A question about “queering” maps — raised during a Thursday hearing on Capitol Hill — revealed just how deep the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives were buried in the U.S. State Department under former President Joe Biden.
Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL) posed the question to Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy Sarah Rogers, who assumed the role previously held by Biden-appointee Liz Allen in 2025, asking her what it meant to “make maps more gay.” Mast was questioning Rogers on a series of programs that were given grant funding during the Biden administration to push DEI priorities.
WATCH:
.@RepBrianMast: How do you make a map more gay? @UnderSecPD brings reciepts exposing just what the Biden State Department wasted tax dollars on for four years. pic.twitter.com/4nQvIptIFM
— House Foreign Affairs Committee Majority (@HouseForeignGOP) March 6, 2026
“Can you tell me, what is queering the map?” Mast asked Rogers.
“So I think we were trying to make the maps more gay,” Rogers replied.
“Literally? That’s — How do you make a map more gay?” Mast asked, clearly baffled by the concept. “Or gay at all?”
“Especially with AI — since the age of cartography we’ve had pretty good maps, but maybe they weren’t gay enough,” Rogers said. “I know also — I took critical theory in college, I think sometimes people use ‘queer’ as a verb. I do understand that the maps that we were trying to make gay were I think of Czechia and Slovakia, so maybe those countries asked for it. I doubt it, but I don’t know.”
Mast made it clear that he was unimpressed by the previous administration’s priorities, adding, “We do have real things to work on in Congress like what’s going on with the imminent threat of Iran, and it is embarrassing that we have to talk about the fact that things like this were funded.”
Mast went on to list a few other similar DEI-focused initiatives that had been funded during the Biden administration, including introducing “non-binary and trans francophones” to minimize the heavily-gendered nature of the French language in order to make it more inclusive.
The goal, Mast explained, was to shift “linguistic attitudes and ideologies towards inclusive French in Montreal, Canada.”
Turning to Rogers, he asked the undersecretary to provide him with receipts for other such initiatives and with the identities of those who were writing the grants.
“Whatever documentation they have on all of these things, we would love to see that and would absolutely love to know the individuals specifically that were busy writing these grants because they have no business receiving another paycheck from the people of the United States of America,” Mast concluded.
Rogers commented on the exchange afterward, offering her apologies to the people of Czechia and Slovakia for what the Biden administration had done to their maps.
“Czechia and Slovakia are great countries. I’m sorry that my predecessors ‘queered’ your maps! This is why future public diplomacy grants will be streamlined, accountable, and channeled toward real American interests, like free speech and sports diplomacy,” she said.
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