The Scene
President Trump claimed this week to have canceled $50 million in “condoms” for residents of Gaza. It could have been a memorable example of how the new administration was scouring the government for wasteful spending. But the group that lost that funding said that it had spent none of it on family planning.
The $50 million figure originated with White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, who told reporters at her first briefing on Tuesday that DOGE and the Office of Management and Budget had stopped “50 million taxpayer dollars that went out the door to fund condoms in Gaza.” On Wednesday, the president said before signing the Laken Riley Act that the administration had “identified and stopped $50 million being sent to Gaza to buy condoms for Hamas.”
Asked about the grant by Semafor, a spokesperson for the State Department said that the reference was to “two $50 million buckets of ‘aid’ for Gaza via the International Medical Corp,” which offered “family planning programming.”
In response, a spokesperson for the IMC said that it had received $68,078,508 from USAID for work in Gaza, but “no US government funding was used to procure or distribute condoms.” If the stoppage continued, it would cease its work in Gaza within a week.
Andrew Miller, a former deputy assistant secretary for Israeli-Palestinian affairs in the Biden administration, told Semafor that the Trump and Leavitt claims “don’t add up.” For its own family planning funding abroad — $60 million last year, none of it in Gaza — USAID purchases condoms at a $0.05 unit rate, meaning that a $50 million grant would buy 1 billion of them. After reporting in 2018 about Hamas fighters using latex condoms to float explosives into Israel, the Jewish state barred condoms from being sent to Palestinian territories.
“The numbers are so exaggerated and so ridiculous that there are only two explanations,” Miller said. “One is that they’re fabricating this, which is possible. The second is that there is some sort of reproductive health cost, but most of that would be treating women in a war zone. Not contraceptives.”
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David’s view
I am not about to become Semafor’s fact-check columnist. Other people do that for other quality news organizations. They have lots of time and, probably, a lot of targets.
The mystery of the $50 million condoms stuck out to me, amid all the stories growing from this week’s OMB funding freeze memo, because it was so quickly believed, even before the White House pointed to some evidence to back it up. David Friedman, Trump’s first ambassador to Israel, reacted to the Leavitt statement by calculating how many condoms might have been in the purchase and suggesting that “Hamas wanted to fill them with helium to carry bombs over the border.” Chris Rufo, the scholar and activist whose anti-DEI work has been enormously influential in the new administration, cited it as an example of why “permanent bureaucrats” should be replaced by private sector whiz kids.
It was an early test of something new and helpful to Trump: New media outlets that will share whatever the administration says. Autism Capital, a popular X account often reshared by Elon Musk, printed Leavitt’s remark as fact unearthed by DOGE. (“Tip of iceberg,” added Musk.) When Fox News covered the claim, it cited an X post from new State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce about stopping “$102 million in unjustified funding to a contractor in Gaza, including money for contraception.”
The natural next question — what contractor? — wasn’t answered in that story. When the State Department did name a contractor, after other reporters’ questions, IMC said that the claim was wrong. And there’s really no evidence that this backfired on the administration. Its premise, that as much funding should be halted as possible until the new team can determine whether it meets Trump’s goals, is totally uncontroversial among Republicans.
But was this the best way to sell it? There is a healthy industry in DC of finding the craziest-sounding federal spending, highlighting it, and asking why taxpayers should be funding it. One very valid source of media skepticism is that stories can go viral before the details get confirmed; “narrative before facts,” as City Journal put it in a fair recap of how early reporting (and Joe Biden) botched the Jacob Blake story, inflaming racial tensions in Kenosha, Wisconsin, before the 2020 election.
The View From Democrats
Few of them commented on the $50 million claim, but Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy hit back at the White House after a reporter repeated Trump’s claim without pushback.
“It’s a lie. Made up. There was no U.S. funding for condoms in Gaza,” he wrote on X. “What he stopped [are] programs to keep malnourished babies alive in Gaza. Aid groups say infants will start to die next week.”
Notable
- In the Daily Mail, Jon Michael Raasch notes the questions about the figure but calls the story “textbook Trump — extract some truth from real things that are happening and polish it into a bigger and bolder statement.”
- In The Wall Street Journal, Lindsay Ellis and Ken Thomas look at how the search to abolish DEI programs is intensifying despite some blunders, like unrelated language being nixed from an IRS manual. “One section that was still deleted as of Wednesday morning mentioned the potential ‘inequity’ of holding on to a taxpayer’s money and described the potential ‘inclusion’ of a taxpayer identification number on a form.”