News Reporter: Fact Checker: $50 million for condoms in Gaza? Nope

Friday, 31 January 2025

Fact Checker: $50 million for condoms in Gaza? Nope

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The truth behind the rhetoric.

By Glenn Kessler

After the White House imposed a government-wide spending freeze — later rescinded — White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt provided justification: "DOGE and OMB also found that there was about to be 50 million taxpayer dollars that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. That is a preposterous waste of taxpayer money."

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.

But this is one of those moments when people tweet and retweet without pausing to think. The U.S. government distributes condoms overseas to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS. From fiscal 2016 to 2022, the U.S. Agency for International Development, 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.

In fact, the government pays an average price per condom of 3.3 cents — which means the White House somehow believed that 1.5 billion condoms were being sent to a war zone roughly twice the size of Washington, D.C. Not only did the math make no make sense, but we could identify no contract of this magnitude. Please click this link to read the fact check and learn the Pinocchio rating.

Read the full fact check

Also (click the link): Speaker Johnson's misleading claim that conditions were placed on Katrina, Sandy aid

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Trump's misleading claim about DEI and the DC plane crash

In the aftermath of the deadly collision between a jetliner and a Black Hawk helicopter at Reagan National Airport, Trump held an extraordinary news conference during which he speculated on the cause of the accident. At length, he attacked former presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden for imposing what he called "a big push to put diversity" that he said weakened the Federal Aviation Administration.

Reading from a 2024 Fox News report — which he incorrectly identified as being two weeks old — Trump listed conditions that he suggested disqualify people from being air traffic controllers: "hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability, and dwarfism."

But here's the rub: During Trump's first term, the FAA began a program to hire air traffic controllers with the conditions that Trump decried. To read the full fact check and learn the Pinocchio rating, please click the link below.

Read the full fact check