge to work with these countries in the place of the U.S. while pledging to maintain the country’s “traditions and values,” the Center said.
A number of Western countries try to impose their values on #Qatar. No respect to national traditions and values of Qatar as an Islamic state. Why are they doing that? Yet another example of totalitarian trends in the policies of the West.
— Mikhail Ulyanov (@Amb_Ulyanov) November 25, 2022
The reversal of 15 years of U.S. taxpayer funding began only hours after Trump’s second inauguration with the signing of Executive Order 14169, which created a 90-day freeze on nearly all U.S. foreign assistance, including programs that had sustained hundreds of LGBTQ movements.
Days later, Secretary of State Marco Rubio approved a waiver exempting “lifesaving humanitarian assistance” from the freeze while specifically naming “transgender surgeries” as not qualifying as lifesaving work.
However, Outright International claims that these cuts did result in death in the LGBTQ community, pointing to an interruption of HIV treatment support, the lack of funding for safe houses, and the investment in the mental health care of communities with particularly high rates of suicide risk.
“By February 2025, termination notices were arriving—not pauses, but permanent cuts,” the report said. “What was initially framed as a temporary freeze has hardened into a structural transformation of the funding landscape.”
The report’s findings come after more than a decade of U.S. funding for LGBTQ organizations and human rights defenders abroad.
In 2011, the State Department joined with the Global Equality Fund, spending more than $100 million in the first 10 years to LGBTQ organizations and human rights defenders in over 100 countries, the report said.
By August 2025, the White House committed to canceling $5 billion in foreign aid and international organization funding that “violates the President’s America First priorities,” including ones that spend millions to support LGBTQ populations.
“Under Joe Biden, it was the policy of the United States to export abortion and radical gender ideology all around the world. That is what they did with your tax money. They would relentlessly bully developing countries into parroting their far-left views,” Vice-President JD Vance said at the March for Life in January.
“And that it’s not our job as the United States of America to promote radical gender ideology; it’s our job to promote families and human flourishing,” Vance continued, adding that instead the administration would be “expanding this policy to protect life, to combat [diversity, equity, and inclusion], and the radical gender ideologies that prey on our children.”
Trump has not only cut federal funding, but his rhetoric has gone a long way in getting others to stop investing in these programs.
“When Trump said there are only two genders, it affected discourse and stakeholders. We faced more stigma in those forums,” one Executive Director and transgender in Nepal, Manisha Dhakal, said, as “people were scared to participate in the program.”
Dhakal said that he and his organization “had to lose our identity as transgender women,” as they and other groups would have to adapt by presenting themselves in a way that still qualifies for funds. (RELATED: Elon Musk Says ‘Zero Point Zero’ People Died From DOGE Cuts To USAID)
Outright International said the report’s central argument is to encourage private philanthropy and foundations to pick up the slack and is not directed at the U.S. government.
