Washington (CNN) — During her first official White House briefing as President Donald Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt announced that Trump had prevented a “preposterous waste of taxpayer money.” Trump’s team, she said, used the president’s pause on foreign aid to thwart a plan in which “there was about to be $50 million taxpayer dollars that went out the door to fund condoms in Gaza.”
Leavitt’s Tuesday comments made headlines around the world. And the president himself told an even more dramatic version of the story in a speech on Wednesday, saying that “we identified and stopped $50 million being sent to Gaza to buy condoms for Hamas.”
But there are at least five big reasons to be skeptical that the story is true.
The White House offered no evidence for the story: Leavitt provided no proof for her claim that there was ever a federal plan to spend $50 million on condoms in Gaza. And when CNN asked Leavitt and her colleagues for any evidence, another White House official instead pointed us to comments from the State Department — comments that, as we’ll discuss below, did not even repeat Leavitt’s claim of a planned $50 million Gaza condom expenditure, let alone prove the claim.
In three previous years under Biden, USAID spent no money on condoms in the entire Middle East: A detailed federal report published last year said USAID did not provide or fund any condoms in the Middle East in the 2021, 2022 and 2023 fiscal years.
The report, noted by The Guardian on Tuesday, said the only Middle East contraceptives provided or funded by USAID during that three-year period went to the country of Jordan in fiscal 2023. This was “a small order of injectables and progestin-only contraceptive pills” totaling about $46,000.
Total worldwide USAID condom spending is far less than $50 million: In the 2023 fiscal year, USAID provided or funded a global total of about $7.1 million worth of male condoms and about $1.1 million worth of female condoms, overwhelmingly to countries in Africa, according to the federal report.
In other words, Leavitt was essentially claiming Tuesday that the Biden administration had decided to provide more than six times the 2023 worldwide value of condoms to a single tiny territory that has about 2.1 million people and that is in a region that usually does not receive condoms from the US.
A former senior Biden official who worked on Gaza aid issues told CNN that Leavitt’s story about a $50 million condom expenditure for Gaza was “imaginary.” The former official said: “It’s a lie, they are making s*** up.”
The State Department would not repeat Leavitt’s claim: The White House official pointed to a series of social media posts from State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce, who listed specific examples of how Trump’s aid pause had prevented what Bruce called unjustified spending that wouldn’t make the country “safer, stronger, and more prosperous.”
But Bruce did not mention $50 million for condoms in Gaza.
Instead, Bruce was vague about how much condom spending was supposedly stopped. She wrote: “Example 1: Condoms. Prevented $102 million in unjustified funding to a contractor in Gaza, including money for contraception.” She did not specify how much of the $102 million in funding was intended for contraception, let alone for condoms in particular.
In an email to reporters earlier Tuesday, Bruce said the entity that was supposed to get $102 million is the International Medical Corps – a US-based organization that operates two field hospitals in Gaza.
In a statement to CNN on Wednesday, International Medical Corps said that it has received about $68 million from the US Agency for International Development for Gaza operations since October 7, 2023, the day of Hamas’ major attack on Israel. While International Medical Corps has publicly discussed its reproductive and sexual health services in Gaza, among various other services from cardiology to orthopedics, the organization said in the Wednesday statement that “no US government funding was used to procure or distribute condoms.”
The organization said the US funding has paid for the two hospitals’ “lifesaving medical care” for roughly 33,000 civilians per month. Trump’s freeze, the organization said, halts US funding for hospital services like performing about 30 lifesaving surgeries per day, delivering about 20 babies per day, running an emergency room receiving up to 200 patients per day, and operating one of Gaza’s only neonatal intensive care units and only stabilization centers for severely malnourished children.
“If the stop-work order remains in place, we will be unable to sustain these activities beyond the next week or so,” the organization said.
A State Department official issued an additional statement to CNN on Wednesday that asserted that the funding Trump had stopped from going to the International Medical Corps “included” funds for family planning, emergency contraceptives and prevention of sexually transmitted infections. Like Bruce’s Tuesday social media posts and email to reporters, this Wednesday statement did not repeat Leavitt’s claim that there was $50 million in planned funding for condoms in particular; it provided no dollar figure at all for condoms.
Experts expressed doubt about Leavitt’s story — or simply called it wrong: Experts on US aid to Gaza and global health aid were baffled by the claim that the US had been planning to spend $50 million on condoms in Gaza.
“We have asked around, and no one is sure what this is referring to,” said Steve Fake, a spokesperson for Anera, an aid nonprofit that has partnered with USAID on a five-year, $50 million health initiative in Gaza.
Fake said this Anera program has “definitely no purchase of condoms” and added: “Our whole program is $50 (million) and represents a significant portion of total US aid going to Gaza.”
Matthew Kavanagh, director of Georgetown University’s Center for Global Health Policy and Politics, said that after doing some digging into Leavitt’s claim, “It seems clear to me there was no $50 million in condoms going to Gaza. That is, at best, a mischaracterization.”
And Jeremy Konyndyk, president of the advocacy organization Refugees International and a USAID official during the Biden and Obama administrations, said, “This is total garbage. Either fully invented, or someone who doesn’t know how to read a spreadsheet.”
The-CNN-Wire
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