Trump’s Revamped Food for Peace Bypasses the Countries Closest to Famine

(Sam Vigersky – Council on Foreign Relations) Help wanted: the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is seeking a contract quote for an instruction manual on how to administer Food for Peace, the $1.2 billion program delivering American-grown wheat, rice, and other commodities to victims of disaster worldwide. Having fed more than four billion people across its seventy-year history, Food for Peace was orphaned last year following the demolition of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). While other USAID humanitarian programs moved to the State Department, a Capitol Hill–supported interagency agreement transferred Food for Peace to USDA in December 2025—quietly, and, evidently, without consideration of a basic operational question: Does USDA have the people to run such a program? The answer, it appears, is no. And yet experts at the State Department—where one can find several dozen former Food for Peace staffers who have decades of experience managing the money and living in hunger hot spots—were shut out from helping, leaving USDA to spend millions of taxpayer dollars to learn what former staffers already know. The program’s transfer is the latest ironic twist in the tale of President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE): it destroyed USAID and displaced Food for Peace under a mandate of eliminating waste and inefficiency, only to manufacture significantly more of both. But beyond the immediate absurdity remains a more consequential question: Why was Food for Peace assigned to an agency without international humanitarian or disaster-response expertise—and what will that mean for millions of hungry people desperate for food aid? – The Revamped Food for Peace Program Bypasses Countries Closest to Famine | Council on Foreign Relations