<
https://www.propublica.org/article/kenya-trump-usaid-world-food-program-starvation-children-deaths>
"On July 18, a mild, overcast night in Nairobi, Kenya, a team of President
Donald Trump’s top foreign aid advisers ducked into a meeting room at the Tribe
Hotel, their luxury accommodations in the city’s diplomatic quarter, for a
private dinner.
The visitors from Washington included Marcus Thornton, a former Border Patrol
agent known for a series of public lawsuits against the Biden administration’s
COVID-19 vaccine mandate; Kenneth Jackson, a former oil executive who had done
a stint in government under the first Trump administration; and Laken Rapier,
who’d previously managed communications for the city of Fort Worth, Texas. This
year, all had been appointed to leadership roles in the U.S. Agency for
International Development, the premier government humanitarian agency in the
world.
Five months earlier, some of the visiting aides had celebrated USAID’s
destruction over cake and speeches in Washington. With that job done, they’d
embarked on a world tour of half a dozen cities, including the Kenyan capital.
They were granted special permission to fly business class “to help ensure
maximum rest and comfort,” according to an internal memo. Thornton alone
received authorization to expense more than $35,000 in taxpayer money for the
trip. The plan was to conduct exit interviews with USAID’s top experts, who
were being forced out of the agency amid the administration’s stated commitment
to austerity.
When the U.S. embassy in Nairobi learned of the visit, officials there arranged
the dinner with a goal in mind. It would be their last opportunity to explain,
face-to-face, the catastrophic impact of Trump’s drastic cuts to foreign aid.
A top concern: the administration’s failure to fund the World Food Program’s
operation in Kenya, where about 720,000 refugees, among the most vulnerable
people on earth, relied on the organization to survive. After providing $112
million in 2024, the U.S. abruptly cut off money in January without warning,
leaving the program with no time to find adequate support or import the food
needed for the rest of the year.
For months afterward, U.S. government and humanitarian officials warned
Washington that the cutoff had led to increasingly dire circumstances. They
begged Trump’s political advisers, including Thornton, to renew WFP’s grant and
give the money it needed to avert disaster. The embassy in Nairobi sent at
least eight cables to the office of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, explaining
the situation on the ground and projecting mass hunger, violence and regional
instability.
Those warnings went unheeded. Rubio, facing pressure from lawmakers and
humanitarian groups, nevertheless publicly asserted that the agency’s mass cuts
had spared food programs — even as the administration failed to fund WFP in
Kenya behind the scenes. “If it’s providing food or medicine or anything that
is saving lives and is immediate and urgent, you’re not included in the
freeze,” Rubio told reporters on Feb. 4. “I don’t know how much more clear we
can be than that.”
By the spring, WFP still had not received funding, ran low on supplies and
would be forced to stop feeding many of Kenya’s refugees. In Kakuma, the
third-largest camp in the world, WFP cut rations to their lowest in history,
trapping most of the 308,000 people in the camp with almost nothing to eat."
Via Susan ****
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
