Warning: This episode contains strong language.As 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.
Chapter 1: What is the focus of this episode on USAID and American soft power?
From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro.
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.
Chapter 2: Why is President Trump dismantling USAID?
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 Nolan, 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 it
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.
Chapter 3: How did USAID originate and what was its initial purpose?
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, were not so heavily involved... Our voice would not speak with such vigor.
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 bloc.
And ultimately, this is the most important part, choose us and not the Soviet Union.
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Chapter 4: What role did USAID play during the Cold War and after 9/11?
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. And
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 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. 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 U.S. wins the Cold War by the end of the 1980s, the early 1990s, that this poses something of a challenge to USAID's purpose.
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Chapter 5: What are some criticisms and failures of USAID projects?
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 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 U.S. 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 gonna work perfectly, not every dollar is going to give you an ideal return, but that 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 and support, that it's really good for the United States of America.
Perhaps the clearest example of how USAID exerts American soft power is through the work 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?
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Chapter 6: How significant is USAID’s impact on global health?
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. 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 USAID 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 U.S.-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 in 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. Wow. 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 malarial treatments, supporting the research that finds new drugs to control the parasites.
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Chapter 7: How do USAID’s health programs benefit American interests?
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 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 U.S.-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.S. 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. Yeah.
And you're suggesting that that journey from being dependent on foreign aid to becoming a potential U.S. 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. And the U.S. 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 U.S. And so not only is the U.S.
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