Peter and Barbie Reynolds, both in their 70s, were arrested by the Taliban in early February.

Peter and Barbie Reynolds were returning to their home in Bamiyan on 1 February when they were detained

The best way to dismantle the federal government, then repurpose it as a tool of personal power and ideological warfare, is to start with the soft targets. Entitlements and defense, which comprise more than half of federal spending and a large share of its fraud and waste, enjoy too much support for Elon Musk to roll them up easily. But nothing is less popular than sending taxpayers’ money to unknown people in poor, faraway countries that might be rife with corruption. Americans dislike foreign aid so much that they wrongly believe it consumes at least a quarter of the budget (in the previous fiscal year, aid constituted barely 1 percent). President John F. Kennedy understood the problem, and after creating the United States Agency for International Development, in 1961, he told his advisers: “We hope we can tie this whole concept of aid to the safety of the United States. That is the reason we give aid. The test is whether it will serve the United States. Aid is not a good word. Perhaps we can describe it better as ‘Mutual Assistance.’ ” At another meeting, Kennedy suggested “International Security.”

USAID continued for the next six decades because leaders of both parties believed that ending polio, preventing famine, stabilizing poor countries, strengthening democracies, and opening new markets served the United States. But on January 20, within hours of his inauguration, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that froze foreign aid. USAID was instructed to stop nearly all work. Its Washington headquarters was occupied and sensitive data were seized by whiz kids from Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. One of their elder members, a 25-year-old software engineer and Matt Gaetz fan named Gavin Kliger, acquired an official email address to instruct the staff of USAID to stay home.

Contractors were fired and employees were placed on indefinite leave; those on overseas missions were given 30 days to return to the States with their families. Under orders to remain silent, they used pseudo­nyms on encrypted chats to inform the outside world of what was going on. When I spoke on Signal with government employees, they sounded as if they were in Moscow or Tehran. “It felt like it went very authoritarian very quickly,” one civil servant told me. “You have to watch everything you say and do in a way that is gross.”

The website usaid.gov vanished, then reappeared with a bare-bones announcement of the organization’s dismemberment, followed by the message “Thank you for your service.” A veteran USAID official called it “brutal—­from some 20-year-old idiot who doesn’t know anything. What the fuck do you know about my service?” A curtain fell over the public information that could have served to challenge the outpouring of lies and distortions from the White House and from Musk, who called USAID “a criminal organization” and “evil.” If you looked into the charges, nearly all turned out to be outright falsehoods, highly misleading, or isolated examples of the kind of stupid, wasteful programs that exist in any organization.

A grant for hundreds of ethnic-minority students from Myanmar to attend universities throughout Southeast Asia became a propaganda tool in the hands of the wrecking crew because it went under the name “Diversity and Inclusion Scholar­ship Program”—as if the money were going to a “woke” bureaucracy, not to Rohingya refugees from the military regime’s genocide. The orthodoxy of a previous administration required the terminology; the orthodoxy of the new one has ended the students’ education and forced them to return to the country that oppressed them. One of Trump’s executive orders is called “Defending Women Against Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government”; meanwhile, the administration suspended the online education of nearly 1,000 women in Afghanistan who had been studying undetected by the Taliban with funding from the State Department.

But hardly anyone in this country knows these things. Contesting Musk’s algorithmically boosted lies on X with the tools of a reporter is like fighting a wildfire with a garden hose.

With no workforce or funding, USAID’s efforts around the world—vaccine campaigns in Nepal, HIV-drug distribution in Nigeria, nutrition for starving children in Sudanese refugee camps—were forced to end. Secretary of State Marco Rubio (who championed USAID as a senator and now, as the agency’s acting head, is its executioner) issued a waiver for lifesaving programs. But it proved almost meaningless, because the people needed to run the programs were locked out of their computers, had no way to communicate, and feared punishment if they kept working.

The heedlessness of the aid wreckers recalls Nick Carraway’s description in The Great Gatsby of Tom and Daisy Buchanan: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” An agency of 10,000 employees is shrinking to about 300 and, despite its statutory independence, being dissolved into the State Department. The veteran USAID official I spoke with foresaw a skeletal operation reduced to health and food assistance, with everything else—education, the environment, governance, economic development—gone. But even basic humanitarian programs will be nearly impossible to sustain with the numbers that the administration envisions—for example, 12 staff members for all of Africa.

“This is the infrastructure and architecture that has given us a doubling of the human lifespan,” Atul Gawande, the writer and surgeon who was the most recent, and perhaps last, head of the agency’s Bureau for Global Health, told me. “Taking it down kills people.”

Trump and Musk’s destruction of USAID was a trial blitzkrieg: Send tanks and bombers into defenseless Poland to see what works before turning on the Western powers. The assault provided a model for eviscerating the rest of the federal bureaucracy. It also demonstrated the radicalism of Trump’s view of America’s role in the world.

Every president from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Barack Obama understood that American power was enhanced, not threatened, by attaching it to alliances, institutions, and values that the American people support, such as freedom, pluralism, and humanitarianism. This was the common idea behind Harry Truman’s Marshall Plan for postwar Europe, Kennedy’s establishment of USAID, Jimmy Carter’s creation of the U.S. refugee program, and George W. Bush’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. These weren’t simple acts of generosity. They were designed to prevent chaos and misery from overwhelming other countries and, eventually, harming our own. They expanded American influence by attraction rather than coercion, showing people around the world that the Leviathan could benefit them, too. Political scientists call this “soft power.”

Every president betrayed these ideas in one way or another, making U.S. foreign policy a fat target for criticism at home and abroad, by the left and the right. Kennedy used foreign aid to wage a bloody counterinsurgency in South Vietnam; Carter put human rights at the center of his policy and then toasted the repressive shah of Iran; Bush, claiming to be spreading democracy to the Middle East, seriously damaged America’s global legitimacy. USAID antagonized host governments and local populations with its arrogance and bloat. “We had a hand in our own destruction,” one longtime official told me. “We threw money in areas we didn’t need to.”

But the alternative to the hypocrisies of soft power and the postwar liberal order was never going to be a chastened, humbler American foreign policy—­neither the left’s fantasy of a plus-size Norway nor the right’s of a return to the isolationist 1920s. The U.S. is far too big, strong, and messianic for voluntary diminish­ment. The choice for this superpower is between enlightened self-­interest, with all its blind spots and failures, and raw coercion.

Trump is showing what raw coercion looks like. Rather than negotiate with Canada and Mexico, impose U.S. demands with tariffs; rather than strengthen NATO, undermine it and threaten a conflict with one of its smallest, most benign member countries; rather than review aid programs for their efficacy, shut them down, slander the people who make them work, and shrug at the humanitarian catastrophe that follows. The deeper reason for the extinction event at USAID is Trump’s contempt for anything that looks like cooperation between the strong and the weak. “America First” is more imperialist than isolationist, which is why William McKinley, not George Washington or John Quincy Adams, is Donald Trump’s new presidential hero. He’s using a techno-futurist billionaire to return America to the late 19th century, when the civil service was a patronage network and great-power doctrine held that “might makes right.” He’s ridding himself and the country of restraining codes—the rule of law at home, the rules-based order abroad—and replacing them with a simple test: “What’s in it for me?” He’s unilaterally disarming America of its soft power, making the United States no different from China, Russia, or Iran. This is why the gutting of USAID has received propaganda assistance and glowing reviews from Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran.

Transactional logic has an obvious appeal. Dispensing with the annoying niceties of multilateral partnerships and foreign aid brings a kind of clarity to international relations, showing where the real muscle is, like a strip-down before a wrestling match. Set loose, the U.S. might be strong enough to work its will on weaker friends and neighbors, or at least claim to do so. Trump’s threat of tariffs to intimidate Colombia into allowing deportation flights to land there was like the assault on USAID—an easy demonstration project. His domination of the propaganda sphere allows him to convince the public of victories even where, as with Canada, there was never much of a dispute to begin with. If NATO dissolved while the U.S. grabbed Greenland, many Americans would regard it as a net win: We’d save money and gain a strategic chunk of the North Atlantic while freeing ourselves of an obligation whose benefit to us wasn’t entirely clear.

It isn’t obvious why funding the education of oppressed Burmese students serves our national interest. It’s easier to see the advantages of strong-­arming weak countries into giving in to our demands. If this creates resentment, well, who said gratitude mattered between nations? Strength has its own attractive force. A sizable cohort of Americans have made their peace with Trump, not because he tempered his cruelty and checked his abuses but because he is at the height of his power and is using it without restraint. This is called power worship. The Russian invasion of Ukraine won Vladimir Putin a certain admiration in countries of the global South, as well as among MAGA Americans, while Joe Biden’s appeals to democratic values seemed pallid and hypocritical. The law of “might makes right” is the political norm in most countries. Trump needs no explaining in Nigeria or India.

Coercion also depends on the American people’s shortsightedness and incuriosity. Trump’s flood of executive orders and Musk’s assault on the federal government are intended to create such chaos that not even the insiders most affected understand what’s happening. An inattentive public might simply see a Washington melee—the disrupters against the bureaucrats. Short of going to war, if the U.S. starts behaving like the great powers of earlier centuries and the rival powers of our own, how many Americans will notice a difference in their own lives?

According to Rubio, the purpose of the aid pause is to weed out programs that don’t advance “core national interests.” Gawande compared the process to stopping a plane in midair and firing the crew in order to conduct a review of the airline industry. But the light of the bonfire burning in Washington makes it easier to see how soft power actually works—how most aid programs do serve the national interest. Shutting down African health programs makes monitoring the recent outbreak of Ebola in Uganda, and preventing its spread from that region to the rest of the world, nearly impossible. In many countries, the end of aid opens the door wider to predatory Chinese loans and propaganda. As one USAID official explained: “My job literally was countering China, providing develop­ment assistance in a much nicer, kinder, partnership way to local people who were being pressured and had their arms twisted.” When 70 Afghan students in central Asia, mostly women, had their scholarships to American universities suddenly suspended and in some cases their plane tickets canceled, the values of freedom and open inquiry lost a bit of their attractiveness. The American college administrator responsible for the students told me, “Young people who are sympathetic to the United States and share our best values are not only not being welcomed; they’re having the door slammed in their faces.”

Most Americans don’t want to believe that their government is taking life­saving medicine away from sick people in Africa, or betraying Afghans who sacrificed for this country. They might disapprove of foreign aid, but they want starving children to be fed. This native generosity explains why Trump and Musk have gone to such lengths to clog the internet with falsehoods and hide the consequences of their cruelty. The only obstacle to ending American soft power isn’t Congress, the bureaucracy, or the courts, but public opinion.

One of the country’s most popular programs is the resettlement of refugees. For decades, ordinary American citizens have welcomed the world’s most persecuted and desperate people—European Jews after World War II, Vietnamese after the fall of Saigon, Afghans after the fall of Kabul. Refugees are in a separate category from most immigrants: After years of waiting and vetting by U.S. and international agencies, they come here legally, with local sponsors. But Trump and his adviser Stephen Miller see them as no different from migrants crossing the southern border. The flurry of executive orders and memos has halted the processing of all refugees and ended funding for resettlement. The story has received little attention.

Here’s what the program’s shutdown means: I spoke with an Afghan special-forces captain who served alongside Americans—­when Kabul was about to fall in 2021, he prevented armed Taliban at the airport from seizing U.S. weaponry, but he was left behind during the evacuation. Arrested by the new regime, the captain was imprisoned for seven months and suffered regular and severe torture, including the amputation of a testicle. He managed to escape with his family to Pakistan in 2023 and was near the end of being processed as a refugee when Trump took office. He had heard Trump criticize the Biden administration for leaving military equipment behind in Afghanistan. Because he had worked to prevent that from happening, he told me, “that gave me a hope that the new administration would value my work and look at me as a valuable person, a person who is aligned with all the administration is hoping to achieve, and that would give a chance for my kids and family to be moved out safely.” Biden’s ineptitude stranded the captain once; Trump’s coldheartedness is doing it again.

A sense of loyalty and compassion isn’t extraneous to American identity; it is at the core of national pride, and its betrayal exacts a cost that can’t be easily measured. The Biden administration created a program called Welcome Corps that allows ordinary Americans to act as resettlement agencies. (My wife and I participated in it.) In Pennsylvania, a retiree named Chuck Pugh formed a sponsor group to bring an Afghan family here, and the final medical exam was completed just before Inauguration Day. When resettlement was abruptly ended, Pugh found himself wondering, Who are we? I know what I want to think, but I’m just not sure. The sponsor group includes Pugh’s sister, Virginia Mirra. She and her husband are devout Christians and ardent Trump supporters. When I asked her early this month how she felt about the suspension of the refugee program, she sounded surprised, and disappointed—she hadn’t heard the news. “I feel sad about that,” she said. “It does bother me. It’s starting to sink in. With these people in danger, I would wonder if there would be an exception made for them. How would we go about that?” Her husband frequently sends American-flag lapel pins to Trump, and I suggested that he write the president about the Afghan family. “I will talk to my husband tonight,” Mirra said. “And I will continue to pray that the Lord will protect them and bring them to this country by some means. I do believe in miracles.”

This article appears in the April 2025 print edition with the headline “The Era of Might Makes Right.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Delegation says Taliban seeks 'dignified' global interaction as it builds 'strong' and 'developed' Afghanistan.

Police say Taliban security personnel were among those killed in the as-yet unclaimed attack.

Project 2025, the conservative governing playbook produced by veterans of the first Trump administration, has an entire chapter on how to overhaul USAID. Its authors urged the next president to “scale back USAID’s global footprint,” “deradicalize” its programs, and throttle its funding.

Before the election, Donald Trump disavowed Project 2025 because it veered so far to the right. But now he’s making the plan look downright timid. Project 2025 did not call for freezing all foreign aid or locking USAID employees out of their headquarters. Nor did the treatise suggest shutting down the $40 billion agency and subsuming it into the State Department—all without a single vote in Congress.

As the chair of Trump’s quasi-official Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk has razed USAID with shocking speed. He’s called it “evil,” “a radical-left political psy op,” and “a criminal organization.” The rampage seemed to come out of nowhere, but the 64-year-old agency has long been one of the government’s most vulnerable conservative targets.

[Read: Why Trump can’t banish the weirdos]

Although foreign aid accounts for less than 1 percent of the federal budget, right-wing politicians began attacking it well before Trump. In the 1990s, the late Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina likened the disbursement of American money abroad to shoving taxpayer dollars “down a rathole.” Conservatives have even tried to abolish USAID—most notably Helms in the late ’90s and early 2000s. But the scope of those attempts pales in comparison to what Trump and Musk are doing now, George Ingram, a former USAID official in the Clinton administration, told me. “This,” he said, “is fundamentally different.”

At Musk’s urging, the Trump administration has placed nearly all USAID employees on administrative leave and recalled thousands from overseas postings with virtually no notice. (At the same time, the president declared that the U.S. would “take over” the Gaza Strip—a mission that would presumably require a sizable American deployment.) Trump designated Secretary of State Marco Rubio as USAID’s acting administrator. In one of his first moves, Rubio wrote to senior members of Congress—not to ask for their help in reforming the agency but merely to notify them that the government might reorganize it.

“It’s ridiculous,” Andrew Natsios, a former USAID administrator, told me. He ran the organization for the first five years of the George W. Bush administration and describes himself as “the most conservative administrator in the history of the agency.” Natsios has his share of problems with USAID, including his sense that its staff is often unresponsive to political leadership, a critique that Project 2025 echoes. But Natsios, who’s now a professor at Texas A&M University, is aghast at the Trump administration’s purge of USAID. (He began our conversation by comparing it to the Russian Revolution.) For days, he’s been fielding calls from panicked contacts at the agency. “They are not reviewing each project,” he said. “They’re eliminating entire bureaus, whole programs, simply deleting them without even looking at what they’re doing.”

USAID was created in 1961 to consolidate programs that had grown out of the Marshall Plan, said Ingram, who is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Congress considered putting USAID in the State Department but kept it separate so that it could operate more nimbly—like a business, Ingram told me, rather than a bureaucracy.

Presidents of both parties have supported foreign aid, including Ronald Reagan and the second Bush, who weren’t enthusiastic about it as candidates. “Once they got into office, they saw that it was a very important tool of U.S. foreign policy,” Ingram said. Even one of the Project 2025 authors acknowledged that foreign aid has helped America check global adversaries; a former USAID deputy administrator, Max Primorac, credited the agency with countering China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Indeed, authoritarian regimes have long denounced American aid, and now some of them are praising Musk’s efforts. Musk himself promoted a laudatory post on X from a top aide to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. With that adulation in mind, Natsios questioned whether Musk’s campaign against USAID might be “motivated by his desire to please the Kremlin.”

[Read: America can’t just unpause USAID]

Sending taxpayer funds abroad has never been particularly popular, a reality that Trump seized on during his first term by attacking foreign aid as part of his “America First” agenda. In 2017, administration officials reportedly drafted proposals to merge USAID with the State Department, but they never went anywhere. Polling has found that Americans dramatically overestimate the amount of money the government spends on foreign aid, and in a survey released this week, most respondents backed cuts to foreign aid. Natsios faulted the Biden administration for making USAID an even more inviting target for Trump 2.0 by trying to export progressive values such as LGBTQ and abortion rights, especially to countries where they are unpopular. “They brought part of this on,” he said.

By and large, Republican lawmakers have simply watched as Musk and his allies shut down an agency that, according to a paper published on Monday by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, cannot be abolished, moved, or consolidated without authorization from Congress. A few have issued mild protests. Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana criticized the pause on distributing HIV/AIDS drugs through the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, a George W. Bush–era program that enjoys wide bipartisan support domestically and internationally. “It is a Republican initiative, it is pro-life, pro-America and the most popular U.S. program in Africa,” Cassidy wrote on X. “This must be reversed immediately!!”

Representative Michael McCaul of Texas, who until last month served as chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said the Trump administration was “right to scrutinize and revamp” USAID, but he strongly defended its purpose and urged the president to eventually resume sending aid abroad. “U.S. foreign-assistance programs not only feed starving women and children in some of the most destitute parts of the world, but they also promote democracy, help stabilize fragile nations on the brink of collapse, and counter our adversaries’ attempts to shift the global balance of power,” McCaul told me.

By contrast, McCaul’s successor atop the committee, Representative Brian Mast of Florida, cheered the administration unreservedly and released a four-minute video “exposing radical, far-left grants” supposedly issued during the Biden administration. His list included $15 million for “condoms for the Taliban,” money to expand “atheism in Nepal,” and various line items promoting LGBTQ rights. (The contraceptives were for Afghan citizens, not members of the Taliban; the Nepal grant promoted religious freedom.)

When I asked Natsios, a lifelong Republican, what he made of the response from GOP lawmakers, he scoffed: “The Republican Party in Congress is a disgrace.”

[Listen: Purge now, pay later]

Advocates for USAID now have little choice but to place their hopes in Rubio, who as a senator defended foreign assistance as “critical to our national security.” In his new role, however, he has characterized USAID as a rogue agency whose leaders misspent taxpayer money and refused to cooperate with Trump’s directives during his first few days in office. “There are a lot of functions of USAID that are going to continue,” Rubio told reporters in El Salvador on Monday. “But it has to be aligned with American foreign policy.”

Natsios used to enthusiastically support Rubio. He told me that he once saw Rubio give “the strongest speech for foreign aid” he had ever heard. He contributed to Rubio’s presidential campaign in 2016—when Rubio was a GOP rival to Trump—and said the then-senator had told him that, had he won, he would have brought him into the White House. Now, Natsios told me, Rubio has a choice to make: “He is going to accept the ideology” of Trump and Musk, “or he is going to get fired.”

While Rubio and other Republicans decide whether, and how much, to fight for U.S. foreign aid, the ripple effects of the firings and funding freeze at USAID are quickly growing. Many policy decisions in Washington take weeks or even months to be felt overseas. Not this one, Ingram said. The moves threaten the jobs of thousands of people connected to the aid industry inside the U.S., and they jeopardize the livelihood of potentially hundreds of thousands of people—or more—in the developing world, who rely on USAID for health care, food, fertilizer, and other crucial supplies. Ingram was stunned: “I have never seen a government action have such an immediate impact.”