More than 200 LGBTQ organizations worldwide are reeling from U.S. foreign aid cuts, with almost half reporting they have lost more than half their budgets since early 2025, according to a survey by Outright International highlighted this week by The Daily Wire. The report, cited in a Daily Wire essay by Rebecca Oas of the Center for Family and Human Rights, found that only 3% of surveyed groups describe themselves as financially stable, and more than a third may be forced to close entirely.
Outright International attributes the crisis squarely to funding reductions that began during President Donald Trump’s second term. The report points to the closure of the United States Agency for International Development, the elimination of the Global Equality Fund — which provided grants specifically to LGBTQ organizations — and the narrowing scope of PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. Together, those moves ended the U.S. government’s role in promoting international LGBTQ advocacy, at least through those channels.
A Movement Built on One Donor
What stands out in the Outright data, according to the Daily Wire, is not just the scale of the shortfall but the concentration of the funding. While Western European governments also support LGBTQ groups in the global South, the report suggests that many overseas organizations were dependent not merely on foreign assistance broadly, but on a single government: the United States.
“The dire situation Outright International describes illustrates how existentially this movement relied on U.S. taxpayers,” Oas writes in the Daily Wire piece.
That reliance has long been a point of contention among U.S.-based conservative organizations, which argue that groups living by government funding will ultimately perish by it. The Daily Wire notes that the Christian humanitarian group Samaritan’s Purse recently rejected a $300 million U.S. government grant, citing concerns about government dependency and the strings attached to federal money.
Grassroots or Astroturf?
The Daily Wire essay argues that the Outright report inadvertently makes two points. First, it contends that a genuine grassroots movement would not reach what the report calls a “breaking point” when a single donor withdraws support. The organizations now facing insolvency, in this telling, represent a form of “neocolonial astroturfing” — the artificial inflation of a small number of local activists whose advocacy priorities are unpopular in their own countries.
Second, the piece argues that this work is not universally popular in the United States either. It cites a Pew Research poll from 2024 indicating that Americans’ top foreign policy priorities center on national security, stopping the flow of illegal drugs, and reducing the spread of infectious diseases — not international LGBTQ advocacy. The essay also claims that public support for same-sex marriage has declined in recent years, though it does not provide specific polling data for that assertion.
From Obama to Trump, Without Interruption
According to the Daily Wire, the flow of American taxpayer money to overseas LGBTQ groups continued uninterrupted from the Obama administration through the second Trump administration, only coming to a halt after dramatic institutional cuts. The essay describes the arrangement as a “bureaucratic perpetual-motion machine” that finally ground to a stop.
One major project of the funded groups, the essay claims, was to create the appearance of a global groundswell of support for human rights concepts that had never gained traction in international forums operating by consensus. While Outright acknowledges that “the field barely existed fifteen years ago,” the Daily Wire notes that LGBTQ activists are now omnipresent at the United Nations, with foreign funding enabling travel to New York and Geneva and stays in those cities’ expensive hotels.
Without grassroots backing at home — and without a U.S. grant to cover the bills — the essay asks what remains.
A Gap Between U.N. Rhetoric and Government Votes
The Daily Wire points to U.N. human rights experts and committees, which it says have taken an aggressive stance on LGBTQ priorities over the past two decades, pressuring countries to decriminalize homosexual behavior, adopt new nondiscrimination categories based on sexual orientation and gender identity, build public and institutional support for the LGBTQ movement, and legally recognize same-sex marriage, adoption by same-sex couples, and changes to gender identity.
But when national governments review one another’s human rights records, a different picture emerges, according to the essay. In the last two cycles of the Universal Periodic Review, covering 2017 to the present, nearly 70% of all recommendations explicitly pertaining to LGBTQ issues came from the Western European and Others geopolitical group — which includes the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Israel. Another 25% originated from a subset of Latin American countries, leaving very little coming from the rest of the world.
The Daily Wire concludes that Outright International’s account, while not intended as such, reveals how heavily the global LGBTQ movement has been propagated by a single government — one that operated, in the essay’s characterization, with insufficient oversight from either taxpayers or elected officials.
Source: www.dailywire.com — https://www.dailywire.com/news/unmasking-the-artificial-inflation-of-global-lgbtq-activism