Wheat grows so prodigiously here on the Kansas high plains that in 1953 the surplus birthed one of the Cold War’s big ideas: Food for Peace, a federal government program that delivered the excess bounty to a hungry postwar world.

Conceived by a Kansas farmer and created by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Food for Peace has sent burlap sacks of grain stamped “From the American People” to more than four billion people in 150 countries around the world.

Now it is effectively dead.

The program was administered by the U.S. Agency for International Development, which Elon Musk fed “into the wood chipper” on a weekend in February. Kansas’s Republican lawmakers tried to save it but failed to persuade President Trump, who last month proposed cutting the entire 2026 budget for Food for Peace as well as another food aid program dear to Kansans, the McGovern-Dole International Food for Education and Child Nutrition program.

The Trump administration said the programs were inefficient and wasteful, “with dubious results.”

It was the latest blow to farmers, particularly in Kansas, where about 80 percent of those on the high plains voted for Mr. Trump and agriculture makes up almost half of the state’s economy. The president’s whipsawing tariffs and cuts to agriculture grants and global food aid have left the state with swollen silos, shrinking markets and volatile prices for crops.

Last year Kansas sold half its annual wheat crop abroad, but those buyers have mostly dried up. At least one big grain broker is now trying to sell Kansas grain that once fed people overseas for use in dog food.