When the Trump administration wanted to call attention to wasteful spending at the U.S. Agency for International Development on Monday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt singled out a $47,000 line item for a “transgender opera in Colombia.” The only problem? USAID didn’t fund the production.
The opera Leavitt pointed to was instead funded through the Department of State in 2021. The Universidad De Los Andes in Bogotá received $25,000 under a State Department’s public diplomacy program, allocated for “expanding and strengthening the relationship between the people and government of the United States and citizens of the rest of the world.”
The remaining $22,000 for the production also wasn’t funded by the federal government.