Soft Power Episode 2: The Death of USAID

How the President of the United States and the planet's richest man conspired to make the world poorer, sicker, and less safe

“The great battleground for the defense and expansion of freedom today,” John F. Kennedy Jr. declared in 1961, “is the whole southern half of the globe — Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East — the lands of the rising peoples. Their revolution is the greatest in human history.

“They seek an end to injustice, tyranny, and exploitation. More than an end, they seek a beginning.”

JFK was pushing Congress to centralize its foreign aid into a single vehicle. It would come to be known as the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID. The agency, the president said, would be both cheap and essential. It would be the “single most important program available for building the frontiers of freedom.”

There is no doubt that JFK was genuine about his desire to lift the world’s poor up to a level of self-sufficiency. He wanted to promote democracy and end tyranny, at least more often than not. The American people, he said, were “fully aware of their obligations to the sick, the poor and the hungry, wherever they may live.”

More development meant less suffering, less conflict, and more customers for American goods. It was an argument that landed well with Democrats and Republicans alike.

JFK also wanted to fight communism. And, as they had just seen in deploying the Marshall Plan to Europe, cash works quite well in winning friends.

So, armed with objectives laudable, selfish, and cynical, America set out to make the world richer, safer, and healthier. And over the next 60 years, it build dams, planted trees, developed drought-resistant crops, fought corruption, pulled plastic from oceans, connected remote villages to the internet, averted roughly 300,000 malaria deaths per year, and so much more.

When a pair of researchers crunched the numbers, they came up with an estimate: 3,296,991 lives saved every year by USAID and related American programs. That’s a bit less than $19,000 per life saved — a callous calculation, but a stunning one nonetheless.

In 1996, Africa was struggling as it faced a surge of wild poliovirus cases: Some 75,000 children had been paralyzed by the virus across the continent. South African President Nelson Mandela announced a mission to “kick Polio out of Africa,” and America vowed to help. Through USAID and the Centers for Disease Control, America and the UN led one of the world’s most impressive vaccination programs. In 2020, wild polio was officially eradicated in Africa.

In 1984, a famine began in Sudan and Ethiopia — it would ultimately kill somewhere between 400,000 and one million people. Deciding that the world should never be caught off guard by mass hunger again, USAID established the Famine Early Warning Systems Network, or FEWS NET. Independent analysis has proven that this system is remarkably accurate and can help catalyze international assistance to actually lessen the impact of famine before it spirals out of control.

When the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Asia unleashed a devastating tsunami in 2004, it caused billions of dollars worth of damage on the island of Sumatra. USAID stepped in to manage some of the most needed reconstruction efforts. Along with a huge array of other agencies and NGOs, USAID contributed to what the Brookings Institution called “one of the largest reconstruction projects ever seen in the developing world” which, quite simply, worked. Not only that, “results were achieved in a remarkably short time.” It set a new standard for how disaster relief ought to work.

It is impossible to fully grasp the impact of USAID. Its 60-year history is so vast and varied, so responsible for ensuring that the worst-case scenario never comes to pass, that its defenders will never truly be able to defend it properly. Every life saved begs the question: Why not save a life at home? Every disaster averted provokes a lazy, knee-jerk take: Why is that our problem? In the deluge of lies and bullshit, defenders of this kind of hard, difficult, unrewarding work are rarely given the time, space, or grace necessary to justify it.

That’s why it’s been so easy to kill.

This episode of Soft Power is all about the lies and misinformation which have enabled Donald Trump and Elon Musk to kill USAID. I hope you’ll give it a watch — and, ideally, share it with your friends.

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As always, thanks for reading (and watching.)

My most recent Star column is about Canada’s misguided approach to cracking down on hate speech. This weekend, you can read my year-in-review of 2025, then early next week I’ll have a deep-dive into Trump’s new — terrifying — national security security strategy, his Munroe Doctrine 2.0.

Two (very different) shout-outs to round out this snappy dispatch:

One is the New Yorker’s own mini-doc on the disastrous destruction of USAID, Rovina’s Choice. It’s exactly the kind of gutsy work that too few outlets are producing right now. Give it a watch.

The other is in place of my normal musical outro: A big five-star review for the-best-thing-to-happen-to-punk-in-a-decade and fellow Substack-ers PUP, who absolutely killed their Montreal show last week. Here’s a terrible photo of lead singer Stefan Babcock in a blurry mid-crowd-surf. Check out their new album if that’s your jam.

Until next week.