During her first-ever briefing, Karoline Leavitt, the new White House press secretary, struggled to defend the administration’s controversial spending freeze. Donald Trump’s chief spokesperson, however, had a specific talking point that she seemed eager to reference.
Leavitt told reporters that Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency and the White House budget office “found that 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.” She added, in apparent reference to the freeze, “That’s what this pause is focused on.”
With remarkable speed, this has become a popular claim in Republican circles. A couple of hours after the White House briefing, GOP Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska appeared on CNN and similarly claimed, “Millions of dollars were being to sent to Gaza for, like, condom programs that they found. So they want to put a freeze on some of that stuff.”
A day later, the president himself, reading carefully from a teleprompter, declared that there’s been “tremendous waste and fraud” in federal spending. He went on to claim that there was some kind of internal review process which led his team to “identify and stop $50 million being sent to Gaza to buy condoms for Hamas.”
Trump: "We identified and stopped $50 million being sent to Gaza to buy condoms for Hamas." (This is a lie.)
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-01-29T19:23:01.890Z
At that point, the president ad-libbed some related thoughts. “You know what’s happened to them?” Trump added, “They’ve used them as a method of making bombs. How about that?”
I’m very tempted to spend a couple of paragraphs exploring the possibility of people trying to use prophylactics for explosive purposes — I honestly wish I knew how Trump came up with this stuff — but let’s instead turn our attention to a more serious point: Republicans appear to be brazenly lying about this.
Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut explained via social media, “It’s a lie. Made up. There was no U.S. funding for condoms in Gaza.”
There were some funds allocated to a health care organization treating patients, and the organization does provide family-planning services, but the group made clear that U.S. funds did not finance condoms in Gaza. A fact-check report in The Washington Post explained, “On the face of it, Leavitt’s statement that $50 million was going to be spent on condoms is preposterous. That figure is three times the yearly average spent by the U.S. government for the entire world. “Moreover, neither [Leavitt] nor the State Department could provide documentation supporting this claim. The department identified a contractor that it claimed was distributing condoms in Gaza, but the organization says no U.S. money is involved.” A related fact-check report from CNN went into more detail about the funding in question: “The [contractor that received the resources] said the U.S. funding has paid for the two hospitals’ ‘lifesaving medical care’ for roughly 33,000 civilians per month. Trump’s freeze, the organization said, halts U.S. funding for hospital services like performing about 30 lifesaving surgeries per day, delivering about 20 babies per day, running an emergency room receiving up to 200 patients per day, and operating one of Gaza’s only neonatal intensive care units and only stabilization centers for severely malnourished children.” I don’t doubt that Republicans in the White House and on Capitol Hill will continue to repeat the false claim about condoms anyway, and it will soon become one of those lies that the party just pretends is true. But the repetition won’t turn fiction into fact.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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