Starvation is a particularly cruel and horrible way to die. Beginning with intense hunger and pain and followed by exhaustion and mental deterioration, starvation continues with the body gradually consuming its own tissues on a downward spiral toward death.
The major safeguard against mass starvation around the globe is the World Food Program (WFP), which received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2020 for its vital humanitarian work. With hundreds of millions of people in jeopardy thanks to poverty, famines, violent conflict, and extreme weather, this UN agency distributes massive quantities of food aid-- last year alone, reaching more than 100 million people facing acute hunger-- thereby saving millions of lives.
But with the advent of the second Trump administration in January 2025, the World Food Program, which in 2024 received nearly half of its funding from the U.S. government, entered a period of crisis that has only deepened in the months since then.
On his first day in office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order freezing all U.S. foreign assistance, declaring that the "foreign aid industry and bureaucracy are not aligned with American interests and in many cases [are] antithetical to American values." Within short order, the DOGE operation of multibillionaire Elon Musk terminated the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which provided the bulk of U.S. overseas humanitarian aid to impoverished nations. Calling USAID a "criminal organization," Musk declared that it was "time for it to die."
Emergency food assistance, a component of U.S. foreign aid, was a key administration target. In April 2025, the Trump administration ended funding to the WFP for food programs in 14 of the world's most impoverished nations. Responding to the action, the WFP warned that "this could amount to a death sentence for millions of people facing extreme hunger and starvation."
In response to sharp public criticism of the cutbacks, some of the food aid cuts were restored. And in June 2025, the administration suddenly gave the WFP an $800 million grant. Although these actions brought total U.S. overseas food aid for 2025 to about $2 billion, during the final year of the Biden administration the U.S. contribution to the WFP had been $4.5 billion.
Thanks almost entirely to the shift in U.S. policy, the WFP experienced a 40 percent drop in funding during 2025.
The results of the financial cutbacks were horrific. In Kenya, where the Trump administration abruptly ended all U.S. funding for WFP operations, there resided about 720,000 refugees, among the most vulnerable people on earth. Although aid workers and local U.S. officials repeatedly appealed for a renewal of U.S. food assistance, none was forthcoming. As a result, a ProPublica study reported, the refugees "began to starve, and many-- mostly children-- died because their malnourished bodies couldn't fight off infections." In these circumstances, "mothers had to choose which of their kids to feed. Young men took to the streets in protests, some of which devolved into violent riots. Pregnant women with life-threatening anemia were so desperate for calories that they ate mud."
Elsewhere, too, the situation grew increasingly desperate. In numerous impoverished nations where special packets of food paste had been distributed to 9.3 million children on the brink of starvation, the packets virtually disappeared. In one region of Nigeria alone, 150 clinics, operated by the WFP and providing nutrition treatment for 300,000 children below the age of two, shut down in July 2025.
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