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.
CNN spoke with Moore just minutes after he said he received a series of contract termination letters from USAID. Still reeling, Moore described the furious scramble that the news had set off at his plant. One of his first orders of business: Asking his workers mid-production to immediately stop putting labels that say “USAID” on the pouches that the peanut butter paste is squirted into.
“Every one of those packets has printing on it that says, ‘From the American people. USAID.’ And if… I don’t deliver it through USAID contracts, it’s trash. I can’t distribute it,” Moore said. “It’s not like I can squeeze that peanut butter back out of that packet and put it in a new packet. So it’s a problem. A huge problem.”
His predicament is just one of the many aftershocks of the Trump administration’s rapid decimation of USAID, which has suffered more severely than almost any other agency across the government. Thousands of positions at the federal agency have been eliminated and the vast majority of its officials have been placed on leave. Contracts are being canceled left and right, leaving many in the humanitarian aid world reeling.
In normal times, Moore’s plant produces 10 pouches of the lifesaving paste every second. Each small bag contains 500 calories’ worth of the special peanut butter — which does not require refrigeration or additional preparation — and is labeled “RUTF” for “Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Food.”
USAID has been a major supporter and funder of RUTF products over the years.
In the middle of a phone call with a CNN reporter, Moore asked to switch to FaceTime to show rolls of USAID-emblazoned packaging film in his office that gets turned into the sealed pouches of peanut butter.
“So this is 45 boxes. USAID-branded. This is our UNICEF stuff,” he said, referring to the United Nations agency tasked with providing aid to children worldwide.
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.
“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.
CNN reached out to the State Department, which now oversees USAID, for comment.
For now, Moore is grasping for any clarity — but nobody seems to have any answers.
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.
One person placed on leave amid the Trump assault on the agency is the USAID contract officer that Moore has dealt with in the past on MANA’s contracts.
“He called me from his cell,” Moore said. “He was just stunned.”
One of the contract termination letters viewed by CNN is dated Wednesday, February 25, and signed by Nadeem Shah, a deputy director at USAID.
“This award is being terminated for convenience and the interests of the U.S. Government under a directive from U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in his capacity as the Acting Administrator for the U.S. Agency for International Development [“the Agency” or “USAID”] and/or Peter W. Marocco,” the letter says. “Immediately cease all activities, terminate all subawards and contracts, and avoid incurring any additional obligations chargeable to the award beyond those unavoidable costs associated with this Termination Notice.”
This comes as a Wednesday court filing showed the Trump administration saying it is terminating more than 90% of USAID’s foreign aid awards.
“In total, nearly 5,800 USAID awards were terminated, and more than 500 USAID awards were retained,” the filing from the administration said. “The total ceiling value of the retained awards is approximately $57 billion.”
In a new world where USAID is no longer a major funder of RUTF products, Moore wonders whether major nonprofit organizations will step in and help out.
“I can call World Vision, or Save the Children, or whoever, and say, ‘Hey, guess what, none of us are going to get this medicine for malnourished kids from the US government anymore, because they’re shut down,’” he said. “’Do you want to buy some?’”
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