“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.<\/span><\/p>\n 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<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n 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 <\/span>his show<\/span><\/a>. (There was a wave of <\/span>incendiary balloon attacks<\/span><\/a> from 2018 to 2021, with a <\/span>brief resurgence<\/span><\/a> in September 2023.) <\/span>President Donald Trump himself repeated Watters’ claim<\/a> about condom bombs at the White House on Wednesday.<\/p>\n 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 <\/span>is<\/span> ridiculous to imagine half a billion contraceptives being sent to a territory of only 2 million people\u2014which 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<\/i><\/a> that the claim was a “feverish dream.”<\/span><\/p>\n Although the White House and the State Department didn’t respond to Reason<\/i>‘s request for comment, they both told<\/a> Semafor<\/em>‘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.<\/p>\n The International Medical Corps told Weigel<\/a> that “no U.S. government funding was used to procure or distribute condoms.”<\/p>\n Last year, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) <\/span>spent $60 million<\/span><\/a> 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.<\/span><\/p>\n Washington does spend a lot of money abroad. Last fiscal year, the U.S. government doled out <\/span>$68 billion<\/span><\/a> 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\u2014a pretty apt metaphor for U.S. involvement in that country.<\/span><\/p>\n 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<\/a> of food to the population, and launched massively inefficient<\/a> airdrop missions. The ship that brought food to the pier, by the way, also reportedly brought<\/a> 1 million pounds of munitions to the region.<\/span><\/p>\n Elsewhere, the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction <\/span>found<\/span><\/a> 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.<\/span><\/p>\n 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. <\/span><\/p>\n The post The White House's 'Feverish Dream' About $50 Million for Condoms in Gaza<\/a> appeared first on Reason.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Trump administration made an extreme claim about wasteful foreign aid that just wasn’t true. …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":""},"categories":[19,9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110601"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=110601"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110601\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=110601"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=110601"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=110601"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"A](\"https:\/\/reason.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/dumpster-1024x768.jpeg\")