Food for starving children worldwide is still sitting in a Rhode Island warehouse. It’s a case study in DOGE aftermath.

But the backlog remains. The nearly 200,000 US government-branded boxes are stuck in North Kingston, and Edesia’s founder, Navyn Salem, says she has no idea when—or if—they’ll be shipped. Each box can bring one child back from starvation.

“What are children supposed to do when we tell them that they need to keep their hearts beating for another six months?” Salem said in an interview. “Can you imagine if your child dies because you didn’t have the equivalent of $1 a day to give them this life-saving food?”

Edesia has spent months trying to get answers on a system broken by the Department of Government Efficiency, which Musk formerly ran. And even if the government reversed course tomorrow, it will still take weeks, if not months, to get any of the medicinal food to the children worldwide who need it.

Edesia’s plight has become a case study not only in how quickly DOGE disrupted the federal government, but how long it is taking to undo its mistakes. Despite repeated public statements from top officials that they’ve resumed the program, deep spending cuts and an overhaul of the foreign aid apparatus have left Edesia in limbo. In the meantime, Edesia and supportive Democratic lawmakers have been trying every avenue — including recruiting Republican colleagues — to correct the issue.

Edesia and a similar organization based in Georgia, MANA Nutrition, have for years made a fortified peanut-based paste called Plumpy’Nut. The product is given to children who are weeks away from dying from severe malnutrition because their bodies are too distressed to digest regular food. Edesia, named for the Roman goddess of food, says it has fed 25 million children since its opening in 2010.

Most of the nonprofit’s funding came from USAID.

In January, after DOGE decimated USAID, Edesia received a stop work order. It was soon rescinded, but the damage piled up: Payments were slow to trickle in, leading the company to lay off 10 percent of its staff in March.

Eventually, the money came, but now Salem says the product, which is technically owned by the US government, is sitting in her warehouse because the shipping and distribution system that sent the food around the world was run by USAID experts. With the agency’s staff essentially terminated and its work set to transition to the State Department as of July 1, Salem has spent weeks contacting anyone in government she can reach through a “a patchwork of emails and phone calls” to try to get food around the world.

“The only thing the government has to do is sign a piece of paper that says, ‘It’s going to ship here,’” Salem said. “It’s sitting here. It’s been paid for by taxpayer dollars. If we’re trying to gain efficiencies, we’re not being successful, currently.”

The State Department denies that it is the hold up, but it did not explain where the breakdown occurred. They referred the Globe to a Fox News article that reported a recent memo from USAID calling for the urgent approval and shipment of RUTF from warehouses. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is also the administrator of USAID.

“We are proud to continue working with our local partners to deliver life-saving ready-to-use therapeutic food,” a State Department spokesperson said in an unsigned statement. “As for the warehouse, this is simply stock waiting for pickup, but they aren’t waiting on the State Department.”

Edesia’s cause has been taken up in Washington by Rhode Island lawmakers including Representatives Seth Magaziner and Gabe Amo. Magaziner has given a speech on the House floor every day it is in session since late April to try to bring attention to the issue. He’s at 26 and counting. He has been working closely with Republican Georgia Representative Austin Scott, who represents MANA Nutrition, to try to get the administration’s attention through a more ideologically friendly messenger.

“Every time he talks to the administration they say the right thing and then a few weeks go by and nothing has changed,” Magaziner told the Globe. “The damage that was done by Elon Musk in just a couple months is going to take a long time to undo. … Irrespective of whether he found any actual waste or not, a lot of good programs were hurt in the meantime and no doubt many innocent lives were lost.”

Amo, who sits on the committee that oversees the State Department, had a fiery exchange with Rubio last month at a hearing in which Rubio insisted the problem was fixed and denied his agency was the source of any further issues.

“No children are dying on my watch,” Rubio told Amo as he asked about the boxes in Edesia’s warehouse. “That food is being distributed now.”

Calculating the human toll of the delayed food has been difficult, but a tracker maintained by a Boston University mathematician and health economist estimates 70,000 children have died of malnutrition as a result of the USAID cuts. The Associated Press reported on malnourished children dying in Nigeria amid cuts to US foreign aid programs including those addressing hunger.

Amo has been in regular contact with the State Department about Edesia’s ordeal. He believes the administration staff are trying to resolve the problems but failed to understand the complexity of the network. USAID’s systems were for not just paying for the RUTF, but they also were also identifying where it was needed and distributing it in dangerous and impoverished parts of the world.

“It’s a little bit of Whac-A-Mole,” Amo said. “You have an interlocking set of contracts and agreements that can be upset when you make arbitrary decisions that don’t see the whole enterprise of how this moves from farm to human being.”

Scott, the Georgia Republican working with Magaziner, defended the administration’s mission of identifying waste and said he’s confident the issues with MANA Nutrition and Edesia will be resolved.

“If you read the book on Elon Musk, I mean, the way he built his companies is to tear it down to the minimum and then build it back up,” Scott said. “I would have preferred that we measure twice and cut once, if you will, but … a lot of things they exposed about where US tax dollars were going, that they shouldn’t have been going, needed to be done.”

Senator Shelly Moore Capito, a West Virginia Republican who worked to get DOGE cuts in her state and others reversed, said she’s helping some Democrats now, but under Democratic administrations, they’ve also had to help her.

“I don’t think that’s so highly unusual,” she said.

Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock, a Democrat who has been working to restore shipments and payments to MANA Nutrition, said he has personally spoken with Rubio, a former Senate colleague, and some progress was made as a result. But he feels the administration still doesn’t understand the urgency and importance of the situation.

“What we saw was an administration that came in literally with a chainsaw and cutting without knowing or caring what they were cutting,” Warnock said. “And so now, not only are millions of lives at stake, not only are children literally dying as a result of this, the tragic insult and irony is that they’re dying while these products, literally, sit on shelves. Make it make sense.”

Tal Kopan can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her @talkopan.