Breaking Point: what a year without US funding did to LGBTIQ groups in 94 countries

Outright International published Breaking Point today, and the number that will travel is that nine in ten LGBTIQ organisations surveyed have lost funding since January 2025. The report’s own authors are careful about that figure, and it is worth being careful with it too. But the numbers underneath it are, if anything, harder to sit with.

Outright surveyed 229 LGBTIQ organisations across 94 countries between late February and late April this year, fielding the survey in ten languages, and followed it in June with 24 in-depth interviews chosen for spread across regions and types of organisation. Of the 229, 203 reported losing funding after January 2025. Nearly all the percentages in the report describe those 203 — not the global movement.

The caveat the report puts on itself

Outright flags the limitation explicitly, and it matters: participation was voluntary, so organisations that had been hit had more reason to respond than those that hadn’t. 203 out of 229 is not a measurement of what share of LGBTIQ organisations worldwide lost funding. It is a description of a sample that self-selected towards damage.

That is an unusually honest thing for an advocacy organisation to put in its own findings, and it does not soften the picture much. Among those 203, 49% lost more than half their total budget and 75% lost more than a quarter. More than half identified US government funding as the source of what disappeared. And 73% were running on annual budgets under US$250,000 to begin with — organisations with no reserves, no endowment and no second donor waiting.

What was withdrawn, and when

The chronology in the report is the clearest short account of the collapse we have seen anywhere.

On 20 January 2025, Executive Order 14169 imposed a 90-day freeze on nearly all US foreign assistance. Operationalised as a stop-work order, it did not read as a pause on the ground: programmes halted, staff were laid off, shelters closed and people were turned away within days. A waiver eight days later exempted “life-saving humanitarian assistance”, defined narrowly as core medicine, medical services, food, shelter and subsistence — and the same memo explicitly excluded diversity, equity and inclusion programming and what it termed “transgender surgeries” from the category of lifesaving work.

By February 2025 the notices arriving were terminations, not pauses. By April the Global Equality Fund — launched in 2011 with allied governments, companies and foundations, and responsible for more than US$100 million to LGBTIQ organisations and human rights defenders in over 100 countries in its first decade — had been shut down entirely. On 1 July 2025, USAID ceased to exist as an independent agency after 64 years, with surviving programmes absorbed into the State Department. Across 2025 PEPFAR was narrowed until HIV prevention support was largely restricted to pregnant and breastfeeding women, leaving community-led service delivery for key populations unfunded.

The wider humanitarian context compounds it. Outright records that more than 30% of global humanitarian funding vanished across 2024 and 2025, driven mainly by US support falling from roughly US$14 billion to US$3.7 billion. UNHCR alone lost US$1.2 billion in a single year and closed or downsized 185 field offices.

The emergency mechanism was itself switched off

The detail in the report that deserves more attention than it will get: the thing built to catch exactly this kind of emergency was shut in the same wave.

Dignity for All, created in 2012 as the rapid-response arm of the Global Equality Fund, made small short-term grants for relocation, legal representation, prison visits, trial monitoring, medical costs and security equipment. Crucially, it accepted applications from unregistered groups that could document six months of activism — which is most of the movement in most criminalising countries. It was delivered by a consortium led by Freedom House with ILGA-Europe, Outright International, UHAI EASHRI, Akahatá and Synergia IHR. The stop-work order reached every grant under the Global Equality Fund, and Freedom House’s wider Emergency Assistance Program halted the same month, having supported more than 17,000 defenders, organisations and survivors since 2007 across 140 countries.

So when organisations in the survey describe threats in 2025 and 2026 they could not answer, this is why. The number to call had been disconnected.

Where the cuts landed

Outright’s second finding is the one that should reshape how donors think. The cuts did not fall evenly, and they did not fall randomly — they concentrated where the need was greatest.

Where states protect LGBTIQ people, organisations can draw on domestic public funding; where the public broadly supports equality, they can fundraise privately. Where neither is available, international money was the whole model. So organisations working in countries with the harshest living conditions, the least impartial justice systems and the most widespread discrimination were roughly two to three times more likely to have been hit than those at the other end of each measure. Two in five affected organisations operate amid democratic backsliding or outright authoritarian governance. Seventy-one percent report high levels of anti-LGBTIQ violence in the places they work.

The services being cut follow from that. Half the affected organisations have reduced health services including mental healthcare. Forty-five percent have reduced or discontinued HIV prevention, treatment or care, and half named LGBTIQ people living with HIV among the constituencies most affected by their own cuts. Sixty-three percent can no longer respond to emergencies involving violence, arrest, displacement or urgent relocation — rising to 73% in countries in conflict or humanitarian crisis. Fifty-five percent have reduced legal and policy advocacy; 38% have reduced human rights documentation. Seventy-one percent have laid off staff or cut pay.

Asked who is bearing the heaviest consequences, respondents named trans, nonbinary and gender-diverse people most often (71%), followed by lesbian, bisexual and queer women (61%).

A year, maybe

The survival figures are the ones to keep. Forty percent of affected organisations placed themselves at severe or immediate risk, including 10% facing immediate risk of closure. Asked separately how likely they were to be forced to close entirely within twelve months, 36% said likely or very likely. Three percent described themselves as stable.

As the Washington Blade reported today, and as GCN noted, the practical recommendations are blunt about pace: emergency and bridge funding needs to move outside standard grant cycles, because a closure timeline measured in months was never going to be met by an annual application round. Outright also argues against simply rebuilding what existed before January 2025 — the concentration of a whole movement’s funding in one government’s hands is what made a single executive order capable of dismantling fifteen years of accumulated support in a matter of days.

Rodolfo Vargas of Colectivo TLGB Bolivia, quoted in the report, puts the case to funders more plainly than any recommendation does: think not only in administrative terms, he says, but about the protection you provide, the participation you support, and the lives you are helping to defend and to dignify.

The report is free to read in full, with the complete testimony and sources in the PDF. For anyone who has covered, funded or worked in this sector, it is the document that explains the last eighteen months. For everyone else, it is a warning about how quickly an infrastructure built over a generation can be taken apart — and how much of it, twelve months from now, is still salvageable if money moves before the closures do.