The Trump administration’s dismantlement of USAID, the United States’ primary source of foreign aid since President Kennedy established the agency in 1961, is devastating the LGBTQ+ community around the globe, recipients report.
“It is a catastrophe,” Mark Bromley, chair of the Council for Global Equality, told the Washington Blade. Bromley estimates the U.S. funds roughly a third of the global LGBTQ+ rights movement.
Related
Donald Trump’s freeze on foreign aid puts 500,000 children’s lives at risk
Secretary of State Marco Rubio blamed aid recipients for “deliberately sabotaging it” as he was accused of “an alarming lack of compassion.”
As Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) guts the department, a 90-day freeze on all foreign aid has thrown USAID’s HIV treatment and prevention efforts, diplomatic battles against LGBTQ+ discrimination, and advocacy for transgender people into chaos.
Insights for the LGBTQ+ community
Subscribe to our briefing for insights into how politics impacts the LGBTQ+ community and more.
Subscribe to our Newsletter today
The effect on PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, is the most egregious example of the administration’s draconian approach to slashing U.S. foreign assistance.
On Monday, the head of the U.N. AIDS agency said the number of new HIV infections could jump more than six times by 2029 if American support for PEPFAR is dropped. UNAIDS Executive Director Winnie Byanyima warned that millions could die and more resistant strains of the disease could emerge as a result.
PEPFAR has contributed to a 60% decline in HIV infections since the virus peaked in 1995, but that progress is at risk following the freeze. Officials estimate that, by 2029, there could be 8.7 million new infections and a tenfold jump in AIDS-related deaths without continued funding, Byanyima told The Los Angeles Times. As a consequence, an additional 3.4 million children could be made orphans.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced an exemption to the funding freeze for “life-saving” programs in January, but said the onus was on aid recipients to apply for it, despite the fact that those organizations’ contacts at USAID have been cut off from communicating with them or fired.
Rubio questioned the “competence” of groups unable to navigate the funding freeze.
The list of LGBTQ+ organizations and programs affected by the freeze — imposed as DOGE and administration officials assess all aid recipients’ contributions to Trump’s version of “the national interest” — is long.
The Institute on Race, Equality and Human Rights — a Washington-based group advocating for LGBTQ+ and intersex rights in Latin America — lost nearly 80% of its funding and announced a suspension in all its programming.
Outright International, a global LGBTQ and intersex advocacy organization, has halted assistance to LGBTQ+ groups in more than 32 countries in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America.
The LGBTQ+ Victory Institute lost $600,000 — about two-thirds of its global program budget — which it uses to support groups like VoteLGBT in Brazil and Caribe Afirmativo in Colombia.
Funding for Equal Namibia and Namibia Pride was gutted, setting back efforts to fight a new anti-same-sex marriage act passed in October.
The Center for Integrated Training and Research, which fights the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the Dominican Republic, said free services they provide, including urology, internal medicine, and pediatric services, are suspended indefinitely.
Replacing funds no longer available after USAID’s demise will be “challenging, if not impossible,” said the Council for Global Equality’s chair Bromley.
“There isn’t a short-term way to fill the current funding gap,” he said. “It sets the movement back at least 10 years.”
Subscribe to the LGBTQ Nation newsletter and be the first to know about the latest headlines shaping LGBTQ+ communities worldwide.