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Hey listeners, it's Lindsay Smith-Rogers, a producer of public health on call.

In a recent story in the Atlantic headlined inside the USAID

fire sale, editor Hana Kiroz looks into what has happened to the millions of dollars of USAID

property, from medication to cars to water pumps and generators, after USAID abruptly closed this

spring. She talks with Stephanie Desmond about stockpiles of

taxpayer-funded supplies either wasted, destroyed, or in many cases still unaccounted for in the chaos.

Let's listen. Hanakiros, thanks so much for joining me. Thanks so much for having me.

So today, what I really want to do is talk about an article that you wrote for the Atlantic.

It's called Inside the USAID Fire Sale, which of course is an intriguing headline.

Start by sort of laying the landscape for those of us who are not as familiar with what's going on at USAID.

Yeah, so at the start of the year, USAID was a government agency that employed

10,000 employees and was running foreign aid projects in over 100 countries. And in February,

most of those staff were fired. Soon after 5,000 or so, foreign aid projects around the world were abruptly

canceled. And I went into this, the piece that you mentioned, just thinking about, okay,

what happened to all of this stuff involved? You know, foreign aid work involves things like

mosquito nets, motorbikes to reach people in rural villages, water towers, water pumps.

And when an aid project ends,

that stuff is the property of the U.S. government. But all of the people that normally would officiate handing this stuff off were being fired. And then the aid groups that might have been

...