USAID Let $2.9 Million in Emergency Food Spoil for Two Years
Summary
Three inspections USAID's Inspector General completed in June 2026 found that when the agency checked its emergency food warehouses in Djibouti, Houston, and Durban in mid-2025, 82 percent of the $44.3 million in stored food had not yet been assigned to a country. Most of that got sorted out within months. What didn't: $2.9 million of food in Djibouti that a vendor's packaging defect had already ruined, which USAID -- mid-transfer to the State Department -- still had not disposed of by its most recent check-in, nearly two years after it arrived. USAID may have spent $460,000 keeping it in storage the whole time, but inspectors could not even confirm that much: the staff who might have known had just been cut in the same reduction in force that both the Djibouti and Houston reports blame for the unenforced contracts.
A stockpile built to save three months, caught mid-collapse
's Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance keeps food -- fortified cereal blends, vegetable oil, sorghum, split peas -- prepositioned in warehouses around the world so it can reach a crisis zone fast; according to , having the food already staged cuts delivery time by an average of three months⧉ compared with buying it after a disaster hits. That system was mid-transition for all of 2025: Executive Order 14169⧉, signed January 20, paused U.S. foreign assistance for review; the State Department announced on March 28 that would stop operating as an independent agency; and on July 1, 2025, 's food-assistance programs -- including these warehouses -- formally transferred to State. inspected the Djibouti, Houston, and Durban warehouses in the weeks just before that handover, checking what was in them and whether storage rules were being followed.
View data as table
Houston's and Durban's unallocated food aid isn't cause for alarm on its own -- by September 2025, contractors confirmed all of Durban's inventory had shipped⧉ and Houston's had been allocated⧉. An emergency stockpile is supposed to sit unassigned until a crisis calls for it; that's the point. Djibouti is the exception that matters, because what found there wasn't a stockpile waiting for a mission. It was food already too far gone to send anywhere.
The food nobody disposed of
Four shipments of super cereal plus -- a fortified corn-soy blend used to treat malnutrition in children and nursing mothers -- arrived at the Djibouti warehouses between January and June 2024, all from the same vendor, all with defective packaging that let in moisture and insects. The contractor, Bahrain Maritime and Mercantile International (BMMI), was required to flag visible defects on arrival, but its contract didn't require opening the boxes⧉ to check what was inside, so the defect went unflagged. allocated the shipments to World Food Programme operations in Ethiopia and Djibouti anyway.
In September 2024, WFP's Ethiopia office rejected its share as "badly infested." and BMMI didn't trace the defect to the vendor's packaging until December 2024. By May 2025, had approved donating the ruined food to Djibouti's Ministry of Agriculture as animal feed -- the only value left to recover. As of 's last confirmation, November 30, 2025, that donation still hadn't happened. The food was still there.
View data as table
| Jan. 2024 | 1,377,842 | first shipment; defect not caught on arrival |
|---|---|---|
| Mar/Apr 2024 | 678,699 | second shipment, same vendor defect |
| Apr/May 2024 | 464,373 | third shipment, same vendor defect |
| June 2024 | 340,295 | fourth and final shipment before WFP rejected the lot as "badly infested" in Sept. 2024 |
Storage isn't free. 's contract with BMMI charges by the pallet, per day, which used to estimate more than $460,000⧉ in accrued storage costs on food had already written off. Whether that money actually changed hands is its own small mystery: says it "was unable to verify whether paid BMMI for storing the spoiled super cereal plus," because by the time anyone asked, the reduction in force and the handoff to State had scattered whoever would know.
A pattern the layoffs didn't create, but did stop anyone explaining
's Djibouti and Houston reports both hit the same wall when they tried to find out why: the Djibouti report says⧉ investigators "could not determine why did not enforce contract requirements for sanitation and pest control due to limited communication with staff" after 's July 1, 2025 reduction in force -- a mass staff cut, distinct from the later agency-wide layoffs at Federal Student Aid and elsewhere, that hit the offices managing these very warehouse contracts.
The Houston report says almost the identical thing⧉ about its own findings: pest activity, a live worm found on a bag of split peas, food stored at room temperature instead of the required regulated range, and more than $31,000 in inventory simply couldn't locate. Both reports also found the contractor inspecting warehouses monthly instead of the contractually required biweekly schedule. In each case, 's finding is not that officials refused to answer -- it's that there was, by the time inspectors called, no one left who knew.
The layoffs don't explain the whole pattern, though. In a March 2026 audit_0.pdf) of BHA's largest warehouse -- in Dubai, one of eight in the network worldwide, storing non-food emergency supplies -- found a $4 million gap between 's own inventory-tracking tools and more than $2.5 million in commodities put at risk by unenforced climate-control rules, both keyed to inventory data from September 2024 -- ten months before the reduction in force, and attributed by that audit to a contract that never specified temperature, ventilation, or inspection requirements in the first place, not to any staffing shortage. The failure mode was already there; the July 2025 cuts didn't invent it, they removed the people who might have caught it before it repeated at three more sites.
Durban is the counterexample that keeps this from reading as an inevitability. Inspectors there found the warehouses "generally in good condition⧉" -- a few pallets of vegetable oil stored too close to batteries, some dust on packaging, bird droppings -- nothing that spoiled or went unaccounted for. The contract requirements that failed in Djibouti and Houston were the same requirements Durban's contractor mostly met. Enforcement wasn't impossible during the transition. It just didn't happen everywhere.
What the rules actually required
None of this is a matter of inspectors applying an outside standard. 's own 2024 Guidelines for Food Aid Storage and Warehouse Good Management Practices⧉ require dry goods like sorghum to be kept between 50°F and 70°F, with air conditioning installed anywhere the climate can't hold that range naturally. One Djibouti warehouse, with no air conditioning despite Djibouti's heat, registered an internal temperature of 109.4°F during the inspection -- nearly 40 degrees over the ceiling -- and 's own pre-fumigation reports had already flagged the same warehouses for pest problems in February and May 2025. The temperature failure and the $1.5 million in infested sorghum it contributed to weren't a surprise finding; they were a documented condition nobody had fixed.
Separately, found that approved BMMI's request to use overflow space in Djibouti's International Free Trade Zone -- a zone partially backed by the Government of China, and separately part of its Belt and Road Initiative -- without BMMI disclosing that link, or documenting any awareness of it, before signing off.
The takeaway
- The failure predates the layoffs -- the layoffs just stopped anyone explaining it. The Dubai audit's findings are keyed to inventory data from ten months before the July 2025 reduction in force, and trace the problem to a contract that never specified temperature and inspection rules in the first place -- not to a staffing shortage. What changed after the RIF wasn't the failure mode; it was that could no longer get an answer for why it kept happening.
- Djibouti's $2.9 million is a closed loss, not a risk. Houston's and Durban's unallocated food aid found its way to recipients by September 2025 -- normal stockpile turnover. Djibouti's spoiled food had no such resolution as of 's last check five months later; the only value left in it is as animal feed, and even that hadn't been delivered.
- The Department of State now owns the bill and the fix -- if there is a bill. State assumed the warehouse contracts on July 1, 2025, and 's reports leave it eleven considerations across the three sites -- dispose of the spoiled food, enforce the temperature and inspection terms, verify inventory accuracy -- with no attached deadline. Per-pallet storage charges keep accruing under the contract's own terms until State disposes of the food; whether anyone has actually been paying them is a question even couldn't answer.
This piece follows the figures exactly as 's three June 2026 inspection reports and its March 2026 Dubai audit state them; none of the four reports assigns intent for why enforcement lapsed, and neither does this article. The $460,000 storage-cost figure and the finding that could not confirm it was paid are both 's own words, not an inference. did not respond to 's draft Djibouti or Houston reports before publication; the Department of State, which now administers all three warehouses, provided comments only on the Dubai audit. The 82.1% unallocated figure and the $44.3 million combined total are this outlet's own sums of the three reports' inventory tables, not a -published total. One discrepancy this piece cannot resolve: 's own May 29, 2025 announcement opening this inspection series said these same three warehouses held nearly $100 million in food aid at that time -- about $56 million more than what 's June 2025 inspections of the same three sites actually counted a month later. Neither the announcement nor the three inspection reports explain the gap, and this article does not speculate on its cause.
Sources(5) ▾
- USAID Office of Inspector General, Emergency Food Assistance: Most of USAID's $21 Million Djibouti Inventory Was at Risk of Not Being Usable and $2.9 Million Had Already Spoiled (Report E-000-26-004-M) (2026-06-16) — 's inspection of 's eight Djibouti City warehouses as of June 30, 2025 -- the source for the $21.3 million inventory total, its 80% unallocated share, the $2.9 million spoiled super cereal plus and its estimated (unverified-as-paid) $460,000 storage cost, the $1.5 million in infested sorghum, and the reduction-in-force explanation gap. oig.usaid.gov · original document
- USAID Office of Inspector General, Emergency Food Assistance: USAID Stored Over $18 Million of Food in Houston Warehouses, but Deficiencies in Storage and Inventory Conditions May Increase Risk of Waste (Report E-000-26-002-M) (2026-06-16) — 's inspection of 's three Houston-area warehouses as of June 13, 2025 -- the source for the $18.8 million inventory total, its 82% unallocated share (resolved by September 2025), the pest and storage-condition deviations, the inventory discrepancies, and the same reduction-in-force explanation gap found in Djibouti. oig.usaid.gov · original document
- USAID Office of Inspector General, Emergency Food Assistance: USAID Durban Warehouses Were Generally in Good Condition, but Limited Storage Gaps May Increase the Risk of Contamination or Spoilage (Report E-000-26-003-M) (2026-06-16) — 's inspection of 's two Durban warehouses as of June 20, 2025 -- the contrast case: $4.2 million in food, 92% unallocated at inspection but fully distributed by September 2025, and only minor, non-recurring storage deviations. Source for the claim that enforcement problems at the other two sites were not inevitable. oig.usaid.gov · original document
- USAID Office of Inspector General, Humanitarian Assistance: Actions Needed to Strengthen Inventory Management and Oversight at the Dubai Warehouse (Audit Report 8-000-26-001-P) (2026-03-03) — An earlier, full-scope audit of BHA's largest warehouse, published March 3, 2026 -- three and a half months before the three June inspection reports, though its own findings are keyed to inventory data from August-September 2024, ten months before the July 2025 reduction in force -- establishes that 's inventory-management and contract-enforcement failures at these warehouses predate the reduction in force, and names the eight-warehouse network these three food-storage sites belong to. oig.usaid.gov · original document
- USAID Office of Inspector General, Project Announcement: Inspections of Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance Warehouses Storing Food Aid (2025-05-29) — 's announcement opening the three-warehouse inspection series -- source for the nearly $100 million these same three warehouses reportedly held as of May 2025, an unreconciled gap against the $44.3 million 's own inspections counted a month later. oig.usaid.gov · original document
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's Office of Inspector General -- the agency's independent internal watchdog -- inspected three of the warehouses where prepositions emergency food for rapid deployment to famines, floods, and other crises, and found that as of mid-2025, 82 percent of the $44.3 million⧉ stored there had not been assigned to any country. Most of that got sorted out within months. What didn't: in Djibouti, $2.9 million of food had already spoiled⧉ from a vendor's packaging defect, and nearly two years after it arrived, -- by then mid-transfer to the State Department -- still hadn't disposed of it. may have spent an estimated $460,000 keeping it in storage the whole time; says it couldn't even verify that much was actually paid.