From the New York Times, I'm Michael Bobarrow. 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 conjo.

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.

Music 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.

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