Murder by numbers

You will be extremely unsurprised to learn that Elon was lying about rescuing food assistance from his wonton cuts:

After Elon Musk made a public show of remedying an apparent error in DOGE’s massive cuts to foreign aid, the Trump administration has quietly doubled down on its decision to stop sending emergency food to millions of children who are starving in Bangladesh, Somalia, and other countries. Without urgent intervention, many of these children are likely to die within months, experts told me.

As DOGE was gutting USAID in February, it alarmed the global-health community by issuing stop-work orders to the two American companies that make a lifesaving peanut paste widely recognized as the best treatment for malnutrition. The companies—Edesia and Mana Nutrition—subsequently received USAID’s go-ahead to continue their work. But soon after that, their contracts were officially canceled. When news of the cancellation was made public, Elon Musk vowed to investigate the issue and “fix it.” Hours later, Musk announced that one contract had been restored days earlier; that night, the second company received notice that its contract had been reinstated.

According to Mana and Edesia, however, that was only the start of the story. The contracts reinstated in February applied to old orders for emergency therapeutic food that Mana and Edesia were already in the middle of fulfilling. But two weeks ago, without any fanfare, the Trump administration then canceled all of its upcoming orders—that is, everything beyond those old orders that were previously reinstated—according to emails obtained by The Atlantic. The move reneged on an agreement to provide about 3 million children with emergency paste over approximately the next year. What’s more, according to the two companies, the administration has also not awarded separate contracts to shipping companies, leaving much of the food assured by the original reinstated contracts stuck in the United States.

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The Trump administration has broken every step of that system. According to Mana CEO Mark Moore and Edesia CEO Navyn Salem, USAID agreed back in October to buy more than 1 million boxes of therapeutic food. The World Food Programme and UNICEF planned to distribute the contents of this order as early as March, according to an email obtained by The Atlantic. But on April 4, both Edesia and Mana received an email from a staffer at USAID that said the plans for 10 countries to receive the emergency paste would not move forward. (Most of USAID has been gutted, and what remains is in the process of being absorbed by the State Department. The countries listed in the email are: Bangladesh, Burundi, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Nigeria, Somalia, and Yemen, to which the U.S. has separately canceled all humanitarian aid.)

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In a statement, UNICEF told me that the Trump administration still has not informed the organization of the canceled orders. UNICEF projects that 7 million children will require treatment for extreme malnutrition in 2025. Even before the USAID cuts, it had the budget to treat only 4.2 million of them. Mana and Edesia typically provide 10 to 20 percent of UNICEF’s annual emergency therapeutic food, and USAID supplies half of its overall funding for nutrition treatment and hunger-prevention services. “Today, we have no visibility on future funding from the US Government,” the statement read. Typically, producers have half a year to fill an order as big as the one the U.S. canceled, according to Odile Caron, a food-procurement specialist at Doctors Without Borders. UNICEF needs that food in much less time. If malnourished kids don’t get access to emergency therapeutic food because of the U.S. government’s decisions, “in three months, half of them will be dead, and the rest will have terrible disabilities, mostly neurocognitive,” Manary, who also ran the first clinical trials on Plumpy’Nut, told me.

“Letting food rot rather than giving it to starving children in order to save trivial amounts of money” is a good summary of the ethos of the Trump administration. But at least the burgers are also getting more expensive.