Federal agencies sold more than 1,300 pieces of unneeded laboratory equipment over four years, some of it subject to export controls, without weighing the risk that buyers could put the gear to malicious use, the Government Accountability Office said in a new report.
From 2022 through 2025, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Agriculture sold 1,316 items, including nine freeze dryers and mass spectrometers on the Commerce Control List, the government’s roster of export-controlled goods, the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy reported. The buyers were individuals and companies in the United States and Canada, some of them apparent resellers.
Neither department told the General Services Administration, which manages the disposal of federal property, that the items were on the control list, a violation of federal regulations. The GAO attributed the lapse to missing policy: HHS’s rules are silent on the requirement, and the GSA’s property-management system has no standard field for agencies to report the information.
“Some lab equipment could pose public health or national security threats if it falls into the wrong hands,” the report said. “For example, bad actors could use it to develop bioweapons.” The agencies, it found, had concentrated on decontaminating equipment rather than on keeping it from people with “nefarious intent.”
To test the risk, GAO investigators used fictitious identities, including that of a nonprofit organization, and successfully acquired four pieces of HHS and USDA laboratory equipment that experts said could pose a biosecurity risk. They also visited a federal lab being decommissioned to review its disposal practices.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee called the sales “a severe bioterrorism threat” in a press release. Representative Brett Guthrie, the Kentucky Republican who chairs the committee, said most of the experts interviewed identified 16 additional pieces of equipment that could have presented a risk but were not on the control list. “With advances in AI and synthetic biology, bad actors and foreign adversaries of the U.S. already possess enhanced access to scientific research information,” he said. Mr. Guthrie and other Republican leaders asked the GAO to open the investigation in February 2024.
The GAO made four recommendations: that the GSA adopt a standard way for agencies to flag controlled equipment headed for disposal, that HHS rewrite its policy to require such items be identified, and that both HHS and USDA regularly assess the biosecurity risks of resales, including the chance that buyers could use the equipment to build a biological weapon or obtain sensitive information. The three agencies generally agreed with the recommendations and indicated plans to carry them out.