After significantly cutting America’s humanitarian aid operations earlier this year, the Trump administration now has a surplus of food that it can’t use. What will become of it? The White House has a simple plan: incinerate it.
Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency unleashed a barrage on the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) earlier this year, as part of the new government’s notorious cost-cutting initiative. In February, the agency’s website went offline, and, since then, massive staffing cuts have all but utterly destroyed the agency. The government is in the process of permanently shutting it down, and its operations are being subsumed into the State Department. As a result, populations all over the world that would have benefited from the U.S.’s aid operations are being threatened with starvation and death.
The Atlantic now reports that about $800k worth of high-energy biscuits that were procured by USAID under the Biden administration will soon need to be destroyed. The biscuits, which would have been distributed by the World Food Programme, would have gone to hungry children in Pakistan and Afghanistan. USAID workers have been warning the Trump administration that they must distribute the food before it expires—and officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, have promised to do so. However, as of today, it appears to be too late. The food expires tomorrow. Instead of sending the biscuits to those who need them, the government plans to spend an additional $130k burning them to ash.
Multiple USAID officials interviewed by The Atlantic said that the destruction of the biscuits represented one of the largest wastes of food that they had witnessed during their time with the agency:
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.
Even worse, The Atlantic reports that even more food could soon expire and may have to be destroyed. Hundreds of thousands of “boxes of emergency food pastes, also already purchased, are currently collecting dust in American warehouses,” the outlet notes. That includes some 60,000 metric tons of food that has already been procured by the government that is currently “sitting in warehouses across the world.” It’s unclear what will happen to most of that food. Gizmodo reached out to the State Department for comment.
The decimation of the U.S.’s aid operations is threatening to decimate communities all over the world. A study, published in The Lancet earlier this month, suggests that the funding cuts to the agency could ultimately lead to 14 million deaths in the next five years, including many children under the age of 5 years old. Little explanation has been given for why it was deemed necessary to destroy USAID, other than a vague need to align with the administration’s mandate of government “efficiency.” Musk has also called the agency “evil” and a “criminal organization,” without much elaboration.
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