A sweeping new report finds that nearly half of the world's LGBTIQ+ organizations are now teetering on the edge of collapse, a direct result of the funding freeze President Donald Trump ordered within hours of taking office in January 2025.
A Movement Gutted in Months
The report, titled Breaking Point: The urgent need to invest in global LGBTIQ movements, was released Thursday and draws on surveys and 24 in-depth interviews conducted across nearly a hundred countries. Its numbers are stark: 49% of organizations lost more than half their total budget once the US cuts hit, and 75% lost more than a quarter.
What began in February 2025 as a supposedly temporary aid review hardened fast into something else. By March, roughly 83% of USAID contracts had been cancelled; the agency officially shut down on July 1. The State Department also terminated the Global Equality Fund, a public-private partnership that had distributed more than $100 million to LGBTIQ+ causes since its 2011 launch, alongside sharp cuts to PEPFAR, the program long credited with saving millions of lives from HIV/AIDS.
Neela Ghoshal, Senior Director of Law, Policy and Research at Outright International, said the timing compounds the damage. "Organisations are working in a context of growing anti-gender organising, where the gains that we've achieved over the last several decades, which were already fragile, are increasingly at risk," she said in a media briefing.
The US has not been the only funder to walk away from or reduce its support for LGBTIQ movements during this period.
Neela Ghoshal, Outright International
The Communities Bearing the Weight
The cuts aren't landing evenly. The report found that groups serving the most marginalized, and operating where living conditions and legal protections are already weakest, absorbed the deepest losses. Half of surveyed organizations cut health services outright, and 45% reduced or discontinued HIV prevention, treatment or care. Sixty-three percent said they can no longer respond to emergencies involving violence, arrest, displacement or urgent relocation, the exact services that often stand between a person and catastrophe.
"Much has already been lost. Shelters and offices have closed, specialized staff have been let go, and organizations describe community trust shaken by services they could no longer deliver," the report's authors wrote.
Worth Considering
Money for queer and trans causes was never abundant to begin with. Between 2023 and 2024, LGBTIQ+ communities received just four cents out of every $100 in official international development assistance, a figure that makes the current losses feel less like a setback and more like an amputation. It's also worth naming who else has quietly stepped back: some foreign governments, corporations and foundations pulled funding under political pressure well before this report, and the Global Philanthropy Project has separately warned that donor nations like the Netherlands may follow with cuts of their own, with fears growing about Britain too.
Companies that dropped diversity and LGBTIQ+ funding commitments to dodge scrutiny from the Trump administration don't get a pass just because the political climate is hostile right now. The report's authors make a fair point: businesses that are too nervous for a public logo or press release can still fund the work quietly, through intermediary funds and no-strings grants. Silence isn't the same as absence, and there's a real difference between stepping back loudly and staying engaged without the spotlight.
What Comes Next
Outright International lays out five recommendations for governments, donors and philanthropists: release emergency bridge funding outside normal grant cycles, commit to flexible multi-year support instead of one-off grants, rebuild community-led HIV services where they're the only option available, directly fund shelters and emergency relocation, and prioritize the trans and LBQ communities absorbing the worst of the fallout.
The outlook isn't encouraging on its own. The Trump-Vance administration's proposed fiscal year 2027 budget would expand the global gag rule and strip LGBTIQ-specific programming from global health initiatives entirely, suggesting this isn't a one-time shock the movement can simply wait out. As the report's authors put it, the goal now shouldn't be recreating the funding landscape that existed before January 2025. "It should be to build one that is larger, more diverse, more flexible, and able to reach organisations operating where LGBTIQ people face the greatest barriers."
Sources: Mamba Online, The Advocate
Cover photo: Jan van der Wolf / Pexels
