The Associated Press published a story on their website on Thursday, 23 July, that has garnered a lot of mockery online. The article describes the plight of trans sex workers in Nepal after they lost their aid work jobs due to the second Trump administration defunding USAID.
However, there seems to be some confusion about the story among its right-wing critics.
USAID did not pay for trans prostitutes in Nepal. The former controversial US foreign aid agency funded a non-profit in the Asian country that hired trans people. The non-profit called Friends Hetauda, according to AP’s reporting, worked to prevent the spread of HIV in the local communities.
With the aid work gone, many of the Nepalese trans people were forced into sex work, as very few other job opportunities are available for transgender men and women in the socially conservative Nepalese society.
However, the AP reporting does confirm that part of the US taxpayer funds were used to pay for not only condoms, but also lubricants for LGBTQ people in Nepal…
Hence, reactions to the Associated Press story have largely been ridicule online.
Conservative commentator Matt Walsh, for instance, wrote: ‘Wow very grateful that my tax dollars are no longer funding a bunch of random trannies in Asia. Is that the point you were trying to make or did you expect us to be somehow sad about this?’
Walsh’s quote has received significantly more likes than the original post by the Associated Press. Walsh’s tweet has received 10,000 positive interactions on the social media platform X, while the AP’s has only received 945.
The story was seemingly intended to garner support for the refunding of USAID, as opposed to drawing attention to the odd projects the aid agency was financing prior to President Trump’s return to office.
For instance, the piece writes: ‘This is the headquarters for the formerly USAID-funded non-governmental organization called Friends Hetauda, which offered HIV testing, counseling and prevention services to central Nepal’s LGBTQ+ community. All of that ended in January 2025, when US President Donald Trump froze funding for USAID, once the world’s leading donor of humanitarian assistance. Trump later dissolved the agency after calling it a waste of money, even though the US spent just 1 per cent of its budget on foreign aid.’
For the record, the annual budget of the United States federal government was $6.95 trillion in 2024, before the second Trump administration took office, so 1 per cent of that would still be $69.5 billion.
USAID Ended by DOGE
The projects funded by USAID in foreign countries came under heavy public scrutiny in early 2025. The newly established Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), headed by the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, put the former agency in its crosshairs as the epitome of the wasteful use of US taxpayer dollars.
USAID funds were originally frozen by the Trump administration, as the AP wrote in its piece. In July 2025, the United States Congress passed a rescission package that permanently cancelled nearly all of the agency’s remaining funding. The controversial aid agency is now a dormant organization.
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