\n<\/p>\n
Enough food to feed about 1.5 million children for a week expires today<\/p>\n
\n\tToward the end of the Biden administration, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) spent about $800,000 on high-energy biscuits used to help people impacted by natural disasters or fleeing war, according to a report by The Atlantic.<\/em> Following Donald Trump\u2018s return to the White House, the food meant for children in Afghanistan and Pakistan reportedly languished in a Dubai warehouse as Trump and former DOGE chief Elon Musk\u00a0dismantled\u00a0much of the\u00a0federal government, including the government\u2019s foreign aid department.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tThe publication said that previously, career staff could have handed off the biscuits to the World Food Programme to distribute them, but employees said that since Musk\u2019s so-called DOGE devastated USAID \u2014 firing and placing thousands of workers on leave \u2014 aid items cannot move without the new political leaders of the agency. And while the responsibility originally was given to Trump appointee Pete Marocco, it passed to Jeremy Lewin, who became deputy administrator for policy and programs for what\u2019s left of USAID. (Rolling Stone <\/em>previously reported on Lewin\u2019s alleged history of violence and racist remarks.) Staffers who sent the memos requesting approval to move the emergency food said they never got a response, however, and its unclear if either Marocco or Lewin ever received the memos.<\/p>\n \n\tNow, enough to feed about 1.5 million children for a week \u2014 equal to nearly 500 metric tons of emergency food \u2014 is set to expire today, The Atlantic <\/em>reports. Despite Secretary of State Marco Rubio ensuring representatives on the House Appropriations Committee in May that food aid would reach its intended recipients, the Trump administration reportedly plans to spend $130,000 to burn the biscuits instead of sending them to children in need.<\/p>\n \t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n<\/h2>\n \n\tWhile improper food storage, a flood, or a terrorist group may lead to a few dozen tons of food aid being lost a year, a USAID staffer said that he has never witnessed this many biscuits wasted over his decades with the agency.<\/p>\n \n\tUnfortunately, USAID inventory lists from January show more than 60,000 metric tons of food already purchased by the U.S. government are sitting in warehouses across the world including 36,000 pounds of peas, oil, and cereal. A former senior official at USAID\u2019s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance told The Atlantic <\/em>that when she left her job earlier in July, only a small portion of the food appeared to have moved, while a current employee said small shipments are starting to leave a warehouse in Djibouti. However, given that USAID has been gutted of key employees essential to coordinating and distributing the food to people across the world, whether those parcels will land in the right hands is uncertain.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Enough food to feed about 1.5 million children for a week expires today Toward the end of the Biden administration, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) spent about $800,000 on high-energy biscuits used to help people impacted by natural disasters or fleeing war, according to a report by The Atlantic. Following Donald Trump\u2018s return<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11015,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[794,1122,77,1725,620,4060,81],"class_list":{"0":"post-11014","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-administration","9":"tag-aid","10":"tag-fire","11":"tag-food","12":"tag-set","13":"tag-tons","14":"tag-trump"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11014","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11014"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11014\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/11015"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11014"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11014"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11014"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n