Trump’s Iran Food Deal Could Easily Become Another Oil-for-Food Scandal

Sam Vigersky served as the lead U.S. humanitarian negotiator at the United Nations from 2019 to 2024.

While U.S. and Iranian negotiators circle the thorniest issues in Switzerland—Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile, Tehran’s regional proxies, and long-term access through the Strait of Hormuz—the Trump administration has quietly seized on something it sees as win-win: releasing frozen Iranian money to buy American food under a humanitarian relief framing.

The emerging proposal speaks to a broader Trump administration mindset about humanitarian aid. The White House’s view is that relief should do more than answer urgent need; it should also advance U.S. strategic and domestic priorities.

Perhaps that is why the Trump administration is now considering the revival of a Biden-era framework that would unlock $6 billion in frozen Iranian funds for the procurement of humanitarian goods, according to the Wall Street Journal. This time, however, the Trump administration has added a new condition: Iran’s funds can only be used to purchase U.S.-origin humanitarian goods. As one U.S. diplomat described this exchange, “Iranians get humanitarian goods for their people, and the Iranian money is used to support American farmers.”

The original framework, agreed to in 2023, allowed frozen Iranian oil proceeds held in South Korea to be transferred to Qatar, and included the release of five American prisoners. But after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, Iran never gained access to the money.

This new arrangement, proposed by the Trump administration, carries real risks for U.S. credibility abroad and Iranian civilians at home. Any assumption that this regime can be trusted to impartially distribute aid can be checked against its extensive record of human rights abuses, including the killing of an estimated twenty thousand civilians during January 2026 protests. U.S.-provided humanitarian goods could easily become another instrument of regime control by withholding the aid from communities deemed disloyal and directing it toward those seen as politically useful.

The possibility of fraud is just as serious. The Iraq Oil-for-Food program illustrates how good intentions can be easily corrupted by a brutal regime. The UN Security Council-mandated instrument, which ran from 1996 to 2003, allowed Saddam Hussein to sell Iraqi oil in exchange for humanitarian goods. Over seven years, Hussein exploited the program to extract $1.8 billion in kickbacks, according to a 2005 UN report. If Iran were able to resell or divert U.S.-provided commodities to rearm its military—or its proxies, including Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis—the consequences would be disastrous.

Then there is the question of Trump’s motivation for this transaction. The administration has been explicit about prioritizing American farmers, reflecting a broader shift in how it approaches humanitarian aid. In the past, purchasing domestic commodities was a means to an end, a way of delivering relief. Today, the purchase itself is the objective.

Indeed, Food for Peace—the former U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) program that sent U.S.-grown food abroad during crises—now sits at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, despite the agency’s negligible expertise managing complex humanitarian operations. Of course, that may not matter: its new goal, according to a Devex report, is not really disaster relief, but to create markets for U.S. farmers through tariff reductions and increased commodity sales in targeted countries. Seen through that lens, the Iran food-for-funds swap looks less like a humanitarian gesture and more like market engineering under diplomatic cover.

It’s also unclear whether this proposal will help negotiations overall. Iran seems eager to use the Trump administration’s proposal to score political points in its ongoing information war with the United States. Mohammad Ghalibaf, the speaker of the Iranian parliament who has led his country’s negotiations with the United States, called the U.S. assertion that Iranian assets would be used to buy American agricultural goods false. “The only crop we’re harvesting is what you planted: decades of mistrust,” he wrote on social media. “It’s organic, abundant, and homegrown.” Whether that is Iranian bluster remains to be seen.  

To be clear, any opportunity to get aid into Iran after months of war should be urgently pursued. A bilateral transfer to Tehran is undeniably fast, whereas tapping the United Nations as a third-party manager might take months, denying President Donald Trump a quick win and confidence-building measure that he seems determined to secure. But if the administration is serious about safely delivering humanitarian aid to civilians, it should resist the risky bilateral route and build critical safeguards into the deal.

Trump’s first step should be tapping U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz to build support in New York for a new UN Trust Fund for Iran. Managed by the UN Development Program, this fund could draw on the Biden administration’s framework for unlocking billions in frozen Venezuelan assets. Under that model, sanctioned funds were to be released for humanitarian activities, placed in a UN trust, and drawn down by UN agencies and NGOs, preventing the Maduro regime from interfering and using the money for their own purposes.

Next, the United States should condition any release of funds on expanded access for UN agencies and NGOs inside Iran. Independent humanitarian actors must be able to oversee distribution and verify that aid reaches civilians based on need, not political loyalty.

Finally, the UN General Assembly should pass a resolution requiring periodic reporting on the humanitarian situation in Iran, including ongoing needs; progress toward drawing down on unfrozen funds; safeguards for waste, fraud, and abuse; and next steps to catalyze early recovery.

The instinct to leverage humanitarian aid as statecraft dates back to the Eisenhower administration. But without independent oversight and professional aid workers, the beneficiary of this deal may not be Iranian civilians enduring months of war, but rather the regime that has spent decades brutalizing them.

This work represents the views and opinions solely of the author. The Council on Foreign Relations is an independent, nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher, and takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.