Four Pinocchios
ONE can be forgiven if one comes to believe the cross karoline leavitt, White House FF* press secretary frequently wears is not a symbol of her faith but is mere jewelry, after all, there is no way a person of true faith, a person true to their faith, would not be able to come before the press and the American people to repeat and defend the lies, the hatred, the racism, the greed, the misogyny, class warfare and fearmongering being spread by the drumpf / trump-vance administration and the gop / greed over people-republican party. UNLESS of course they are believers in, followers of the neo-nazi, fascist religious right-wing extremist magat cult with it's alt-jesus icon and "christian" sharia anti-beatitudes beliefs. Oh and here is the truth about another of their lies, this one exposed by the Washington Post fact checkers....
$50 million for condoms in Gaza? There’s no evidence for the White House claim.
In her maiden news briefing, Leavitt defended the Trump administration’s freeze on federal grants by pointing to a particular line item as “preposterous” — $50 million to fund condoms in Gaza.
Regular readers know that we have a high bar for fact-checking flacks, as they are paid to mislead and dissemble. We prefer to keep our scrutiny on policymakers and people with authority. But this was Leavitt’s first news conference, and she made an astonishing claim that spread rapidly on social media.
Could it be true? When we queried Leavitt, she responded by sending a Fox News article that initially just quoted her own statement. Quoting yourself is not evidence. Moreover, the article quoted an unnamed White House official as saying that the “State Department halted several million dollars going to condoms in Gaza this past weekend.”
That’s not the same as $50 million.
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.
“Definitely no purchase of condoms in our program, and there are no components for family planning in the GHRA [Gaza Health Recovery Activity],” spokesman Steve Fake said. “We have asked around, and no one is sure what this is referring to.”
Last night, State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce posted a thread on X in which she cited examples of “unjustified and non-emergency spending.” The first example was “Condoms. Prevented $102 million in unjustified funding to a contractor in Gaza, including money for contraception.”
She did not identify the contractor, but, in an email to State Department reporters, her office said it was “$102,236,000 to fund the International Medical Corps in Gaza.” IMC is a global first responder based in Los Angeles.
Could half — or even a significant portion — of that contract be for condoms? There is no evidence of that.
The Facts
Let’s start with why the U.S. government distributes condoms overseas: It’s to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS. Perhaps the Trump administration believes that is a preposterous waste of money, but many of those condom purchases are for a George W. Bush program called the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which is credited with saving 26 million lives. No countries or territories in the Middle East are part of PEPFAR.
More broadly, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) distributes condoms to address gaps in their availability and use, especially in low- and middle-income countries, to prevent the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.
A USAID report for fiscal 2023, the most recent detailing condom expenditures unrelated to PEPFAR, 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.
Indeed, according to the report, spending $50 million on condoms for an entity roughly double the size of Washington would be a huge increase in condom spending. 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. (USAID also distributes female condoms, but that’s a small fraction of the spending.)
In effect, USAID has been buying condoms at an average price of 3.3 cents. Was the U.S. government really going to distribute more than 1.5 billion condoms in Gaza? That makes little sense.
Traditionally, family planning in the Palestinian territories, including Gaza, was handled by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). The agency 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.
The war that erupted after that attack created a family planning crisis in Gaza, according to the International Planned Parenthood Federation. “Contraception is also in very short supply, with reports of women sharing contraceptive pills leading to unintended pregnancies,” the IPPF said in a 2023 report. “The unavailability of condoms, which were already heavily restricted in Gaza, will lead to the transmission of sexually transmitted infections, including HIV.”
With the ceasefire now in place, it’s possible there is a pressing need to fill. But we could not find any evidence that the International Medical Corps contracts called for condom delivery.
Todd Bernhardt, 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 said it deployed two state-of-the-art field hospitals — the first in January 2024, with 200 beds, and the second in July 2024, with 50 beds. The hospitals operate 24 hours per day, seven days per week. Each day they see as many as 2,000 patients, perform an average of 45 surgeries and deliver an average of 10 babies, the report said. It did not mention any family planning efforts. CBS News last year aired a report on American doctors working at the hospitals.
“Since January 2024, International Medical Corps has provided health care to more than 383,000 civilians who had no other access to services or treatment, including performing about 11,000 surgeries, with one-third of those categorized as major or moderate procedures,” Bernhardt said. “We have assisted in the delivery of some 5,000 babies, about 20 percent of them via the Caesarean section. In addition, International Medical Corps has screened 111,000 people for malnutrition, treated 2,767 for acute malnutrition, distributed micronutrient supplements to 36,000 people, and more.”
“If the stop-work order remains in place, we will be unable to sustain these activities beyond the next week or so,” he said.
After this fact check was published, a White House official sent The Fact Checker a statement claiming, without providing documentation, that two $50 million buckets of aid for Gaza via the International Medical Corps that were suspended included “family planning programming including emergency contraception; Sexual health-care including prevention and management of sexually transmitted infections (STIs); and Adolescent sexual and reproductive health.” The statement added that this included contraceptives and that “condoms have traditionally always been used for family planning in developing countries by USAID.”
The White House official declined to say how much money in these contracts related to family planning. From our review of International Medical Corps contracts, we did not find any funds earmarked for contraception or family planning. In any case, the White House statement appears to be a pullback of the original claim.
The Pinocchio Test
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 she 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.
Leavitt earns Four Pinocchios. Not an auspicious debut.
Four Pinocchios
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