Ron DeSantis accidentally attacks Joe Biden for something the Trump administration did

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) attacked President Joe Biden for helping transgender people, but the example that DeSantis picked was actually a Trump administration policy.

During a Fox News town hall event last week in Iowa, DeSantis attacked Biden for “promoting transgenderism in Bangladesh,” which DeSantis said was a waste of taxpayer money.

Related: Ron DeSantis won’t even talk to Pete Buttigieg about Florida’s transportation projects

Buttigieg called out DeSantis’s obsession with culture war issues: “He’s more worried about Bud Light or Disney or whatever.”

“I think the president should get a line-item veto,” DeSantis said. “If they put a big spending bill on your desk, you can hack out, veto, individual spending items. They’re spending your money now to promote things like transgenderism in Bangladesh. Is that really a good use of your tax dollars?”

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The problem with his argument? Besides the fact that it was a very small program that was intended to help Bangladesh’s hijra community – USAID’s purpose is to lead the U.S.’s international development and humanitarian efforts, and those efforts aren’t suddenly ineffective just because they address LGBTQ+ people – the program DeSantis referred to was launched in June 2018, years before Biden was president.

The USAID program cost $850,000, lasted three years, and was intended to help civil rights groups in Bangladesh push for hijra inclusion. “Hijra” is a Hindustani term used to refer to people in South Asia who are usually assigned male at birth, whose gender expression is feminine, and who are considered a third gender by governments in the region.

USAID spent almost $30 billion in 2021 alone, which means that the LGBTQ+ program represented less than 0.003% of the agency’s budget, according to CNN.

USAID has been a target of Republicans over the last few years, often for its LGBTQ+ programs. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) said that the agency uses its funding “to spread perverse ideology, that is antithetical to functioning, well-ordered society, across the globe.” He presented a bill to abolish USAID because of the tiny fraction of its funding that goes to advance LGBTQ+ human rights.

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