The Trump administration canceled more than 5,000 USAID foreign-aid projects, leaving vast amounts of usable equipment without regular handoffs. Normally leftover goods are inventoried and redistributed to other projects or local partners, but emergency closeouts have proceeded with little agency guidance. Federal and humanitarian workers raced to liquidate or repurpose assets before terminations or bankruptcies, resulting in auctions, abandonment, or donated transfers. The State Department assumed responsibility for about 20 percent of projects. Some NGOs and local partners donated bed nets, medical supplies, and potentially generators to hospitals, though operational sustainability remains a concern.
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,
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.
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