USA
USAID-funded contraceptives worth $10 million pledged for vulnerable women in developing countries will be burned in France, the U.S State Department confirmed on Wednesday, in the latest case of wasted aid following Trump cuts.
The United Nations and several family planning organisations offered to buy the supplies to save the taxpayer-funded donation, but the Trump administration rejected the offer, two sources told Reuters.
The aid package includes contraceptive implants and pills as well as intrauterine devices to prevent unwanted pregnancies, according to a screengrab confirming the imminent incineration.
The healthcare provisions have been stored in a warehouse in Antwerp, Belgium, for months, but will now be transferred to a facility in France that handles medical waste.
The U.S government will pay $167,000 to destroy the supplies, the State Department confirmed to Reuters.
The non-profit, MSI Reproductive Choices, had volunteered to pay for the supplies to be repackaged without USAID branding and shipped off.
Still, the offer was declined by the U.S. government, which would only sell at full market value, Sarah Shaw, the organisation's Associate Director of Advocacy, told Reuters.
"This is not about saving money. It feels more like an ideological assault on reproductive rights, and one that is already harming women," Shaw said.
Lack of access to reproductive healthcare leads to an increase in unsafe abortions. Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest estimated proportion of unsafe abortions in the world and the most maternal deaths per 100,000 abortions, according to The Guttmacher Institute, a leading research and policy organisation advancing reproductive health.
Nearly one million vaccines to be destroyed
The upcoming incineration of reproductive health supplies follows a string of similar reports in July of wasted U.S.-funded aid packages after President Trump froze all foreign development funding on January 20.
On Wednesday, forty-eight Democratic members of the House of Representatives urged U.S State Secretary Marc Rubio to save what remains of 800,000 mpox vaccines promised to African countries.
The vaccine shipment has been delayed following the closure of the U.S. Agency for International Development, which administered most aid programs, and they are now nearing their expiration date, according to Politico.
In the shared letter, author Rep. Marc Pocan encourages Rubio to ship the 220,000 vaccines, which he said might still be salvageable.
"This is a moral, strategic, and public health failure in the making", Pocan stated.
Food for 1,5 million children goes up in flames.
On July 17, the State Department confirmed that it had destroyed 500 metric tons of emergency food aid – enough to feed 1.5 million children for a week – because it had expired.
The food packages, consisting of high-calorie biscuits primarily used to help malnourished children in crisis zones, had been stored in a warehouse in the UAE.
The Atlantic newspaper reported that USAID aid workers had sent repeated requests to distribute the shipment. However, after USAID was dismantled in February, it was an Elon Musk-appointed DOGE employee who was responsible for signing off on the delivery, and he had failed to process the request, an unnamed government source told the Atlantic.
Political pushback
On Friday, Democrats introduced a bill to prohibit the destruction of foreign aid purchased with taxpayer funds unless every effort has been made to ensure those supplies could be used as intended.
"The Trump administration is incinerating critical U.S.-purchased commodities—like contraceptives and emergency food—denying women health care, keeping meals from starving families, and sending millions of taxpayer dollars up in smoke," said the authors of the bill, Gregory W. Meeks, Lois Frankel and Grace Meng, in a statement.
"This cruel and senseless destruction is a textbook example of the very waste, fraud, and abuse the administration claims to oppose."
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