A shocking report reveals that the Trump administration has made another major misstep in it’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, this time by paying a Texas company $7.3 million for test tubes to track the spread of the illness nationwide. And it is a serious misstep because the recently formed company sent plastic tubes that are used to make soda bottles and they are completely unusable, state officials have said.

Those officials also say that the “preformed” tubes, designed to expand with heat and pressure into two-liter soda bottles aren’t suitable because they don’t fit the racks that are used to analyze laboratory test samples, ProPublica reports.

But that’s not all. The officials also said even if the bottles were the correct size, the company’s methods for forming the tubes likely means they are contaminated, leading to incorrect test results. And many employees for the company, Fillakit, based in Texas, didn’t wear masks and gathered up the small soda bottles with snow shovels and dumped into plastic bins. Then doused the bottles with saline solution.

All of this was done in the open air. That observation was made by former employees and by ProPublica’s own team.

“It wasn’t even clean, let alone sterile,” said Teresa Green, a retired science teacher who worked at Fillakit’s warehouse near Houston. After working there two weeks, she quit out of frustration.

Fillakit was formed by an ex-telemarketer who has been accused numerous times of fraudulent practices over a period of two decades and had only been in business for a few days when the Federal Emergency Management Agency contracted with the company on May 7. Fillakit stands to earn a total of $10.16 million if it fulfills its contractual obligation to produce four million tubes.

And that’s nothing if not wasteful since officials in New York, New Jersey, Texas, and New Mexico already say they can’t use the tubes. Now FEMA is asking health officials in several states to seek alternative uses for the unfinished soda bottles.

“We are still trying to identify an alternative use,” said Janelle Fleming, a spokesperson for the New Jersey Department of Health.

Fillakit’s owner, Paul Wexler, refused to comment, other than to say the tubes are normally used for soda bottles.

And the Trump administration has repeatedly hired first-time federal contractors without properly scrutinizing them as the pandemic wears on. The federal government has awarded more than $2 billion to these inexperienced contractors for work related to fighting the virus. That’s according to ProPublica’s analysis of purchasing data. What’s worse is that many of these companies, including Fillakit, have no experience with medical supplies.

The U.S., as compared to many European countries, is lagging behind in its rate of testing people for coronavirus, due in part, to supply shortages and inadequacies. For at least one state, the shipment of unusable Fillakit tubes has caused delays in widespread testing.

“They’re the most unusable tubes I’ve ever seen,” said one high-level public health scientist in that state who requested anonymity to protect his job. “They’re going to sit in a warehouse and no one can use them. We won’t be able to do our full plan.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, FEMA is trying to do a bit of damage control in response to questions, writing it inspects testing products “to ensure packaging is intact to maintain sterility; that the packing slip matches the requested product ordered, and that the vials are not leaking.” The agency also reported “product validation” that medical supplies are effective “is reinforced at the state laboratories.”

But the agency remained mum regarding questions on the size and lack of sterilization of Fillakit’s tubes. It also didn’t say why it was seeking an alternative to the tubes.

In one particularly shocking example, Washington state, the epicenter of the virus’s initial outbreak, received over 76,000 Fillakit vials from FEMA. Not a single one can be used.

“They were packaged unusually,” noted Frank Ameduri, a spokesman for the state Health Department. “Not in a way we’re used to seeing, and they were not labeled. Some of them have been sent out to our lab for quality control. None of the vials will be used until we’ve identified what’s in them and that they are safe for use.”

An additional 140,000 Fillakit tubes are sitting on shelves in Texas, where officials have been slow to conduct coronavirus testing. And this is really worrisome because the number of confirmed cases in the state has increased by more than one-third over the past two weeks. That’s according to data compiled by the COVID Tracking Project.

“There were issues with the labeling, and they use saline rather than viral transport medium, so we have not used them for our testing efforts,” said Chris Van Deusen, a Texas Health Department spokesman.

So if these tubes aren’t usable, what’s going to happen to them? That’s the question that hasn’t been answered. Are they going to wind up being stored unused for decades, or are they going to wind up in our oceans, which are currently drowning in plastic?

This is just another instance where the Trump administration has a lot to answer for as Americans continue to suffer and die from this terrible virus.