We’re setting fire to food aid

Speaker 1 Depending on your politics, you might see some of Trump to Trump Harder's policies as cruel.

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Speaker 1 But I'm willing to bet that no matter what your politics may be, you would not agree with lighting a bunch of food on fire.

Speaker 8 Food grown in the United States, manufactured in the United States, to be sent out to the most vulnerable people on the planet with a sticker with the United States emblem on it.

Speaker 8 What the hell are we doing here?

Speaker 1 We're going to ask on Today Explained.

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Speaker 1 Today explained here with Hannah Kiros. She's an assistant editor at The Atlantic, but she recently wrote a piece that unsurprisingly got a lot of attention.

Speaker 1 It was titled, The Trump Administration is About to Incinerate 500 Tons of Emergency Food.

Speaker 16 So, the U.S. has agreed to incinerate nearly 500 metric tons of emergency food, or you know, enough to feed about 1.5 million children for a week.

Speaker 17 Alarming new report in the Atlantic reveals that the Trump administration is planning to destroy a massive amount of emergency food.

Speaker 9 The Trump administration gave the order to burn it.

Speaker 7 This is according to current and former government officials interviewed by the Atlantic and Reuters.

Speaker 16 The food in question, it's a specialized nutritional product. They're called high energy biscuits.

Speaker 16 And what these are are calorie-dense biscuits that are designed to serve as sort of a meal replacement that cram in all of the nutritional needs of a child under the age of five.

Speaker 16 And these biscuits were originally slated to be distributed in Afghanistan and Pakistan in January.

Speaker 14 According to a report from USAID's Office of Inspector General, more than 489 million of food aid is sitting at ports in transit and in warehouses around the world where it's at risk of spoiling.

Speaker 19 415 children per hour that will not get the lifesaving food that we couldn't make.

Speaker 19 And right now, as you're running basically half the facility, that creates to 200 children every hour that will not get

Speaker 19 this life-saving food. That has been paid for by the United States taxpayers.

Speaker 16 But those warnings weren't heeded, and now the food is past the point where it can even be made into animal feed. And the US has agreed to pay over $100,000 to incinerate it.

Speaker 16 The US uses pre-positioned warehouses that are in strategic locations around the world.

Speaker 16 And the idea is that you have the food there so that, you know, if a famine breaks out, if a natural disaster breaks out, if you want to prevent people from dying from starvation, then you can quickly deploy it.

Speaker 16 So, this food was in a warehouse in Dubai. It was procured around the end of the Biden administration.

Speaker 16 The idea was that, you know, in January is when the food was meant to be, you know, handed over to the World Food Program and it would begin distributing it around then.

Speaker 16 But

Speaker 16 at that time, U.S.AID was being dismantled, the humanitarian agency that the U.S. has used for around 70 years to distribute this stuff.

Speaker 4 Thousands of USAID workers cleared out their deaths today after being laid off or fired.

Speaker 4 The Trump administration has terminated 90% of its contracts for international development and humanitarian aid.

Speaker 20 I spent time in Washington on projects related to keeping people from starving. And that actually benefited American farmers.

Speaker 20 It benefited the American workers who load food into rail cars and send it to ports and those who actually

Speaker 20 load and unload at ports. This program

Speaker 20 helped people.

Speaker 1 How does it usually go when this food gets to a site in Dubai?

Speaker 16 Normally the World Food Program will enter into an agreement with USAID and they will begin making plans to distribute the food and they might partner with other NGOs.

Speaker 16 The UNICEF usually plays a pretty big role in this as well. And the goal is really just to get it to the last mile.

Speaker 16 And getting

Speaker 16 food into a crisis situation can be sort of bowling a strike in the middle of a war zone.

Speaker 16 And in order to make that happen, the World Food Program, UNICEF, they work with local clinics to distribute this stuff. Maybe they'll have distribution sites in schools.
And so it's a pretty...

Speaker 16 complicated ecosystem. And what the U.S.
government typically does is they procure it and then they'll hand it off.

Speaker 16 And so there's a call that goes out maybe a year in advance of when the products might be used and the U.S.

Speaker 16 procures them and then they get into the World Food Program's hands or UNICEF's hands and then they're off to the races trying to get this stuff to the last mile.

Speaker 1 And if they're destroying food because they couldn't get it out in time, is there any plan to replace the stuff that's being destroyed?

Speaker 16 Tammy Bruce, who is the spokesperson for the State Department, said in a press briefing or suggested that the destroyed stockpile would be replaced.

Speaker 21 The story here is the nature of the commitment of the United States to food aid,

Speaker 21 which we all commit to, but also still, like everything else, doing it more efficiently,

Speaker 21 with less expense, but with the same framework.

Speaker 21 So, yes, I mean, there's a dynamic there where we're going to destroy, and we have before the emergency food food rations in particular that might expire and then replenish that.

Speaker 16 But so far the Trump administration hasn't purchased any

Speaker 16 new

Speaker 16 specialized nutritional products. So I guess we'll just have to see.

Speaker 1 Aaron Powell has anyone confronted Marco Rubio or President Trump about this? Just point blank, said, hey, why are we letting food be destroyed instead of feeding hungry children?

Speaker 16 Aaron Ross Powell, no one has confronted Marco Rubio or President Trump about this. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee has been meeting.

Speaker 22 What do you think Martin Luther King Jr.

Speaker 22 would say about a nation that purchased food for starving kids and then locked it in a warehouse until it expired and incinerated it rather than giving it out so that 27,000 starving kids could survive meagerly for one more month?

Speaker 16 During that meeting, the top Democrat on that committee, Jean Shaheen,

Speaker 16 She pressed a deputy secretary on the destruction of this food.

Speaker 23 We're destroying 500 metric tons of food that could feed 1.5 million children a week, and we're destroying it because

Speaker 23 for no other reason than that the administration put a hold on getting that foreign assistance out to people and so now it's spoiled.

Speaker 23 I mean, I don't think that's consistent with the values of the United States or consistent with American taxpayers and how they want to see their money spent.

Speaker 16 And she secured a commitment from him to produce an inventory of all of the current food aid stockpiles the U.S. has around the world.
And this deputy secretary also pledged that the U.S.

Speaker 16 would try to distribute the food before it expires.

Speaker 1 Aaron Powell, is it just hungry people around the world that are going to suffer if this doesn't get figured out? Or will this

Speaker 1 shift in international food aid have any effects here in the United States?

Speaker 16 So something that I think gets lost in the conversation a bit is that the way that the U.S. delivers food aid

Speaker 16 overseas is already quite America first in its approach. For certain types of food that the U.S.
gives, there are stipulations that it can only be

Speaker 16 sourced from American farmers. It can only be shipped abroad using ships that the U.S.
owns.

Speaker 16 Part of the way that we deliver food aid is designed to benefit American farmers, benefit American freight forwarders. And that's part of why

Speaker 16 some of the Republicans that have really been advocating for this food assistance to continue have been in states where there's a large contingent of farmers that are saying.

Speaker 24 It's telling the American farmers that we're not even considering. your part and role in this.
We are the people that grow this food that's that's going to these needy families.

Speaker 24 USAID annually buys about $2 billion worth of surplus ag commodities like wheat and grain sorghum that Louise and I grow right here on our farm.

Speaker 25 There's only so many Kansans and we cannot clearly eat

Speaker 25 all the wheat that we produce or the grain sorghum.

Speaker 25 And so we rely on customers, whether that's USAID or other countries through USAID. You know, we need customers to buy our product or we're at SOL.
I mean, we're, you know, we don't have a market.

Speaker 25 And it's critical, absolutely critical.

Speaker 16 It's also something that has an impact domestically on farmers that are losing a big share of their market if the U.S. isn't buying food from them for this purpose.

Speaker 1 Aaron Trevor Barrett, and what does it say about foreign aid from the United States or even just the impression people have of the United States abroad that the country is currently letting this happen?

Speaker 16 About every 15 seconds, a child dies of malnutrition, and that seems very much like something you would hear during an infomercial with with the arms of an angel in the background.

Speaker 16 But you know, those are like

Speaker 16 they are children that could have gone on to live a full life. And I just think that in the conversation,

Speaker 16 you know, the person who is suffering often due to you know, absolutely no fault of their own, can get lost. So, part of why there's been a strong reaction to this story is just that if the U.S.

Speaker 16 buys food to feed children that are hungry, not feeding them just feels very mean

Speaker 16 and counterintuitive. And I think that literally like incinerating the food at additional cost to taxpayers, it doesn't feel like something

Speaker 16 we want to be doing.

Speaker 1 You can read Hana Kiros at theatlantic.com. The Trump administration is incinerating food abroad, but it's also scaling back food benefits at home.

Speaker 1 We're going to get into that when we're back on Today Explained.

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Speaker 1 Today, Explain is back. I'm Sean Romsfrom, and Tracy Roof joins us now.

Speaker 1 She's an associate professor at the University of Richmond who focuses on domestic policy and is writing a whole book about the history of food assistance in the United States.

Speaker 1 And this is a big moment for her because the United States is dramatically shaking up food aid, not just abroad, but here at home.

Speaker 1 The Congressional Budget Office estimates that 3 million Americans will likely stop receiving food assistance in the next several years due to the president's signature spending program.

Speaker 18 Tracy.

Speaker 18 Okay, so there's several provisions in the Big Beautiful Bill, as they are calling it, that are going to make some pretty big changes to the Food Stamps Program, which is now referred to as SNAP.

Speaker 35 Four million children will go to bed hungry because of this cruelty to pay for tax cuts for billionaires.

Speaker 36 The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has confirmed that the Senate bill would end SNAP for nearly a million seniors and 270,000 veterans.

Speaker 35 Biggest cut to food assistance in American history.

Speaker 18 There's going to be a lot of shifting of cost from the federal government to the states.

Speaker 18 So currently, the federal government and the states split the cost of administration, which is like hiring all the caseworkers and the welfare agencies. That's split equally.

Speaker 18 And they're going to shift that now to 75% of the cost will be borne by the states. So that's one way states are going to have to pay more.

Speaker 18 And then the other is that they're going to shift a portion of the cost of the benefits to the states.

Speaker 18 And that is for the first time in the history of the program, will the states have to take on a share of the cost of the actual benefits.

Speaker 1 Aaron Powell, what's the history of food assistance in the United States, of SNAP? Like, whose idea was this, and why did we want to do it as a country originally?

Speaker 18 In the 1950s, you got more attention to certain pockets of poverty in the United States. So, one of the areas that got the most attention was in Appalachia with coal miners who were losing their jobs.

Speaker 18 So, you were starting to see more mechanization of coal mines as well as competition from things like oil.

Speaker 18 And so, you had all of these coal miners that were losing their jobs jobs in the middle of areas that didn't have other economic opportunities.

Speaker 18 And because you had able-bodied workers in the household, a lot of these families didn't qualify for cash assistance.

Speaker 37 What are your plans if elected president for the situation existing in the coal mines in West Virginia? Well, I think that,

Speaker 37 and I've been in the Congress now for 14 years.

Speaker 18 John F. Kennedy, when he was running for president in 1960, toured some of these areas and saw how widespread the problem of starvation was.

Speaker 37 What do you think about

Speaker 37 so much help going to foreign countries instead of being

Speaker 37 given to the United States in depressed years? Well, now one of the things which we send abroad is surplus food. I've been the sponsor, some of the other senators sponsored a food stamp bill.

Speaker 37 One of the things which I sponsored was to take it out of the Department of Agriculture and put it in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.

Speaker 18 At the same time, you had members of Congress who made the argument that we were spending all of this money to store surplus grain and we could not find enough places to sell that grain.

Speaker 18 So we started sending some of it abroad to starving people in other countries, but we had starving people in the United States who were not getting access to that food.

Speaker 18 And so the idea came about trying to get some of these surplus commodities to people. When Kennedy came into office, his very first executive order was to create a pilot program.

Speaker 38 The diet which is being provided for the people who are unemployed is still inadequate. Nevertheless, we have used the funds that are available to the maximum.

Speaker 18 People were given these coupons. They look like monopoly money on this that people could take into grocery stores and use to buy any food within the grocery store.

Speaker 18 You couldn't get alcohol, you couldn't get cigarettes, but pretty much any consumable food you were able to purchase with it.

Speaker 18 Then, during the kind of mid-1960s mid-1960s into the late 1960s, you started to see more and more attention to the plight of tenant farmers in the South.

Speaker 39 Man can manage to live without shelter, without clothing, even without love. Poverty, unpleasant as it is, is bearable.
But man can't remain alive without food.

Speaker 18 You saw a documentary from CBS called Hunger America came out, and it just showed, I mean, starving children.

Speaker 39 This baby is dying of starvation.

Speaker 39 He was an American.

Speaker 39 Now he is dead.

Speaker 18 And when Nixon came in, there was a very famous speech where he pledged to end hunger.

Speaker 38 The plain fact is that a great many Americans are not eating well enough to sustain health.

Speaker 18 And so that ultimately led to the creation of a permanent program in 1964 that was expanded over the course of the late 1960s. And ultimately, every jurisdiction was required to have it by 1974.

Speaker 18 It was set up such that the federal government would cover all the cost of the benefits and the states would still be responsible for administering it, but a lot of the cost would be borne by the federal government.

Speaker 18 So that's kind of the origins of the program.

Speaker 1 Epic.

Speaker 1 This isn't the first time that people have wanted to cut this program or curtail this program or prevent certain people from accessing this program. That's been a long established history as well.

Speaker 18 Yeah. So pretty much from the beginning, there have been critics of the program.

Speaker 18 I mean, there were people in Congress that just didn't think it was necessary or they thought that it should be treated as a welfare program and not as a nutrition or agricultural program because it was always put into something known as the farm bill.

Speaker 18 But as inflation grew in the 1970s, enrollment really started to take off. And you saw people like Ronald Reagan, you know, in his run for the presidency became very critical.

Speaker 18 of people becoming overly dependent on it.

Speaker 6 Like some other government programs that grew out of our compassion for the needy, food stamps have gone out of control.

Speaker 6 In a nation that's taken pride in self-reliance for 200 years, we're actually encouraging able-bodied young men and women to go on the dole.

Speaker 18 The argument was very similar to what we've just heard, that we needed to protect the program from the truly needy and get people, you know, that could fend for themselves off of it.

Speaker 1 Is this most recent adjustment to SNAP or cut to snap the like most drastic cut we've ever seen?

Speaker 18 Yes. Yes, it's likely to be the biggest cut we've seen.

Speaker 1 But it isn't an elimination. It's saying, states, you got to figure this out, your move.
Exactly. Who's it going to affect?

Speaker 1 Is it going to affect Democrats, Republicans, white people, black people, Asian people, poor people, tall people? What?

Speaker 18 A lot of that is going to be up to the states.

Speaker 18 So rather than the Congress coming in and saying, you know, we're going to eliminate eligibility for these categories of people, it's telling the states, you're going to have to bear a larger share of the benefits.

Speaker 18 And if you can't cover that, you're going to have to figure out how you reduce enrollment in the program or come up with ways to cover the additional cost.

Speaker 18 You know, some of the bluer states are probably going to try to make up those differences and maintain assistance to people.

Speaker 18 And some of the poorer states are probably going to cut back. People will be hungry.

Speaker 1 Why let people go hungry? We're the richest country on earth. Why do people want to cut food aid for the poor?

Speaker 18 You always have a number of people that could be getting something like SNAP, but they don't apply, either because of the stigma associated with it or because they don't want to go through all the paperwork or for whatever reason.

Speaker 18 They don't know they're eligible for whatever reasons.

Speaker 18 The participation rate had fallen into the 50s, back in the 90s, in the midst of welfare reform. And then, over the course, really, of the George W.

Speaker 18 Bush administration, that number came up into the 70s as they tried to make the program more accessible. And that took off during the Great Recession.

Speaker 18 What you saw was a real steep increase in the percentage of people that were on SNAP. It went up to 15% of the population at the peak in 2013.

Speaker 18 But it remained pretty high, even as the economy started to recover. And that was largely because it took a long time for the economic recovery to hit low-income workers.

Speaker 18 And it was partly because of the decline in stigma. And so that criticism became really loud in Congress once Republicans took control of Congress during the Obama years.

Speaker 40 No president has put more people on food stamps than Obama. Now, this is not an attack.
It's a statement.

Speaker 40 It's not negative. It's a fact.

Speaker 18 Thanks, Obama. And it carried over into the Trump administration.
This isn't the first time that the Trump administration has tried to cut benefits.

Speaker 18 They tried to do it back in the wake of the 2016 election as well. They just weren't successful.
And so now they see this as an opportunity to finally get some of these cuts in place.

Speaker 1 Trevor Burrus And, you know, we talked in the first half of the show, as I mentioned, about

Speaker 1 basically having to destroy food, which is so dramatic. This feels less dramatic, but how much of a shake-up do you think this is of food aid in the United States ultimately?

Speaker 18 Well, shifting these costs to the states, I mean, where you're really going to see the biggest impact is when the economy turns down again.

Speaker 18 If we slip into a recession, you know, most states have to have balanced budgets, either because of their constitutions or because of state laws.

Speaker 18 They can't just sell more treasury bonds the way the federal government does.

Speaker 18 So that means that when we slip into a recession, states face really, really tough choices because they need to fund education, they need to fund Medicaid, they need to fund all the other services that states provide.

Speaker 18 They're going to face some really tough choices about where they allocate their resources. And that's when you'll see a lot more people will be looking to apply for SNAP.

Speaker 18 You'll see a lot more people needing SNAP to be able to meet their basic needs.

Speaker 18 And so that's when you're going to see the biggest consequences. And it's going to be hard, very, very difficult for the states to meet those needs.

Speaker 1 Tracy Roof. Her book's not out yet, but it will be one day soon, we hope.
Gabrielle Burbay and Peter Balinon Rosen made the show. Amina Alsadi edited.
Laura Bullard fact-checked.

Speaker 1 Patrick Boyd and Patrick Boyd were on the mix for Today Explained.

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