Up to date at 7:31 p.m. ET on August 26, 2025
One of many extra surreal knock-on results of the gutting of USAID is that the U.S. authorities is now holding an enormous fireplace sale for mosquito nets, water towers, printers, iPads, chairs, mills, defibrillators, textbooks, agricultural gear, motorbikes, cellular well being clinics, and extra. Till lately, these things supported the 5,000-plus foreign-aid tasks that the Trump administration has now canceled.
Usually, when a USAID venture ends, its leftover, usable items get methodically inventoried, then distributed to different tasks or native companions who can put them to good use. This 12 months is, fairly clearly, completely different.
Federal and humanitarian employees have scrambled to run a mass closeout earlier than their very own termination or their venture’s chapter, with little steering from management at USAID or the State Division. The result’s that hundreds of thousands of {dollars}’ value of apparatus that the USA has already bought is being auctioned off, doubtless at an excessive loss, or just deserted.
Some USAID employees and native companions have managed to comply with Plan A—that’s, donating items the place they are often most helpful—even if there are not any USAID-funded tasks handy gear off to. (The State Division has assumed accountability for the roughly 20 % of USAID’s unique tasks that can proceed.) After publication of this story, following requests for remark that went unreturned, I acquired an emailed assertion from somebody who used a State Division press inbox and repeatedly refused to establish themselves as something aside from a State Division spokesperson. This individual informed me that the majority of USAID’s grantees off-loaded property to native governments or NGOs.
A employee at one NGO that operates in Myanmar informed me that her colleagues donated mattress nets and medical gear to the nation’s collapsed well being system after the U.S. authorities terminated a malaria venture. (She, like many different present and former USAID employees I spoke with for this text, requested anonymity out of worry {of professional} reprisal.) Shumet Amdemichael, the director of the nonprofit Mercy Corps’ Nigeria applications, informed me that his group might off-load mills to native hospitals. “But when they don’t have the cash for the gasoline for these mills,” he mentioned, “it gained’t be very helpful.” An worker at an NGO working in Kenya informed me that her group ended up donating USAID autos to native technical faculties in order that engineering college students might choose them aside. In Nigeria, a small staff orchestrated the handoff of at the least 140 autos and 1,350 items of furnishings and IT or workplace gear, in response to an inner doc I reviewed earlier this summer time. Former USAID officers in Nigeria informed me that they consider the gadgets went principally to native well being ministries. There may be seemingly no public file of the place these things, or any of USAID’s different property, have gone.
The Trump administration, for its half, has given few straight solutions on the place U.S. authorities property abroad ought to go. A current report back to Congress on operations in Iraq and Syria discovered that “USAID workers mentioned that a lot of the path they acquired relating to the transition was casual in nature, typically with no follow-up to doc choices taken.” (The State Division spokesperson disputed the report in an e-mail, writing that USAID’s shutdown course of “has been spelled out in official communications to staff, in addition to follow-up notices and formal paperwork.”) In Afghanistan, the Trump administration canceled a venture that ran faculties in neighborhood settings—essential for women who, below the Taliban’s guidelines, can’t proceed their formal training previous sixth grade. (That program had continued even after the Biden administration’s withdrawal from Afghanistan.) Then it waited months to inform the nonprofit Worldwide Rescue Committee what to do with lots of of hundreds of textbooks and school-supply kits, James Sussman, an IRC spokesperson, informed me. When the venture was canceled in February, the books and stationery had been in a warehouse awaiting distribution, the place they’ve since remained. The IRC additionally operated a community of well being clinics in Afghanistan, and when that funding was terminated, a number of had been compelled to shut. The group gathered the leftover provides—medical-examination tables, stethoscopes, gloves, measuring tapes to diagnose severely malnourished children, fortified pastes for treating them—to restock its surviving clinics, Sherine Ibrahim, IRC’s nation director in Afghanistan, informed me. Legally, these gadgets are the property of the U.S. authorities, which has not green-lit this redistribution, Ibrahim mentioned. However, she added, “it is vitally laborious for us to see dietary assist for kids and say, Okay, we’re not going to make use of this as a result of we’re ready for the U.S. authorities to inform us what to do with it.”
When donation fails, Plan B is mostly to carry an public sale. In Guatemala, the U.S. embassy has auctioned off iPads, ring lights, megaphones, and defibrillators that had been as soon as the property of USAID. At the least 13 heaps bought for a complete of about $13,600. In Nigeria, the U.S. embassy marketed the public sale of the contents of a USAID warehouse, together with laptop provides and used mills. Earlier this 12 months, in a letter to 2 congresspeople, USAID’s appearing deputy inspector normal expressed concern that auctions like those which have now occurred in a number of nations would “return solely cents on the greenback.” Additionally they include national-security issues. The Trump administration isn’t publicly monitoring the bidders of any auctioned USAID items, which might plausibly find yourself being an inexpensive supply of provides for terrorist organizations, because the appearing deputy inspector normal famous in her letter. USAID can be not requiring staff to herald their electronics to be erased in individual, which leaves open the chance that delicate info stays on gadgets now being bought to the best bidder. (“Relating to the disposition of USAID IT gear, we comply with safeguarding procedures comparable to encryption, multi-factor authentication, and distant wiping to make sure minimal threat to any authorities knowledge,” the State Division spokesperson wrote to me.)
Some gadgets have been stranded and even deserted. For a lot of this summer time, the U.S. authorities has reportedly paid a parking storage in Nepal 80 cents a day per car to retailer greater than 500 vehicles and motorbikes used within the administration’s canceled USAID tasks. (Requested to justify the usage of taxpayer funds on such an expense, the State Division spokesperson cited the complicated means of de-registering and transferring duty-free autos in Nepal. The parking zone, they mentioned, was a brief resolution till the U.S. authorities might get native approval.) Lisa Schechtman, a former senior USAID adviser, informed me that the Trump administration left greater than 20 water and sanitation tasks half-finished throughout the globe. One other $4 million value of instruments and gear meant for clean-water work in Ethiopia is probably going mendacity unused someplace in a warehouse, Schechtman mentioned. However as of July 4, when she left her job, senior USAID management didn’t appear to know the place the instruments had been, she informed me. Based on a current federal report, the standing of 4 USAID tasks in Ukraine—greater than $115 million value of labor that supplied meals, “constructing supplies to restore war-damaged houses,” and extra—was “unknown” as of June 30. (I requested the State Division for an replace on these tasks however didn’t obtain one.)
Different assist bought by U.S. taxpayers is solely being destroyed. The Trump administration, as I beforehand reported, ordered the incineration of almost 500 tons of meals meant for kids in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It additionally intends to incinerate almost $10 million value of contraceptives, regardless of gives from the United Nations to purchase the gadgets, and has wasted lots of of hundreds of mpox-vaccine doses that at the moment are so close to expiration that they will’t be shipped to the African nations experiencing an outbreak. A former senior official at a serious nonprofit informed me that tubes of an antibiotic ointment—utilized in infants to stop an an infection that may trigger blindness—sat unused in Mozambique whereas her colleagues waited for steering from USAID that by no means got here. Some portion of the antibiotics expired, she mentioned, and had been in the end destroyed. Burning the emergency meals alone value American taxpayers greater than $100,000; burning the contraceptives, the State Division says, will value $100,000 extra. In June, a Bloomberg reporter obtained a memo by USAID’s deputy administrator estimating that shutting down the company would value the federal authorities $6 billion a 12 months for an undetermined period of time. That determine doesn’t seem to incorporate the sunk prices of half-finished tasks and now-worthless items.
By the federal authorities’s personal requirements, USAID’s fireplace sale is unacceptable. Paul Martin, USAID’s former inspector normal, informed me that company staffers might usually get fired for failing to correctly oversee the disposition of apparatus purchased with taxpayer {dollars}. (Martin was fired in February after his workplace launched a report warning that USAID’s shutdown risked assist going to waste or being stolen.) A former USAID contracting officer informed me that below regular closeout circumstances, if items are hoarded or fall into the improper arms, federal staff can “actually go to jail.” One former USAID employee I spoke with helped evacuate company workers from Afghanistan because the Taliban took over in 2021. He informed me that this 12 months’s retreat additionally felt chaotic and disjointed. “There was no mental curiosity as to the right way to do it proper,” he mentioned.
The bikes, malaria nets, and dietary biscuits that the U.S. is at the moment off-loading are the final vestiges of a pre-2025 American dedication to humanitarian assist overseas. The American pullback might end in greater than 14 million extra deaths by 2030, in response to a research printed in The Lancet final month. Governments that beforehand relied on the U.S. for fundamental well being companies are urgently making an attempt to fill the vacuum, although a lot of them lack the funds to take action, particularly on such quick discover. Nonprofits and philanthropists are additionally working to blunt the impression. Whether or not they succeed—and what number of of these 14 million individuals survive—relies upon partially on whether or not they have the gear they want and, subsequently, on how effectively the Trump administration can distribute what’s left.