WASHINGTON – It was an astounding revelation, one that Donald Trump’s White House was eager to share with the American public.
The Trump administration, eager to stop wasteful government spending, halted the distribution of $50 million in taxpayer dollars set aside to buy condoms to be sent to Gaza, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced at her first press briefing Tuesday.
The next day, Trump drew chuckles from the crowd gathered for a bill signing in the White House East Room when he repeated a variation of the same story, claiming his administration had “identified and stopped $50 million being sent to Gaza to buy condoms for Hamas.”
The problem: There’s no evidence it’s true.
“You are not finding any evidence of that because it simply cannot be true,” said Matthew Kavanagh, director of Georgetown University’s Center for Global Health Policy and Politics.
For years, the U.S. government has provided millions of dollars worth of condoms and other contraceptives to foreign countries as a way to help prevent the spread of AIDS and HIV and to make sure that family planning is available in developing nations.
The U.S. Agency for International Development, the government agency responsible for administering civilian foreign aid and development assistance, said in a report last April that it had spent $61 million in 2023 to provide condoms and other contraceptives to other countries.
But just $8 million of that went for the purchase of condoms, the report said. And not a cent was used to send condoms to Gaza.
Between 2016 and 2022, the agency spent $118 million to buy condoms for 60 countries – an average of about $17 million per year, according to a separate report released in 2023. None of those went to Gaza either.
More:Trump floats plan to ‘just clean out’ Gaza, move Palestinians to Egypt and Jordan
Asked to back up its claim, the White House referred to a State Department statement that said the administration had stopped “two $50 million buckets of ‘aid’” headed to Gaza through the International Medical Corps, a nonprofit humanitarian assistance organization based in Los Angeles.
“The $100 million for these programs included contraceptives,” the statement said. “Condoms have traditionally always been used for family planning in developing countries by USAID.”
The White House did not respond to an inquiry about how much of the $100 million it paused was to be used to purchase condoms.
The answer: None of it, according to the International Medical Corps.
The organization has received $68 million from USAID since 2023 to support its operations in Gaza, including two large field hospitals that provide medical care to roughly 33,000 civilians a month in a dangerous environment where the healthcare infrastructure has been decimated, said Todd Bernhardt, the group’s spokesman.
The corps provides lifesaving activities such as surgical and post-operative care for trauma, emergency maternal and newborn care, neonatal intensive care and pediatrics, orthopedics, pulmonology and cardiology care, Bernhardt said.
“No U.S. government funding was used to procure or distribute condoms,” Bernhardt said.
Humanitarian groups defend the use of government funding to send condoms and other contraceptives to foreign countries, saying they are essential to stopping the spread of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases and making sure that people have access to family planning in countries where it otherwise may not be available.
Most of the condoms and contraceptives purchased with government funds have gone to countries in Africa that are still dealing with a significant AIDS epidemic. Some of the contraceptives have been distributed through the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, a global health initiative started by George W. Bush.
“Ensuring that people in Africa, but also in other low- and middle-income countries, have access to condoms is one of the most important parts of the AIDS response and one that the United States has been funding and should be funding,” said Kavanagh, the Georgetown global health expert.
More:Judge temporarily blocks Trump policy that aimed at freezing federal grant funding
Family planning is also important to help women survive in countries where poverty and the maternal mortality rate are high or in places where quality health care is unavailable, said Beth Schlachter of MSI Reproductive Choices, which works to make sure contraception is accessible around the world.
“If you are a woman living in Gaza over the last year, it’s not the ideal time to get pregnant,” said Schlachter, a former population policy adviser for the State Department. “Providing family planning or contraceptives is a routine part of humanitarian assistance because women bring their uteruses with them when they are in a time of crisis and they still need all the reproductive health care they would need at any other time in their life.”
Even so, humanitarian groups said the administration’s claim that $50 million was about to be spent to send condoms to Gaza is absurd.
“Condoms cost four cents (to make), so $50 million in condoms is over a billion condoms,” Kavanagh said. “There’s only a million adults in Gaza. I did a quick calculation, and I think on average that would be three condoms per day for every adult in Gaza. That’s not happening.”
Michael Collins covers the White House. Follow him on X @mcollinsNEWS.
