Remember how the Left said that eliminating USAID would lead to “devastating” consequences?
It certainly did, but for their global cultural aspirations, not for our country.
The Associated Press published a lengthy report on Thursday—and I can’t believe this is real—highlighting how shutting down USAID in Nepal led to “around 100 LGBTQ+” now-unemployed workers to turn to prostitution.
“In impoverished Nepal, where a conservative culture leaves openly transgender people with few legal job options, the impact on aid workers’ lives was particularly crushing,” AP reported. “Starving and scared, [Rubi] Lama and around 100 other LGBTQ+ aid workers left jobless by the funding cuts have turned to sex work to survive, walking the streets alongside the very people they once fought so hard to help.”
Turning to prostitution is terrible, but why on earth are the American taxpayers expected to fund what is essentially a jobs program for transgender foreigners?
I’m going to keep quoting from this piece because it’s hard to believe it isn’t parody. The shuttered USAID offices were apparently primarily dedicated to handing out free condoms, lubricant, and “HIV prevention medication.”
No longer.
“Just a few minutes down the road, in Lama’s old office, stickers bearing the logo of the U.S. Agency for International Development still cling to laptops that lie unused on barren desks, and to the empty condom distribution containers collecting dust,” the AP reported.
Forget the foreign thing, we shouldn’t even be funding these “jobs” here at home.
USAID was created via executive order in 1961 with the intent of helping the “underdeveloped world” build their economies and get to the point where they “will no longer have to depend on outside assistance.” It was also meant to create better relations between the U.S. and those nations to deter the threat of communism.
In what way does handing out condoms in a country with a “conservative culture” help us accomplish the goal of either strengthening their economy or improving relations between our countries?
It doesn’t.
Instead, what USAID became was a taxpayer-funded project of a particular kind of socially liberal globalist empire, supported by a constellation of NGOs working toward the same goal. It’s social engineering of a sort that likely creates bad feeling toward the U.S. rather than good will or “soft power.”
Last year I interviewed Giorgi Labadze, an American studies professor at the Tbilisi State University in the nation of Georgia.
He explained that in his country there was a rising amount of anti-Americanism in part because of the efforts of USAID in his country.
“For instance, while most Georgians support freedom of speech and minority rights in principle, programs aggressively promoting inclusivity for non-traditional groups (such as LGBT) have become flashpoints for controversy,” he wrote. “Despite awareness of the sensitivities of the vast majority of Georgia’s churchgoing conservative population, relevant officials and NGO [nongovernmental organization] representatives have failed to adapt their approach or present these initiatives in a more culturally appropriate manner.”
Labadze noted that USAID’s cultural programs failed to communicate the best parts of America that could very much have appealed to traditional Georgian culture.
If they did, then maybe the effect would be more like what we saw during the World Cup, when Europeans and other people came to America and encountered our broader culture rather than the thin slice of our culturally leftist pseudo-elites. It turns out that part of America is quite appealing.
Come back anytime, Freddy. You’ve been a great guest! My offer still stands for you to come west! Cheers.
https://t.co/tVtjhZuRg6
— Buzz Patterson (@BuzzPatterson) July 24, 2026
But America’s international organizations have been nothing like that.
Instead, they’ve been wasting taxpayer money on cultural projects that work counter to American interests.
That the media has tried to portray the end of USAID as some kind of catastrophe only shows how much they are invested in this larger cultural project.
Even taking their contention at face value that the end of USAID led to “hunger and violence,” it’s still hard to explain why the United States is responsible for what amounts to welfare programs around the world.
If USAID programs were really making countries like Nepal more self-sustaining as was originally intended, then why is it that they were in the country for nearly 75 years?
At best USAID was creating a kind of permanent international welfare dependency. But it wasn’t just that. Instead, the program had become little more than thinly disguised patronage meant to support like-minded leftists while carrying out the goal of indoctrination around the globe.
I’m genuinely thankful Associated Press went through the hard work to bring us this story. It proves that not only was USAID a massive waste of taxpayer money, but it was also actively detrimental.
Thanks to the Trump administration, the American people are no longer on the hook to support the jobs of people handing out condoms to transgender prostitutes in Nepal or anywhere else.
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[ H/T The Daily Signal ]
