Transgender ‘recognition’ in Bangladesh, Kosovo, Guatemala — how one USAID employee shows what’s wrong with the embattled agency

In the annals of asinine USAID funding now bursting into public view under Trump administration scrutiny, the $50-billion-a-year United States Agency for International Development’s efforts to make the world safe for Queerocracy ring particularly perverse.

For a window into these most colorful of efforts, consider the cool million bucks you the taxpayer committed in an award for an LGBTQI program adviser you probably didn’t know you needed.

The $969,821 award’s recipient is a longtime activist named Stephen Leonelli.

Curiously, the awardee is now listed as “undisclosed” on the USA Spending website. And Leonelli removed his LinkedIn profile after The Post contacted him.

As per his title, Leonelli was tasked with supporting the hub’s programs “protecting the human rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex individuals” globally.

This, according to an August 2021 USAID blog post, included:

* Efforts resulting in Bangladesh adding a third gender option in its 2021 national census.

* Supporting “gender affirming healthcare” in South Africa, including clinics administering “hormone replacement therapy.”

* “Reducing transgender discrimination and advocating for legal gender recognition in Kosovo.”

* “Increasing LGBTQI+ political participation” in Guatemala.

* Creating a toolkit “to enhance security protections for LGBTQI+ organizations in the Middle East and North Africa.”

Social-media posts suggest Leonelli continued these activities under the USAID award that started in August 2022.

Why would American tax dollars be spent on such programs?

Or on a transgender comic book in Peru and opera in Colombia to millions of dollars for sex changes and LGBT advocacy from Guatemala to the western Balkans — all USAID programs now uncovered by the new administration?

These outlandish items in some ways serve as a rainbow-colored distraction from USAID’s arguably more disastrous efforts, with funds ultimately landing in the hands of terrorist groups like the Taliban or funneled to the likely COVID-originating Wuhan lab.

Even those outrages only further serve as a veneer, diverting our gaze from the reality that might explain why Democratic lawmakers and their like-minded Ruling Class allies are really in a tizzy over USAID’s reorganization: The ostensible foreign-aid agency has collectively served as a slush fund providing billions of dollars to left-wing nongovernmental organizations, including Censorship-Industrial Complex cogs, contractors and alleged regime-change/color-revolution and intelligence operations abroad.

Have American taxpayers for years been funding what essentially amounts to a “nongovernmental” administrative state in the form of these NGOs?

To what extent have the politicians supportive of all this funding received kickbacks, including from the private-sector contractor recipients of massive gobs of largesse?

These are just some of the questions for which we deserve answers.

And that we have to ask them perfectly explains why this agency needed to be gutted.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said USAID has largely been unaccountable and refuses to be forthcoming.

In announcing Monday he had been named acting director of the agency, Rubio asserted that “we owe the American people the assurance that every dollar we are spending abroad is being spent on something that furthers our national interest.”

By Tuesday night, USAID’s website noted that by week’s end, all USAID direct-hire personnel would be placed on administrative leave.

Critical functions, Rubio has indicated, will persist. Foreign aid broadly, he stressed, must be “in furtherance of and aligned with the national interest and foreign policy of the United States.”

This is what a republican government responsive to its people is supposed to look like.

The cries of self-styled “democracy defenders” livid over the Trump administration’s efforts to reassert the American people’s control over our government has revealed just how hollow and cynical their entire democracy-eroding project has been.

Benjamin Weingarten is a contributor at RealClearInvestigations.