The Blue Diamond Society, a Nepalese LGBT organization, operated 20 clinics and employed 350 people — 85% of it funded by USAID. That's American taxpayer money. When President Trump signed his executive order on January 20, 2025 reviewing foreign aid spending, 262 of those 350 employees lost their jobs.

The Associated Press thought this was a tragedy.

AP reporter Kristen Gelineau filed a piece this week framing the cuts as a humanitarian disaster, writing that "these transgender sex workers operate in the shadows alongside a busy highway in central Nepal, risking their lives for a few dollars." The AP's own social media team posted it with the caption: "Starving and scared, around 100 LGBTQ+ aid workers left jobless by the funding cuts have turned to sex work."

Read that headline one more time and ask yourself which part is supposed to make you angry. Because the media thinks the outrage is that Trump turned off the money. The rest of us are stuck on the part where the money was flowing in the first place.

The program, run through an organization called Friends Hetauda and the Blue Diamond Society, provided free condoms, free lubricant, and free HIV-prevention medication including PrEP to roughly 1,200 clients in Nepal. According to PJ Media's David Manney, the organization admitted that between 35% and 45% of former workers entered sex work after the funding dried up. A former HIV outreach worker named Rubi Lama, who held the position for nine years, was featured prominently in the AP's reporting as the face of the cuts.

So the pitch here is that American taxpayers should feel guilty because people who were being paid with our foreign aid dollars to distribute free condoms in Nepal are now doing something else. The 280,000 aid workers worldwide who lost positions in the broader USAID restructuring didn't all get individual AP features. But this particular group checked every box the legacy media cares about.

The executive order included a 90-day review period for all foreign assistance programs. The idea, radical as it may sound, was to figure out what American tax dollars were actually buying overseas before continuing to write blank checks. USAID was effectively restructured, with remaining programs shifted to the State Department. The entire apparatus that had been shoveling money to organizations like the Blue Diamond Society was put under a microscope for the first time in years.

Media outlets aren't even pretending to ask whether this was a good use of taxpayer money. Not one paragraph in the AP piece questions whether funding 85% of a foreign NGO's operations — indefinitely — represents sound policy. Not one sentence explores whether nine-year government-funded positions distributing lubricant in central Nepal might be the kind of spending a $36 trillion debt demands we reconsider.

The framing tells you everything about where legacy media stands in 2026. Trump reviews foreign aid. Workers at a taxpayer-funded transgender outreach program lose their positions. Some enter sex work. And the Associated Press — credited as the original source by MRCTV and picked up across conservative media — runs it as an indictment of the guy who asked where the money was going.