India’s transgender clinic has closed following the Trump administration’s freezing of USAID funding.
“We were informed that the funds had been cut off because President Trump ordered a freeze on our clinic’s funding,” a clinic official shared with The Telegraph. “We had been serving hundreds of transgender patients, providing mental healthcare and transition-related medical services. We stopped operations in early February, with no hope of resuming.”
The Mitr Clinic was founded in 2021 by USAID and Johns Hopkins University under the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR).
The clinic’s funding was one of the numerous discoveries made by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Earlier this month, Senator John Kennedy (R-LA) explained the finding, stating that Elon Musk “found that USAID gave money to support electric vehicles in Vietnam—our money, taxpayer money. He found that USAID gave money to a transgender clinic in India. I didn’t know that. I bet you the American people didn’t know that.”
“He found that USAID gave $1.5 million to a Serbian LGBTQ group,” Kennedy further explained. “They got $1.5 million to ‘advance diversity, equity, and inclusion in Serbia’s workplaces and business communities.’ What else did Mr. Musk find that my colleagues don’t want to talk about?”
The Trump administration has eliminated over 90% of the USAID contracts. The administration also initiated a 90-day pause on all U.S. foreign development assistance programs for review.
The pause, mandated by a recent executive order, notes that the “United States foreign aid industry and bureaucracy are not aligned with American interests and in many cases antithetical to American values. They serve to destabilize world peace by promoting ideas in foreign countries that are directly inverse to harmonious and stable relations internal to and among countries.”
