Today, Explained - We’re setting fire to food aid

Episode Date: July 21, 2025

The Trump administration is dismantling — or quite literally burning up — both domestic and international food aid programs. The actions will likely usher in a new era of hunger. This episode was produced by Peter Balonon-Rosen and Gabrielle Berbey, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast. A discarded USAID wheat sack outside a shelter in Mekele, Ethiopia. Photo by XIMENA BORRAZAS/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Depending on your politics, you might see some of Trump to Trump-Harder's policies as cruel. From third-party deportations. The Trump administration has deported eight migrants to South Sudan. They were held at a military base in Djibouti for weeks. To alligator Alcatraz. Don't run in a straight line. Run like this. To just the general broad erasure of trans people. Thousands of transgender troops are facing removal from the military because of the Trump

administration's ban on their service. 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. 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. What the hell are we doing here? We're going to ask on Today Explained here with Hana Kiro, she's an assistant editor at The Atlantic, but she

recently wrote a piece that unsurprisingly got a lot of attention. It was titled, The Trump Administration is About to Incinerate 500 Tons of Emergency Food. to incinerate 500 tons of emergency food. So the US 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. A long and new report in the Atlantic reveals that the Trump administration is planning to destroy a massive amount of emergency food. The Trump administration gave the order to burn it. This is according to destroy a massive amount of emergency food. The Trump administration gave the order to burn it. This is according to current and former government officials

interviewed by the Atlantic and Reuters. The food in question, it's a specialized nutritional product. They're called high-energy biscuits, 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. And these biscuits were originally slated to ports, in transit, and in warehouses around the world where it's at risk of spoiling. 415 children per hour that will not get this life savings that has been paid

for by the United States taxpayers. 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. The US uses pre-positioned warehouses that are in strategic locations around the world. 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. So this food was in a warehouse in Dubai. It was procured around the end of the Biden administration. 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. But at that time, USAID was being dismantled, the humanitarian agency that the US has used for around 70 years to distribute this stuff. Thousands of USAID workers cleared out their desks today after being laid off or fired. The Trump administration has terminated 90% of its contracts for international development and humanitarian aid. I spent time in Washington on projects related to keeping people from starving. And that actually benefited American farmers. It benefited the American workers who load food

into rail cars and send it to ports and those who actually load and unload at ports. This program helped people. How does it usually go when this food gets to a site in Dubai? 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. 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. And getting food into a crisis situation can be sort of bowling a strike in the middle

of a war zone. 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 complicated ecosystem. And what the US government typically does is they procure it and then they'll hand it off. And so there's a call that goes out maybe a year in advance of when the products might be used and the US procures them and then they get into the World Food Program's hands or UNICEF's hands and then they they're off to the races trying to get this stuff to the last mile. 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? Tammy Bruce, who is the spokesperson for the State Department, said in a press briefing or suggested that the destroyed stockpile would be replaced. The story here is the nature of the commitment of the United States to food aid, which we all commit to, but also still, like everything else, doing it more efficiently with less expense, but with the same framework.

So yes, I mean, there's a dynamic there where we're going to destroy and we have before the emergency food rations in particular that might expire and then replenish that. But so far the Trump administration hasn't purchased any new specialized nutritional products. So I guess we'll just have to see. 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? No one has confronted Marco Rubio or President Trump about this. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee has been meeting. What do you think Martin Luther King Jr. 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? During that meeting, the top Democrat on that committee, Jean Shaheen, she pressed a deputy secretary on the destruction of this food. We're destroying 500 metric tons of food that could feed one and a half million children a week.

And we're destroying it because for no other reason than the administration put a hold on getting that foreign assistance out to people and so now it's spoiled. 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. And she secured a commitment from him to produce an inventory of all of the current food aid stockpiles the US has around the world. And this deputy secretary also pledged that the US would try to distribute the food before it expires.

Is it just hungry people around the world that are going to suffer if this doesn't get figured out? Or will this shift in international food aid have any effects here in the United States? So something that I think gets lost in the conversation a bit is that the way that the US delivers food aid overseas is already quite America first in its approach. For certain types of food aid that the US gives, there are stipulations that it can only be sourced from American farmers, it can only be shipped abroad using ships that the US owns.

Part of the way that we deliver food aid is designed to benefit American farmers, benefit American freight forwarders, and that's part you know 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 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 USAID annually buys about $2 billion worth of surplus ag commodities like wheat and grain sorghum that Louisiana grow right here on our farm. There's only so many Kansans and we cannot clearly eat all the wheat that we produce

or the grain sorghum. 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 and it's critical, absolutely critical. It's also something that has an impact domestically on farmers that are losing a big share of their market if the US isn't buying food from them for this purpose. 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?

About every 15 seconds a child dies of malnutrition and that seems very much like something you would hear during an infomercial with the arms of an angel in the background. But you know, those are like, you know, children that could have gone on to live a full life. And I just think that in the conversation, you know, the person who is suffering often, often due to eating 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 US buys food to feed children that are hungry, not feeding them just feels very mean

and counterintuitive. And I think that literally like incinerating the food at additional cost to taxpayers, it doesn't feel like something we want to be doing. You can read Hanakiros at theatlantic.com. The Trump administration is incinerating food abroad, but it's also scaling back food benefits at home. We're going to get into that when we're back on Today Explained. Let Vanta blow your mind says Vanta. Vanta is a trust management platform that says they help businesses automate security and compliance. Demonstrating trust to customers and prospects is critical to closing deal.

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That's greenlight.com slash explain. To get started, greenlight.com slash explained. Today, Explain is back, I'm Sean Romsperm and Tracy Roof joins us now. 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. 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. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that three million Americans will likely stop receiving food assistance in the next several years due to the president's signature spending

program. Tracey? 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. Four million children will go to bed hungry because of this cruelty to pay for tax cuts for billionaires. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has confirmed that the Senate bill would end

SNAP for nearly a million seniors and 270,000 veterans. Biggest cut to food assistance in American history. There's going to be a lot of shifting of cost from the federal government to the states. 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. 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. And then the other is that they're going to shift a portion of the cost of the benefits to the states. 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. 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? ["Walking in the Night"] 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. So you were starting to see more mechanization of coal mines, as well as competition from things like oil. And so you had all of these coal miners that were losing their jobs in the middle of areas that didn't have other economic opportunities. And because you had able-bodied workers in the household, a lot of these families didn't qualify for cash assistance. What are your plans as elected president for the situation existing in the coal mines in West Virginia?

Well, I think that, uh... I've been in the Congress now for 14 years. 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. What do you think about so much help going to the foreign countries instead of being given to the United States and the depressed areas? Well now one of the things which we send abroad is surplus food.

I've been named to sponsor, some of the other senators sponsored a food stamp bill. 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. 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.

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. 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. 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. People were given these coupons. They looked like Monopoly money on this, that people could take into grocery stores and

use to buy any food within the grocery store. You couldn't get alcohol, you couldn't get cigarettes, but pretty much any consumable food you were able to purchase with it. Then during the kind of mid 1960s into the late 1960s, you started to see more and more attention to the plight of tenant farmers in the South. 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. You saw a documentary from CBS called Hunger America came out and it just showed, I mean, starving children. This baby is dying of starvation. He was an American. Now he is dead. And when Nixon came in there was a very famous speech where he pledged to end hunger. The plain fact is that a great many Americans are not eating well enough to sustain health. 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. 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 so that's kind of the origins of the program. Epic! 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. Yeah, so pretty much from the beginning there been critics of the program. 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. But as inflation grew in the 1970s, enrollment really started to take off. And you saw people like Ronald Reagan, in his run for the presidency, became very critical of people

becoming overly dependent on it. Like some other government programs that grew out of our compassion for the needy, food stamps have gone out of control. 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. 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. Is this most recent adjustment to SNAP or cut to SNAP snap the like most drastic cut we've ever seen? Yes. Yes, it's likely to be the biggest cut we've seen. 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? Is it going to affect Democrats, Republicans, white people, black people, Asian people, poor people, tall people, what?

A lot of that is going to be up to the states. 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. 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. Some of the bluer states are probably gonna try to make up those differences and maintain assistance to people.

And some of the poorer states are probably gonna cut back. People will be hungry. Why let people go hungry? We're the richest country on earth. Why do people want to cut food aid for the poor? 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. They don't know they're eligible for whatever

reasons. 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. 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. 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. 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 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. No president has put more people on food stamps than Obama. Now this is not an attack, it's a statement. It's not negative, It's a fact. 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. 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. And you know, we talked in the first half of the show, as I mentioned, about basically having to destroy food, which is so dramatic. This feels less dramatic, but how much of a shakeup do you think this is of food aid in the United States, ultimately?

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. 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. They can't just sell more treasury bonds the way the federal government does. 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. 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. You'll see a lot more people needing SNAP to be able to meet their basic needs. 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. ["The Star-Spangled Banner"] Tracy Roof, her book's not out yet, but it will be one day soon, we hope. Gabrielle Burbae and Peter Balanon Rosen made the show. Amina Alsati edited.

Laura Bullard fact-checked. Patrick Boyd and Patrick Boyd were on the mix for Today Explained. you