The Daily - The Demise of U.S.A.I.D. — and American Soft Power

Episode Date: February 11, 2025

s President Trump demolishes the government’s biggest provider of foreign aid, the United States Agency for International Development, he is ending a 60-year bipartisan consensus about the best way to keep America safe from its enemies.Michael Crowley, who covers U.S. foreign policy, and Stephanie Nolen, a global health reporter for The New York Times, discuss the rise and fall of U.S.A.I.D. — and American soft power.Guests: Michael Crowley, a reporter covering the State Department and U.S. foreign policy for The New York Times; and Stephanie Nolen, a global health reporter for The New York Times.Background reading: With his aid cutoff, President Trump has halted U.S.A.I.D.’s legacy of “acting with humanity.”The agency’s workers are braced for the worst.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Photo: Safin Hamid/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

From the New York Times, I'm Michael Bobarro. This is The Daily. The horrible USAID, the horrible things that they're spending money on, it's got to be kickbacks. As President Trump demolishes the government's biggest provider of foreign aid, the United States Agency for International Development, which he calls wasteful and misguided. It's absolutely obscene, dangerous, bad, very costly. I mean, virtually every investment made is a con job.

He's ending a 60-year bipartisan consensus about the best way to keep America safe from its enemies. Today, my colleagues State Department reporter Michael Crowley and health reporter Stephanie Noll on the rise and fall of USAID and American soft power. It's Tuesday, February 11th. Michael, as we speak to you, USAID has basically been dismantled. A judge has paused elements of that dismantling, but the writing is very much on the wall. It's a shell of itself,

so much so that its name has literally been removed from its headquarters in Washington. And I think a lot of us have the sense that this elimination of this agency is a very big deal, even if we don't entirely understand exactly how USAID worked and why the United States was doing so much of this kind of foreign aid work on this scale to begin with. So what is that backstory? Well, USAID was founded by President John F. Kennedy, who created it with an executive order in 1961.

And he did that not out of some pure sense of charity, not out of a sense that there was famine in the world and America had a responsibility to address it. The people who are opposed to aid should realize that this is a very powerful source of strength for us. It was a matter of national security. It permits us to exert influence for the maintenance of freedom. He was reacting to the Cold War competition with the Soviet Union that was underway at the time.

If we did not, we're not so heavily involved, our voice would not speak with such a bigger. And which he saw as a real threat to America's primacy and security and you know the Soviet Union was presenting itself as the champion particularly in the developing world of countries that had been under colonialism for decades or more and You know felt that they had been treated badly by the West. And as we do not want to send American troops to a great many areas where freedom may be

under attack, we send you. And Kennedy felt like America had to show that we are not exploiting the world around us. We care about its welfare. Working with the people in those countries to try to work with them in developing the economic thrust of their country so that they can make a determination

that they can solve their problems without resorting to totalitarian control and becoming part of the block. And ultimately, this is the most important part, choose us and not the Soviet Union. Right, choose democracy and capitalism, not communism. That's right. And in Kennedy's mind, the United States had a real problem.

The United States was at risk of losing this competition with the Soviet Union. Why? Well, one thing that motivated Kennedy, and it's such an interesting footnote to all of this, was a popular bestselling book at the time called The Ugly American. The Ugly American essentially told the story that American diplomats in Asia were out of touch with the places where they were working.

They didn't understand the local culture. They seemed like they had parachuted in from another world and in some cases made more enemies than friends. And this was a big problem for the United States that Americans were seen as ugly. And Kennedy actually recommended that his associates and members of Congress read this book to understand this problem. And he felt like America had to stop presenting the ugly face and had to present a more benevolent, helpful face. Fascinating. So USAID in Kennedy's mind is the antidote to the perception of the ugly American, it is the generous American, the altruistic

American who shows up strategically with humanitarian aid and makes your life, if you're overseas, skeptical of America, materially better. That's exactly right. USAID is building schools, building hospitals, providing people with clean drinking water, life-saving medicines, helping them find employment, developing local infrastructure, all kinds of things that help people in a fundamental day-to-day way have better lives in these countries. But part of what's happening as USAID does this work is you're

gaining influence, you're getting to know government officials, you're getting to know government officials, you're getting to know people in the local population. So this kind of becomes the basis of what we know as soft power, which is distinct from hard power. That's military power. Right. Soft power is influence and relationships.

And a bipartisan consensus forms around the value of soft power as an instrument of American foreign policy going forward for decades. And so Kennedy launches USAID, but year after year, presidents of both parties accept USAID as a central part of American foreign policy. I have to imagine, however, that when the US wins the Cold War by the end of the 1980s, the early 1990s, that this poses something of a challenge to USAID's purpose. It does. But at the same time, some pretty good new rationales emerge for the continuation of a robust USAID.

Why? Because after 9-11, America realized that the Soviet communist ideology that threatened us had been replaced by a new ideology. It was a terrorist ideology. It was a radical fundamentalism that was emerging from parts of the world where USAID did a lot of work. And that terrorism really flourished in countries where there was instability, weak civil society. When a state collapses entirely, that becomes a breeding ground for radicalism.

And so there was a new value placed on American aid programs in countries that could maintain stability, try to help find jobs for people who might otherwise turn to radicalism. All kinds of programs that were perceived as being part of the mission of combating worldwide terrorism. But it's also during that period that we see some of USAID's real limitations and frankly, some of the most wasteful projects that it's ever undertaken. Huh, like what? Well, there was one project in Afghanistan known as Promote that was meant to empower

women in the country, give them workplace experience. It was originally budgeted at $280 million and it was supposed to help 75,000 women get jobs, promotions, apprenticeships, internships. But an inspector general report that came out a few years ago found that only 55 women had been promoted to better jobs Wow out of 75,000 original goal that was the original goal and the inspector general essentially said the whole thing had been a complete waste so basically a nearly 300 million dollar program funded by us the taxpayer turned out to have been a boondoggle Yeah, basically down the tubes.

So look, you might cut them some slack for having been in a war zone. A lot of projects were tried by a lot of different parts of the US government in Iraq and Afghanistan that just flopped. Even granting that, USAID has maintained strong bipartisan support for years and years. And the view of both parties is that not every project is going to work perfectly. Not every dollar is going to give you an ideal return. But then at the end of the day, relative to the national budget, USAID does not spend that much money.

And actually, overall, you get a good return on your dollar, and you're getting real value for American interests. And that USAID is important to continue in support, that it's done in public health. And to understand that, I spoke with my colleague, global health reporter Stephanie Nolan. Stephanie, how big a part of USAID's budget and work is healthcare, the subject you have spent so much of your career covering? So it's roughly a third. If you think about USAID having a budget of about $40 billion, about $12.5 billion of

that was spent on healthcare. Wow. budget of about $40 billion, about $12.5 billion of that was spent on health care. Wow. So it's a really meaningful part of what this agency does around the world. Yeah, totally. And in your global travels, which are many and varied, how frequently do you encounter a U.S. AID program of one kind or another? I would have to think for a long time to think of a trip when I have not come across either US-funded research or medications or humanitarian assistance.

And one of the big ones is the HIV program, which was started at the height of, you know, if you think back 20 years to when there were almost 30 million people living with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa and no treatment and people were dying and just these extraordinary numbers. And at that point, President George W. Bush created this emergency AIDS response program and it has brought life-saving HIV medication to millions and millions of people. Today, there's about 21 million people who rely on that program for that medication. It's been responsible for getting drugs to hundreds of thousands of women with HIV who were giving birth to make sure that their babies weren't infected.

Less well known, but I would argue about as important, is something called the President's Malaria Initiative. And it does malaria control programs across the countries that have the highest burden of malaria. And they do an extraordinary range of things from helping people put the chemicals in water supply to control mosquitoes, giving out bed nets, giving out malaria treatments, supporting the research that finds new

drugs to control the parasites. They've played, I would say, like an essential role in the fact that deaths from malaria were cut in half over the last 15 years that the program was operating. So let me be dense for just a moment, deliberately so. How do those two programs, which are clearly saving hundreds of thousands in the case of the HIV program, millions of lives in places like Africa, how in the minds of USAID and the US government do those beyond the indisputable altruism

that you're describing advance American American interest, as this program has always been envisioned. I think one really basic but important thing is that it really directly touches people's lives, right? You're getting help and it's made clear to you where that help is coming from. So the medications you get, emergency supplies, tents, food aid. It all comes branded with the words, a gift of the people of the United States, right?

And it's a message from the US government saying, we are here for you in this difficult moment, in your moment of need. We are a compassionate and benevolent actor. We are good guys who care about you, We're on your team. And that's like viewed as laying a kind of cornerstone for a positive foreign policy relationship. Right. This is essentially President Kennedy's vision of USAID from the beginning, which we just talked about with Michael Crowley. This is the opposite of the imperialistic,

ugly American image that Kennedy was trying to fight. Exactly. You're taking your baby in to get TB medication, and the little counter that they're sitting your kid up on to weigh and examine them has a little American flag in the corner. This is not a nefarious actor, right? This is a country that's here to help. And then I think, you know, it's also important to recognize that this, of course, is a country that's here to help. And then I think, you know, it's also important to recognize that this, of course,

is not only about goodwill. There is economic value in a lot of this for America and American companies. So- How so? You know, as I look back over kind of 25 years of covering the response to the AIDS epidemic, keeping those people alive was the right thing to do, you know, in human terms.

It also had economic payoff, right? Like I used to go to Zambia, for example, and report when close to a third of people who would be your productive workforce, like people between the ages of about 18 and 45. A third of those people had untreated HIV. So now today, 20 years later, thanks in large part to this US-funded program, almost all of those people with HIV are on treatment, they're back to work, they don't even think about it.

And that's obviously incredibly valuable for them, for their families, but it also had an economic impact on the country, right? Like it became a much more economically stable country when it was not being crippled by HIV. And is it kind of grim to think about it in these terms? Sure.

But if you're looking for a justification for the investment of American taxpayer dollars, well, Zambia has a very busy mining sector. The U. The US has a lot of mining interests there, including agreements for electric vehicle supply chains. So I think it's pretty clear that this was the right thing to do in human terms. It also had direct economic benefit to the United States. That might sound kind of very pragmatic, but you're saying the reality is that when the United States does right by the people of Zambia by giving them HIV drugs and saving their lives, they happen to ensure the country's economic health persists in a way that way downstream benefits Americans and the American economy,

which really does feel like the ultimate win-win version of foreign aid. That's exactly right. And every year or every couple of years, a USAID partner country kind of graduates from the roles of foreign assistance and stops being a country that's getting USAID and becomes just a trading partner. Like, there is ultimately long-term economic payoff in something like helping a community get bed nets and malaria treatment in all of their rural clinics.

And you're suggesting that that journey from being dependent on foreign aid to becoming a potential US trading partner, that journey seems unimaginable if these countries can't surmount their overwhelming HIV and malaria problems to begin with, which is what the American assistance allowed them to do. I think this gets to another point, because these countries that have received all of this assistance, we imagine them

becoming global actors who are also American allies. Right. And the US is not the only country capable of providing this kind of assistance. When I go to Zambia these days, I actually see a bigger presence from China than I do the US. And so not only is the US attempting to buy some goodwill, but they're occupying space that otherwise might be taken up by other people. So it's also sort of a deliberate foreign policy play in that way.

Well, I think that brings us to the moment we're in, right? Where President Trump is inaugurated, looks at this agency, and sees a lot of problems. I mean, is he right to think that there is some real cost cutting to be done at USAID, putting aside the extent of it for just a moment? I will say that everyone I have ever spoken to who works for USAID has said that they wished that things about the organization were done differently and more efficiently and often in a way that would probably save money. I don't think I've ever met anyone who worked there who would not have said that there was room for significant improvement and lots of ways that

things could have been done better. But I don't think any of those people would have said that even badly needed reform would look like what we've seen in the last few days. Of total dismantling and in the very real sense of shutting down of USAID. Yeah, it's the complete eradication of this agency with this 60 year history in hours, basically. I mean, I feel like I watched it dissolve in real time. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. Stephanie, I want you to talk about what it has looked like for this agency to be dissolved, to use your word, and specifically what that has looked like within the healthcare programs

that you have spent all these years covering and that were designed to benefit the United States. Well, let me give you one example. I spoke to a scientist named Leila Mansour in South Africa at an HIV research project where I've spent a lot of time. She was running a clinical trial to test new ways of trying to prevent HIV. And so she had a new experimental ring. It's a vaginal ring that women would wear to prevent both pregnancy and infection with HIV.

And it's an early stage trial. So they're just testing these rings to see if they're comfortable, if they fit, that kind of thing. And this testing, it sounds like, is funded by USAID. It's funded by USAID. And so this researcher, Dr. Leila, she gets up one day and she's got this stop work order from Washington. It's an order that she do no activities using US funds.

So that's her USAID grant money that's paying for this clinical trial. So she's in fact not supposed to have any further communication with these women from the community who are now wearing this experimental ring. She's not even supposed to tell them that she's no longer allowed to take care of them. Huh. That's how thoroughly the Trump administration wants this all to just come to a halt. Yeah. So Dr. Layla told me that she couldn't accept that as a doctor, as an ethical scientist.

And she arranged with her team to bring all of these women immediately into the clinic and to have them remove the rings and collect them and make sure that everybody was okay and just try to explain to them that the US had suddenly withdrawn its funding and the trial was over. And I really wondered listening to her what that felt like for those women. This is a community that I know pretty well where literally generations of people have volunteered their bodies for science. Some of the best HIV treatments and prevention mechanisms we have have been tested on these communities. So as you can imagine, there's a real relationship of trust between

these people who volunteer and these scientists. And so I asked Dr. Leila to connect me with someone who'd been in her clinical trial. And I spoke to a young woman named Azanda Zondi. And she told me about how bizarre it was to just get this phone call that said, come in right away, tomorrow morning, we're going to take out the ring, the trial is over. And she told me how she and the other women in the trial were talking to each other saying, what do you think has happened? And of course, the explanation they've been given is kind of a non-explanation, right? Which leaves you wondering. And she said, really fearful, right? Which leaves you wondering, like, and

she said, you know, really fearful and are you being told the whole truth and what's really happening? And listening to Dr. Leyla, like, you could see how this relationship of trust that is foundational to the kind of scientific research the US has wanted to do around the world for, you know for years and years is just chattered instantly. So the speed and the manner in which the Trump administration is dismantling USAID means that this medical work in South Africa that has been intended to strengthen ties between the US and the people of South Africa is now dissolved into the situation where they are probably angry and distrustful and fearful,

this would seem to be the very opposite of the mission of USAID. You know, I think in that one relationship in South Africa, you see a kind of overnight switch from appreciation to mistrust and fear. And I think writ large, that's what I've seen really in every conversation. And I've had 30 or 40 of them a day for the past couple weeks, where people have gone from deeply, deeply valuing this relationship that has either made their work possible or kept their kids alive or kept them alive to a response that just feels extraordinarily capricious and cruel and profoundly isolating.

And so, you know, I guess the thing that really stands out for me is that you could cut the amount the U.S. spends on foreign aid. You could dramatically change the way the U.S. spends money on foreign aid. But it would be very hard to overstate the degree of damage that has been done to those relationships with individuals and with governments around the world by the events of the last few days. So, Michael, if, as Stephanie Nolan just explained very clearly, USAID's work, generally speaking, advances America's interest overseas with a full awareness of its potential for bloatedness

and wastefulness. But if it generally delivers, still, on Kennedy's vision of soft power, why, if you were Donald Trump and those around him, eliminate it? Well, Michael, Trump and the people around him have never had much interest in the use of soft power. Trump is a hard power kind of guy. He's not about winning friends and influencing people through favors, charity, sweet talk. He likes to apply muscle, pressure, threats. Some people say bullying.

So this isn't really part of his playbook. And a lot of this work is done in parts of the world about which he's spoken derisively, including Africa, where a huge amount of USAID work happens. Right. Those were the countries that famously in his first term, he referred to as shithole countries. That's right. So that's one thing. You know, another is that USAID was an easy target. Explain that. One of Trump's highest priorities, clearly, is really trying to break the bureaucracy,

trying to purge federal workers, trying to dramatically shrink the size of the American government. And, you know, Americans, generally speaking, are very skeptical of foreign aid. So I think USAID has almost become a test case or a trial run for Trump's larger plans to smash apart the existing bureaucracy, purge thousands of federal workers, and shrink the size of the federal government. What's interesting about the way you're framing this is that it's tempting to see what Trump is doing as, first and foremost, attacking, dismantling the idea of soft power.

You're saying that may be incidental to dismantling the federal bureaucracy, and that you can't really disentangle the two missions. But I'm still curious why, based on your reporting, the president wants to dismantle USAID so quickly, so haphazardly in a way that frankly pisses so many people across the world off. Well, it's a little bit of a mystery, Michael. And I think that we've seen clues to what the answer might be. Look at comments that people around Trump have made for years

suggesting that you have to attack the bureaucracy almost mercilessly. You have to smash it, knock it down and keep it down before it has a chance to get back up. To people around Trump, the bureaucracy is almost like a movie monster that keeps getting back up. You can't kill it. And I think that there's a sense that you have to deal a knockout blow quickly before the courts, members of Congress, the unions, all these other factors can come in and start

fighting back. Now that doesn't mean that USAID has no defenses. The courts are already involved. We'll see what happens. But the strategy, I think, is speed kills. The critique of this, I guess the critique of Trump's critique is that this dismantling of this particular agency, this test case, has real impacts. And the impacts are that it may cede a huge amount of ground to our rivals in the world of soft power, especially China, which has shown enormous enthusiasm for soft power. And we've done so many episodes about this. China wants to build your new highway. China wants to put solar panels on the streetlights so that they work at night in a country with

not much electricity. China wants to do almost anything it can to deepen its ties to all these countries where USAID has been doing work. That's right. It's going to create a vacuum. And the risk here is that we have circled back to the context that led President Kennedy to create USAID in the early 1960s. John F. Kennedy believed that America was in a global competition for influence with another great power and that USAID was

a way to win friends and influence people. We are now back at a time where even President Trump and his advisors say the defining national security threat for America is a global competition for power and influence with another great power. In this case, it's China. Right. And to really bring it back to Kennedy, based on everything you're saying, Michael, we're not just at this moment getting rid of USAID and the concept of soft power through Trump's actions. We are replacing it, it would seem, with what you described as Trump's approach to hard power, tariffs, and threats. And that makes me wonder if we are resuming in that

full circle way the version of American foreign policy that existed right before Kennedy created USAID. It's the ugly American approach to foreign policy, perhaps. And what is that going to mean for the US and the world? Well that's exactly the concern, Michael, and no one is really providing good answers. People in the Trump administration just kind of dismissed the idea that China or Russia are going to benefit from this. And their critics say they're taking a huge risk and we can't know how it's going to play out.

But I think you're exactly right. I think the concern is that the ugly American will make a comeback and that will work to the benefit of our adversaries around the world. Well, Michael, thank you very much. We appreciate it. Thanks for having me on. On Monday afternoon, the inspector general who oversees USAID issued a report on the impact of the Trump administration's near total shutdown of the agency's operations. Among the findings was that nearly half a billion dollars worth of emergency food assistance,

much of it supplied by U.S. farmers, is now at risk of spoiling inside ports and warehouses across the world. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. On Monday, the Trump administration told federal prosecutors to drop sweeping corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who has made repeated attempts to curry favor with the new president since his inauguration. Adams was indicted for allegedly abusing his power to obtain free travel and for accepting illegal campaign contributions. The order to drop those charges raises new questions about the independence of federal

prosecutors under Trump and whether those close to the president will be given preferential treatment by his Department of Justice. And in his latest trade maneuver, Trump has imposed 25 percent tariffs on steel and aluminum imported from every U.S. trading partner. The tariffs are likely to please domestic metalmakers, but significantly increase costs for U.S. companies that make items like cars, planes, and food packaging, and it could spark trade wars. The tariffs are likely to please domestic metalmakers, but significantly increase costs for US companies that make items like cars, planes, and food packaging, and it could spark trade wars that may bring

a variety of retaliatory tariffs against the US. Today's episode was produced by Nina Feldman and Rochelle Bonja. It was edited by Mark George, contains original music by Pat McCusker, Marian Lozano, and Diane Wong, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Mel Landfork of Wonderly. That's it for the day. I'm Michael Barbaugh. See you tomorrow.