Inside the USAID Fire Sale

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.

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.) After publication of this story, following requests for comment that went unreturned, I received an emailed statement from someone who used a State Department press inbox and repeatedly refused to identify themselves as anything other than a State Department spokesperson. This person told me that most of USAID’s grantees off-loaded property to local governments or NGOs.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/inside-usaid-fire-sale-215825277.html

China's going to start eating our lunch thanks to Krasnov.