Workers put up giant LGBT flags on the facade of a building of the European Council on May 13, 2025 in Brussels, a few days ahead of the Brussels’ Pride.
NICOLAS TUCAT / AFP
“What we are looking at today is the perversion of aid: the use of aid money to attain political objectives which cannot be obtained openly by other means,” declared John O’Sullivan, president of the Danube Institute that hosted the conference “The Politicization of Aid,” held in Budapest on Tuesday, February 24th.
The speakers of the event elaborated on the central topic of the conference: how foreign aid has shifted from traditional humanitarian relief to supporting activist networks and the promotion of progressive causes. According to many of the speakers, aid has long been shaped by political and ideological interests, but in recent decades it has taken on a more explicitly political character.
Although this “perversion” has been apparent for quite a while, with the closing down of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) under the new U.S. president Donald Trump in 2025, public awareness of this transformation has accelerated.
Hungarian MEP András László, who also serves as the Budapest government’s commissioner investigating USAID’s activities in Hungary, presented figures showing that the agency spent more than €3.5 million in Hungary in 2022, a significant increase on the previous year.
Funding had practically exclusively gone to left-wing organisations, including Amnesty International, Transparency International, and the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, as well as left-leaning media outlets and think tanks.
László also recalled the so-called rolling dollars scandal, in which the NGO Action for Democracy channeled more than $10 million into Hungary’s left-wing opposition during the 2022 parliamentary election campaign. He linked the organisation to networks associated with former Socialist Prime Minister Gordon Bajnai and billionaire businessman George Soros.
László quoted an April 2025 article by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in which then-Senator Rubio wrote that the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor had become “a platform for left-wing activists to wage vendettas” against governments in countries including Poland, Hungary, and Brazil.
László argued that the expansion of the NGO sector since the 1980s had fundamentally altered the nature of civil society, claiming that many organisations now operate as “quasi-NGOs,” or Quangos, with between 60 and 90% of their budgets derived from state sources. In his view, such groups can no longer be described as genuinely non-governmental. He further pointed to a 2025 report by the European Court of Auditors, which he said confirmed longstanding conservative concerns about insufficient transparency and oversight in the allocation of EU funds to NGOs.
István Kiss, the executive director of the Danube Institute, contended that aid under former U.S. President Joe Biden had been used in ways that strained relations with allies such as Hungary.
Paul McCarthy of the U.S. Heritage Foundation maintained that domestic political developments in the United States were closely linked to the foreign aid debate. He suggested that dissatisfaction with the Biden administration’s promotion of transgender rights and other progressive causes contributed to Donald Trump’s electoral victory in 2024.
Several speakers turned their attention to the European Union. They criticised programmes such as Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values (CERV) and Horizon Europe for supporting projects they described as ideologically driven.
Journalist and author Thomas Fazi, who recently published an explosive report for MCC Brussels on EU media funding practices, argued that the European Commission’s strategic use of NGO funding intensified after the eurozone crisis in 2008-09, as Brussels sought to counter growing Euroscepticism in member states such as Hungary and Poland.
He claimed that substantial sums from the EU budget have since been directed towards promoting broadly defined “European values,” including projects designed to combat Eurosceptic narratives and to strengthen support for deeper integration. Programmes such as CERV have become central instruments in this effort, distributing hundreds of millions of euros annually to organisations that advocate liberal-progressive interpretations of democracy and human rights, including the expansion of LGBT rights.
But it was not in Europe alone that the Brussels establishment, in cohorts with the groups it funded, has sought to expand its progressive agenda. Jorge González-Gallarza of the Center for Fundamental Rights cited examples of EU-funded initiatives in Latin America that he characterised as radical or socially contentious. He said between 2014 and 2024 the EU had spent approximately €1 billion in Latin America, with a significant portion directed towards activist organisations. He cited cases in Uruguay and Brazil in which EU funds supported initiatives related to drug liberalisation, sex education, and transgender activism, including public events and educational materials.
