Plumpy'nut Saves Lives

Floor Speech

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Mr. MAGAZINER. Mr. Speaker, I rise for the 34th time to call on the Trump administration to restore food aid for children around the world suffering from malnutrition. We have been doing this for months.

We have been doing this for months because after decades of United States leadership in providing aid to children around the world suffering from malnutrition, the Trump administration has stopped funding this lifesaving program.

In my district in North Kingstown, Rhode Island, there is a warehouse with 90,000 boxes of Plumpy'Nut, lifesaving food aid that is designed to save the lives of starving children whose organs are shutting down and can no longer process conventional food.

This food aid has already been manufactured and has already been paid for but is sitting in a warehouse in Rhode Island because some bureaucrat in the Trump administration refuses to sign the piece of paper to restart the shipments.

Why? What possible good can come from allowing children to starve needlessly around the world while American factories and American farmers do not get paid?

The crazy thing is that for months the administration has been insisting that they are going to restart this program. Secretary Rubio, under oath in the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said that this program was going to be restarted.

Elon Musk, when he was still in the administration before he had his big break up with Donald Trump, even tweeted the name of the factory in my district and said that they were going to get their funding.

Time and time again when we have inquired with the administration, they say: Yes, any day now we are going to restart it. It has been 6 months. Every day that they delay is another day that children unnecessarily starve to death.

We need the administration to honor its word. We are not asking them to change their policy. We are asking them to execute on their stated policy.

I will continue to speak out on this floor every day until they honor their commitment to restart funding for emergency food aid around the world. Helping Small Businesses Thrive and Survive

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Mr. MAGAZINER. Mr. Speaker, when I was back in my district in Rhode Island, I took the opportunity to catch up with a number of leaders in the restaurant and hospitality industry around my State, and they told me to a person that business is down this summer compared to last summer.

Why? Well, there are a few reasons.

Number one, the tariffs that Donald Trump has put in place are a tax on small businesses and on the middle class. Why are we putting a 10, 15, or 20 percent tariff on food that we can't even grow in the United States?

Mr. Speaker, 99 percent of the coffee that we drink comes from other countries because we can't grow it here. We are taxing ourselves 10, 15, or 20 percent to import pineapples, bananas, and foods that we do not make or grow in the United States. That hurts restaurants and other small businesses in my district and the entire country. It hurts consumers as well.

On top of that, this is summer tourism season in Rhode Island, and we typically get a lot of tourists from Canada and Europe who come to Rhode Island for our beaches, our food, and our hospitality. Wouldn't you know it, international travel into Rhode Island and the entire Northeast is down because, it turns out, when you threaten to invade other countries, when you enact tariffs on other countries with no clear strategy, and when you bad-mouth our allies, they don't want to come visit here anymore.

We have a hospitality industry in Rhode Island--hotels, restaurants, and other small businesses--that is facing crushing costs from tariffs and less business from international travel. In addition, by the way, their domestic customers, American customers, also have less discretionary income because of the increased cost of food. Besides that, for some reason, we are also taxing imports of energy from Canada, so people's electric and heating bills were higher this year.

Supporting small business used to be a bipartisan cause in Washington, D.C., one of the few things that both parties could join together and come together on, but for some reason, over the last 6 months, it seems that Washington, D.C., is intent on doing everything that it can to make it harder for small businesses in this country to operate.

Let's reset. Let's prioritize tax relief for small businesses and the middle class instead of the rich. Let's eliminate these tariffs on products that we don't even produce in the United States because we don't have the climate for it. Let's help small businesses thrive and survive this summer.

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