Locked Away and Left to Expire: The Trump Administration's Destructive Denial of Contraceptive Care

The Trump administration has wasted $434,317 in taxpayer dollars since January 2025 to store contraceptives that it refuses to distribute to women and girls in low-income countries. A report from the Office of Inspector General of US Agency for International Development (USAID) reveals that the administration has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in storage and transportation costs for the $9.7 million worth of family planning supplies that it abandoned in Belgium rather than allowing them to be used. (The supplies were originally purchased by USAID.) With every additional month that passes after June 2026, the administration will spend over $24,000 to store these products, which include birth control pills, implants, injectable contraceptives and IUDs.

This wasteful misuse of US government resources is part of the fallout from the administration’s disastrous and chaotic dismantling of USAID last year, which has already denied tens of millions of people in low-income countries access to the family planning services on which they relied to improve their health and futures.

The report also finds that $8 million of the withheld contraceptives are now expired or unusable due to their removal from temperature-controlled storage. Currently just $1.7 million of these products are still in usable condition. These contraceptive commodities were meant to be distributed in various low- income countries, primarily in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The tremendous waste and harm caused by withholding these products is two-fold. First, had they been distributed, these contraceptives could have provided pregnancy prevention for more than 650,000 people for up to one year, and for 950,000 people for three to 10 years, depending on the contraceptive method. Second, the money the administration is spending on transportation and storage costs could have otherwise gone toward the provision of essential reproductive health care.

If this funding had been spent on providing, rather than denying care, it would have had immense benefits for women’s lives and reproductive health outcomes.

The process of denying this lifesaving contraceptive care began in early 2025, with the stop work order and foreign aid freeze at the beginning of Trump’s second term—actions that ultimately led to the dismantling of the US foreign assistance apparatus and USAID. Amid that chaos, the administration went out of its way to prevent the distribution of these contraceptive commodities, which had already been purchased by USAID. The administration refused to sell the contraceptives to the nongovernmental organizations and UN agencies, such as the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), that had offered to purchase them and distribute them themselves. In July 2025, the State Department sought to incinerate the health products using additional taxpayer dollars, trying to justify the destruction by falsely claiming that the contraceptives were “abortifacients.” However, the plan to destroy these products was subsequently blocked by local law in Belgium.

For decades, Congress has recognized the importance of international family planning with bipartisan support. The Trump administration should immediately distribute these contraceptives as per longstanding US commitments, allow a nongovernmental organization to purchase and distribute them, or donate them. Further, the administration must act with transparency and accountability to ensure that all family planning assistance appropriated by Congress is spent as intended. In the face of the State Department’s current refusal to act, members of Congress have introduced the bipartisan “Saving Lives and Taxpayer Dollars Act,” which would require that foreign assistance commodities be made available for their intended purposes before they expire. Congress should move swiftly to pass this legislation.

Methodology

The total funding amount spent on storage and transportation costs from January 2025 through June 2026 was calculated based on the information outlined in the USAID Inspector General’s Management Advisory published on June 10, 2026. Specifically, the report indicates that $360,667 had been spent on storage and transportation costs as of March 31, 2026. This was combined with the monthly storage fee incurred since then of $24,550 per month. The fees from January 2025 through March 2026 were added to the monthly storage fees incurred from April 1, 2026 through June 30, 2026, to get a total of $434,317.

The number of women and couples that would have been served with these funds was calculated based on estimates from the Guttmacher Institute’s Just the Numbers analysis for fiscal year 2024. The total funds spent to date and the monthly spending going forward were divided by the average cost-per-user for providing modern contraceptive care in countries that previously received US family planning foreign assistance in FY24.