Almost 500 metric tons of high-calorie biscuits—specially formulated for malnourished children in war zones and natural disaster areas—are stacked inside a warehouse in Dubai. By tomorrow, they will expire and in a few days, destroyed. Purchased with U.S. taxpayer money and originally intended for vulnerable populations in Afghanistan and Pakistan, they will never leave the warehouse.
According to current and former officials at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the food had been ready for distribution for months. But since January, when the agency was effectively dismantled and its operations folded into the State Department, every shipment of humanitarian goods has required a central political sign-off. That authorization, for reasons never publicly explained, never came.
As a result, the stockpile sat idle as its expiration date drew near. The biscuits—therapeutic foods packed with energy, often deployed in the early stages of humanitarian emergencies—had been purchased with roughly $800,000 in public funds during the final stretch of the Biden administration. They were stored in the UAE, awaiting distribution. Under normal circumstances, USAID staff would have coordinated their shipment through the World Food Programme. But that capacity no longer exists under the current decision-making structure.
Internal agency sources describe a series of memos sent between January and April to political appointees—none of which received a response. Responsibility for managing aid in this period shifted from a Trump-era holdover to a recently appointed junior official with no background in humanitarian logistics. According to insiders, neither took action to authorize the release of the food.
In May, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Congress that no food aid would go to waste. But according to internal documents reviewed by agency personnel, the order to incinerate the biscuits had already been issued. The disposal operation is expected to cost an additional $130,000, bringing the total loss to nearly $1 million.
The consequences are not merely financial. By conservative estimates, those biscuits could have fed 1.5 million children for an entire week. In Afghanistan, where child malnutrition remains at crisis levels, the World Food Programme currently reaches just a tenth of those in dire need. In other regions, from Sudan to Gaza, the shipment could have been life-saving.
Once expired, the stockpiled food cannot be repurposed—even as animal feed—due to strict regulations in the United Arab Emirates. A January USAID inventory showed over 60,000 tons of U.S.-funded food aid sitting in storage worldwide, including 36,000 kilograms of legumes, oil, and grains held in Djibouti and earmarked for countries in the Horn of Africa. While a handful of smaller shipments have resumed in recent weeks, most stock remains locked in place.
The freeze in aid distribution is further compounded by the loss of institutional knowledge. Many of the agency’s logistics experts have been laid off or reassigned. Companies that produce therapeutic foods for children report that there have been no new orders from the U.S. government and remain uncertain about what will happen to existing inventories.
The planned destruction of the 500 tons of biscuits—a volume described by insiders as unprecedented—has become the most tangible emblem of a broader paralysis in U.S. foreign aid. The crisis extends beyond policy—it now involves the erosion of operational capacity itself.
At a time when the World Food Programme warns that 58 million people globally face extreme hunger, the loss of even a single shipment carries enormous weight. But this was not the result of a logistical error, a flood, or a terror attack. It was a political decision. And its costs—both human and economic—have already begun to be felt.
