The Trump Administration Chose to Incinerate Food Rather Than Send It to Starving Kids

This administration's commitment to public indecency remains rock solid. If there is inhumanity anywhere to be found in one of its policy positions, they will by God find it, shine it up, and put it out there. From The Atlantic:

Five months into its unprecedented dismantling of foreign-aid programs, the Trump administration has given the order to incinerate food instead of sending it to people abroad who need it. Nearly 500 metric tons of emergency food—enough to feed about 1.5 million children for a week—are set to expire tomorrow, according to current and former government employees with direct knowledge of the rations. Within weeks, two of those sources told me, the food, meant for children in Afghanistan and Pakistan, will be ash. (The sources I spoke with for this story requested anonymity for fear of professional repercussions.)

I mean, you're killing the program anyway. Why not have shipped this stuff to where it was supposed to go anyway? (It has to have been cheaper than the $800,000 it cost to buy the food plus the $130,000 it's going to cost to burn the stuff.) Luckily, I have been assured by two generations of Republican politicians and two generations of TV Bible-banging that this is indeed ... A Christian Nation! Today's reading is from the Book of Starvations, Chapter 25, Verse 35: "For when I was hungry, you burned all the food."

The chloroforming of USAID was stupid and despicable at the time, and it hasn't become less stupid and less despicable with time. It is inhumane as a moral choice and moronic as public policy. The abandonment of the concept of "soft power" in our foreign policy is something for which we're going to pay for years. I have a modest proposal—on the day they burn all the food, they should also set fire to $800,000 in cash. Now that's a party.