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.