One of many Trump administration’s first acts in workplace was to freeze virtually all international assist. The administration claims the transfer is already bearing fruit.
“There was about to be $50 million taxpayer {dollars} that went out the door to fund condoms in Gaza. That could be a preposterous waste of taxpayer cash,” White Home press secretary Karoline Leavitt advised reporters on Tuesday, citing the White Home’s Workplace of Administration and Price range and the newly-created Division of Authorities Effectivity.
The State Division made a good bigger, albeit vaguer, declare. “Prevented $102 million in unjustified funding to a contractor in Gaza, together with cash for contraception,” spokeswoman Tammy Bruce wrote in a social media thread.
Conservative media seized on the explosive claims. Actually explosive, in the event you ask Fox Information’ Jesse Watters. “Hamas inflates the condoms, straps on an explosive, and floats them into Israel. It is a dual-use know-how,” he stated on his present. (There was a wave of incendiary balloon assaults from 2018 to 2021, with a transient resurgence in September 2023.) President Donald Trump himself repeated Watters’ declare about condom bombs on the White Home on Wednesday.
On his present, Watters questioned what else Palestinians can be doing with “500 million condoms,” which is “a decade’s provide of secure intercourse.” It is ridiculous to think about half a billion contraceptives being despatched to a territory of solely 2 million individuals—which is each motive to be skeptical of that declare. Andrew Miller, former deputy assistant secretary of state for Israeli-Palestinian affairs, advised The Occasions of Israel that the declare was a “feverish dream.”
Though the White Home and the State Division did not reply to Cause‘s request for remark, they each advised Semafor‘s David Weigel that the claims have been referring to 2 separate $50 million grants to the Worldwide Medical Corps, a charity that operates in Gaza, Ukraine, Venezuela, and several other Center Japanese and African nations.
The Worldwide Medical Corps advised Weigel that “no U.S. authorities funding was used to acquire or distribute condoms.”
Final yr, the U.S. Company for Worldwide Growth (USAID) spent $60 million on contraception worldwide, largely concentrated in Africa. The one contraceptive cargo to the Center East that USAID reported was $45,680 in contraception medicines for the Jordanian authorities.
Washington does spend some huge cash overseas. Final fiscal yr, the U.S. authorities doled out $68 billion in international assist, 1 / 4 of it for Ukraine. In lots of war-torn areas of the world, the USAID emblem is ubiquitous, on every little thing from tents to baggage of meals. I as soon as noticed a dumpster in Iraq with the USAID emblem and the phrases “from the American individuals” printed on it—a reasonably apt metaphor for U.S. involvement in that nation.
There isn’t a doubt that waste, fraud, and abuse exist in international assist, simply as in different authorities applications. In Gaza alone, the U.S. navy spent $230 million on an assist pier that delivered in the future’s price of meals to the inhabitants, and launched massively inefficient airdrop missions. The ship that introduced meals to the pier, by the way in which, additionally reportedly introduced 1 million kilos of munitions to the area.
Elsewhere, the U.S. Particular Inspector Common for Afghanistan Reconstruction discovered in 2019 “a transparent sample of nonuse, misuse, deterioration, or destruction of many capital property that the U.S. authorities has supplied to the Afghan authorities.” The American taxpayer-funded waste ranged from a college constructing with so many electrical hazards that lecturers held courses exterior to a highway that was utterly washed away by floodwaters inside a month.
However there is no proof for this specific waste of cash. And throwing out outlandish tales is a solution to keep away from onerous conversations about how the U.S. authorities spends cash overseas.
