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department of government efficiency
Trump Cuts to Foreign Aid Leave Food Destined for Desperate Millions Rotting in Storage
"The dismantling of USAID and cuts to humanitarian aid has been devastating and unacceptable," said one international aid group.
May 16, 2025
More than a million people in some of the world's most impoverished countries could be fed for three months and hundreds of thousands of children's lives could be saved if $98 million in ready-made meals and other rations were able to leave four warehouses run by the U.S. foreign aid agency dismantled by the Trump administration.
But instead, there is no end in sight to the food languishing in the facilities—or to the starvation of millions of people in Gaza, Sudan, South Sudan, and other parts of the Global South facing high levels of hunger and malnutrition.
Some of the 66,000 tonnes of food, including grains, high-energy biscuits, and vegetable oil, are slated to expire as soon as July, when they will likely be turned into animal feed, incinerated, or otherwise destroyed, Reuters reported Thursday.
The warehouses are located in Houston, South Africa, Djibouti, and Dubai, and are run by the U.S. Agency for International Development's (USAID) Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance. Many of the staff who help run the warehouses are scheduled to be fired on July 1 in the first of two rounds of cuts that will effect nearly all of USAID.
Contracts with suppliers, shipping companies, and contractors have been canceled since USAID was taken over by the Trump administration's so-called Department of Government Efficiency, with the White House saying the agency—with a relatively small budget of just $40 billion—was responsible for "significant waste."
Since DOGE, run by tech billionaire Elon Musk, targeted USAID in one of its first full-scale attacks on a federal entity, the agency is being run by Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The State Department's Office of Foreign Assistance has not yet approved a proposal to give the stranded food stocks to aid organizations for distribution, two former USAID staffers told Reuters.
That office is being led by Jeremy Lewin, a 28-year-old former DOGE employee who is overseeing the complete decommissioning of USAID, which has provided humanitarian assistance in conflict zones and the Global South for more than six decades.
Max Hoffman, a foreign policy adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), said the massive waste of life-saving food rations was the result of President Donald Trump and Musk deploying "some idiot 20 year old staggering around USAID turning things off without the faintest idea of the consequences."
Some of the rations were intended for Gaza, where half a million Palestinians are currently facing starvation and the rest of the population of 2.3 million people are suffering from acute levels of food insecurity due to Israel's total blockade on humanitarian aid which was reimposed in March after a brief cease-fire. Thousands of children have been hospitalized with acute malnutrition since the beginning of the year, but Israel's U.S.-backed assault on Gaza has left health providers with extremely limited means to treat them.
The entire population of Gaza could be fed for a month and a half with the food rations that are on the verge of rotting in the four warehouses, Reuters reported.
Nearly 500 tonnes of high-energy biscuits in Dubai are among the stocks that will expire in July, a former USAID official told the outlet. They could feed at least 27,000 acutely malnourished children for a month.
The food aid was also scheduled to go to Sudan, where famine has been confirmed in at least 10 areas as the country faces the third year of a civil war.
Action Against Hunger is one of many aid groups that have had to scale back operations after losing significant funding due to U.S. cuts; the group said last month that its suspension of work in the Democratic Republic of Congo had already directly led to the deaths of at least six children.
In addition to USAID's warehouses full of soon-to-be-expired food, the U.S.-based company Edesia, which makes the peanut-based Plumpy'Nut, told Reuters that USAID's cuts to transportation contracts had forced the company to open an additional warehouse. A $13 million stockpile of 5,000 tonnes of Plumpy'Nut, which is used to prevent severe malnutrition in children, is in the warehouse now—but could be used to feed more than 484,000 children.
"The dismantling of USAID and cuts to humanitarian aid has been devastating and unacceptable," said Oxfam America.
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'A Huge Scandal': Internal Doc Exposes Trump-Musk Hunt for Social Security Fraud as a Sham
A newly reported document shows that "anti-fraud checks" implemented at the Social Security agency found virtually no improper benefit claims—while slowing payments substantially.
May 16, 2025
An internal Trump administration document reportedly shows that anti-fraud checks recently installed at the Social Security agency have found just two cases of potentially improper benefit claims out of more than 110,000—a rate of 0.0018%.
The documents, first reported Thursday by Nextgov/FCW, further undercut President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk's narrative that Social Security is brimming with fraud. Musk falsely claimed in March that "40% of the calls into Social Security were fraudulent."
The anti-fraud checks for Social Security have been applied only to benefit claims made over the phone. According to the internal document, "No significant fraud has been detected from the flagged cases." Earlier this year, amid widespread outrage, the Social Security Administration (SSA) walked back a proposal to scrap many of its phone-based benefit claim services.
Nextgov/FCW noted Thursday that the Trump administration's deployment of the anti-fraud tools beginning last month "did cause delays, as SSA changed its phone procedures to add the checks on the backend."
"The lags stem from the three-day hold placed on telephone claims in order to run the anti-fraud [checks], a move that 'delays payments and benefits to customers, despite an extremely low risk of fraud,'" Nextgov/FCW reported, citing the internal document.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said in a statement that "the Trump-Musk Social Security takeover has only meant more chaos and confusion for Americans."
"Every one of DOGE's so-called 'mistakes' is a backdoor cut to people's benefits," said Warren. "There's nothing efficient about making it harder for people to access the checks they’ve earned and are owed."
On social media, Warren called the revelations in the internal administration document "a HUGE scandal."
This is a HUGE scandal. Elon Musk, JD Vance, and Trump are lying about Social Security fraud. Internal documents show DOGE found "no significant fraud"—but did slow retirement claim processing by 25%. Nothing efficient about making it harder for people to get their benefits.
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— Elizabeth Warren (@warren.senate.gov) May 15, 2025 at 4:13 PM
It's long been clear that Social Security fraud is minuscule, with an inspector general report published last year estimating that just 0.84% of Social Security benefits paid out between 2015 and 2022 were dispensed improperly—and even those improper payments were not necessarily fraudulent.
The new reporting out Thursday bolstered warnings that the Trump administration's hunt for fraud is a mere pretext for slashing Social Security benefits and weakening the program.
"Turns out there ISN'T rampant Social Security fraud, but Elon's witch hunt, driven by his insane conspiracy theories, IS keeping seniors from getting their benefits as quickly as they should be," Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) wrote on social media. "THIS is Republican governing: hunting for nonexistent fraud while breaking Social Security."
Frank Bisignano, the newly confirmed SSA administrator, has close ties to Musk's Department of Government Efficiency and has defended the president's false claim that tens of millions of "dead" people are receiving Social Security benefits.
CNNreported earlier this week that as SSA combs "through its databases to check whether beneficiaries are alive or dead" at Trump and Musk's behest, agency staffers are "seeing more people coming in to be resurrected" after being falsely deemed deceased.
"I've been saying it all along," former SSA chief Martin O'Malley wrote Thursday. "Elon Musk is the biggest fraud, not Social Security."
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Math Versus Musk: Closing the Tax Gap
The value of tax enforcement is such that just accounting for DOGE's cuts to the IRS, DOGE will likely increase the deficit, even if they hit their target of cutting $150 billion in spending.
May 14, 2025
Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency's current goal is to cut $150 billion a year in spending from the federal government. One fundamental problem with Musk's approach is that sometimes spending a little more money saves a lot of money, or makes a lot of money. Repairing a hole in a roof in Florida before hurricane season saves money. Regularly changing the oil in your car saves money. For every dollar that the Internal Revenue Service spends auditing the top 10% of earners, it recovers $12 in taxes. A recent Stanford study found that auditing partnerships nets $20 in taxes recovered for every dollar spent by the IRS.
The largest chunk of fraud in America's federal government is the tax gap. The tax gap is the difference between how much is owed in taxes and how much is paid in taxes. For 2022, the IRS estimated that the tax gap was $606 billion. That $606 billion in fraud that tax cheats get away with is equivalent to the total federal income taxes paid by the bottom 90% of earners in America.
For most Americans, like myself, every dollar in wages we earn is reported by our employers to the IRS, our taxes are withheld from our paychecks, and that money is paid to the Treasury as estimated taxes four times a year. So for most Americans, cheating is close to impossible, and our rate of compliance is 99%. But for rich individuals and corporations, our byzantine tax code gives them lots of nooks and crannies to hide their income and avoid paying the taxes they owe, so their rate of cheating can be as high as 55%.
I propose that we not only hire back all those fired workers at the IRS, but double down and spend an additional $5 billion auditing the top 10% of earners and $5 billion auditing partnerships at the IRS to reduce the tax gap by $160 billion.
If we collected 25% more of the tax gap, that would be roughly $150 billion a year, which happens to match the DOGE yearly goal. But DOGE isn't even looking at bringing in more revenue. How can DOGE, whose mission is government efficiency, ignore the biggest chunk of fraud in the federal government? DOGE has actually done the opposite. DOGE has aggressively cut workers from the IRS, targeting those employees recently hired and being trained to go after the worst of the worst of the tax cheats. The Inflation Reduction Act, which former President Joe Biden pushed through Congress, bolstered tax enforcement and modernization at the IRS, and experts being trained to audit the most complex returns were hired less than two years ago, so they were cut as part of Musk's purge of probationary federal employees. Even worse, it has been reported that Musk and President Donald Trump are working on plans to cut staffing at the IRS by half.
The Budget Lab at Yale has estimated that if 22,000 employees are cut from the IRS, the tax gap will increase by $160 billion in 2026. If DOGE cuts half of IRS employees, or 50,000, the Budget Lab at Yale estimated that the tax gap will increase by $203 billion in 2026. So just accounting for DOGE's cuts to the IRS, DOGE will likely increase the deficit, even if they hit their target of cutting $150 billion in spending.
I propose that we not only hire back all those fired workers at the IRS, but double down and spend an additional $5 billion auditing the top 10% of earners and $5 billion auditing partnerships at the IRS to reduce the tax gap by $160 billion. So the score is an estimated increase of $203 billion in fraud for DOGE, $150 billion in deficit reduction for me.
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