萨曼莎·鲍尔：美国国际开发署被毁是软实力自杀

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It's been almost a year since USAID, the United States Agency for International Development, was dismantled. The Trump administration shuttered it on July 1st, 2025.

This was Elon Musk and Doge and a handful of tech bros in a kind of fever dream building on the shock and awe of those early days of the Trump administration more generally, but basically putting a knife through butter and then realizing that they could just go and go and go without Republicans or the president stopping [music] them.

Samantha Power led USAID until President Trump started his second term, and she's the last person the US Senate confirmed to that job. Power was a journalist. She's a Pulitzer Prize-winning author who became an advisor to Barack Obama in the Senate and the White House. During Obama's [music] presidency, Power served as the US's permanent representative to the UN. She was President [music] Biden's pick to be USAID's 19th administrator.

Ahead of the anniversary of the agency's end, I wanted to hear Power's perspective on the legacy of that agency and the costs of the Trump administration's cuts to foreign aid, her reflections on the way she wielded power when she had it, and her thoughts on how the Trump administration is changing the US's standing in the world.

I mean, even if this administration had wanted to absorb [music] USAID in the State Department or significantly reduce or even end foreign assistance, there's a way to do it on a glide path, in a way that takes account the human consequences. They did it in the way most designed to obliterate soft power, human capital, human trust.

I'm David Garratt, and this is The Big from Bloomberg News. [music] Today on the show, Ambassador Samantha Power. We're a year away from the dissolution, the end of USAID. You've called it the ravaging of USAID. And I'd like to start just by asking you to help us take stock of of this moment and explain what's been lost uh over the course of the last year.

Well, the predictions are that 14 million lives will be lost by 2030, and we're already seeing expansions in hunger and severe malnutrition, a large number of deaths, kids who just a year and a half ago would be able to have reliable access to a mosquito bed net now at risk of dying of a mosquito bite. No kid in 2026 on this earth should die from a mosquito bite when it is so preventable. So, the death toll is growing.

We see with Ebola our rapid response capacity eviscerated. Uh there are still individuals who call themselves, people who work on Ebola, but they are too few, they are too dispersed, and many of them lack the expertise that was exported when the USAID staff was terminated so abruptly. The unseen costs are equally dramatic, and that ranges from girls who are no longer getting an education because USAID was either helping support a school to do that or leveraging its other programming in health or clean energy or agriculture to push a government to move in that direction.

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So, the soft power suicide for the United States, I think, is pretty obvious when you pull the rug out from programming of this nature with no warning, with no regard for the human consequences of those actions. It's all system failure and all system attack, and there's not one part of human development that has been untouched by this blunder.

I was going to ask you who this has affected and is likely to affect going forward. It sounds like children are going to pay a huge cost for this.

Yeah, the 14 million prediction from the Lancet and a peer-reviewed study that are anticipated to die preventable deaths by 2030, 4.5 million of those are likely to be children under five. And maybe one way to really bring this home is that over the last decades every year we have seen child mortality drop every single year. And 2025, the year that USAID was dismantled, is the first year in decades where we have seen deaths of children under five increase.

What has this last year been like for you? I imagine you've had a lot of conversations with now former colleagues at USAID. Um what have those folks said to you and what have their lives been like in light of this happening?

Well, thank you for asking about them. Um it is 15,000 people who were directly employed in some fashion by USAID all around the world. About two-thirds of the places they worked were crisis zones. So, places that had suffered coups or conflicts or natural disasters. And they didn't care. They worked in those places because they saw that America's fate was connected to the fates of those communities in which they worked.

They put their lives on the line and they were spit upon by their own government. They were literally in many cases physically escorted out of the USAID headquarters if they were in Washington by security guards. That can't happen. If if that were men and women wearing our country's uniform, uh military uniform, there would have been a complete uproar. The fact that they were wearing USAID, US Agency for International Development, with the agency mantra from the American people, somehow that meant that that uproar didn't occur.

And they were denigrated and lied about, described as radical left lunatics when what they've been doing is the nation's bidding with bipartisan support for decades.

How much surprise do you have the Republicans who I assume you knew before through your work two White Houses and here as an academician um have behaved in in this way? Has it surprised you? Have you talked to any of them about their decision to to back this?

Well, initially in the early days, I had very productive, I thought, back channel um you know, text message exchanges and phone calls with Republicans who were the biggest champions of USAID's work. And where they would reach out to me and say, "Okay, they're they're they're saying this, you know, there's this claim that USAID spent this amount on this crazy program, you know, provide me with the facts." And we had these crack teams that had come together and were turning around the facts as best we could.

So, people were, you know, reaching out by text message all around the world to try to get information that could be used and that was fact-checked. I will say within a couple weeks when it began to seem like more of a fait accompli, my text messages began to go unreturned. And that was crushing.

I want to ask you more broadly about soft power which this country has practiced for a very long time. Is this a country today that still practices soft power? How much of that has been kind of neutered by what's happened over the last year and a half?

Well, as the former administrator of USAID, of course, I'm focused on what I described earlier as the soft power suicide associated with terminating life-saving programs and life betterment programs overnight. I mean, even if this administration had wanted to absorb USAID in the State Department or significantly reduce or even end foreign assistance, there's a way to do it on a glide path in a way that takes account the human consequences.

They did it in the way most designed to obliterate soft power, human capital, human trust, and I should say parenthetically, they did it in a manner that they've just announced is going to cost them $19 billion wasted American taxpayer just because of cancellation fees, uh termination, severance. Basically, talk about waste, fraud, and abuse. $19 billion in taxpayer money that could have been used to save lives being used because of the abrupt termination.

But, your question isn't really just about assistance, it's about soft power, and I think it is important to put even these dramatic cuts and these huge blows to America's standing in the broader context of threatening to invade Greenland, um killing fishermen without much evidence being brought forward about who those fishermen are, being seen to act with complete impunit

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