One of the very first promises made by White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt during her inaugural press news briefing, January 28, was to “commit to telling the truth from this podium every single day…[to] commit to speaking on behalf of the president of the United States. That is my job.”
She added:
And I will say it’s very easy to speak truth from this podium when you have a president who is implementing policies that are wildly popular with the American people, and that’s exactly what this administration is doing…
Finally, she reiterated, “So, yes, I will hold myself to the truth, and I expect everyone in this room to do the same.”
A few minutes later she made the astonishing claim that “DOGE and OMB also found that there was about to be 50 million taxpayer dollars that went out the door to fund condoms in Gaza.” She added, “That is a preposterous waste of taxpayer money.”
During a signing ceremony Wednesday for the Laken Riley Act, President Donald Trump repeated the claim that his administration had “identified and stopped $50 million being sent to Gaza to buy condoms for Hamas.”
According to the CIA World Factbook there are (were?) 627,235 males in the Gaza Strip between the ages of 15 and 64.
The Washington Post writes that USAID has been buying condoms at an average price of 3.3 cents per condom.
If my math is right, $50 million would buy more than 2,400 condoms for each and every male in Gaza between the ages of 15 and 64.
That would allow the use of a condom every day, for almost seven years by every male in Gaza in that age group. A daunting task.
One could continue to postulate, extrapolate, muse ad nauseam on this bizarre “fact.”
However, Glenn Kessler editor and chief writer of “The Fact Checker” at the Washington Post saves us the trouble.
In his “$50 million for condoms in Gaza? There’s no evidence for the White House claim” Kessler provides the facts. Here are some of them:
• Last year, the State Department launched a five-year, $50 million program to improve health care in Gaza. But the contractor, Anera, said it was not supplying condoms.
• A USAID report for fiscal 2023…showed that about $46,000 was spent on condoms in the Middle East — but only in Jordan. The report said that was the first shipment of condoms to the Middle East since fiscal 2019, when $1 million was spent.
• From fiscal 2016 to 2022, USAID spent $118.6 million to buy 3.6 billion male condoms for 60 countries. That’s an average of $17 million a year for the entire world — one-third of the amount Leavitt said would be spent just on Gaza…
• The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) distributed oral contraceptives and condoms, but President Joe Biden froze U.S. funding a year ago after Israel claimed that 12 of the agency’s 33,000 employees participated in Hamas’s 2023 attack on Israel.
• Todd Bernhardt, International Medical Corps (IMC) spokesman, told The Fact Checker that “no U.S. government funding was used to procure or distribute condoms.” In a November report describing its activities in Gaza, IMC…did not mention any family planning efforts…
After the fact check was published, a White House official claimed “without providing documentation, that two $50 million buckets of aid for Gaza via the IMC that were suspended included ‘family planning programming including emergency contraception…’ and that this included contraceptives and that ‘condoms have traditionally always been used for family planning in developing countries by USAID.’”
However, the fact checkers, from their review of IMC contracts, “did not find any funds earmarked for contraception or family planning…”
Other experts and authorities expressed doubts about Leavitt’s claim.
According to CNN, 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 Fact Checker concludes:
On the face of it, Leavitt’s statement that $50 million was going to be spent on condoms is preposterous…Leavitt earns Four Pinocchios. Not an auspicious debut.
