# Food for Peace Food for Peace is the United States' oldest and largest overseas food aid program. [[Dwight D. Eisenhower]] signed it into law on **July 10, 1954**, as the Agricultural Trade Development and Assistance Act — **Public Law 83-480**, universally called **P.L. 480** — which also created an Office of Food for Peace. It did two things at once, which is why it survived seventy years of otherwise hostile politics: it shipped American-grown commodities to countries facing hunger, and it bought those commodities from American farmers. [[John F. Kennedy]] gave the program its formal name in **1961** and appointed [[George McGovern]] its first director that January, as a special assistant to the president. Eisenhower had already been calling it "food for peace" by 1959. ## Why Eisenhower built it The program belongs to the same strand of Eisenhower's thinking as his support for the postwar alliance system. He had commanded the war in Europe and had seen what a collapsed economy produces politically; his view was that raising living standards abroad was a defensive measure, not a charitable one — cheaper and more durable than the alternatives, and aimed at the conditions in which demagogues recruit. Food aid was the agricultural instrument of that argument, as the alliance structure was its military one. ## Where it has lived | Period | Home | |---|---| | 1954 | Office of Food for Peace, created by P.L. 480 | | 1961 | Director appointed in the White House under [[John F. Kennedy]] | | 1965 | Folded into the State Department | | 1966 | Restructured by the Food for Peace Act of 1966 | | 2008 onward | Food for Peace Act; USDA ran Title I, [[United States Agency for International Development]] ran Titles II, III and V | | 2025 | Moved to the State Department after USAID was dismantled | | 2026 | Moved again to the [[Department of Agriculture]] under an interagency agreement with State and the Office of Management and Budget | The 2026 move is not yet permanent. It rests on an interagency agreement rather than a statute, and making the transfer durable requires legislation Congress has not passed. On **February 3, 2026** the Agriculture Department announced it would commit up to **$452 million** in fiscal 2025 Food for Peace funds through an agreement with the U.N. World Food Programme, covering roughly 211,000 tons of American commodities bound for the Democratic Republic of the Congo, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Haiti, Kenya and Rwanda. > [!note] The lineage is the point > Food for Peace is one of the clearest cases of a Cold War institution built by a Republican president and dismantled, or at least unmoored, by a later one. The program was run inside [[United States Agency for International Development]] until that agency was taken apart in 2025 by the [[Donald Trump]] administration and [[DOGE]] under [[Elon Musk]]; what remained of Food for Peace was then shifted twice in a year. Analysts at the Council on Foreign Relations have argued the revamped program directs less of its aid to the countries closest to famine. ## See also - [[Dwight D. Eisenhower]] — signed P.L. 480 in 1954 - [[George McGovern]] — the program's first director, 1961–1962 - [[United States Agency for International Development]] — its home for decades, dismantled in 2025 - [[Department of Agriculture]] — its home since 2026 - [[DOGE]] · [[Elon Musk]] — the dismantlement that displaced it