As the White House seeks to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Trump administration has taken to touting certain examples of “waste and abuse” at USAID that have nothing to do with USAID.
In fact, at least three of the White House’s examples are not USAID: “$70,000 for a production of a DEI musical in Ireland, $47,000 for a transgender opera in Colombia, $32,000 for a transgender comic book in Peru,” as White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters this week.
“I don’t know about you, but as an American taxpayer, I don’t want my dollars going toward this crap,” she said, calling those three examples “some of the insane priorities that organization [USAID] has been spending money on.”
But in reality, USAID hasn’t been spending money on any of those examples. According to federal spending records, it’s the State Department — which President Donald Trump recently put in control of USAID — that is funding these line items.
As the White House claimed, there was a “live musical event to promote the U.S. and Irish shared values of diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility,” according to spending records. The event did use $71,000 of U.S. taxpayer dollars, but it wasn’t funded through USAID. The Department of State bankrolled the event, routing the money through the U.S. embassy in Dublin.
The so-called “transgender comic book in Peru” also has a shred of truth to it. The Department of State, via the U.S. embassy in Lima, awarded a $32,000 grant in 2022 to produce “a tailored-made comic, featuring an LGBTQ+ hero to address social and mental health issues.” But, again, that wasn’t USAID money.
According to the U.S. embassy, there are three volumes of the comic “El Poder De La Educación” — the Power of Education — which the embassy describes as “the story of two young Peruvians who transform their lives by studying in the United States.” It’s not immediately clear whether any of the characters are transgender.
And the “transgender opera in Colombia” was, once again, State Department money. The project was related to a $25,000 public diplomacy grant to stage the opera “As One” in Bogotá. The rest of the funds Leavitt referred to from that project were not funded by the federal government, as NOTUS first reported on Wednesday.
It may seem like a small nuance. But it’s an important distinction that the State Department, not USAID, is funding these projects — especially as the White House looks to shut down USAID and points to these funding priorities as reason enough to shutter the agency.
Despite the fact that none of these projects are related to USAID, the White House repeatedly pointed to them as part of its justification for the recent furloughing of USAID workers, shutting down the agency’s website and pausing federal funds for USAID projects.
And when reached for a comment on these spurious examples of USAID waste, the White House ignored that the projects weren’t funded by USAID.
“This waste of taxpayer dollars underscores why the president paused foreign aid on Day One to ensure it aligns with American interests,” deputy White House press secretary Anna Kelly told NOTUS.
But Jeremy Konyndyk, a former lead official at USAID and the president of Refugees International, said he sees the White House presenting these controversial line items as part of USAID — even though they’re not — as an intentional “disinformation campaign in order to kill this agency.”
“All of this is bullshit,” Konyndyk told NOTUS. “All of the evidence they point to, they are making things up because the truth and the reality are not on their side, so they have to resort to lies, they have to resort to gaslighting. That’s all they have.”
Konyndyk continued that the strategy seemed to be working. “But we need to get the truth out there,” he said.
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Claire Heddles and Katherine Swartz are NOTUS reporters and Allbritton Journalism Institute fellows.