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—accordin...
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