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Trump administration to incinerate 500 tons of emergency food designated for kids through USAID [1]

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Date: 2025-07-15

The indifference of this administration towards human life should shock exactly no one at this point. Its deliberate decimation of those government agencies, whose sole purpose is to provide for the health, welfare and well-being of American citizens, alone speaks for itself. But if an outside observer really wanted an example of just how far and how fast this nation has fallen, its conscious abandonment of any semblance of concern for the less fortunate in the world by dismantling the organization known as USAID might provide the strongest indictment. And nothing more aptly reveals that abandonment more clearly than the dismal spectacle of this nation literally burning food intended to feed starving and malnourished children.

As reported by Hana Kiros, writing for The Atlantic:

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.)

As Kiros reports, five hundred metric tons of high-energy biscuits are currently sitting in a warehouse in Dubai. They were purchased by USAID toward the end of the Biden administration for distribution through the World Food Programme, back in the “before” time, when this country and those who run its government still strove to demonstrate human decency and competence.

Those federal workers still employed by USAID had requested approval from the Trump administration on multiple occasions to hand off this food for distribution. According to Kiros’ reporting, this approval is now required ever since Elon Musk’s DOGE dismantled USAID and the agency was absorbed into the State Department.

As Kiros notes:

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.)

Thus, it’s not clear whether the failure to approve this food distribution is due to incompetence, indifference, or willful, malign neglect. According to Kiros, despite assurances in March from Sec. of State Marco Rubio that food aid would continue, the order to incinerate these biscuits had already been issued at that time. And although the State Department has ordered a halt to food aid shipments to Afghanistan and Yemen on the grounds that it could benefit “terrorists,” Kiros notes that no similar justification has been applied to Pakistan. However, Kiros also observes that even if such an excuse were justifiable, the food aid could have been sent to Sudan or other countries with malnourished child populations.

Regardless of why this food is being destroyed, the plain fact is that the biscuits are currently slated to be incinerated at the reported cost to US taxpayers of $130,000 (added to the $800,000 cost of their original purchase). It’s difficult, therefore, to paint such an act with the catch-all mantra of “efficiency.” Rather, it’s simply a pure waste of food. As Kiros notes, “[S]everal 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.”

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.

As Kiros notes, these 500 tons of biscuits about to be discarded constitute a ”small fraction” of food intended for USAID programs, such as food paste, oils and cereal, now apparently destined to rot away in warehouses and elsewhere. She notes that “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.” Her interviews with the remaining USAID officials normally responsible for its distribution suggest that very little of it has moved. Moreover, “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,” so even if the Trump administration suddenly decided that feeding starving children was actually the right thing to do, its actions and mass indiscriminate firings have now made it far more difficult.

It’s tempting to merely state that this nation should be ashamed of itself, but that would obscure the reality. The officials who deliberately took these actions in our name don’t appear to be moved by shame, or indeed any other human impulse (other than, perhaps, greed). Nor would their shame — if they actually felt any — do much good for the children who were supposed to get this food because they mistakenly believed the wealthiest nation on earth might have the moral decency to spare it.

One thing seems reasonably certain, though. The people who ordered this food to be destroyed have never spent a day going hungry in their lives.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/7/15/2333533/-Trump-administration-to-incinerate-500-tons-of-emergency-food-designated-for-kids-through-USAID?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=trending&pm_medium=web

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