Why the Trump Administration Is About to Set Fire to 500 Tons of Emergency Food
The publication said that previously, career staff could have handed off the biscuits to the World Food Programme to distribute them, but employees said that since Musk's so-called DOGE devastated USAID — firing and placing thousands of workers on leave — aid items cannot move without the new political leaders of the agency. And while the responsibility originally was given to Trump appointee Pete Marocco, it passed to Jeremy Lewin, who became deputy administrator for policy and programs for what's left of USAID. (Rolling Stone previously reported on Lewin's alleged history of violence and racist remarks.) Staffers who sent the memos requesting approval to move the emergency food said they never got a response, however, and it is unclear if either Marocco or Lewin ever received the memos.
Now, enough food to feed about 1.5 million children for a week — equal to nearly 500 metric tons of emergency food — is set to expire today, The Atlantic reports. Despite Secretary of State Marco Rubio ensuring representatives on the House Appropriations Committee in May that food aid would reach its intended recipients, the Trump administration reportedly plans to spend $130,000 to burn the biscuits instead of sending them to children in need.
While improper food storage, a flood, or a terrorist group may lead to a few dozen tons of food aid being lost a year, a USAID staffer said that he has never witnessed this many biscuits wasted over his decades with the agency.
Unfortunately, USAID inventory lists show that as of January, more than 60,000 metric tons of food already purchased by the U.S. government were sitting in warehouses across the world, including 36,000 pounds of peas, oil, and cereal. A former senior official at USAID's Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance told The Atlantic that when she left her job earlier in July, only a small portion of the food appeared to have moved, while a current employee said small shipments are starting to leave a warehouse in Djibouti. However, given that USAID has been gutted of key employees essential to coordinating and distributing the food to people across the world, whether those parcels will land in the right hands is uncertain.
More from Rolling Stone
Speaker Mike Johnson Splits From Trump, Calls for Release of Epstein Files
How Texas Bullied Big Banks Into Dropping Their Climate Commitments
What Trump Has Said About Jeffrey Epstein Over the Years
Best of Rolling Stone
The Useful Idiots New Guide to the Most Stoned Moments of the 2020 Presidential Campaign
Anatomy of a Fake News Scandal
The Radical Crusade of Mike Pence
Solve the daily Crossword

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
4 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Trump releases AI 'action plan' that offers a split with Biden
President Trump released an AI "action plan" on Wednesday that outlines the administration's vision for achieving global dominance in artificial intelligence. The report marks a split from Biden administration policies, which favored restrictions against exports of AI chips and steps to ensure AI was not used to spread misinformation. However, the new rules do come with limitations for AI developers that build "ideological biases" into their systems, which have yet to be defined by the administration. 'There is a global competition now to lead in artificial intelligence, and we want the United States to win that race," said David Sacks, chair of the president's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, during a briefing on the report. Sacks said the report builds on President Trump's executive order on AI issued during the first week of his second term in office by taking away "unnecessary barriers" to AI adoption put in place by the Biden administration. Keys to the action plan include removing federal regulations that the administration believes hinders AI, promoting the build out of AI data centers, and exporting American-made AI around the world. More details of the plan are expected to come in an executive order or orders issued by the president on Wednesday afternoon. And Trump is also expected to discuss the plan during a speech at a Wednesday event titled "Winning the AI Race," organized by White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks and his co-hosts on the "All-In" podcast. Those executive orders, according to Axios and the Wall Street Journal, would promote the exports of chips and AI technology to countries considered friendly to the US. There may also be an order that targets "woke AI," according to The Wall Street Journal. It would target AI developers that the administration believes create liberally biased algorithms and block them from serving as federal contractors. The White House didn't respond to a request for comment. Asked who decides if an AI system is biased, a senior White House official said during a briefing that "what we're recommending here is that federal procurement guidelines be updated to ensure that government only, the federal government only contracts with LLM developers who ensure that their systems are objective and and free from top-down ideological bias. And you know, DEI is really the main one." Two constitutional law scholars who talked with Yahoo Finance said it is doubtful the "woke AI" measure will withstand legal scrutiny. "If you sanction software that is liberal, but not software that is conservative, the challenge will be that the executive order is content-based discrimination," said UC San Francisco School of Law professor Rory Little. "I don't even know how you tell if software is liberal or conservative," Little said, adding that the First Amendment protects intellectual property as forms of speech that the government may not single out for punishment. But the order's constitutional viability may not matter in the short term for companies like Amazon (AMZN), Anthropic ( Google (GOOG), OpenAI ( Microsoft (MSFT), and Perplexity ( all of which are vying to supply AI systems to the government. Even if the order is met with legal challenges, AI developers might not have time to wait out a court solution. "A lot of people are trying to make deals with the Trump administration, so they view these executive orders not as law, but as the opening bid in a negotiation," Little said. "If you're an AI company, like Google, you're probably going to do your best to negotiate something that permits whatever you want to do to go forward," he added. "And you could care less what atmospheric politics might look like, so long as you're making money on your software." OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Tuesday at a Federal Reserve banking conference in Washington, D.C., that his company now has lots of government work. "We are increasingly working with the government to roll out our services to lots of government employees," Altman said. If such an AI order is issued and then challenged, a court fight is likely to resemble those in multiple ongoing lawsuits against two other DEI-focused executive orders issued by Trump during his first days back in office. Those earlier orders directed all federal contractors to certify that they do not operate DEI programs in violation of anti-discrimination laws. They also shuttered government offices and employment positions focused on DEI. David Coale, a partner with the law firm Lynn Pinker Hurst & Schwegmann, said the executive orders get into an area called the "unconstitutional conditions" doctrine, which prohibits the government from conditioning a grant on the exercise of constitutional rights. "This [type of] proposal goes too far," Coale said, explaining that tying the eligibility to an AI's liberal bias presents "serious First Amendment issues." Alexis Keenan is a legal reporter for Yahoo Finance. Follow Alexis on X @alexiskweed.


CNN
4 minutes ago
- CNN
Trump admin will soon propose to kill EPA's ability to make rules about climate pollution, sources say
The Environmental Protection Agency has drafted a proposal to reverse a landmark scientific finding that planet-warming pollution from fossil fuels endangers human health, and could release that proposal as soon as this week, according to three people familiar with the plan. Known as the 'endangerment finding,' the 2009 declaration has served as the basis for federal rules limiting greenhouse gas pollution from power plants, cars and trucks, and the oil and gas industry. The repeal, if successful, would take away the federal government's main way to fight climate change. EPA administrator Lee Zeldin announced in March the agency would reconsider the rule as part of a suite of proposals to overturn pollution rules the Trump administration considers to be burdensome to the fossil fuel and transportation industries. A proposal to 'update' the finding was first touted by Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation blueprint to overhaul the federal government and repeal many keystone regulations that have come to define life in modern America. An EPA spokesperson did not comment on when the proposed rule would be released. 'The proposal will be published for public notice and comment once it has completed interagency review and been signed by the Administrator,' the EPA spokesperson said in a statement. Environmental groups who have attended public meetings about the EPA's proposal have been alarmed at the lack of EPA staff in those meetings. Only one White House Office of Management and Budget staffer has attended the public meetings with stakeholders, a highly unusual move, said David Doniger, a senior federal strategist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, and Shaun Goho, the legal director for the Clean Air Task Force. 'There was only one participant on the government side, and there was nobody from EPA,' Goho told CNN. 'In my many years of experience doing these meetings, that is unprecedented. It raises questions about the role of EPA staff in this rulemaking. It raises questions about who is actually doing the work.' The EPA spokesperson did not answer CNN's questions about which agency is leading the rulemaking process. The draft, titled 'Reconsideration of 2009 Endangerment Finding and Greenhouse Gas Vehicle Standards,' was sent to the White House Office of Management and Budget on June 30, the EPA spokesperson said. It is widely expected the proposal will also seek to repeal rules that regulate greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles, since they stem from the finding, sources told CNN. The Biden EPA sought to tighten those standards to prod the auto industry to make more fuel-efficient hybrids and electric vehicles. CNN's sources said the EPA proposal is still in draft form, and could still change before its release. 'We're expecting that they will repeal all of the climate related vehicles standards, saying the predicate finding of danger wasn't made right or doesn't exist,' Doniger told CNN. The EPA appears to be making a legal argument in the draft that the agency went beyond its legal authority to use the Clean Air Act to regulate pollutants that contribute to climate change, rather than trying to make a scientific argument that climate change itself isn't harming humans, sources told CNN. The EPA plans to argue the Biden vehicle rule presented harm to public health by increasing vehicle prices, decreasing consumer choice, and slowing the replacement of older vehicles, according to one person with knowledge of the draft. 'Legally, it's misguided and creates enormous harms to the American people,' said Richard Revesz, a former Biden White House official and New York University environmental law school professor. Doniger said the effort inside the administration has been helmed by political staff including Jeff Clark, who heads the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, the White House office that reviews regulations. Clark is the former Justice Department official who was investigated for aiding President Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Clark served as assistant attorney general for DOJ's Environment and Natural Resources Division in the first Trump administration and served in the same office during the first George W. Bush administration. 'He's been on a crusade to block EPA regulation of greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act since then,' Doniger said. Doniger said the agency's proposed rule ignores the current reality of climate change, which is supercharging rainfall and leading to record global temperatures. 'For the administration to stand up and say in effect climate change isn't happening or there's nothing significant going on, so there's no need for government standards, this is mindbogglingly out of touch with reality,' Doniger said.


The Hill
5 minutes ago
- The Hill
Democrats can rebuild government by learning from how Trump has destroyed it
We know the tragic effects of President Trump's dismantling of the federal government. Social Security service delivery are in crisis. Calls to the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the wake of disaster go unanswered. Rural hospitals brace for a loss of federal support. And now congressional Republicans are surrendering the power of the purse to further hobble core government services by choking off funding. But the truth is, Trump alone didn't break the federal government. He is putting the devastating capstone on a decades-long conservative project of undermining its capacity to function: underfunding agencies, outsourcing expertise, layering on procedural hurdles, stacking courts with partisan allies, and eroding public trust. Long before Trump took office, the result was a government that couldn't move quickly, deliver boldly or meet the needs of the people it was supposed to serve. And when the government is unable to visibly respond to people's discontent and aspirations within the timeframe of an electoral mandate, the legitimacy of democracy itself erodes. If Democrats truly believe in the power of government to improve people's lives, they should be cautious about reverting to pre-Trump institutions. Our time in the Biden-Harris administration taught us that the federal government wasn't meeting the needs of middle- or working-class people long before the 2024 election. What was left of it has now been intentionally sabotaged. If we want to implement a bold policy agenda in the future — one that truly creates agency, power and opportunity for people who don't have it — we have to start planning now to build the basic infrastructure for a government that's much more responsive to and resonant with ordinary Americans, not the monied few. For too long, Democrats have been stuck in a vicious cycle of playing catch-up in a game with existential stakes. Phase one: Republicans dismantle government programs and services and trigger economic crises through their laissez-faire approach to governance. Phase two: Democrats retake power, and then scramble to steer a hobbled system back to the status quo. Phase three: Democrats fail to deliver the visible change the electorate craves, Republicans retake power, and the cycle repeats. What has to change? We need to confront a hard truth: Despite good intentions and tireless efforts from appointees and civil servants alike, the old tools and norms have not worked. Administrative rulemaking has been too slow, fragile, and captured by well-resourced industries to meaningfully serve the public interest. Major policies passed with fanfare took four or more years to show results — long after voters were asked to judge them. Meanwhile, activist courts stacked by the right delayed or dismantled even modest reforms. Agencies were afraid to antagonize the powerful industries they were supposed to oversee, or to take an investment risk and face public failure. Enforcement against corporate lawbreaking was underfunded and slow. Outsourcing of core government functions made private contractors rich even when their performance was shoddy. And far too often, the government was a distant, impenetrable behemoth that piled paperwork on Americans, instead of proactively listening to them to understand their needs and deliver frictionless services in response. We can't win back faith in government with policies that are invisible, delayed or drowned in process. We need a new playbook — one that matches the urgency of the moment and the acuteness of people's needs. One that learns, paradoxically, from the relentlessness of Trump and his allies. What they've demonstrated is that the rules and norms constraining government action aren't fixed laws of nature. They're conventions — and they can be changed. If there's no political cost for ignoring them in the service of corporate power and oligarchic corruption, there should be even less fear about changing them to make government work better for ordinary people. Democrats should take the lesson: Flip the risk profile. Go big or go home. That means reorganizing policymaking around speed, visibility and political resonance. It means building teams around outcome-driven missions — not statutes, institutional bias or risk-averse compliance. It means treating economic, legal, outreach and communications strategy as one integrated campaign, and working much more collaboratively with our state and local government partners and community-based organizations. It means starting work long before Day One with the understanding that we will need to simultaneously build and deliver: pre-drafting policies, mapping authorities, recruiting top-flight talent and identifying the signature priorities for each agency that will show up in people's lives within a single term. These are unified campaign-style operations, not bureaucratic ones. And it means breaking free from the norms that keep the government mired in caution. Abolish or radically retool obsolete veto gates, such as the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Limit judicial meddling in economic policy choices made by political leaders accountable to the people, and refocus courts on protecting individual liberties. Make the government great to work for again, and repopulate it with technologists, statisticians, product managers, service designers, community organizers and movement lawyers. Clean out the procedural clutter that saps time and bandwidth. We've seen what gets in the way. Now it's time to start clearing it. Importantly, when we act, we must act boldly. During the last administration, the types of policies that resonated were the big, simple, universal ones: a cap on insulin prices, a ban on junk fees, an end to noncompetes, a free, easy way to file your taxes. These were policies designed to be tangible, memorable and swift — and they addressed economic frustrations that transcend partisan lines. That's not just good economics. It's good politics. It's good democracy. Policies must provide proof that the government can still work for ordinary people, not just large corporations or insiders. For too long, Democrats have tried to govern within a framework designed to thwart them and to protect entrenched interests. Trump simply ignored it. If we want to change that trajectory for government, we need to be just as fearless and bold in building a new framework as Republicans have been in destroying the old one. If Democrats want to lead, the party must demonstrate that the government can — and will — continue to change lives for the better. Let's stop trying to tinker with a broken machine. Let's start building one that actually works.