In an effort to save the Food for Peace program amid the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development, farm-state Republicans have proposed to move the program to the Agriculture Department. But aid experts and USAID veterans say it would take USDA years to build the expertise it needs.
The 70-year-old Food for Peace program faces an uncertain future after the Trump administration paused USAID funding and stalled an estimated $489 million of commodities in transit to feed people around the globe. Although Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued waivers to resume shipping of aid, Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., told Agri-Pulse that food aid remained stalled in ports and warehouses.
Farm-state Republicans introducing the legislation include House Ag Committee Chair Glenn "GT" Thompson of Pennsylvania and Reps. Tracey Mann of Kansas, Rick Crawford of Arkansas, Dan Newhouse of Washington and David Rouzer of North Carolina. Sens. Jerry Moran of Kansas and John Hoeven of North Dakota introduced the bill in the Senate.
“In the short term, it would cause an enormous amount of disruption as you transition programs,” said one former USAID contractor who spoke with Agri-Pulse about the proposal on the condition to not be identified by name.
“USDA would have to figure out how to do grants to international organizations and grants to local partners, and figure out how all that ecosystem works,” the former contractor said. “And on the contractor side, it's the same thing. I don't know if in the long term it makes a lot more sense to put stuff under USDA versus USAID.” 
Protesters at a Feb. 5 U.S. Agency for International Development protest in the Senate Square. (Photo: Lydia Johnson)
A current USAID contractor granted anonymity to speak openly about the proposal had similar concerns. While USDA has some experience administering food aid through the McGovern-Dole Food for Education Program, the contractor said the department lacked the necessary expertise to administer food aid at scale. The McGovern-Dole program has a budget of about $250 million annually, while Food for Peace operates with about a $1.7 billion budget that can be even higher, based on emergency needs.
“The general sentiment amongst food aid experts like myself is that it will be a massive reversion in quality of programming,” the contractor said.
USAID undertakes extensive analysis and oversight of the food aid it delivers, the source said, which includes ensuring any food aid does not hurt the recipient countries in the long term by undermining local producers. USAID must assess markets to ensure the distribution of U.S. commodities doesn't depress the prices local farmers get for their crops.
“It's not just supply chain stuff. Anybody can move things around and drop it off in another place,” the source said. “The specialized expertise that we have on the USAID side has been built up over many years.”
It’s easy to be “in the know” about what’s happening in Washington, D.C. Sign up for a FREE month of Agri-Pulse news! Simply click here
Phil Karsting, who ran USDA's Foreign Agricultural Service during the Barack Obama administration, echoed the sentiments of the current and former USAID contractors.
“It's not to say that USDA couldn't do it, but it's not the sort of thing where you just flip the switch,” Karsting said.
“In addition to procurement and shipping people, there's a whole host of other sort of development issues that go along with that. You can't just drop bags of corn-soy blend in the desert and say, Here, have at it . ... especially in a humanitarian context, a much more sophisticated process than that," he said.
Coons, who is a senior member of the Foreign Relations and Appropriations committees, said USDA would need to pick up USAID staff members who are being lost in the agency's downgrading.
"To deliver a large-scale program in remote and difficult parts of the world requires experience both to ensure transparency and efficiency and to actually navigate the mechanisms of getting food" delivered where it's needed, Coons said.
Some of the specialized expertise that USAID has accumulated may have already left the agency. Of the original more than 10,000 global USAID employees, Reuters reported that only 294 staff at the agency will keep their jobs, including 12 in the Africa bureau and eight in the Asia bureau. The staffing totals do not include contractors and implementing partners funded by grants or nonprofit organizations.
The USAID contractor who was still employed by USAID expected to be terminated “any day.” Should that happen, this person said they won’t be able to wait around to be rehired by USDA.
House Ag Committee Chair Glenn “GT
Kip Tom” Thompson, R-Pa., expressed confidence USDA could manage the program, saying “it looks like perhaps they'd have the infrastructure and the bandwidth,” to accommodate Food for Peace with Ag Secretary Brooke Rollins now confirmed.
Kip Tom, ambassador to the United Nations agencies for food and agriculture during Trump’s first term, echoed support for the proposal.
“I’m more than confident Secretary Rollins will find the right USDA leadership and staff to facilitate and execute the program without pause and with excellence,” Tom said.
But even if the department could revive the program with existing staff, many of the third-party organizations that work with USAID have already issued mass layoffs as funding chaos has rippled through implementing organizations.
Catholic Relief Services, which operates in 100 countries serving about 200 million people globally each year, receives about half its $1.5 billion budget from USAID. It has already laid off half its workforce. Democracy International furloughed all 95 U.S. employees and 92% of the organization's overseas staff.
“There’s a difference between saving the program in terms of the appropriations and the U.S. government buying commodities” and saving the program “in terms of feeding hungry people what they need, when they need it, in a cost-effective way,” said Chris Barrett, senior faculty fellow of the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability at Cornell University and coauthor of the book “Food Aid After Fifty Years: Recasting its Role.”
Kansas Republican Sen. Jerry Moran said on the Senate floor that the Food for Peace program should be moved to USDA “in an effort to prevent waste and bring the program closer to farmers that depend upon it.”
Dating back to the 1953 agriculture commodity surplus, Kansas farmer Peter O'
Kansas Republican Sen. Jerry Moran Brien brought up the idea of sending excess commodities overseas to those in need during a county Farm Bureau meeting. Then-Kansas Sen. Andy Schoeppel led legislation in the Senate, which was signed into law by President Eisenhower in 1954. Then-Sen. Bob Dole from Russell, Kansas, later championed the reauthorization of Food for Peace.
In fiscal 2023, $713 million of U.S.-grown commodities were purchased by the Food for Peace program, “putting money back into the hands of farmers,” Moran said.
Historically, the USDA Agricultural Marketing Service oversaw the procurement of commodities through the Kansas City Commodity Office. Then, USAID took over managing the program: Setting priority countries, collaborating with the State Department on which commodities to purchase and then overseeing the shipment of the aid.
There is a small contingent of USDA employees who are detailed to USAID to work on the Food for Peace program, the current USAID contractor said. But this contingent is a fraction of the 80 to 100 people the contractor estimated the department would need just to carry out the logistics of moving food around the globe – never mind the analysis and oversight that goes along with it.
USDA did not immediately respond to a question from Agri-Pulse on the exact number of USDA staff detailed to USAID.
For more news, go to www.Agri-Pulse.com. .
