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.
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.
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. Then it waited months to tell the nonprofit International Rescue Committee what to do with hundreds of thousands of textbooks and school-supply kits.
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.”
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.
