Donald Trump has boasted that the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency stopped $50 million worth of condoms being sent to Hamas on the Gaza Strip.
Speaking during a signing ceremony for the Laken Riley Act in the East Room on Wednesday, he repeated a boast about huge sums of money being sent to finance contraceptives in the Middle East.
The claim was first promoted by White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt at her first-ever White House briefing on Tuesday when she told reporters that DOGE and the White House Office for Management and Budget had found and blocked “$50 million taxpayer dollars that went out the door to fund condoms in Gaza” and called the alleged expenditure “a preposterous waste of taxpayer money.”
But an administration official who spoke to The Independent about the contraceptive controversy said the $50 million was part of larger aid package for medical services in Gaza.
The official said the figure – a massive number that would have represented roughly $23 spent on contraceptives for each of the 2.1 million residents of Gaza – was part of two equal “buckets” of foreign aid meant to help the International Medical Corps provide medical services in Gaza.
Moreover, the claims about the alleged condom shipment did not appear to match what the government had previously said about its aid efforts in Gaza.
A September 2024 US Agency for International Development report says not one dollar of the $60.8 million used to fund condoms and contraceptives distributed by the agency worldwide last year was allocated to the Palestinian territory.
The same report shows that the only contraceptives sent to the Middle East were distributed to the Jordanian government in the form of $45,680 worth of oral and injectable medications – not condoms.
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