Even before Nepal was devastated by deadly flooding, questions were already emerging in Congress and elsewhere about whether the Asian nation used its U.S. foreign aid assistance to focus on woke ideology vanity projects like assisting transgender sex workers instead of shoring up its defenses against the threat of annual monsoons.

Those questions are now looming larger after the latest round of extreme rains killed at least 900 and left 4,200 missing in Nepal over the last week, while neighboring Bangladesh mobilized early with its early warning system and evacuated residents in the path of potential flooding.

"I know that lots of people are talking about the rebuilding and so on. But I want them to start thinking about rethinking," Alok Bohara, a University of New Mexico economics professor emeritus, told Al-Jazeera this week.

He pointed out the country is likely to get as much as $5 billion in foreign recovery aid but that it should be used to re-engineer risks that have long been known. 

"We had a sort of federalism, but we never thought about development federalism. It's political federalism that came to Nepal, but we never thought of our ecological risk."

The flooding has hit close to home in the U.S.: 13 Americans have evacuated to safety, but at least 80 remain unaccounted for, according to State Department spokesperson Tommy Pigott, who told NBC News on Monday that State had “activated $3.6 million in humanitarian assistance, including lifesaving food assistance.”

“There is no higher priority for us than the safety of American citizens,” the State Department said in a statement on Facebook. “Our embassies in Nepal and China are working closely to assist Americans and support disaster relief efforts.”

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was previously working with NASA on SERVIR, an initiative that would help areas in Asia, Africa and Latin America address issues of food security, disasters, land use, air quality and more. 

The initiative concluded in January 2025 when President Donald Trump took office, but the “services, tools, and resources developed under the initiative remain active and fully operational,” according to the SERVIR website.

The current warning systems in Nepal primarily track heavy rainfall forecasts and rising river levels, according to a study published in March 2025 in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction. 

While USAID money did go to some helpful programs in Nepal, questions about whether U.S. taxpayers should have been funding education and health initiatives in the country aside, at least some went to questionable services such as transgender employment. Last month, the Associated Press lamented the fact that USAID funding cuts have led to lower employment for transgender aid workers in Nepal.

 Rep. Brandon Gill, R-Texas, responded to the article on X.

“Our tax dollars no longer fund employment for transgender Nepalese sex workers,” he wrote. “Thank you for reminding us why defunding USAID was long overdue.”

Other USAID initiatives also went toward diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) goals, rather than tangible assistance. One program, estimated to cost $20 million, sought to “improve equitable educational outcomes for marginalized children,” including “equity and inclusion activities” to keep students in school.

A former USAID worker, Jeremy Konyndyk, who worked for the organization starting in the Obama administration, accused the Trump administration of cutting necessary funds to Nepal’s early-warning systems and disaster readiness. However, even the left-wing outlet Snopes could not conclude that the cuts were responsible for any deaths during the current flooding. 

In late July, Bangladesh had similar catastrophic flooding but used its early warning systems to evacuate tens of thousands of people and keep the death toll much lower. Fifty-nine people died in the flooding, according to the United Nations. Much of USAID’s funding in Bangladesh, a more conservative country than Nepal, went to disaster management and food security, rather than DEI initiatives – although there was some funding for that as well.

While Nepal used SERVIR to track rain forecasts, Bangladesh used it for satellite-based flood forecasting and other early warning detection systems, according to NASA.

Journalist Michael Shellenberger noted the difference between the two countries on his Substack, where he argued that climate change did not cause the flood because the disaster had been warned about for years, with the same river flooding just last year. He also said that a “cheap technical fix” wasn’t in place, one that could have saved lives.

“Proof of the efficacy of flood prevention comes from Bangladesh, which evacuated nearly one million people ahead of a 2022 cyclone with mobile alerts, loudspeakers and concrete shelters and lost fewer than 40 people, where a cyclone of similar size in 1970 had killed 300,000 to 500,000. Nepal could have done the same but didn’t,” Shellenberger wrote.