One of the Trump administration’s first acts in office was to freeze almost all foreign aid. The administration claims the move is already bearing fruit.
“There was about to be $50 million taxpayer dollars that went out the door to fund condoms in Gaza. That is a preposterous waste of taxpayer money,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters on Tuesday, citing the White House’s Office of Management and Budget and the newly-created Department of Government Efficiency.
The State Department made an even larger, albeit vaguer, claim. “Prevented $102 million in unjustified funding to a contractor in Gaza, including money for contraception,” spokeswoman Tammy Bruce wrote in a social media thread.
Conservative media seized on the explosive claims. Literally explosive, if you ask Fox News’ Jesse Watters. “Hamas inflates the condoms, straps on an explosive, and floats them into Israel. It’s a dual-use technology,” he said on his show. (There was a wave of incendiary balloon attacks from 2018 to 2021, with a brief resurgence in September 2023.) President Donald Trump himself repeated Watters’ claim about condom bombs at the White House on Wednesday.
On his show, Watters questioned what else Palestinians would be doing with “500 million condoms,” which is “a decade’s supply of safe sex.” It is ridiculous to imagine half a billion contraceptives being sent to a territory of only 2 million people—which is every reason to be skeptical of that claim. Andrew Miller, former deputy assistant secretary of state for Israeli-Palestinian affairs, told The Times of Israel that the claim was a “feverish dream.”
Although the White House and the State Department didn’t respond to Reason‘s request for comment, they both told Semafor‘s David Weigel that the claims were referring to two separate $50 million grants to the International Medical Corps, a charity that operates in Gaza, Ukraine, Venezuela, and several Middle Eastern and African countries.
The International Medical Corps told Weigel that “no U.S. government funding was used to procure or distribute condoms.”
Last year, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) spent $60 million on contraception worldwide, mostly concentrated in Africa. The only contraceptive shipment to the Middle East that USAID reported was $45,680 in birth control medications for the Jordanian government.
Washington does spend a lot of money abroad. Last fiscal year, the U.S. government doled out $68 billion in foreign aid, a quarter of it for Ukraine. In many war-torn regions of the world, the USAID logo is ubiquitous, on everything from tents to bags of food. I once spotted a dumpster in Iraq with the USAID logo and the words “from the American people” printed on it—a pretty apt metaphor for U.S. involvement in that country.
There is no doubt that waste, fraud, and abuse exist in foreign aid, just as in other government programs. In Gaza alone, the U.S. military spent $230 million on an aid pier that delivered one day’s worth of food to the population, and launched massively inefficient airdrop missions. The ship that brought food to the pier, by the way, also reportedly brought 1 million pounds of munitions to the region.
Elsewhere, the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction found in 2019 “a clear pattern of nonuse, misuse, deterioration, or destruction of many capital assets that the U.S. government has provided to the Afghan government.” The American taxpayer-funded waste ranged from a school building with so many electrical hazards that teachers held classes outside to a road that was completely washed away by floodwaters within a month.
But there’s no proof for this particular waste of money. And throwing out outlandish stories is a way to avoid hard conversations about how the U.S. government spends money abroad.
