It is a racket, for sure, and not a new one. These will be warehoused, and when needed again sold back to the government at full list. When I was a contract administrator (private sector) I remember seeing a clause in the F.A.R. requiring a vendor to certify that goods offered had not previously been sold as surplus. That was over 40 years ago. The game was old even then.
A friend of mine was an assistant store manager at a regional grocery chain in the Northeast. As a example, during the beginning of the Covid panic, the buyers place orders for any hand sanitizer, masks, shields, gloves, etc. for employee use they could get. As the “emergency powers” in places like NY, MA, CT, RI, etc. kept gettign extended, they kept buying to not run out or risk fines, shut downs, etc.
They used their store supply distributor (trash bags, deli containers, cake boxes, etc) to deliver these things with those weekly deliveries. Early on they were just sent as they came in, then switched to a order as needed system. Well, when all of a sudden in May 2021 the “science” decided no more masks/restricting in all these states piratically the same week, it created a huge issue.
They still had orders they paid for on a emergency basis they couldn’t cancel, no stores were ordering that stuff and the 3rd party distributor getting more they didn’t own as all they were contracted to was receive it and deliver it to the chain with their regular supplies. Well, eventually they ran out of space for hundreds of pallets of mask, shields, etc.
As in your cases, no one wanted the stuff on a business to business sale, and most wasn’t packaged for resale. In the end they literally shipped about a 1/2 - 3/4 full pallet of random PPE to each store, where they still collect dust. some stores slowly “used” them by tossing a box in the trash every so often as they took up lots of room.