Elon Musk’s Empty Hunt for Condoms Is Causing Real Harm
Multiple aid agencies have effectively ceased operations preventing the global spread of HIV and treating patients with AIDS in the wake of funding cuts by the Trump administration.
That’s the result of Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) appearing to take special aim at programs that include the word “condoms” or “contraceptives” in their funding documents. This includes virtually every initiative related to a global HIV/AIDS response program administered by the State Department known as the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR.
The furor over aid funding that includes contraceptives eventually led to the false allegation that the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, was trying to supply condoms to a designated terror group, Hamas. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said late last month that Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) had found that $50 million worth of taxpayer money was ready to go “out the door to fund condoms in Gaza,” adding: “That is a preposterous waste of taxpayer money.”
President Donald Trump, himself, claimed: “We identified and stopped $50 million being sent to Gaza to buy condoms for Hamas.”
The allegation formed the centerpiece of the campaign to abolish USAID amid claims of “massive fraud” at the agency.
More than 39.9 million people worldwide live with HIV, with nearly 630,000 dying annually, according to U.S. government data. PEPFAR has been central to providing education, prevention and treatment of the illness. The program describes itself as “the largest commitment by any nation to address a single disease in history, enabled by strong bipartisan support across ten U.S. congresses and four presidential administrations, and through the American people’s generosity.”
PEPFAR’s success has been measurable. The rate of new HIV infections has declined 39 percent since 2010. Around 77 percent of those suffering from the virus receive some kind of antiretroviral therapy.
Despite a waiver issued by the State Department for a number of critical PEPFAR programs, uncertainty about what is included in the exemption has effectively frozen much of the work.
“More than three weeks since the U.S. government froze PEPFAR funding, there is still widespread confusion and uncertainty as to whether this critical lifeline for millions of people has been cut off,” Avril Beno?t, chief executive officer of the American section of Doctors Without Borders, or MSF, said in a statement. “Despite a limited waiver covering some activities, what our teams are seeing in many of the countries where we work is that people have already lost access to lifesaving care and have no idea whether or when their treatment will continue.”
MSF does not accept government funding. Many other aid groups rely on government grants, and don’t feel comfortable sounding the alarm.
Multiple humanitarian workers privately told Rolling Stone that their organizations are reluctant to plunge into the political battle, with one international aid worker saying their organization’s leadership was trying to “keep their heads down,” to avoid antagonizing the Trump administration. The hope, the aid worker says, is that a bipartisan consensus on the importance of critical aid would prevail and at least partial funding would be restored — once the Trump administration had “collected scalps from USAID.”
The Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, which provides contraceptives as part of a complex program preventing and treating HIV/AIDS in Mozambique, may have been the origin of the “$50 million condoms for Gaza” claim. Gaza Province is a rural area in the country’s south. Having heard that the Glaser Foundation’s program treating children born with AIDS had been caught up in the freeze, Rolling Stone reached out, seeking to verify if the foundation had ceased operations in Mozambique. There was no response.
When a reporter at the White House asked if the Gaza condoms might actually be meant for Mozambique’s Gaza Province, Musk acknowledged that even he makes mistakes.
“No one bats a thousand,” he said, but he stuck to his guns that this was a clear sign of wasteful spending, later tweeting: “$50 million of condoms is A LOT of condoms.”
It most certainly would be.
The USAID-funded U.N. sexual and reproductive health agency UNFPA, responsible for procuring and distributing contraceptives, spends an average of 2.7￠ per condom, according to publicly available budget documents.
At that rate, $50 million of USAID cash would purchase 1.85 billion condoms. That’s more than four times the number of condoms sold in the United States each year. The total population of the Gaza Strip is 0.6 percent the size of America’s.
It’s hard to picture 1.85 billion condoms. Here’s another way to think of it: Assuming the condoms meet the ISO standard minimum length of 6.3 inches, then laid end to end, that many condoms would encircle the Earth seven times.
An industrial box of condoms contains 1,000 condoms. A pallet contains 32 boxes, or 32,000 condoms. Shipping containers, known as TEUs, or Twenty-Foot Equivalents, each hold 10 pallets — or 320,000 condoms. If you have 1.85 billion condoms, you’d have nearly 5,800 shipping containers to move.
If the point has not yet been made, a humanitarian aid official with expertise in logistics tells Rolling Stone: “No aid organization is shipping thousands of containers of condoms anywhere, let alone to Gaza.”
So what about the $50 million supposedly seized by DOGE?
“First of all, any funding document that referenced ‘condoms’ was likely part of an extended, comprehensive medical aid package covering multiple programs and procurement initiatives, such as PEPFAR,” the aid official says, requesting not to be named given the negative impact the funding freeze was already having on their work.
But for the sake of argument, the aid official continues, if someone really did have $50 million to spend just on distributing condoms to remote war-torn areas with limited infrastructure, they’d have a lot of overhead: procurement, shipping, warehousing, security, tracking, as well as work to develop partnerships with local organizations, hire staff and organize distribution.
“You’re not sending it with Amazon,” the aid official says, noting that a program shipping prophylactics from a developed country to remote areas would at best look like someone on a motorbike being sent to a village which is not accessible most of the year, with a single box of condoms.
More typically, contraceptives are supplied to clinics run by local health authorities or partner organizations, and included in kits or education programs designed to address a range of health care needs. “It would be incredibly inefficient and irresponsible if setting up a logistics chain for condoms was the full extent of an aid initiative. I just haven’t heard of any program like that. Ever.”
A spokesperson for the International Medical Corps — a USAID-funded group initially suspected of being the source of the “condoms-for-Hamas” claim, as it operates in the Gaza Strip — points to a statement the organization released in the immediate wake of the White House’s claims, which says: “No U.S. government funding was used to procure or distribute condoms, nor to provide family-planning services” by IMC in Gaza.
Instead, IMC says, their $68 million in funding from USAID was used to run “two major field hospitals” providing medical care to 338,000 people over the past year and a half.
Despite such denials, conservatives continue to use contraception as a whip with which to flog USAID spending as criminal and fraudulent. Trump said at one point that America has actually spent “$100 million on condoms to Hamas.” Hamas was using condoms to make balloons which it uses to drop explosives on Israel, a Fox News host claimed, pointing at five-year-old photos of masked men apparently doing that.
USAID has also spent millions supplying condoms to the Taliban, says Rep. Brian Mast (R-Fla.), the chair of the House Foreign Affairs committee, lambasting his “Democrat colleagues that are trying to spread misinformation, saying that ‘people are going to die,’” because DOGE had precipitously pulled all USAID funding.
“I don’t think anybody’s going to die because we don’t give the Taliban any more condoms,” Mast growled in a video posted on YouTube.
Who is responsible for approving these funding requests? Well, there is at least one culprit: Rep. Brian Mast.
“Every dollar that USAID requests from Congress goes through White House review,” notes Jeremy Konyndyk, the president of Refugees International and a former lead for disaster relief at USAID. “Congress sets the budget… Once USAID gets its budget from Congress, it must go straight back to Congress again with a further level of detail on how it will satisfy the various budget directives — via ‘Congressional Notifications.’”
A detailed breakdown for each program is then sent to four committees, including the House Foreign Affairs Committee, where the money can be cleared or held. Mast has served on that committee since first joining Congress in 2017, approving tens of millions in health care initiatives that included contraceptives, in some shape or form.
The Trump administration has made it increasingly difficult to get answers about the impact of the funding freeze. The handful of USAID employees who remain on government payrolls have been explicitly told they will be fired for speaking to the press.
Meanwhile, the White House and its allies have widened their net, taking aim at government spending that they view as subsidies for supposedly “left-wing” news outlets. This includes subscriptions to Politico Pro, a platform used to track public policy developments, and a contract with Thomson Reuters — a financial data and risk management firm.
“Reuters was paid millions of dollars by the U.S. government for ‘large scale social deception.’ That is literally what it says on the purchase order! They’re a total scam,” Musk claimed. The funding was actually intended for a program designed to combat disinformation.
DOGE has repeatedly promised to release specific documentation proving its claims of government fraud — and released a website it claims has “a wall of receipts.” The site, which claims to have saved taxpayers $55 billion, appears to include multiple basic data errors — such as listing a consulting contract for U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement as being worth $8 billion, instead of the actual amount of $8 million.
One item not currently listed on the website among DOGE’s wall of receipts: anything resembling $50 million worth of condoms for Gaza, Mozambique, or elsewhere.
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