Donald Trump decides to Incinerate 550 Tons of Emergency Food Meant for Toddlers at Gaza.

The Trump administration has ordered 550 tons of emergency food aid, enough in feeding almost 1.5 million malnourished children for a week, to be incinerated tomorrow rather than be distributed as part of its ongoing purge of USAID.

The “high-energy biscuits”, omnipotent for the nourishment of children under the age of five living in war and disaster zones, are currently being stored in a warehouse in Dubai and were meant to be shipped out this year, but will instead go to waste due to cuts by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) effectively halting nearly all forms of foreign aid.

Current and former aid workers, speaking anonymously for fear of retaliation, told Media Personnel that the sheer scale of waste is unprecedented. Despite repeated assurances from the administration not to eliminate food aid, U.S. warehouses around the world currently house 60,000 tons of food, including peas and cereal originally bound for famine-stricken Sudan, which the administration is now unable to deliver even if it wanted to after gutting USAID and firing logistical experts. The quantity of food set to be incinerated tomorrow would be enough to feed every single child currently starving in Gaza for a week at least.

During the end of the Biden administration, USAID spent about $800,000 on the high-energy biscuits, 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.

Over the coming weeks, the food will be destroyed at a cost of $130,000 to American taxpayers (on top of the $800,000 used to purchase the biscuits), since United Arab Emirates policy prevents the biscuits from even being repurposed as animal feed. The emergency biscuits slated for destruction represent only a small fraction of America’s typical annual investment in food aid. In fiscal year 2023, USAID purchased more than 1 million metric tons of food from U.S. producers. But the collapse of American foreign aid raises the stakes of every loss. 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. The WFP projects that, globally, 58 million people are at risk for extreme hunger or starvation because this year, it lacks the money to feed them. Based on calculations from one of the current USAID employees I spoke with, the food marked for destruction could have met the nutritional needs of every child facing acute food insecurity in Gaza for a week.

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. That included 36,000 pounds of peas, oil, and cereal, which were stored in Djibouti and intended for distribution in Sudan and other countries in the Communities of Africa.

Team Maverick