Unmasking The Artificial Inflation Of Global LGBTQ Activism

The Trump Administration’s dismantling of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs has left the international LGBTQ movement increasingly cash-strapped and at risk of losing its powerful lobbying reach, according to a recent report from Outright International. Since early 2025, almost half of the more than 200 organizations they surveyed had lost more than half their budget, only 3% describe themselves as financially stable, and more than a third may have to close their doors altogether.

The report blames one thing: cuts in U.S. funding that began in President Donald Trump’s second term. From the closure of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to the cutting of the Global Equality Fund, which specifically gave grants to LGBTQ organizations, and the narrowing of the scope of the president’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), the U.S. government got out of the business of promoting international LGBTQ advocacy. The dire situation Outright International describes illustrates how existentially this movement relied on U.S. taxpayers.

Western European countries also fund LGBTQ groups in the global South, but it is staggering to witness the extent to which so many overseas-based organizations were dependent, not just on foreign governments’ assistance, but on one foreign government’s assistance: Uncle Sam’s.

There is a common understanding among U.S.-based conservative organizations that those who live by government funding will perish by government funding. They are wary of government dependency and distrust the inevitable strings attached. Recently, the Christian humanitarian organization Samaritan’s Purse rejected a $300 million U.S. government grant for those reasons.

The Outright report illustrates two important things, although perhaps unintentionally. First, no legitimate grassroots movement can reach a “breaking point,” to borrow from the report’s title, when a single donor withdraws its backing. The organizations now facing financial insolvency represent a kind of neocolonial astroturfing — the artificial inflation of a few local fringe activists’ capacity for advocacy and outreach based on priorities that are highly unpopular in their own countries.

Second, the work these organizations do is not universally popular in the U.S. either. Public opinion has turned against the excesses of gender ideology in recent years. Same-sex marriage has seen a downturn in public support. A Pew Research poll in 2024 found that Americans’ top priorities for U.S. foreign policy are related to national security, stopping the flow of dangerous illegal drugs, and reducing the spread of infectious diseases.

The slush fund provided to overseas LGBTQ groups by American taxpayers continued through the Obama administration to the second Trump administration without interruption. Only after dramatic institutional cuts was this bureaucratic perpetual-motion machine finally brought to a rest.

One of the major projects of the groups that received this funding was to create the illusion of a global groundswell of support for novel human rights concepts that had never gained traction in any international forum that operates on consensus through negotiation. While Outright admits that “the field barely existed fifteen years ago,” LGBTQ activists are omnipresent at the U.N., whose foreign funding enables them to travel to New York and Geneva and stay in the cities’ pricey hotels.

But without grassroots support in their own countries, and without a U.S. grant to foot the bill, what is left?

U.N. human rights experts and committees have taken an aggressive stance in favor of LGBTQ priorities over the last couple of decades, pressuring countries to decriminalize homosexual behavior, introduce new categories for nondiscrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, promote public and institutional support for the LGBTQ movement, and legally recognize same-sex marriage, adoption by homosexual couples, and changes to gender identity.

However, when national governments review each other’s human rights records, a different story emerges. In the last two cycles of the Universal Periodic Review, which extend from 2017 to the present, nearly 70% of all recommendations that explicitly pertain 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% came from a subset of Latin American countries, leaving very little coming from the rest of the world.

While far from being its intended message, Outright International’s chronicle of the effects of U.S. funding cuts reveals the extent to which the global LGBTQ movement has been artificially propagated by a single government operating with insufficient oversight from either its taxpayers or elected officials.

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Rebecca Oas, Ph.D. is the Director of Research for the Center for Family and Human Rights (C-Fam) a research institute dedicated to protecting national sovereignty and the dignity of the human person at the U.N.