The Biden administration has given nearly $4.6 million to help foreign groups promote LGBT projects like drag shows and pride parades.
Advocacy groups from at least 55 foreign nations have received millions from the Biden State Department to fund a range of initiatives aimed at bolstering the LGBT community and spreading its ideology into the mainstream, according to a Washington Free Beacon review of federal spending databases. The United States has helped organize pride parades in at least seven different countries, paid for drag queen shows in Ecuador, funded a Polish advocacy group that encourages puberty blockers for children with gender confusion, and sent cash to a Mexican group that markets cross-sex hormones to gender-confused individuals.
The global funding spree is part of the Biden administration’s larger effort to promote a woke cultural agenda throughout the United States and abroad, even in countries with more traditional social values. In addition to funding LGBT activism across the world, the administration has allocated millions to fight climate change in various countries and teach gender studies in war-torn nations like Iraq. In 2023 alone, American taxpayers have helped foot the bill for Pride Month festivities in Australia, Estonia, Slovenia, and Bosnia.
The State Department told the Free Beacon these programs help create "a world that is safer and more prosperous for all." But critics accuse the Biden administration of wasting millions in taxpayer funds on far-left causes that do little to actually strengthen American diplomacy abroad.
"There was a time when America's most recognizable exports were baseball and apple pie. But now, under the Biden administration, we're subjecting the rest of the world to drag queens and childhood sex changes," said Terry Schilling, president of the American Principles Project. "Of course, no one outside of LGBT extremists actually wants this. American parents are fed up with this agenda being imposed on their kids here at home and funded by their tax dollars."
The Biden administration’s focus on these priorities, Schilling warned, is pushing foreign nations to embrace China "for aid rather than submit to the left's radical ideology."
Since 2021, the Biden administration has funded at least 84 separate LGBT advocacy projects in 55 countries, with budgets ranging from as little as $5,000 to more than $1.5 million, according to the federal government’s spending database.
This year alone, the Biden administration doled out nearly $800,000 for LGBT projects in nine different countries, including $300,000 for "Lesbians, Gays, and Bisexuals of Botswana," and another $45,000 for Australia "to welcome LGBTQIA+ people from across the globe."
Taxpayer funds have also been allocated to foreign groups pushing what many believe to be radical medical treatments for gender-confused children and adults.
A Mexican advocacy group, Impulso Trans, received $10,000 this year from the State Department to help "raise awareness and connect key stakeholders of the LGBTQ community." That organization, in posts on its Instagram page, promotes cross-sex hormones for people with gender dysphoria and also provides "medical information for children who want to change certain aspects of their body."
The Biden administration is also promoting these causes in more socially conservative nations like Poland. In 2021, the State Department allocated $12,408 to an organization that provides "toolkits" to help teachers promote gender ideology in school, a project that run counter to efforts by the Polish government to outlaw the teaching of this material.
The group, Stowarzyszenie Teczowka, touts the State Department funding on its website, money that benefited a program providing "legal education for the LGBT+ community."
The United States in 2021 also funded LGBT film and art festivals in Latvia, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Australia, Spain, Italy, and Serbia. In 2022, $32,000 in taxpayer cash was awarded to a group in Peru so it could create an LGBT comic book. Another $25,000 was given to a group in Thailand that is pushing "digital empathy" for the LGBT community.
In Colombia, Liberia, and Slovakia, the United States allocated thousands throughout 2022 to groups working to eliminate negative media coverage about the LGBT community. The State Department additionally sponsored LGBT film and arts festivals in South Korea, Poland, and India.
A State Department spokesman defended the funding in comments to the Free Beacon, saying these programs "advance the foreign policy priority of reducing discrimination and violence and promoting inclusion."
"Indigenous persons, religious and ethnic minorities, women, LGBTQI+ persons, and persons with disabilities, among others, live with disproportionate violence that requires targeted support," the spokesman said. "U.S. citizens benefit from a world that is safer and more prosperous for all."
Secretary of State Antony Blinken is slated to host a Pride Month reception at the State Department on Thursday.
Simon Hankinson, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation's Border Security and Immigration Center, said that the Biden's administration's foreign funding strategy is isolating nations that typically would welcome U.S. aid.
"The Biden Administration’s activist-led diplomacy is managing to leverage small grants of money to remarkable success—in alienating the target countries and uniting them in opposition," Hankinson said. "American realists have long understood that even our allies will not agree with us on everything, and that we need to build out from areas of consensus like peace, democratic governance, and the rule of law."
The Biden administration, however, "seems to think that a mixture of lecturing governments and injecting money into local activism will suddenly change that. So far, that doesn’t seem to be working."