Immediately after Hamas and Israel agreed to the first phase of President Donald Trump’s peace plan, food and medical supplies were supposed to start flooding into the Gaza Strip. Like other key aspects of the agreement, that influx did not go exactly as planned. Some food, fuel, medical supplies, and other resources are moving, but the flow of aid remains clogged.

The success of the Gaza cease-fire—which Trump has called perhaps “the greatest deal” of any he’s made—depends on the United States’ continued involvement. Top U.S. officials, including Vice President J. D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, have flown to Israel, trying to shore up the cease-fire. (Israeli media, The Wall Street Journal reports, have taken to calling the visits “Bibisitting.”) On the immediate agenda is “giving people some food and medicine,” Vance said during a press conference last week.

Faced with humanitarian crises in the past, the White House could lean on USAID’s experience with global aid and its expertise in postwar recovery. But since DOGE was unleashed on the U.S. government, that agency essentially no longer exists. Work on aid in Gaza was not exempt, former and current aid workers told me: The Trump administration fired people actively working on this conflict, and the State Department now must figure out, largely on the fly, how to help aid reach Gaza.

As much as the Trump administration has undermined American aid around the world, its interest in peace between Israel and Palestine shows that the U.S.