Founded to provide help and collaborate with international development, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) operated in more than 100 countries and had a budget of 50,000 million dollars in 2023according to recent figures.
With less than a month in his second term in the White House, the US president, Donald Trump, now plans to cut the USAID labor campus of 10,000 employees to less than 300.
The reform has been accompanied by false information about an organization that Trump’s team believes that he has been wasting taxpayers’ money.
DW Verifica’s writing has unmasked some of those statements.
Hollywood stars paid by USAID?
Affirmation: USAID finances celebrity trips to Ukraine, including Hollywood stars visits such as Ben Stiller and Angelina Jolie, according to several posts on social networks, including this video Repossed by the owner of X, Elon Musk, and by Donald Trump Jr.the son of the president of the United States.
DW verifies: false.
The video carries the logo of AND! Newsan entertainment website belonging to NBC Universal. In the video, a female voice explains that the target of travel funded by Usaid was to increase the popularity of Ukrainian President, Volodimir Zelenski, especially in the United States.
A spokesman for E! News, however, told the AFP agency that the video is not authentic and that was not produced by them.
Several of the stars involved have denied having received money from USAID. Ben Stiller, for example, said in his X account that he “completely self -financed” his trip to Ukraine, adding that “there were no USAID funds.”
A possible track about where the false statement originated is this publication on social networks. It is a screenshot of a web page called Pravda (“Truth,” in Russian)which published a story (Link filed here) On celebrity visits.
Pravda It has been described as a Russian network of misinformation websites that publishes stories in several languages. The European Digital Media Observatory (Edmo) said the network Pravda He publishes, mostly, propaganda and misinformation.
According to Edmo, “all the web pages of Pravda They use the same type of sources, in particular, means that are owned by the Russian state or media controlled by him, such as Tass, Ria, Slow, Tsargragra, and others. ”
The source of the article on celebrities in Ukraine is the Tsargragra television station, controlled by the Russian state.
50 million dollars in condoms for Gaza?
Not only Usaid is the object of frontal attacks with misinformation and false news. These attacks are directed against international development aid in general, as this viral example demonstrates, in which Trump says that the US was sending condom shipments for a value of 50 million dollars to Gaza.
Affirmation: “We identified and stopped 50 million dollars sent to Gaza to buy condoms for Hamas, 50 million,” said Trump. (Minute 5:40).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbntnglkjoy
Before, the White House Press Secretary, Karoline Leavitt, made a similar statement: “(…) about 50 million dollars of money from taxpayers who left for condoms in Gaza. That is an absurd waste of the money of the money of the money of the money Taxpayers. ” (Minute 24:12).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivaec9q5qra
DW verifies: false.
Trump and his spokeswoman seem to have referred to 102 million dollars from USAID for the International Medical Body (BMI), an Oenegé that provides medical services and psychological support for trauma in Gaza. Last week, a state department spokesman posted in X that the agency had “prevented unjustifiably financed 102 million dollars for a contractor in Gaza, including money for contraceptives” thanks to a pause in foreign assistance.
USAID works in close cooperation with BMI, which issued a press release after the controversy. In it, he declared that, from Hamas’s attacks against Israel, on October 7, 2023, he received more than 68 million USAID dollars to support his operations in Gaza, but clarified that “no fund of the US government was used to seek or distribute condoms, nor to provide family planning services.”
There is no evidence that the US has ever sent 50 million dollars in condoms to Gaza. In the records of American help abroad, such expenses are not contained. USAID does provide contraceptives, including condoms, to countries around the world, but, according to the USAID report (page 9)their total expenses in 2023 were of just over 60 million dollars.
Jordan was the only country in the Middle East to which the help of this program in 2023 was allocated, receiving $ 45,680 in injectable contraceptive pills and progestin alone (pages 21, 44). Gaza was not mentioned.
Did USAID pay the sexual offender Jeffrey Epstein?
Affirmation: Posts like this in x They suggest that USAID paid the financier and convicted for sexual crimes Jeffrey Epstein. The post shows a screenshot of a document with payments to Epstein under the name of the Kaiser Foundation health plan.
DW verifies: false.
The Epstein referred to in the document is not the US financier, but a homonym (Jeff Epstein) who was a high -ranking representative in the medical care company mentioned in the document (Kaiser Foundation Hospitals).
Here And also here There are sites that show Epstein’s work in the Kaiser Foundation.
Beyond that, the document that supposedly shows payments refers to fiscal year 2023 as the year in which Epstein received his money.
The sentenced sexual offender, however, died in 2019.
(CP/ERS)
