‘Soft Power Suicide’: Samantha Power on One Year Without USAID

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio, News.

**David Gura** (0:09)
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

**Samantha Power** (0:19)
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 them.

**David Gura** (0:44)
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 presidency, Power served as the US's permanent representative to the UN. She was President 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.

**Samantha Power** (1:26)
I mean, even if this administration had wanted to absorb USAID and 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.

**David Gura** (1:55)
I'm David Gura, and this is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. 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 this moment and explain what's been lost over the course of the last year.

**Samantha Power** (2:17)
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. 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 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. 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.

**David Gura** (3:57)
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.

**Samantha Power** (4:03)
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. 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.

**David Gura** (4:38)
What has this last year been like for you? I imagine you've had a lot of conversations with now former colleagues at USAID. What have those folks said to you and what have their lives been like in light of this happening?

**Samantha Power** (4:49)
Well, thank you for asking about them.
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.