On Sunday, I read an article from The Independent. The headline: “Food earmarked for millions of people still languishes in warehouses after Trump shuttered USAID.” The sub-head reads: “There are concerns that millions of dollars’ worth of food aid is at risk of spoiling or has expired as a result of the administration dismantling USAID.”
This comes after a report by Reuters a few weeks ago that the Trump administration has ordered 496 tonnes of emergency food aid destroyed, enough to feed 1.5 million children for a week. The cost to destroy the high-energy biscuits worth $793,000 is estimated to be $125,000.
Both these reports give the lie to Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s testimony to Congress in May that no food aid would be wasted. “So we will do humanitarian assistance. We will do food assistance. We will do developmental assistance. And we will do security assistance. But we will do it driven by our embassies and our regional bureaus.”
Leadership failures
When you read that 60,000 tonnes of food aid worth millions of American dollars from the public purse are going to waste, you might want to blame Rubio. But hey, he’s secretary of state plus he’s also now the national security advisor and US archivist. He’s a busy man. He can’t keep track of every little thing like 60,000 tonnes of food aid. That’s someone else’s job, right? Right.
Jeremy P Lewin, as of a month ago, is under secretary for foreign assistance, humanitarian affairs and religious freedom. He is 28 years old and graduated from Harvard Law School three years ago. His main qualification for dealing with 60,000 tonnes of food aid is having worked for a short time at the same law firm as Vice President Vance’s wife.
A rookie in charge
A friend sent me an interview with Lewin published in the The New York Times. He mainly talks in vague generalities. The interviewer does not try to pin him down when Lewin states that foreign aid has failed for the last 20, 30, 40 years. (Give some examples, Jeremy.) To me, it’s obvious he doesn’t know what he’s talking about except when he’s lavishing praise on Trump and Rubio.
I went to work for USAID/Tanzania in 1984 specifically to deal with food aid. You may remember We are the World and the disastrous famine in Ethiopia with photos of emaciated children. We also had food shortages in Tanzania – nothing on the scale of Ethiopia – but starvation in children doesn’t have borders.
As bad as those photos and images were on TV, when you stand in front of a Tanzanian mother out in a bush dispensary watching her four-year-old daughter, too weak from hunger to cry, die in her arms, that’s something you will never ever forget. And you know that dealing with food aid means you darn well have to get it right. If you deal with development aid, you win some and you lose some. If you don’t get emergency food aid right, people can die.
The real consequences of dismantling USAID
When Elon Musk fed USAID into the woodchipper, he destroyed the US food aid infrastructure. There is a reason that USAID was a separate agency from the State Department. Contrary to what Rubio told Congress about assistance driven by embassies, diplomats don’t do aid.
In Tanzania, we had (and may still have) what was called ‘the ambassador’s self-help fund’. It gave small grants to local groups carrying out worthwhile projects. It wasn’t managed by the ambassador or anyone at the embassy. It was managed by USAID – specifically, by me.
After the bombing of the American embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam on 7 August 1998, Congress reacted by appropriating funds for humanitarian assistance. In the immediate aftermath, Tanzania and Kenya got in excess of $5mn, with Tanzania having received $9.23mn by the following February. The ambassador called the USAID director and told him words to the effect of “you take care of it”. So USAID – i.e. me, again – took care of it.
Alternative uses for aid ignored
To put the wasted 60,000 tonnes of food aid in perspective, the May 2025 Global Report on Food Crises states that that 53 countries experienced high levels of acute food insecurity, affecting more than 295 million people in 2024.
Now, there’s a very straightforward way to save these 60,000 tonnes of food, if it’s not already too late. Hand it over to the UN World Food Programme (WFP). Food aid is what they do. Back in the day, I worked closely with WFP – mostly good and extremely competent people. Unfortunately, I doubt that will happen, because Trump, Rubio and 28-year-old Lewin suffer from a serious condition called hubris. All three never miss a chance to slam the UN. So, to then turn over American food aid to them? Too quote Eliza Doolittle: “Not bloody likely.”
No traction, no action redux
My hillbilly Uncle Manny in Joplin, Missouri, had a term he used referring to people who were stuck in a situation, floundering around, not knowing what to do. Like a car stuck in the mud. He’d tell me: “Sonny boy, see that fella over there – no traction, no action.”
