19-02-2025
This USAID Program Made Food Aid More Efficient for Decades. DOGE Gutted It Anyways
One of the first things Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) did was push for extreme cuts to the United States' primary international aid agency, the US Agency for International Development (USAID). Musk insisted that USAID was too wasteful and corrupt to exist, but by effectively dismantling the agency, DOGE ended projects like the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (Fews Net), a long-running, broadly successful data analysis initiative that provides guidance to ensure that food aid is delivered in the least-wasteful way possible.
Deprived of USAID funding, the Fews Net program is currently offline. The international development firm Chemonics, which staffs a large portion of the project, says it has furloughed 88 percent of its US-based workforce. For now, that means the United States may be facing a new, less efficient era of food assistance, one that could leave the country more vulnerable to future global crises.
The goal of Fews Net is to crunch a wide array of variables—from weather patterns to armed conflicts—to predict where famines will occur ahead of time and deploy resources to prevent and curb disasters. Its reports are used both internally by USAID and by other governments, nonprofit groups, and aid agencies around the world. It can't flat-out prevent people from going hungry or guarantee that foreign governments will take its recommendations, but it has a fruitful track record of providing advance warnings and guidance that keep people alive. For example, Fews Net has been credited with saving up to a million lives in 2016, when it predicted and responded to a famine in the Horn of Africa.
'We are really a pillar,' says Laouali Ibrahim, a former Fews Net West Africa regional technical manager who retired last year. 'If you withdraw Fews Net, systems will collapse. The quality of early warnings will decrease.'
A current Fews Net worker in southern Africa, who spoke on condition of anonymity as they are currently furloughed and still hopeful the program might restart, tells WIRED that some countries are already feeling the impact of the program going offline, especially since it's the 'lean season,' the time when food aid is most acutely needed. While the United Nations and private-sector programs still offer their own insights into how to distribute aid, the worker says that Fews Net produced more timely reports. 'It leaves a huge gap,' the worker says.
USAID launched Fews Net in 1985 in response to a series of famines that ravaged Ethiopia and Africa's Sahel region. The severity of the humanitarian disaster sparked a new wave of interest in humanitarian aid. (Remember the celebrity-studded song to raise money for the cause, 'We Are the World?')
The Trump administration's stance on foreign aid today is markedly more negative, but secretary of state Marco Rubio, who is currently serving as acting administrator of USAID, has repeatedly emphasized that DOGE's cuts do not represent the total end of US international assistance. Rubio's office has offered emergency waivers to allow 'lifesaving' work to continue, but many aid groups say the system is not working, causing a number of crucial programs, including HIV medical assistance, to screech to a halt. Similarly, even though predicting and detecting famines can save lives, Fews Net's work is currently on hold.
