Senators removed funding cuts to Food for Peace, as well as to other programs that buy grain from American farmers.
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Senators removed funding cuts to Food for Peace, as well as to other programs that buy grain from American farmers.
July 18, 2025
July 18, 2025 – Republicans in Congress passed a controversial rescissions package last night that will claw back money previously allocated, primarily to public media and foreign aid. It is now on its way to be signed into law by President Trump. But while the original package included deep cuts to two food aid programs run by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Republicans in the Senate amended the bill to keep them funded.
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“While this legislation provides the administration flexibility on which funds they can return, I included an amendment that clarifies that funding will not be taken from the administration of commodity-based programs like Food for Peace and McGovern-Dole that provide a critical market for our farmers to sell excess commodities to feed hungry people around the world,” Senator Jerry Moran (R-Kansas) said in a press release.
The rescissions process is being used as a way to give Congressional authority to the Trump administration’s spending cuts. With the help of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Trump began dismantling USAID soon after he took office, and the agency was shuttered on June 30. In a May budget proposal, President Trump proposed eliminating Food for Peace and the McGovern-Dole International Food for Education program, which funds school meals in low-income countries.
Staff in Uzbekistan unload a shipment of USAID food assistance in 2020. (Photo CC-licensed by USAID Central Asia on Flickr)
However, unlike with other cuts to foreign aid, some Republicans have pushed back on defunding the food programs because they purchase billions of dollars in commodities from farmers in their states. In early July, The New York Times reported that Kansas farmers who lost Food for Peace contracts were looking into dog food as a new market for their grains.
In the press release, Moran pointed out that the recently passed Senate appropriations bill allocating agriculture funding for next year also preserved funding for the Food for Peace and McGovern-Dole programs. Senators included a requirement that the administration provide a report on what it would take to transfer Food for Peace to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. A team at the State Department is currently running the remaining USAID programs.
The rescissions package’s zeroing out of funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is expected to hit the small, rural affiliates of National Public Radio (NPR) the hardest, since federal funding generally makes up a larger portion of their budgets. The total cuts saved $9 billion, which is about .1 percent of the federal government’s $7 trillion in annual spending. (Link to this post.)
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