One of the more surreal knock-on effects of the gutting of USAID is that the U.S. government is now holding a massive fire sale for mosquito nets, water towers, printers, iPads, chairs, generators, defibrillators, textbooks, agricultural equipment, motorbikes, mobile health clinics, and more. Until recently, these items supported the 5,000-plus foreign-aid projects that the Trump administration has now canceled.
Normally, when a USAID project ends, its leftover, usable goods get methodically inventoried, then distributed to other projects or local partners who can put them to good use. This year is, quite obviously, different.
Federal and humanitarian workers have scrambled to run a mass closeout before their own termination or their project’s bankruptcy, with little guidance from leadership at USAID or the State Department. The result is that millions of dollars’ worth of equipment that the United States has already purchased is being auctioned off, likely at an extreme loss, or simply abandoned. (The State Department declined to comment after repeated requests.)
Some USAID workers and local partners have managed to follow Plan A—that is, donating goods where they can be most useful—despite the fact that there are no longer any USAID-funded projects to hand equipment off to. (The State Department has assumed responsibility for the roughly 20 percent of USAID’s original projects that will continue.) A worker at one NGO that operates in Myanmar told me that her colleagues donated bed nets and medical equipment to the country’s collapsed health system after the U.S. government terminated a malaria project. (She, like many other current and former USAID workers I spoke with for this article, requested anonymity out of fear of professional reprisal.) Shumet Amdemichael, the director of the nonprofit Mercy Corps’ Nigeria programs, told me that his organization may off-load generators to local hospitals. “But if they don’t have the money for the fuel for those generators,” he said, “it won’t be very useful.” An employee at an NGO operating in Kenya told me that her organization ended up donating USAID vehicles to local technical colleges so that engineering students could pick them apart. In Nigeria, a small team orchestrated the handoff of at least 140 vehicles and 1,350 pieces of furniture and IT or office equipment, according to an internal document I reviewed earlier this summer. Former USAID officials in Nigeria told me that they believe the items went mostly to local health ministries. There is seemingly no public record of where these items, or any of USAID’s other assets, have gone.
The Trump administration, for its part, has given few straight answers on where U.S. government property overseas should go. A recent report to Congress on operations in Iraq and Syria found that “USAID staff said that much of the direction they received regarding the transition was informal in nature, often with no follow-up to document decisions taken.” In Afghanistan, the Trump administration canceled a project that ran schools in community settings—crucial for girls who, under the Taliban’s rules, can’t continue their formal education past sixth grade. (That program had continued even after the Biden administration’s withdrawal from Afghanistan.) Then it waited months to tell the nonprofit International Rescue Committee what to do with hundreds of thousands of textbooks and school-supply kits, James Sussman, an IRC spokesperson, told me. When the project was canceled in February, the books and stationery had been in a warehouse awaiting distribution, where they have since remained. The IRC also operated a network of health clinics in Afghanistan, and when that funding was terminated, several were forced to close. The organization gathered the leftover supplies—medical-examination tables, stethoscopes, gloves, measuring tapes to diagnose severely malnourished kids, fortified pastes for treating them—to restock its surviving clinics, Sherine Ibrahim, IRC’s country director in Afghanistan, told me. Legally, those items are the property of the U.S. government, which has not green-lit this redistribution, Ibrahim said. But, she added, “it is very hard for us to see nutritional support for children and say, Okay, we’re not going to use this because we are waiting for the U.S. government to tell us what to do with it.”
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When donation fails, Plan B is generally to hold an auction. In Guatemala, the U.S. embassy has auctioned off iPads, ring lights, megaphones, and defibrillators that were once the property of USAID. At least 13 lots sold for a total of about $13,600. In Nigeria, the U.S. embassy advertised the auction of the contents of a USAID warehouse, including computer supplies and used generators. Earlier this year, in a letter to two congresspeople, USAID’s acting deputy inspector general expressed concern that auctions like the ones that have now happened in multiple countries would “return only cents on the dollar.” They also come with national-security concerns. The Trump administration is not publicly tracking the bidders of any auctioned USAID goods, which could plausibly end up being a cheap source of supplies for terrorist organizations, as the acting deputy inspector general noted in her letter. USAID is also not requiring employees to bring in their electronics to be erased in person, which leaves open the possibility that sensitive information remains on devices now being sold to the highest bidder.
Some items have been stranded or even abandoned. For much of this summer, the U.S. government has reportedly paid a parking garage in Nepal 80 cents a day per vehicle to store more than 500 cars and motorbikes used in the administration’s canceled USAID projects. Lisa Schechtman, a former senior USAID adviser, told me that the Trump administration left more than 20 water and sanitation projects half-finished across the globe. Another $4 million worth of tools and equipment meant for clean-water work in Ethiopia is likely lying unused somewhere in a warehouse, Schechtman said. But as of July 4, when she left her job, senior USAID leadership didn’t seem to know where the tools were, she told me. According to a recent federal report, the status of four USAID projects in Ukraine—more than $115 million worth of work that provided food, “building materials to repair war-damaged homes,” and more—was “unknown” as of June 30.
Other aid purchased by U.S. taxpayers is simply being destroyed. The Trump administration, as I previously reported, ordered the incineration of nearly 500 tons of food meant for children in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It also intends to incinerate nearly $10 million worth of contraceptives, despite offers from the United Nations to buy the items, and has wasted hundreds of thousands of mpox-vaccine doses that are now so near expiration that they can’t be shipped to the African countries experiencing an outbreak. A former senior official at a major nonprofit told me that tubes of an antibiotic ointment—used in infants to prevent an infection that can cause blindness—sat unused in Mozambique while her colleagues waited for guidance from USAID that never came. Some portion of the antibiotics expired, she said, and were ultimately destroyed. Burning the emergency food alone cost American taxpayers more than $100,000; burning the contraceptives, the State Department says, will cost $100,000 more. In June, a Bloomberg reporter obtained a memo by USAID’s deputy administrator estimating that shutting down the agency would cost the federal government $6 billion a year for an undetermined amount of time. That figure doesn’t appear to include the sunk costs of half-finished projects and now-worthless goods.
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By the federal government’s own standards, USAID’s fire sale is unacceptable. Paul Martin, USAID’s former inspector general, told me that agency staffers could normally get fired for failing to properly oversee the disposition of equipment bought with taxpayer dollars. (Martin was fired in February after his office released a report warning that USAID’s shutdown risked aid going to waste or being stolen.) A former USAID contracting officer told me that under normal closeout circumstances, if goods are hoarded or fall into the wrong hands, federal employees can “literally go to jail.” One former USAID worker I spoke with helped evacuate agency staff from Afghanistan as the Taliban took over in 2021. He told me that this year’s retreat also felt chaotic and disjointed. “There was no intellectual curiosity as to how to do it right,” he said.
The motorcycles, malaria nets, and nutritional biscuits that the U.S. is currently off-loading are the last vestiges of a pre-2025 American commitment to humanitarian aid abroad. The American pullback could result in more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, according to a study published in The Lancet last month. Governments that previously relied on the U.S. for basic health services are urgently trying to fill the vacuum, even though many of them lack the funds to do so, especially on such short notice. Nonprofits and philanthropists are also working to blunt the impact. Whether they succeed—and how many of those 14 million people survive—depends in part on whether they have the equipment they need and, therefore, on how efficiently the Trump administration can distribute what’s left.