The Trump Administration Is About to Incinerate 500 Tons of Emergency Food

The Atlantic

4 days ago

Five months into its unprecedented dismantling of foreign-aid programs, the Trump administration has given the order to incinerate food instead of sending it to people abroad who need it. Nearly 500 metric tons of emergency food—enough to feed about 1.5 million children for a week—are set to expire tomorrow, according to current and former government employees with direct knowledge of the rations. Within weeks, two of those sources told me, the food, meant for children in Afghanistan and Pakistan, will be ash. (The sources I spoke with for this story requested anonymity for fear of professional repercussions.)
Sometime near the end of the Biden administration, USAID spent about $800,000 on the high-energy biscuits, one current and one former employee at the agency told me. The biscuits, which cram in the nutritional needs of a child under 5, are a stopgap measure, often used in scenarios where people have lost their homes in a natural disaster or fled a war faster than aid groups could set up a kitchen to receive them. They were stored in a Dubai warehouse and intended to go to the children this year.
Since January, when the Trump administration issued an executive order that halted virtually all American foreign assistance, federal workers have sent the new political leaders of USAID repeated requests to ship the biscuits while they were useful, according to the two USAID employees. USAID bought the biscuits intending to have the World Food Programme distribute them, and under previous circumstances, career staff could have handed off the biscuits to the United Nations agency on their own. But since Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency disbanded USAID and the State Department subsumed the agency, no money or aid items can move without the approval of the new heads of American foreign assistance, several current and former USAID employees told me. From January to mid-April, the responsibility rested with Pete Marocco, who worked across multiple agencies during the first Trump administration; then it passed to Jeremy Lewin, a law-school graduate in his 20s who was originally installed by DOGE and now has appointments at both USAID and State. Two of the USAID employees told me that staffers who sent the memos requesting approval to move the food never got a response and did not know whether Marocco or Lewin ever received them. (The State Department did not answer my questions about why the food was never distributed.)
In May, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told representatives on the House Appropriations Committee that he would ensure that food aid would reach its intended recipients before spoiling. But by then, the order to incinerate the biscuits (which I later reviewed) had already been sent. Rubio has insisted that the administration embraces America's responsibility to continue saving foreign lives, including through food aid. But in April, according to NPR, the U.S. government eliminated all humanitarian aid to Afghanistan and Yemen, where, the State Department said at the time, providing food risks benefiting terrorists. (The State Department has offered no similar justification for pulling aid to Pakistan.) Even if the administration was unwilling to send the biscuits to the originally intended countries, other places—Sudan, say, where war is fueling the world's worst famine in decades—could have benefited. Instead, the biscuits in the Dubai warehouse continue to approach their expiration date, after which their vitamin and fat content will begin to deteriorate rapidly. At this point, United Arab Emirates policy prevents the biscuits from even being repurposed as animal feed.
Over the coming weeks, the food will be destroyed at a cost of $130,000 to American taxpayers (on top of the $800,000 used to purchase the biscuits), according to current and former federal aid workers I spoke with. One current USAID staffer told me he'd never seen anywhere near this many biscuits trashed over his decades working in American foreign aid. Sometimes food isn't stored properly in warehouses, or a flood or a terrorist group complicates deliveries; that might result in, at most, a few dozen tons of fortified foods being lost in a given year. But several of the aid workers I spoke with reiterated that they have never before seen the U.S. government simply give up on food that could have been put to good use.
The emergency biscuits slated for destruction represent only a small fraction of America's typical annual investment in food aid. In fiscal year 2023, USAID purchased more than 1 million metric tons of food from U.S. producers. But the collapse of American foreign aid raises the stakes of every loss. Typically, the biscuits are the first thing that World Food Programme workers hand to Afghan families who are being forced out of Pakistan and back to their home country, which has been plagued by severe child malnutrition for years. Now the WFP can support only one of every 10 Afghans who are in urgent need of food assistance. The WFP projects that, globally, 58 million people are at risk for extreme hunger or starvation because this year, it lacks the money to feed them. Based on calculations from one of the current USAID employees I spoke with, the food marked for destruction could have met the nutritional needs of every child facing acute food insecurity in Gaza for a week.
Despite the administration's repeated promises to continue food aid, and Rubio's testimony that he would not allow existing food to go to waste, even more food could soon expire. Hundreds of thousands of boxes of emergency food pastes, also already purchased, are currently collecting dust in American warehouses. According to USAID inventory lists from January, more than 60,000 metric tons of food—much of it grown in America, and all already purchased by the U.S. government—were then sitting in warehouses across the world. That included 36,000 pounds of peas, oil, and cereal, which were stored in Djibouti and intended for distribution in Sudan and other countries in the Horn of Africa. A former senior official at USAID's Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance told me that, by the time she'd left her job earlier this month, very little of the food seemed to have moved; one of the current USAID employees I spoke with confirmed her impression, though he noted that, in recent weeks, small shipments have begun leaving the Djibouti warehouse.
Such operations are more difficult for USAID to manage today than they were last year because many of the humanitarian workers and supply-chain experts who once coordinated the movement of American-grown food to hungry people around the world no longer have their jobs. Last month, the CEOs of the two American companies that make another kind of emergency food for malnourished children both told The New York Times that the government seemed unsure of how to ship the food it had already purchased. Nor, they told me, have they received any new orders. (A State Department spokesperson told me that the department had recently approved additional purchases, but both CEOs told me they have yet to receive the orders. The State Department has not responded to further questions about these purchases.) But even if the Trump administration decides tomorrow to buy more food aid—or simply distribute what the government already owns while the food is still useful—it may no longer have the capacity to make sure anyone receives it.