On Feb. 11, 2025, tech billionaire Elon Musk appeared at the White House with U.S. President Donald Trump to defend his Department of Government Efficiency. While he was there, a reporter asked him about a claim he had amplified online: that the federal government had planned to spend $50 million on sending condoms to Gaza. He later posted about the exchange on his social media platform X, captioning a video (archived) of the exchange, “$50M of condoms is a LOT of condoms.”
$50M of condoms is a LOT of condoms
pic.twitter.com/V2C7znndUB— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 12, 2025
Musk’s comments came several weeks after White House Press Secretary, Karoline Leavitt, claimed the administration had stopped millions of dollars in funding for condoms in Gaza. Calling the expense a waste of taxpayer funds, it was one example Leavitt gave of the benefits of Trump’s temporary pause on foreign aid, grants and loans, which included funds for the World Health Organization.
Per the White House transcript from Jan. 29, 2025, Leavitt said: “[The Department of Government Efficiency] DOGE and [the Office of Management and Budget] 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.”
Numerous Snopes readers asked us whether the U.S. government had indeed planned to spend $50 million on condoms for Gaza. The story spread far and wide, amplified by Musk, who shared a clip of Leavitt making the statement with the caption, “Tip of the iceberg.”
Leavitt offered no evidence to back up her claim. We looked through documents detailing funds spent on contraceptives and family planning initiatives by the U.S. Agency for International Development and found no evidence that tens of millions of dollars were earmarked for condoms in Gaza. We regard the claim as unproven.
We reached out to USAID (including its West Bank and Gaza office), the White House and former President Joe Biden’s team asking for clarification. We will update this story if we get more information.
USAID
The latest data from USAID shows that in 2023-24, no condoms were funded by the agency anywhere in the Middle East. The full overview of contraceptive and condom shipments delivered internationally from October 2023 to September 2024 and funded by USAID family planning and reproductive health funds can be found here. However, $45,680 was spent on a small shipment of oral and injectable contraceptives designated for the country of Jordan. The Jordanian government was responsible for its distribution and it was the first shipment of its kind to the Middle East by USAID since 2019.
The USAID report noted that, “Condoms delivered through the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) funding are not reported here.”
PEPFAR
So we also looked at the latest data from the PEPFAR program showing condoms purchased for distribution in other countries from 2016 to 2023. The overview showed that the continent of Africa received the largest number of condoms, with the Middle East region representing less than 1% of condoms procured. The report showed that the U.S. government spent a total of $17 million on male condoms alone in the 2023 fiscal year.
The global total spent by USAID in 2023 for contraceptives and condoms was $60 million, of which $7 million was used for male condoms. Most of those funds went to African countries. It is therefore improbable that $50 million would be earmarked for condoms for Gaza alone.
USAID did announce in November 2024 that $50 million would be spent to launch the Gaza Health Recovery Activity in partnership with Anera, a refugee relief organization. The initiative aimed to improve health access in the region after health systems faced an almost complete collapse. Per Anera’s description:
Within the next two months the project aims to establish three health clinics in Khan Younis to provide primary healthcare, offer health services to informal shelter communities, and serve people with disabilities; as well as establishing a health clinic in North Gaza. Mobile outreach medical days focusing on rehabilitative and mental health and psychosocial support services for persons with disabilities in Khan Younis are also planned for launch before the end of the year. […]
The USAID-funded GHRA will draw on the expertise of Anera and its partners to revitalize primary, secondary, and rehabilitative healthcare. This collaborative effort will ensure vulnerable communities receive the comprehensive care they need. It also will expand access to care, and ensure that services are well-coordinated for communities, many of whom have been frequently displaced over the past year.
Steve Fake, a spokesperson for Anera, told Snopes over email, “No portion of the GHRA includes family planning or condoms.”
It is clear, then, that the $50 million was to be used for healthcare services overall, particularly in building health clinics and providing basic care.
We reached out to the International Medical Corps, which operates two field hospitals in Gaza. A spokesperson told us the organization had received $68 million from USAID since October 2023, but no U.S. government funding was used to procure or distribute condoms. The spokesperson provided the following list of the activities actually supported by USAID in Gaza and told us that if this funding stopped, they would be unable to sustain such activities beyond another week:
1. The safe deliveries of approximately 20 babies per day;
2. Roughly 30 lifesaving surgeries per day, including limb-saving, abdominal and spinal surgeries, emergency cesarean surgeries and complicated wound management;
3. The operation of one of only three neonatal ICUs in all of Gaza, which provides care for the most vulnerable newborns;
4. The operation of one of Gaza’s only stabilization centers for severely malnourished children; and
5. The operation of an extremely busy ER that receives up to 200 patients a day and an outpatient department that sees as many as 2,000 patients per day.
A U.S. State Department official did not speak to Snopes on the record nor provide us with any specific data or documentation. The Trump administration later claimed it had stopped $100 million in aid from being sent to Gaza via the International Medical Corps that included family planning and contraceptives funds, adding that condoms have traditionally been part of USAID’s family planning initiatives in developing countries. However, the White House did not respond to our questions regarding the International Medical Corps’ and Anera’s assertion that no funds at all went toward condoms, nor our request for documentation of funds that were intended for Gaza.
As former Snopes reporter Dan Evon pointed out on X, the first Trump administration itself spent around $40 million on contraceptives worldwide in 2019.
We have covered the impact of Trump’s January 2025 pause on federal spending, including the development that a federal judge had temporarily blocked the funding pause as of this writing. In our research, we encountered widespread confusion over the vague language used in the OMB memo announcing the pause and in statements from the Trump administration that contradicted the original memo. This made it impossible for Snopes to determine what specific programs would be affected, should the directive go into effect.
