Freshly released emails from the State Department have exposed the chaos behind the Trump administration’s drive to torch nearly $10 million in birth control.
Officials had tried to destroy contraceptives and HIV-prevention supplies sitting in a warehouse in Geel, Belgium, after the White House gutted the U.S. Agency for International Development in early 2025.
Elon Musk, 55, spearheaded the dismantling of USAID as head of the administration’s controversial Department of Government Efficiency drive. The plan was abandoned because Belgian rules blocked incineration, but by this point, most of the stock had spoiled.
The documents—obtained by the Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR) through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit and first reported on Tuesday by the Washington Post—show U.S. diplomats scrambling for basic facts.
A staffer at the U.S. Embassy in Belgium told a Washington colleague on Aug. 13 last year that “there is no one here that knows definitively what is in the warehouse,” days after news outlets had independently pinned down its contents.
Officials themselves had sparked the confusion. A senior official had emailed foreign-assistance appointee Jeremy Lewin on Aug. 8 with a list of stock, wrongly identifying several items as abortion drugs. None of the items named on the list is classified as abortion-inducing by the Food and Drug Administration.
The State Department confirmed in a statement to the Post that “a preliminary decision was made to destroy certain abortifacient birth control commodities” tied to canceled Biden-era USAID deals. It did not spell out which items it deemed abortion drugs.
Liz McCaman Taylor, an attorney for the CRR, rejected that framing entirely. “These are not abortion drugs, just plain and simple,” she said, adding that the administration ought to have known better.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, 55, who ran USAID in an acting capacity until late August, defended the wider policy before the House on June 2, saying Washington is “not going to be involved in distributing contraceptives” abroad.
Four truckloads of goods remain at the warehouse, while another 20 truckloads are being held at a separate facility, where they were moved during discussions about their destruction.
Storage and transport have cost taxpayers more than $434,000 since January 2025, a USAID inspector general report estimated last month—more than double the projected cost of destroying the goods. The Daily Beast has contacted the State Department and the White House for comment on this story.
