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USAID And MAGAville Georgia [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-02-27
The MAGA world has largely cheered the Musk/Trump/DOGE gutting of USAID because, after all, it is all about foreign aid. The argument is that we should be spending it here first, on Americans. What this argument fails to realize is that much of it is spent here, on Americans. Much of it goes to American farmers, as USAID buys their crops and ships it overseas. USAID is, in many ways, a subsidy program for American farmers.
However, that is not the extent of it, and I am going to give an example of one company called "Mana Nutrition." At a factory in Fitzgerald Georgia Mana Nutrition employs about 125 Americans. They manufacture a special vitamin fortified peanut butter paste. The energy rich mix is loaded into 500 calories packets and shipped to areas of high starvation risk where it is dispensed primarily to starving children.
The Fitzgerald Georgia factory produces 500,000 pounds of this ready-to-use therapeutic food (RUTF) a year, enough to feed 10 million starving children a year. Each packet includes a statement that it is brought to them by the generosity of the American people through USAID.
Mana Nutrition's contracts with USAID are all being cancelled. The company has $10 million in wasted peanut butter pouches on hand that it has been told will not be purchased and will have to be thrown away. The company is awaiting $14 million for product already shipped that it doesn't know if it will ever get. Musk/DOGE/Trump are firing all of USAID employees and there is no one to process any payments to Mana Nutrition.
Let's tally up the winners and losers here.
Losers:
The American company Mana Nutrition.
125 American employees of Mana Nutrition
American peanut farmers.
10 million starving children.
Winners: I got nothing. I'll leave MAGA to answer that.
One final note. Fitzgerald Georgia (population about 9,000) is the county seat of Ben Hill County Georgia. Ben Hill County went to Donald Trump with 66% in 2024, a two to one margin, over Harris. They could not have voted knowing Trump would do this to them. He did not campaign on eliminating USAID. After all, doing that could have lost him Ben Hill County Georgia.
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