Fact or fiction? White House claims US spent $50m on condoms for Gaza
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Fact or fiction? White House claims US spent $50m on condoms for Gaza
During a briefing this afternoon, the White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt tried to justify Donald Trump’s sweeping order to freeze federal funding by citing what she called important new research from Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” (or Doge), a special group that Trump has created, and the office of management and budget.
“Doge and OMB also found that there was about to be 50m taxpayer dollars that went out the door to fund condoms in Gaza,” Leavitt claimed. “That is a preposterous waste of taxpayer money. So that’s what this pause is focused on: being good stewards of tax dollars”.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt briefing the media on Thursday.
While Leavitt did not offer any evidence to support this claim, and was not pressed to by reporters, the idea that the United States government planned to spend $50m to send condoms to Gaza quickly went viral, with an assist from Musk himself.
The Fox pundit Jesse Watters even claimed that the condoms were being used by Hamas militants as balloons to float explosives into Israel.
A review of the available evidence, however, suggests that the claim is almost certainly not true.
According to a comprehensive report issued in September by the US Agency for International Development (USAid), not a penny of the $60.8m in contraceptive and condom shipments funded by the US in the past year went to Gaza. In fact, the accounting shows, there were no condoms sent to any part of the Middle East, and just one small shipment, $45,680 in oral and injectable contraceptives, was sent to the region, all of it distributed to the government of Jordan.
For the financial year 2023, the most recent for which data is available, only about $7m worth of condoms were distributed globally by USAid, and the vast majority of family-planning funds, 89%, were spent on programs in Africa.
As Dan Evon of the non-profit News Literacy Project points out : “It’s also worth noting that this is not a Biden program. Trump, too, spent funds on sending contraceptives around the globe. In 2019, about $40m was spent on contraceptives by the Trump administration”.
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First day on the job and she's lying her ass off already.
They have to lie right out of the gate to show they can handle the heat when it comes to the really big and important whoppers.
The rest of the world would be laughing its ass off about America if they didn't realize how fucking sick the American government has become, and how it is going to negatively affect the rest of the world. And what's REALLY sick about it all is that Trump, his chosen staff, the Republicans in both houses and the SCotUS don't give a shit about it.