Caribbean Hen wrote: ↑Sun Mar 02, 2025 8:53 am
kalm wrote: ↑Sun Mar 02, 2025 7:50 am
“Streamlined” for the better” is the issue here. UNI is right. Trumpmusk has already proven their ignorance on this front. Wild land firefighters, meteorologists,f and VA care providers are more important than tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations.
Hey, I agree that the approach is different for sure and I don't necessarily agree with all the details on how they are doing it, but I totally agree on why they are doing it
don't lose sight of the big picture just because you hate Musk and Trump.... Your kids need them to succeed at cutting government waste and it they fail, we will fall
I’m glad you don’t agree with the deaths of malnourished children that are being caused by the destruction of USAID.
CNN
—
MANA Nutrition makes a special kind of peanut butter paste that many humanitarian aid workers are familiar with. It is fortified with milk and essential vitamins, packed with calories and sent to severely malnourished children around the world, including some countries in Africa.
On Wednesday afternoon, Mark Moore, the CEO and co-founder of the Fitzgerald, Georgia-based plant, got word from the US Agency for International Development: MANA’s contracts with the agency were being canceled.
In their warehouse, Moore said, there are around 400,000 boxes of USAID-branded RUTF ready to be shipped out. He estimates that if USAID doesn’t pay MANA for those boxes, he will have at least $10 million in wasted peanut butter pouches on his hands. And that doesn’t include an additional $14 million in reimbursements from the federal government that he was already waiting for. He is unsure whether or when he will get paid.
Erin Boyd, a USAID nutrition adviser who was laid off from the agency in January, told CNN it is not an overstatement to say that children will die as a result of the decimation of USAID and funding for RUTF.
Adelaida Marquez, 25, serves ready-to-use therapeutic food to her 15-month-old son Javier, who has been diagnosed with malnutrition, at the house of her sister-in-law where they are staying whilst receiving medical treatment in Barquisimeto, Venezuela, in August 2019.
Adelaida Marquez, 25, serves Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Food to her 15-month-old son Javier, who has been diagnosed with malnutrition, in Barquisimeto, Venezuela, in August 2019. Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters/File
“Even before this happened, there wasn’t enough funding to treat all the children who were presenting wasting.” Boyd said. Wasting, according to UNICEF, refers to a life-threatening form of malnutrition: “Children with wasting are too thin and their immune systems are weak, leaving them vulnerable to developmental delays, disease and death,” the group says.
And it’s not just the production of RUTF that Boyd is alarmed about. She worries that the overhaul of USAID will mean the elimination of countless humanitarian programs around the world designed to save impoverished children.
“It will just mean that kids’ programs don’t exist; the children don’t even get identified as malnourished, and they’ll die at home and we won’t know,” Boyd said.
MANA had received around a half-dozen contract termination letters by Wednesday evening. That accounts for “most of the contracts” that MANA has with USAID, he said, but it was impossible to get anything resembling real guidance from anyone at USAID on how his company should proceed.
That’s because Trump’s assault on the agency has left thousands of positions eliminated and the majority of the agency’s employees put on administrative leave.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/27/politics ... index.html
My kids discuss this openly and decided they will be better off if Trumpmusk fails. Not to mention the world. It gets harder and harder to convince them that the United States is on the side of good.