From. The New York Times, I'm Michael Babaro.
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 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 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?