After USAID, Food for Peace enters a new and uncertain chapter

One year after the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development, the outlines of how the United States’ largest food aid program will survive are coming into focus. For months, there had been growing pressure to move Food for Peace under the U.S. Department of Agriculture. For more than 70 years, the program has relied on USDA to source the American-grown commodities it sends abroad — food that ends up reaching millions of people facing hunger each year. From the earliest days of USAID’s dismantling last year, Republicans moved to push the program fully into USDA’s hands, arguing that the department was a natural home for the program. But the proposal has faced sustained pushback, including from congressional Democrats who argue the department lacks the institutional capacity and technical expertise to manage a complex global humanitarian aid program. Despite that resistance, a temporary arrangement is now in place. On Dec. 24, USDA, the State Department, and the Office of Management and Budget signed an interagency agreement transferring Food for Peace from the State Department — which took over responsibility for the program after USAID’s dissolution — to USDA on an interim basis, according to three sources familiar with the matter. A permanent move would require congressional approval. “The administration is temporarily enacting this policy which will bring the program closer to the farmers and producers who grow the crops that feed hungry people across the globe,” Senator Jerry Moran, a Republican from Kansas, said in a statement last week. “This is a good step, and I will continue working to permanently transfer Food for Peace to USDA,” added Moran, one of the cosponsors of legislation to move it. In the following days, agricultural commodity groups released a flurry of statements applauding the transfer — even as some humanitarian aid experts remain concerned that this could mean prioritizing what U.S. farmers want at the expense of what people in emergencies need. Multiple sources told Devex that the agreement covers fiscal years 2025, which ended Sept. 30, and 2026. It’s expected to allow USDA to spend the remaining unallocated Food for Peace funds from FY25 — estimated at just under $500 million — as well as the program’s FY26 budget, which Congress in November set at $1.2 billion, lower than in previous years but far more than the Trump administration wanted. The president’s budget request proposed cutting the program’s entire budget. Details of the interagency agreement have not been made public, and nearly a month after its signing, multiple sources across the food aid community say they have not been able to review it. Devex’s repeated requests to USDA, the State Department, and OMB for comment and a copy of the agreement have gone unanswered. Meanwhile, USDA has begun engaging directly with the groups that would be responsible for carrying the program forward. Earlier this month, the department convened a roundtable in Washington with a broad group of food assistance stakeholders — including humanitarian organizations, commodity groups, and shippers — to gather input on how Food for Peace could operate under USDA’s oversight, according to multiple people who attended. Among the USDA senior officials present were Luke J. Lindberg, under secretary for trade and foreign agricultural affairs; Jennifer Mack, associate administrator and general sales manager at the USDA Foreign Agricultural Service; and Peter Laudeman, senior policy adviser for trade and foreign agricultural affairs. Participants described the session as constructive and well organized, with USDA officials emphasizing that they wanted to learn from those with experience implementing food assistance programs. “The tone was very much: We want to do this right, we want to do this well, and we want to hear from you,” said one attendee, speaking on condition of anonymity to protect their relationship with USDA. But just as notable as who was in the room was who was not. As another participant told Devex: “No one from State was there. But they were invited,” a detail that reflects how USDA has taken the lead in shaping the program’s next phase. What’s happened so far? Food for Peace has long been one of the U.S. government’s most visible aid programs. In fiscal year 2023, it directed nearly $2 billion toward feeding people around the world, including in fragile and conflict-affected countries. The program has enjoyed broad political support over its 72-year history — in part because of its humanitarian role, and in part because it purchases U.S.-grown commodities, making it popular with farmers, farm groups, and their allies in Congress. When USAID was dismantled last year, Food for Peace was caught in the fallout. But the program did not disappear entirely. In August, $52 million in emergency food aid was released through Food for Peace for the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Haiti, and Djibouti. The World Food Programme — long a major implementing partner of Food for Peace — distributed the shipment, which included yellow split peas, rice, and vegetable oil, and moved through warehouses in Houston and Djibouti. Last year, Food for Peace was being administered through the State Department’s Office of Global Food Security, which, since June, has been led by Meghan Hanson — an official who was noticeably absent from this month’s roundtable, several attendees told Devex. Still, amid the upheaval, it remained unclear where the program would ultimately land. By September, momentum began to build around shifting it to USDA. Agricultural commodity groups organized a series of “fly-ins” to Washington to press the case for the transfer, including a mid-September effort led by the North American Millers’ Association — a trade group representing the wheat, corn, oat, and rye milling industries — that brought together roughly 80 organizations to endorse the legislation. By November, that push had made its way into another prominent piece of legislation. Language in the stopgap spending bill that passed on Nov. 12 — which ended a 43-day government shutdown — set aside $1 million for a study examining what it would take to move Food for Peace to USDA. The study was to be conducted by USDA in partnership with the State Department and other agencies, and would be due within 60 days — a deadline which passed earlier this month. Can USDA handle it? One of the central questions hanging over the transfer is whether USDA has the capacity to run Food for Peace. It administers some smaller international food aid programs on its own, including Food for Progress and the McGovern-Dole International Food for Education and Child Nutrition Program. But Food for Peace is complex, operates in emergency settings, and has historically been managed by staff with deep technical expertise. At USAID, it was handled by the Bureau for Humanitarian Affairs, which employed some 1,300 people worldwide and worked in the world’s most difficult crises. At a press conference in November, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins publicly confirmed for the first time that USDA would manage the program. “USDA has historically always played a role in the Food for Peace program,” Lindberg said at the same event. “The funding dollars actually come from the agricultural jurisdictions on the Hill and have moved to USDA, and then we’ve implemented the program with USAID,” he said. “But there has always been a role for USDA in those conversations, and prioritizing American commodities has been an important part of the Trump Administration’s America First agenda since the beginning.” Statements from commodity groups following the interagency agreement echoed that framing. “Placing Food for Peace under USDA strengthens that mission, supports American-grown crops like sorghum, and improves transparency and efficiency,” the National Sorghum Producers said last week. “NSP urges Congress to advance legislation led by Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., and Rep. Tracey Mann, R-Kan., to permanently transfer Food for Peace to USDA.” But USDA faces very real internal constraints. The department lost over 20,000 people over the past year — about a fifth of its staff. And while it remains unconfirmed which USDA office would ultimately oversee Food for Peace, multiple sources point to the Foreign Agricultural Service — which works to enhance U.S. export opportunities and oversees programs such as McGovern Dole — as the most likely home. FAS has seen significant staff losses in recent years, shedding 19% of its workforce between January and October and reaching its lowest staffing levels since 2010. Many of those departures were senior staff, with employees leaving in the first quarter averaging 26 years of experience. “Basically every division of the USDA is stretched extremely thin right now, and they lost a lot of their most experienced employees, particularly in foreign ag service,” said Becky Schewe, a researcher and policy analyst for the Washington-based National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition that advocates for federal policy reforms. At the same time, USDA is undergoing a broader reorganization, the public details of which remain limited. Taking on a program of Food for Peace’s size and complexity would require additional capacity and staffing, several people familiar with the program said, but it is not yet clear if — or when — that would happen. As of this month, its FAS had just one open position listed on the USDA’s public jobs portal, for a public affairs specialist. Changing the program’s purpose? Some experts wonder whether the transfer would bring back the outdated practice of the U.S. government buying up surplus agricultural commodities and sending them wherever they can be offloaded. “The question is, is USDA going to regard this as a surplus disposal program? If they are thinking of that — that is easier to do. But if you want to do this as a food aid program, that’s much more complex,” said Stephanie Mercier, senior policy adviser at the Washington-based Farm Journal Foundation. Dina Esposito, who served as director of Food for Peace at USAID from 2010 to 2016, was more blunt. In an opinion piece for Devex last month, she called the transfer a “disaster” and warned of the risks of shifting away from a humanitarian model. “Humanitarians choose commodities that stretch every taxpayer dollar and save as many lives as possible,” said Esposito, who was also assistant administrator of USAID’s Bureau for Resilience, Environment, and Food Security under the Biden administration. “A USDA commodities-first approach will fuel other perverse outcomes, such as sending food where it’s cheapest to ship rather than where hunger is worst; and cutting back on the essential activities that make food aid work, from secure storage to monitoring and nutrition screening.” In recent years, Food for Peace has increasingly explored cash-based assistance and other flexible approaches, in part because they can be faster and more cost-effective. Those models, however, are less appealing to agricultural groups because they do not directly support U.S. farmers — a point that commodity groups have made explicitly. “In recent years, the volume of U.S.-grown wheat used in Food for Peace has declined,” Kansas Wheat said in a statement. “In some cases, U.S. taxpayer dollars are used to buy food from foreign competitors, which undermines American farmers and their strategic interests.” A move to USDA would help fix that by bringing the program closer to U.S. farmers, they argue. A short-term deal with long-term questions The roundtable with USDA officials earlier this month offered a closer look at how USDA is approaching the transition. According to several people who attended, the session was structured as a series of small-group discussions, with participants split across three tables led by senior USDA officials. Several participants said the discussion focused on how Food for Peace currently operates, what has worked in past food assistance efforts, and where inefficiencies tend to arise, with USDA officials asking detailed questions about program design and implementation. Notably, roundtable participants said the interagency agreement itself was not discussed in detail. “There’s nothing public — it’s just dancing around things,” one attendee said. For now, Food for Peace’s shift to USDA remains temporary. Any longer-term move would require congressional action, either through standalone legislation or inclusion in the next farm bill. The latter path comes with its own complications: The farm bill is a sprawling and politically sensitive package, and long-standing alliances between farm and nutrition groups have already frayed amid disputes over the domestic Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP — adding another layer of complexity to the legislative efforts. For some humanitarians, the concern is less about which agency controls Food for Peace than about avoiding another disruption. “We still remain hopeful, but we want to make sure that they have the right things in place,” one person who attended the roundtable said. “The transition from USAID to State was not smooth and caused many delays, which harmed both American companies and children and clinics.” “The system and the children who rely on it cannot go through another eight months of breakages.”