Capitol Police on Thursday arrested five HIV/AIDS activists who disrupted a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing that focused on the U.S. Agency for International Development.

The activists — including Health GAP Executive Director Asia Russell, Housing Works CEO Charles King, and ACT UP NY co-founder Eric Sawyer — started chanting “PEPFAR (the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) saves lives. Restore AIDS funding now” shortly after Max Primorac, senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, began to testify. They also held posters that read “Trump kills people with AIDS worldwide.”

The Trump-Vance administration last month froze nearly all U.S. foreign aid spending for at least 90 days. Secretary of State Marco Rubio later issued a waiver that allows PEPFAR and other “life-saving humanitarian assistance” programs to continue to operate during the freeze.

The Washington Blade last week reported PEPFAR-funded programs in Kenya and other African countries have been forced to suspend services and even shut down because of a lack of U.S. funding. The Trump-Vance administration’s efforts to dismantle USAID, along with the suspension of nearly all U.S. foreign aid, has been “a catastrophe” for the global LGBTQ rights movement.

“I guess these guys don’t watch the news. They didn’t realize that PEPFAR was one of the many programs that did prove to be lifesaving, so the funding was restored,” said U.S. Rep. Brian Mast (R-Fla.), who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee, after Capitol Police removed the activists from the room. “Somebody better give ’em a link to … I don’t know, maybe Fox News or something like that.”

Protesters interrupt a House hearing on USAID spending, demanding that funding be restored to PEPFAR, but "the funding was restored" says Rep. Brian Mast. pic.twitter.com/9bQduNEwnQ

— Fox News (@FoxNews) February 13, 2025

Russell and King are two of the dozens of HIV/AIDS activists who protested outside the State Department on Feb. 6 and demanded U.S. officials fully restore PEPFAR funding.

Three House Democrats including Congressional Equality Caucus Chair Mark Takano (Calif.) issued a letter on Wednesday urging the Office of Personnel Management to not implement President Donald Trump’s anti-trans executive order, “Defending women from gender ideology extremism and restoring biological truth to the federal government.”

Also signing the letter were U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin (Md.), ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, and U.S. Rep. Gerald Connolly (Va.), ranking member of the House Oversight Committee.

The lawmakers wrote the order “unlawfully attacks the civil rights of transgender Americans” while the White House’s corresponding memo and guidance “implements unlawful discrimination by the federal government against transgender people in the civil service and the provision of federal services.”

Specifically, they call unconstitutional the directive for agencies to “end all programs, contracts, grants, positions, documents, directives, orders, regulations, materials, forms,
communications, statements, plans, and training that ‘inculcate’ or ‘promote’ ‘gender
ideology’—which the Executive Order defines broadly to encompass acknowledging the simple
existence of transgender people and gender identity.”

“We are deeply alarmed by these and other actions the Trump Administration has taken in its first few weeks to eliminate all government support for the transgender community, including efforts designed to enforcing the rights and support the health of transgender individuals,” the congressmen wrote.

They added, “We are also appalled by the Administration’s attempts to weaponize federal agencies to target the transgender community for discrimination and exclusion. These actions contradict federal law, Supreme Court precedent, and most importantly the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection under the law.”

House Minority Whip Katherine Clark (D-Mass.), the second highest-ranking Democrat in the lower chamber, has selected newly seated freshman U.S. Rep. Sarah McBride (D-Del.) to serve as her deputy whip for policy.

The high profile role will involve “strategic, long-term planning, and coordination on policy,” according to a press release from McBride’s office announcing the appointment.

“My number one priority in Congress is helping to lower costs facing Delawareans and American families,” the congresswoman said. “We can do this by guaranteeing paid family and medical leave, lowering the cost of childcare and restoring the child tax credit.”

McBride added, “I look forward to working alongside my Democratic colleagues to prioritize common sense solutions to making it more affordable to raise a family. I’m grateful to Democratic Whip Katherine Clark for this opportunity and for her steadfast leadership and mentorship.”

In a statement on X, she said, “I’m thrilled to be named a deputy whip for Policy in the 119th Congress, advising House Democratic Leadership on policy priorities and plans for our caucus. Just as I was in the state Senate, I remain focused on lowering the cost of housing, health care, child care, and helping families make it through the inevitable challenges of life.”

Last week, McBride became the first freshman Democrat to introduce a bill, together with U.S. Rep. Young Kim (R-Calif.), which targets scams by companies that take large fees from consumers in exchange for “empty promises” to improve their credit scores.

When serving in the Delaware state senate, McBride sponsored the Healthy Delaware Families Act, which was signed into law in 2022 and allows Delawareans to take a 12-week paid family or medical leave, receiving up to 80 percent of their current wages.

“Care infrastructure” will remain a major focus for the congresswoman’s work moving forward, along with policies in areas like investment in green technologies, Medicare reforms, expanding access to quality health care including reproductive care, empowering labor unions, gun violence prevention, and more.

The congresswoman worked on Beau Biden’s campaign for Delaware attorney general in 2010, and in the years since has maintained a close personal relationship with President Joe Biden and the Biden family. (Beau, the president’s eldest son, died of glioblastoma in 2015.)

House Republicans escalate their transphobic attacks against McBride

McBride is transgender, becoming the first trans speaker to address a major party convention in 2016, the trans state senator with her first election to public office in 2020, and the first trans member of Congress with her election to represent Delaware’s at-large congressional district in 2024.

While she has not shied away from acknowledging the significance of her position as the first and the only voice in Congress representing her community, McBride has repeatedly emphasized that she did not run for office to be — as a recent profile in the Washington Post put it — “a symbol, or a spokesperson, or the first anything.”

Her focus, rather, is on delivering results for her constituents in Delaware.

“I’m here to be a serious person,” she told the Post. “And if there are people here who don’t want to be serious, then they can answer to their constituents.”

McBride’s arrival in Washington comes as national Republicans have made anti-trans policy and legislation a greater priority than ever before, while transphobia and the use of transphobic hate speech by conservative elected leaders escalates into dangerous territory.

Responding to the news of McBride’s appointment to lead policy development for her party under the Democratic whip, U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) said, in a post on X, “Democrats just put a mentally ill congressman, who parades himself as a congresswoman to thrill his disturbing sexual fetishes, in charge of democrat policies.”

The bigoted attacks by House Republicans began before the first transgender member of Congress was even seated, from deliberate misgendering and the use of her birth name to the proposal barring trans women from women’s restrooms in the Capitol building, which was drafted by U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) in direct response to McBride’s election and subsequently enacted by House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.).

Before she was elected, McBride sought to mitigate the risk that her use of public women’s bathrooms on the Hill might draw unwanted attention or interest, privately making arrangements with Democratic leadership to instead use facilities in the Capitol suites reserved for Clark and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (R-N.Y.). 

Mace introduced the bathroom ban on Nov. 19 and, in the days and weeks since, availed herself of every chance to discuss the matter with Capitol Hill reporters, on cable news programs, and on her X account — where, according to Newsweek, the congresswoman had published 326 posts or replies about the resolution within just the first 72 hours.

Last month, Mace filmed herself reading the Miranda warning with a megaphone to activists who were arrested for staging a demonstration against her bathroom rule outside Johnson’s office, later sharing the video on X mocking the protestors with an anti-trans slur.

McBride declined to comment or engage beyond saying that she would comply with the policy. In response to criticism that she ought to have pushed back more forcefully, she told NBC News, “The point of this bathroom ban was to bait me into a fight, was to diminish my capacity to be an effective member of Congress by turning me into a caricature.”

“I refuse to give them that opportunity or that response that they seek,” McBride said, adding that allowing herself to be baited would “not do the trans community any good” either. “That is what they want. There is power in not giving people what they want.”

This week, a video from 2019 in which McBride is seen reading to students in a classroom and leading a discussion about the importance of respecting their gender diverse peers was circulated on X by the anti-LGBTQ account Libs of TikTok.

Mace responded in a post that began by proclaiming “she is a he” and asserted without evidence that McBride “appears to be grooming young children” for sexual abuse, while Greene falsely accused her Democratic colleague of being a “groomer” and “child predator.”

As an anti-trans/anti-LGBTQ moral panic has taken hold in the U.S. and escalated over the past few years, conservatives including several U.S. lawmakers have revived the dangerous and baseless lie that trans people and gay people are inclined toward pedophilia or child sexual abuse or “grooming,” which refers to the practice of priming a victim, usually a minor, for sexual abuse or exploitation.

Experts, including organizations like the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, say this rhetoric can put children at greater risk by stealing the focus away from efforts to identify actual cases of abuse while also diminishing the experiences of survivors.

This specific form of transphobic and homophobic hate speech was more common in the 1970s and 80s but until recently was considered out of bounds for mainstream political discourse.

McBride so far has not addressed the posts from Mace and Greene. Her office did not respond to a request for comment on the matter last week.