Beyond Funding Cycles

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) permanently ceased operations on July 1, 2025, and 83 percent of its programs were terminated and 94 percent of its staff laid off. No doubt such extreme measures trigger devastating consequences. For example, a study in The Lancet claims that by 2030, this freeze in funding could lead to an estimated 14.05 million avoidable fatalities.1 Already, emergency food and health shelters addressing the genocide in Sudan have been severely affected.2 Aid to earthquake-torn Myanmar was affected as well.3 There are countless other examples.

The sudden and complete evisceration of USAID has generated a lot of crisis reporting, stories that highlight the dire consequences faced by aid recipients in various regions of the Global South. However, such reporting also masks the complex histories of USAID and its contribution to the imaginaries of the United States as the most powerful country in the world. Let us turn to India for a moment to illustrate this point. A BBC report dated March 3, 2025 states, “USAID Cuts Shutter India’s First Clinic for Transgender People.”4 The Mitr (Friend) Clinic in Hyderabad, the capital city of Telangana in Southern India, was touted as India’s first transgender health-care center. Following US President Donald Trump’s freezing of USAID funds, Mitr had to shut operations. Right-wing media widely picked up on this story in the United States. Conservative commentator Gunther Eagleman claimed on X that American taxpayers’ money was utilized to fund trans clinics in India and therefore India owed a full refund to the United States, a post that was reshared by Elon Musk.5 The upsurge of authoritarianism in the United States and elsewhere in the Global North has repeatedly invoked the specter of gender nonconformity as a threat to nature, tradition, and the white family. Hence, Eagleman’s response is not surprising. I would argue, however, that just a liberal demand for the restoration of USAID elides the brutal interconnections between geopolitical exigencies, transnational funding patterns, and rights regimes. USAID’s history reveals less about alleviating crisis around the world and much more about establishing a US-led world order. Policymakers have already denounced the gutting of the program as a strategic mistake, as China and Russia might skew the balance of power.6 Hence, unless we undertake a deeper dive into these connections, there is no way out of the whimsies of philanthropy undertaken by neocolonial state formations.

In response to a question in the upper house of the Indian parliament, the Ministry of External Affairs disclosed the breakdown of USAID funding in India between 2022 and 2025 on August 21, 2025.7 The money was spread among assistance for Tibetan communities in India and Nepal, education, energy and environment, HIV/AIDS, and other issues. There are no prizes for guessing that most of these funds were allocated for Tibetan communities. While China’s brutal clampdown of the Tibetan right to sovereignty deserves urgent attention, the fact that most of the USAID funds to India were earmarked for Tibetan communities points out that hostilities between China and the United States played an important role in this allocation. In other words, this mode of assistance is not based on any ethical principle of justice; rather, it is about geopolitical strategy. This is all the more reason to study what alternate modes of financial well-being can be achieved that heed local needs and are sustainable in the long term.

If one studies India’s history of HIV/AIDS activism, one notices how trans activists, sex workers, public health activists, and other civil society actors have repeatedly pushed the Indian state to commit to funding HIV advocacy measures. Sociologist Gowri Vijaykumar notes how in the first decade of the 2000s, it was massive pressure from activists that forced the Indian state to negotiate drug prices with Indian drug manufacturers to provide generic drugs.8 This means that the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) administered through USAID constituted only 5.6 percent of India’s HIV budget in 2017–2018.9 Interestingly, long before the current conversations about gender ideology, PEPFAR funding was often based on conditions that were just as ideological. Scholars working at the intersections of queer studies and African studies note the imposition of sexual abstention and anti-sex-work discourse referred to as the “antiprostitution pledge” being made a precondition of funding in different African nations.10 International relations scholar Rahul Rao notes that PEPFAR accounted for the majority of Uganda’s HIV budget. He writes, “Informed by theological prohibitions on extramarital, commercial, and non-heterosexual sex, PEPFAR diverted funding from progressive public health organizations to faith-based organizations (FBOs), among which US and African PCCs (Pentecostal Charismatic Church) were prominent.”11 Today when human rights organizations and Western nations decry Uganda’s antihomosexuality laws, it is important to bear in mind the importance of PCCs and the role the United States played in cementing t presence in the religious ecology of postcolonial Uganda.

In India, the Veshya Anyay Mukti Parishad—a sex workers’ union based in Sangli, Maharashtra—famously returned $20,000 of USAID funding in 2006 to oppose the antiprostitution pledge.12 The Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee—a sex workers’ collective in Kolkata, West Bengal, in Eastern India—set up its own cooperative bank and self-help groups to support its HIV programs.13 This is not to romanticize sexual minority movements in India. Much has been written about the troubling impact of transnational funding in HIV/AIDS advocacy and how it configured rights-bearing queer and trans subjects in the region.14 The Gates Foundation, the Global Fund, the Department for International Development (United Kingdom), and USAID, among others, operated in tandem with the Indian state’s National AIDS Control Organization and its state-level counterparts. Together, this neoliberal coalition of government and philanthropic entities created new categories of vulnerable populations that deserved intervention. This meant that community-based organizations that needed these funds had to struggle to fit within these imposed rubrics of gender and sexuality to be eligible to receive funding. The gradual withdrawal of these funds also meant that many of these organizations had to shut down, and their underpaid employees, mostly from trans communities, lost their jobs. In light of these outcomes, it is all the more important to continue asserting autonomy, driving a hard bargain with the state to force it to commit to public health without any form of conditions.

India has just witnessed the launch of a dedicated philanthropic fund for LGBTQ communities. Titled the Pride Fund India, it claims that its aim is to meet the funding gap experienced by LGBTQ communities and organizations.15 It is currently sponsored by queer corporate leaders in India. A report that was launched with the inauguration of the grant states that despite India’s huge population, it receives only 1 percent of the total donor funds allocated globally for LGBTQ communities. It also notes that only two of India’s top fifty philanthropic donors identify these issues as a priority.16 It is against this stark backdrop that the Pride Fund India emerges. What is left unsaid here is the absence of the state. Private philanthropy is only a stopgap response to the withdrawal of foreign donors. Pride Fund India’s website states that its grants are for three years in what is intriguingly referred to as a “three-year patient capital model.”17 Given the larger state of an economy where the majority of the population lives below the poverty line and most are unemployed or underemployed, what is three years? What happens after that? Who steps in then? Given the stark state of the world where transphobia is raging across one authoritarian state after another in the Global North, grassroots queer and trans organizations have no option but to apply for these resources. Yet philanthropy must not distract us from the larger demands of the right to health, education, and shelter that the state must provide its citizens. The Indian state, also under authoritarian rule for now over eleven years, purports to present itself as liberal on the global stage. It often brandishes legislation for trans rights and its initiatives for trans shelters and livelihood schemes as its stake in progressive politics under the larger umbrella of Hindu majoritarianism. This opens the possibility for relentless negotiation with the state to force it to not only abide by its stated commitments but also expand them.