Author’s note: This blog was posted the same day The Lancet published online a study that projects more than 14 million people could die unnecessarily by 2030, as a direct result of the Trump Administration's suspension of humanitarian aid funding and the evisceration of USAID in January 2025.
What links two women, separated by continents, oceans, cultures and languages, together? The brutality of American food policy under the Trump regime. Anna Pesek, a young, independent American farmer in Iowa, lost 10% of her operating budget in federal subsidies, funding that enabled her small-scale farm to feed hungry school children and elders in her community, dependent on food assistance in order to eat. Duaa Tariq, a volunteer organizer of a communal kitchen in Khartoum--one kitchen out of the 1460 Emergency Response Rooms--that feed millions of people across Sudan since 2023 when war broke out following the country's democratic revolution, has listened helplessly to neighbors crying from hunger.
Both women, as well as the countless people that they serve, are the collateral damage resulting from the politically motivated whims and vindictive scheming of a petty authoritarian, who, in collusion with techno-oligarchs and corrupt enablers in the U.S. Congress, are enriching themselves by monopolizing federal contracts, privatizing the U.S. government to benefit corporations, and slashing U.S. humanitarian programs, including programs that get food aid to people at risk of malnutrition and starvation.
On January 20, 2025, the inauguration day of his second term in the White House, President Trump signed an Executive Order that froze all U.S. foreign humanitarian aid, including food assistance through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)'s Food for Peace, a program initiated under President Eisenhower both to feed millions of hungry Europeans in the wake of WWII, as well as to serve American diplomatic efforts.
Following the order, billionaire Elon Musk, an unelected official who was unconstitutionally appointed by Trump to head up the "Department of Government Efficiency" or DOGE, illegally fired thousands of federal employees, diplomats and contractors working for USAID, and shuttered the agency, purportedly to root out "waste, fraud and abuse" across the U.S. government to realize "billions in cost savings" for American taxpayers. To put this in perspective, in fiscal year 2024 Congress allocated US$ 21.7 billion to USAID, which accounted for less than one percent of overall federal spending in FY24.
These humanitarian programs that distributed desperately needed food aid around the world, including in the United States, also provided essential subsidies that enabled farmers to grow food, and get it to hungry people domestically and globally. Under DOGE, food aid programs that serve hungry people domestically, where more than 47 million Americans, and 1 in 5 children are food insecure, and internationally, particularly countries facing critical food shortages, like Sudan, where more than half of Sudanese people do not eat regularly, and two-thirds are dependent on emergency food assistance, were brutally chopped, with the precision of a chainsaw.
In its ongoing "war on waste" DOGE in March also illegally slash federal programs funded by Congress and administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), including the Local Food for Schools and the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement. Both programs, which cost American taxpayers a measly US $1 billion in FY25, and connected local farms to public schools and food banks in their neighborhoods and counties. On its own, the LFPACA was funded US $ 864 million in 2023, and was projected to produce more than US$ 1.8 billion to local economies across the U.S. by end of fiscal year. Both programs enabled a virtuous circle of food assistance and farm subsidies for the direct benefit of some of the U.S.'s hungriest and poorest communities.
The impacts of these unconstitutional cuts - it is the U.S. Congress that allocates federal funds, not the Executive Branch - were immediate and devastating. In the ensuing weeks and months after the evisceration of USAID and Food for Peace, food rotted in ports and warehouses, at a cost of US $340 million, and far from those in imminent danger of starvation. And more than 1100 of ERR kitchens shut down, as the U.S. provided 80% of all food aid in Sudan. And U.S. farmers, who have always produced food on paper-thin margins or fueled by decades-old debt, couldn't afford to harvest crops already planted or distribute food to food banks and public schools, when those federal contracts that kept them in business, and hungry people fed, were dissolved. As of June 2025, Congressional Republican legislators shot down all of the USDA's international food aid programs, including the transfer of the Food for Peace program to the USDA. The cruelties continue.
Amidst this tumult, Sudanese human rights scholar, peace activist and exile Al-Baqir al-afif Mukthar, who was the founder and director of the Al-Khatim Adlan Center for Enlightenment and Human Development (KACE), and a dear personal friend of mine, passed away within days of the January 20th Executive Order that dismantled USAID. Before he died, I witnessed my friend make phone calls to coordinate with his colleagues in Kampala, to ensure that KACE's partnerships with several ERRs continued, or overheard him consulting with peace negotiators in Addis Ababa, as they attempted to broker a cease fire between the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Force (RSF).
Quite literally to his very last days, Baqir was unwavering in his faith in the good of humanity, and in his belief that ordinary people are powerful, and are capable to peacefully revolutionize their societies, in small and great ways. A people power so strong that it can topple authoritarian regimes, like the young women and men who brought democracy to the streets of Khartoum and Omdurman in April 2019. He fought to alleviate the suffering of millions of Sudanese people, while he was in immense pain himself, all from his hospital bed in an ICU ward in Philadelphia, far away from the country that he loved.
For more than 70 years, while the U.S. built itself as a neoliberal and imperialist superpower both internationally and domestically, the USAID and Food for Peace swooped in with soft power to burnish America's diminished global humanitarian reputation into a more favorable light, through food aid policies. This leveraging of the earnestness of everyday Americans who want to serve their local and global communities, many of whom share Baqir's belief that ordinary people are capable of small, yet great, revolutions of mutual care, enabled small-scale farmers to help feed hungry people at home and abroad. I am grateful that Baqir is not a witness to these ongoing and tragic cruelties both in the United States and in his home of Sudan.
About the author
Mary F.E. Ebeling is Professor of Sociology and Affiliate Faculty at the Center for Science, Technology & Society, Drexel University in Philadelphia, USA. Her research examines the intersections of gender, race, and digital technologies, data privacy, health marketing and medical capitalism. Her latest book Afterlives of Data: Life and Debt Under Capitalist Surveillance examines data commodification and AI governance in healthcare and consumer finance.
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