It has a dry, bureaucratic name, but Ready to Use Therapeutic Food has functioned for over a decade as a lifeline for countless starving children around the globe. Manufactured in the United States and distributed by the U.S. Agency for International Development, it’s a paste made of peanuts, milk, and vitamins that alleviates a form of acute malnutrition known as “severe wasting.”
Now the Trump administration has officially terminated a number of current contracts struck by USAID for this lifesaving nutrition, contracts that had called for the paste to be delivered to hundreds of thousands of children, most in Africa, according to the Georgia-based nonprofit set to deliver them, Mana Nutrition.
Mark Moore, the CEO of Mana, says ready-to-move boxes of the paste are now piled up in a Georgia warehouse and may never be shipped abroad. “If these contracts are not reinstated, there is no doubt children will die,” Moore told me.
This comes mere days after I reported that these shipments had been thrown into doubt because Trump’s mass firings at USAID included employees overseeing the latest round of contracts.
The nixed arrangements are just a handful of hundreds canceled amid the Trump administration’s appalling decision this week to terminate 90 percent of USAID’s foreign aid contracts. As the details of these cancellations have started trickling out, one thing is clear. This latest turn has wrecked the narrative that Trump and his MAGA propagandists have tried to spin about these cuts—they’re targeting “wokeness” inside USAID, they’re about “waste and fraud,” they’re designed to achieve “efficiency.” All of it has been unmasked as absolute nonsense.
The full extent of the damage from these cuts—originally set in motion by Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency—is not yet known. But Atul Gawande, a surgeon who formerly led USAID’s global health initiatives, has established, via communications with partners that work with USAID, a list of contracts that were terminated. Among them are programs that offer natal care for mothers and children, that provide netting and other equipment to prevent the spread of malaria, that work to thwart the spread of Ebola and bird flu in dozens of countries, and much more. The cancellations will nix programs that helped tens of millions of people, Gawande notes.
“This is going to be a massive loss of life overall,” Gawande told me in an interview. “Children are likely already dying, and will clearly be dying in large numbers.”
Meanwhile, The New York Times has developed a long list of other terminated contracts, which include programs preventing the spread of polio, treating HIV and tuberculosis, ensuring clean drinking water in war-torn regions, and buttressing public health in many other ways. Tens of millions of people benefited; now they will not.
The details of the canceled Mana contracts illustrate the point. RUTF, the sweet nutritional peanut paste that Mana manufactures, is safe for ingestion by children who are suffering acute nutritional deprivation or are on the verge of starving to death. It comes in foil packets that don’t need refrigeration, making it easy to distribute in regions suffering extreme deprivation. RUTF is widely hailed as an extraordinary innovation in feeding children facing starvation and death.
According to Moore, the cancellation of Mana’s latest contracts will mean that around 300,000 kids, mostly in Africa, don’t get aid packets that Congress intended for them. But we, too, are the losers: This paste is manufactured by American workers, and made of peanuts and dairy grown by American farmers, in a spreading of American bounty and goodwill that has long had bipartisan support. Now it’s piled up in a warehouse in Savannah, unshipped and uneaten.
All of this lays waste to the spin that Trumpworld has employed to defend the dismantling of USAID. For instance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has claimed all along that “lifesaving humanitarian assistance” will be spared. By any reasonable standard, many of the contracts that have just been canceled qualify as just that.
What’s more, there is no longer any way to pretend any of this is about “efficiency” or “good management.” Aid like this is incredibly cost-effective. Not only does foreign aid constitute a tiny portion of our budget; things like RUTF cost a relative pittance, but they spread a positive image of the U.S. abroad and each treatment can save a child’s life.
Then there’s Rubio’s claim earlier this month that foreign aid is merely being reviewed to ensure that only “dumb” aid gets cut. In reality, this “review” process has been appallingly terrible even from a management perspective. Assuming it’s true that the administration does intend to restore some of these contracts—which is difficult to believe—then why did this review process require them to be suspended in the first place?
Even if some of these suspensions do turn out to be temporary, they will nonetheless have terrible consequences. Programs like these rely on complex supply chains, involving workers in the U.S. and abroad. They require continued delivery of supplies and sustained administering over time. But many people benefiting from ongoing treatments at this moment have now been “completely abandoned,” Gawande said.
“They’re pausing a plane in midflight, and firing the crew, then trying to tell us that it’s not going to be a catastrophe,” Gawande told me. “Terminating the contracts means we’re not investing in a wind-down at all.”
The fact that these cuts were handled this way—wantonly and recklessly—tells us everything we need to know about the administration’s true goal: To broadcast a clear message to the world that we are now shrugging off any sense of obligation to the global poor. As Awande put it: “They’re almost gleefully celebrating the destruction of these programs.”
