Hana Kiros had the scoop about Trump’s latest taxpayer-funded fiasco for The Atlantic on July 14th.

Five months into its unprecedented dismantling of foreign-aid programs, the Trump administration has given the order to incinerate food instead of sending it to people abroad who need it. Nearly 500 metric tons of emergency food—enough to feed about 1.5 million children for a week—are set to expire tomorrow, according to current and former government employees with direct knowledge of the rations. Within weeks, two of those sources told me, the food, meant for children in Afghanistan and Pakistan, will be ash. (The sources I spoke with for this story requested anonymity for fear of professional repercussions.)

The article explains that the approximately $800,000 worth of food was purchased by USAID during the Biden administration. The food consists of high-energy and high-nutrition biscuits which are given to children in emergency situations, such as after a natural disaster or fleeing a war.

If spending taxpayer money to deprive children of pre-purchased food isn’t a deliberate plan of the Trump administration, it doesn't look like an unintended consequence, either. This latest hideousness seems to result from unelected Elon Musk taking a chainsaw to our government services, combined with placing unqualified DOGE workers at high-level government jobs, combined with the general cruelty, dishonesty and incompetence of the Trump administration. That includes lies and/or incompetence from Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

More from The Atlantic:

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.

Earlier this month, Wired wrote about how Trump's gutting of foreign aid means children will die from hunger elsewhere, too.

Sadly, there’s even more to this Trump horror. Wired pointed out that malnourished children have weakened immune systems. Trump cuts have also left them without funding to treat TB, malaria or HIV immunizations. That not only means more dead children but more possibilities of spreading preventable diseases.

If you can read this without feeling like you want to throw something, you’re a better person than I. But a far better thing to do is to join one of the nationwide Good Trouble Lives On protests on Thursday, July 17.

"Five months into its unprecedented dismantling of foreign-aid programs, the Trump administration has given the order to incinerate food instead of sending it to people who need it"
waste, fraud, etc: it costs $130,000 to burn food worth $800,000 https://t.co/udo1DxI57i

— Anne Applebaum (@anneapplebaum) July 15, 2025