Karoline Leavitt Tears Into USAID's Trans-Heavy Spending

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt tore into the United States Agency for International Development on Monday as reporters grilled her outside the White House, saying she didn’t want her tax dollars “going toward this crap.”

“If you look at the waste and abuse that has run through USAID over the past several years, these are some of the insane priorities that organization has been spending money on,” Leavitt said as she held up a paper that detailed specifics. She said recent expenditures had included:

$1.5 million to advance DEI in Serbia’s workplaces;
$70,000 for the production of a DEI musical in Ireland;
$47,000 for a transgender opera in Colombia; and
$32,000 for a transgender comic book in Peru.

“I don’t know about you, but as an American taxpayer, I don’t want my tax dollars going toward this crap,” Leavitt said, before ending the press conference and walking away.

USAID became a subject of contention over the weekend after USAID Director for Security John Voorhees and Deputy Director for Security Brian McGill refused to allow staffers from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to access their agency’s personnel files and security systems. They were relieved from their positions and escorted out of the building on Saturday, and the agency’s website was shut down.

In El Salvador on Monday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio — whose department oversees USAID — told reporters that he believed some of the agency’s programs should continue. However, he said that he had assumed responsibility for the agency as its acting administrator. He said employees had been “deciding that they’re somehow a global charity separate from the national interest or taxpayer dollars” and added, “That sort of level of insubordination makes it impossible to conduct a sort of mature and serious review.”

Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, led by Sens. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) and Brian Schatz (D-HI), objected to DOGE’s approach to USAID in a Sunday letter addressed to Rubio, saying “security guards present at the facility were threatened when they raised questions” about the DOGE staffers who sought to access the building. The group request an “immediate update about the access of USAID’s headquarters.”

Musk, meanwhile, called the agency a “criminal organization” in a Sunday post on X, saying it was “time for it to die.” He added in a post on Monday, “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.”

You can watch the video of Leavitt’s comments above.