Biden burned your tax dollars making foreign maps more gay.
Now a Trump official had to sit in Congress and explain it out loud.
What she said had the whole room trying not to laugh.
The Biden State Department DEI Spending Nobody Expected to Defend
The House Foreign Affairs Committee called Sarah Rogers, Trump's Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy, in to testify about how the State Department plans to advance American interests under the new administration.
It was supposed to be a forward-looking hearing.
Then Rep. Brian Mast of Florida – the committee's chairman – started going through the receipts from the last four years.
He had four words for Rogers.
"What is queering the map?"
Rogers paused.
"I think we were trying to make the maps more gay."
Mast stared.
"Literally? How do you make a map more gay? Or gay at all?"
Rogers kept going.
"Since the age of cartography, we've had pretty good maps. But maybe they weren't gay enough."
She added that she took critical theory in college, that some people use "queer" as a verb, and that the maps in question covered Czechia and Slovakia.
"Maybe those countries asked for it," she said. "I doubt it, but I don't know."
This was a congressional hearing on advancing national security through public diplomacy – and a sitting State Department official was apologizing to two Central European nations for what Biden did to their maps.
What Biden Spent Your Taxpayer Money on Overseas
The "queer maps" program was a $72,000 Fulbright-Hays doctoral grant awarded in 2024 to a University of Wisconsin-Madison student.
The money funded travel to Czechia and Slovakia to build an interactive online map of LGBT community spaces.
That was one line item.
Rep. Bill Huizenga of Michigan read the rest.
$25,000 for a transgender opera in Colombia.
$150,000 to build the capacity of intersex leaders in India.
$20,000 for a drag show in Ecuador.
$1 million to boost French-speaking gay lobby groups across West and Central Africa.
$70,000 for a DEI music production in Ireland.
A DEI flash mob in Kyrgyzstan.
A diversity roadshow in India.
Mast didn't mince it: "We do have real things to work on in Congress – like what's going on with the imminent threat of Iran. And it is embarrassing that we have to talk about the fact that things like this were funded."
None of it was cheap.
The Heritage Foundation documented that the State Department spent $77 million building its DEI platforms over two years under Biden – with another $83 million budgeted for the year that followed.
Biden’s top priority was spreading DEI throughout the federal government.
The Biden Foreign Aid Waste Has Names Attached to It
Mast demanded the receipts – the Facebook posts from the Kyrgyzstan flash mob, the paper trail on every program on the list.
Then he named the real target.
"We would absolutely love to know the individuals specifically that were busy writing these grants, because they have no business receiving another paycheck from the people of the United States of America."
Rogers posted a public apology to the Czech Republic and Slovakia the same day.
"I'm sorry that my predecessors 'queered' your maps. This is why future public diplomacy grants will be streamlined, accountable – and channeled toward real American interests, like free speech and sports diplomacy."
Biden's State Department ran four years on one assumption – that the bureaucrats writing these grants would never have to explain themselves in public.
They assumed the money would keep flowing and nobody would ever ask a sitting official in a congressional hearing why your tax dollars went to making Slovak road maps more inclusive.
Wrong.
There are receipts now.
And the people who signed them are about to find out that "I took critical theory in college" is not a defense.
Sources:
- House Foreign Affairs Committee Majority, "Chairman Mast Exposes Outrageous USAID and State Department Grants," House Foreign Affairs Committee, February 12, 2025.
- Rep. Brian Mast, hearing transcript, "Advancing National Security Through Public Diplomacy," House Foreign Affairs Committee, March 6, 2026.
- Rep. María Elvira Salazar, "Salazar Denounces Wasteful DEI Spending at Biden-Harris USAID," salazar.house.gov, February 13, 2025.
- The Heritage Foundation, "America's Broken Foreign Aid Apparatus," heritage.org.
- Washington Examiner, "Brian Mast Questions State Department Official on 'Queer' Maps," March 7, 2026.
- Daily Wire, "'How Do You Make A Map Gay?' Biden-Era Program Used Tax Dollars To 'Queer' Maps," March 7, 2026.