Be glad you don’t have a label that says USAID on you, or you could be going up in flames along with high-energy biscuits which are meant to prevent starvation and which could keep 1.5 million children alive in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Trump administration dismantled USAID and now it’s busy burning up expired food stores that could have been shipped and consumed by the needy. But they won’t be. They’ll just go up in flames. The Atlantic:
Sometime near the end of the Biden administration, USAID spent about $800,000 on the high-energy biscuits, one current and one former employee at the agency told me. The biscuits, which cram in the nutritional needs of a child under 5, are a stopgap measure, often used in scenarios where people have lost their homes in a natural disaster or fled a war faster than aid groups could set up a kitchen to receive them. They were stored in a Dubai warehouse and intended to go to the children this year.
Since January, when the Trump administration issued an executive order that halted virtually all American foreign assistance, federal workers have sent the new political leaders of USAID repeated requests to ship the biscuits while they were useful, according to the two USAID employees. USAID bought the biscuits intending to have the World Food Programme distribute them, and under previous circumstances, career staff could have handed off the biscuits to the United Nations agency on their own.
But since Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency disbanded USAID and the State Department subsumed the agency, no money or aid items can move without the approval of the new heads of American foreign assistance, several current and former USAID employees told me. 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.)
In May, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told representatives on the House Appropriations Committee that he would ensure that food aid would reach its intended recipients before spoiling. But by then, the order to incinerate the biscuits (which I later reviewed) had already been sent. Rubio has insisted that the administration embraces America’s responsibility to continue saving foreign lives, including through food aid. But in April, according to NPR, the U.S. government eliminated all humanitarian aid to Afghanistan and Yemen, where, the State Department said at the time, providing food risks benefiting terrorists.
(The State Department has offered no similar justification for pulling aid to Pakistan.) Even if the administration was unwilling to send the biscuits to the originally intended countries, other places—Sudan, say, where war is fueling the world’s worst famine in decades—could have benefited. Instead, the biscuits in the Dubai warehouse continue to approach their expiration date, after which their vitamin and fat content will begin to deteriorate rapidly. At this point, United Arab Emirates policy prevents the biscuits from even being repurposed as animal feed.
So not even animal life can benefit, because we have a totally dysfunctional government, overseen by billionaires, who far from cutting waste, have accelerated the waste of valuable resources at an epic rate. This is just more blood on this misadministration’s hands. It’s a true tragedy. People are dying over this, like people died in Florida because of the mishandling of the flood crisis.
This is what America voted for. These are the kind of results the game show host generates in the real world. Death.
Hey evangelicals…do you believe in Scriptures? If so, John, the beloved disciple, the only one at the cross, and the only one not put to death, wrote the gospel and revelations. As Dr. Lennox from Oxford, where he is a professor emeritus in mathematics, points out, Christianity is the only faith that promises justice. Tens of millions have died without justice, and many more will. In Revelations, it is written that when Christ returns, he will judge the living and the dead. So you who claim to believe but promote evil such as this…YOU WILL BE JUDGED!
This makes me want to cry and scream. All that food is waiting for the go-ahead, ready and waiting, and now the go-ahead is to burn it. All those children are starving. Death is, indeed, what this country has come to. And the world continues to look at us and wonder what the hell has happened.
Ask the people of Ukraine about death and Donald Trump’s America.
Some mass murderers get the chair…some get 78 million co-conspirators to keep them well funded by the taxpayers. More deaths to come.