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.
Those inconvenient facts haven’t stopped Republicans from running with the claim after Leavitt highlighted “fraud, waste and abuse” at USAID by, in part, singling out the opera.
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Asked about the apparent mistake, White House deputy press secretary Anna Kelly suggested it was immaterial.
“President Trump is delivering on his promise to cut wasteful spending across federal agencies. NOTUS is totally missing the point — taxpayers don’t want to fund transgender operas in Colombia,” Kelly said in a statement.
But a former USAID official countered that the mixup was relevant, suggesting it was indicative of the haphazard way in which the administration is gutting the agency.
“From Day One, this administration has demonstrated that they were more focused on blowing up an agency than actually understanding what it is and what it does,” a former USAID official told NOTUS.
The official said, from their perspective, the error wasn’t “incompetence” on the part of the administration; it was a direct attack on USAID.
“If this wasn’t intentional, then they wouldn’t have taken down the USAID website and social media account to hide what is true information about the impact of USAID. If they were confident in the facts they were digging up, then they wouldn’t have to hide all this information about what USAID is and what it does,” the official said.
Either way, the claim quickly caught the attention of Republican Sens. John Kennedy and Marsha Blackburn, with both GOP senators calling out the opera — written by an American composer to “raise awareness and increase transgender representation in Opera,” per the State Department — as a key example of the wasteful spending at USAID that the Trump administration is trying to eliminate.
But it’s not just wasteful spending that’s been called into question. The entire future of the agency is in doubt. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced he would take over as acting administrator on Monday, and nearly all USAID employees will be placed on leave on Friday, according to a directive issued Tuesday evening.
Even more ominously, Elon Musk said on Saturday night that he’d spoken to Trump and the president agreed the agency should be shut down.
The opera, “As One,” premiered in 2014 and has been staged 60 times across the world in the last decade. The chamber opera was composed by Laura Kaminsky and focuses on the journey of Hannah, a transgender woman, as she navigates childhood and college.
The opera was staged three times over a month in spring 2022 in Bogotá for the public.
Juana Monsalve, who starred in and produced the opera’s Colombia performances, confirmed on one of Colombia’s major radio networks on Tuesday that they had only received $25,000 in aid.
“This is a famous show in the U.S., it has been highly acclaimed by the public,” Monsalve said in Spanish. “The last thing I expected was to hear those statements from the White House.”
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Katherine Swartz is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.
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