JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Let me go to something that actually is happening, which is that USAID, the United States Aid, International Aid Agency, 10,000 employees, $40 billion distributed every year, basically shut down by Elon Musk, who is not, as I noted at the top of the show, elected, confirmed by the Senate.

It's just a guy who's been given the keys apparently.

So, USAID is the foremost expression of American soft power in the world.

Here's what Musk tweeted.

I thought this was remarkable when you're talking about people's jobs and lives.

We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.

Could gone, could have gone to some great parties, did that instead.

I mean, you know, put aside the 10,000 people who work there.

This is an organization that distributes food aid and medical aid in the billions.

What does this all mean, Eugene?

Untrammeled power?

EUGENE DANIELS: Essentially, right?

You know, I was at the press conference today with the Japanese prime minister and Trump and he was asked about DOGE, he was asked about Elon Musk.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: DOGE being the Department of Government Efficiency.

EUGENE DANIELS: It's not a government agency, but it is some kind of group that is getting the keys to the kingdom to go around and see these different agencies kind of rifle through things and seemingly do whatever they want.

And the question was to him, to President Trump, is there anything that you're telling Elon Musk not to do?

Is there a line that you're telling him not to cross, something to for him to not go into?

He basically said, no.

He said, you know, I'm telling him to go.

You know, we are he said a government and we should be open and all of those things should happen.

And when it comes to intel, maybe he said, I will get into it.

But other than that, he is allowing a long leash for Elon Musk and all of the seemingly young people who are working for him to be able to do that.

That is something that is extremely abnormal and I think a lot of people in this country never thought would happen, even when Trump talked about DOGE.

And it's another one of those things, the conversation started and now it's actually happening.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: It started as a joke, right.

Yes, when the first -- when it was like, oh, a crypto joke, basically.

MICHAEL SCHERER: I mean, I think that tweet points to, this is a lot of theater, and this is round one.

I mean, there was a judge today who put a temporary stop on the elimination of USAID.

He's going to have hearings early next week.

We don't know where the courts are going to come in.

We know right now Republicans have their tail between their legs up on the Hill, but that doesn't mean that when appropriations come down in a few months, a lot of these programs are very popular.

Like there are coalitions in Congress for these programs.

And then on top of that, there's the bigger question, which is hanging over all of this, which is what is the constitutional power of a president to not spend money that Congress appropriates.

This is appropriated money.

This is a -- Congress created this organization.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Congress makes laws and appropriates money.

MICHAEL SCHERER: And the Trump administration has a legal theory that the president can just not spend whatever he doesn't want to spend regardless of what Congress does.

Now, that's not what the law says.

There's a law from 1974, the Empowerment Act.

That's going to go to the Supreme Court.

So, we don't know where any of this is going at this point.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

MICHAEL SCHERER: But we do know there's a lot of strumming -- you know, like there are a lot of fireworks.

And Musk is out there.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Yes.

Before we continue on USAID and the consequences of this, I just want you to listen to Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii, who said, had this to say about USAID.

SEN. BRIAN SCHATZ (D-HI): What I can tell you is that money is not flowing.

I can tell you that medicine is not being delivered.

I can tell you that there is medicine on the dock that was abandoned and spoiled.

All of those programs are either completely shut down or hobbled to the point where people can't deliver aid.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: So, let's talk about this, Anne.

What does USAID do?

And then I have a second question for you, which is what does it do specifically in the Ukraine context?

ANNE APPLEBAUM: So, to be clear, if USAID is destroyed, if it's not blocked by the courts, USAID is about 40 percent of all the humanitarian aid given in the world.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: By all countries?

ANNE APPLEBAUM: By all countries.

Also USAID has the thought leadership the technical ability to run aid programs at a large scale that nobody else has.

So, removing USAID means probably the collapse of food aid programs across Africa, probably the collapse of aid to help refugees.

USAID runs vaccination programs for children all over the world.

You know, it will mean children will not get polio vaccines.

I mean, there are literally -- I spoke to a former USAID senior leader this afternoon, who said to me, you know, there are children who get special malnutrition feedings, so children who are dying of starvation, who get packages of food every day given to them by USAID.

If this is cut off, all of those children will die.

So, this is a very, very serious change.

It will have a huge impact.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: And what does it mean specifically in the Ukraine context?

ANNE APPLEBAUM: So Ukraine is a country that's at war, and USAID plays a huge role in Ukraine also in ways that people probably don't know.

So, for example, it has a role in restarting the Ukrainian energy grid.

You know, it has a role in helping Ukrainian farmers get back to work.

I mean, it provides seed and technology and so on.

So, USAID thinks not only in terms - - it's not just humanitarian aid, it also thinks more broadly about economics.

Ukraine plays a big role in world food production.

They want Ukrainian farmers to be back working.

USAID also gives a lot of money through small grassroots organizations.

That was a big change that was made there over the last few years.

So, there are a lot of small groups, small charities who survived partly thanks to USAID, not just in Ukraine, but all over the world.

So, this is going to be a devastating blow for tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people.

ASMA KHALID: There's something I think just very strange in this moment of seeing the world's richest man really sort of take a hatchet that will essentially take people who are already in the depths of poverty and, you know, increase starvation rates or increase hunger rates, which is likely what will happen if USAID is entirely cut off.

I think that the other point that I heard, I was talking to some folks at USAID this week, and one thing I heard from I guess you would call them a maybe former staffer in this moment, considering so much of them have been like, oh, exactly.

But this person said to me, you know, we realize that foreign aid is not something that a lot of people, maybe in the United States, pay a lot of attention to.

It is not really high on the bucket list of many Americans' priorities.

But they said what they are worried about is that this is a test case for how Trump views overall his presidential power.

And that what is happening at USAID will not be isolated.

And it could potentially be a test case for how he could engage his power in other agencies and institutions.

ANNE APPLEBAUM: You know, it's a test case for two things.

You're exactly right.

It's a test case for can agencies just be abolished with no without Congress having any say, but it's also a test case of cruelty.

You know, are Americans willing to accept a high level of cruelty and death just, you know, on the president's whim, on Elon Musk's whim?

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: But I have to ask, I mean, there are many documented cases of government waste, including in USAID.

I've covered countries where USAID was not the most efficient deliverer of services.

Did they set themselves up in a kind of way?

Was there a kind of a laxity in the way that these things were administered that allowed this to happen, or is that just an unfair -- EUGENE DANIELS: I mean, I think when you have a bunch of humans doing one thing and the bigger the organization gets, there's always going to be some thing that is missed.

I think what we have not -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: This show, for instance.

EUGENE DANIELS: But what we've seen -- what we have not seen from Elon Musk or this administration is in the evidence of all of this abuse that they're talking about, right?

Like they say they've gone in, they found all of this waste that has been happening.

We haven't seen it.

I will say though, it matters -- it's a test case and it matters who or what organizations or groups of people push back.

We're not seeing a lot of pushback on the Hill, where there's absolute -- where they are supposed to have the power of the purse.

They created these organizations.

Republicans are not saying anything.

I've talked to many of them, Republicans.

Why do you think you don't have the power?

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Michael, why do you think that there will be some push?

You're intimating that there will be some pushback, maybe.

MICHAEL SCHERER: Well, I think there'll be legal pushback and there'll be appropriators pushback.

I don't know about political public pushback.

And I actually think what's been happening this week is that a lot of Democratic strategists have been warning Democrats not to make this their issue, because Democrats have to be saying we're making your lives better, voters.

And if they're seen as the party of defending a bureaucracy most people don't know about that helps people very far away, they're way off their message of you know eggs and butter.

ANNE APPLEBAUM: There are a lot of Christian groups and other grassroots groups in this country who spent a lot of time -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Catholic relief services, which a lot of -- MICHAEL SCHERER: The Democratic project right now is to find a way to win back the working class voters that were their voters for decades and they lost to Trump, and those voters, the people who don't vote very often, who deliver Trump the popular vote, are not in that group.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: We've come a long way from the idealism of the JFK inaugural.

ANNE APPLEBAUM: We've come a long way from George W. Bush, who created PEPFAR.

This is the organization that has solved essentially the AIDS crisis.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right, through the mechanisms of USAID, the State Department, and so on.

Let me go to an issue that we kind of alluded to before.

There have been many sudden changes in the way government has done business this week.

Elon Musk just this evening is tweeting about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

He says it's RIP, which is again a congressionally mandated creation.

And it seems as if people in Congress, Republicans in Congress, are not structurally fulfilling their oversight role.

Here's what Speaker Johnson said when he was asked about this.

REP. MIKE JOHNSON (R-LA): The executive branch of government in our system has the right to evaluate how executive branch agencies are operating.

That's what they're doing, by putting a pause on some of these agencies and by evaluating them, by doing these internal audits.

That is a long overdue, much welcomed development.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: So not to get all schoolhouse rock here or anything, but in our system, Congress is supposed to monitor and be a check on the executive, we have a system that's been -- that was devised a long time ago and it seemed to work.

Congress is supposed to be very vigorous in overseeing the way the executive branch operates, not deferring to the executive branch to decide how it operates.

So, what am I missing here?

Why aren't they interested in power?

EUGENE DANIELS: Well, I mean, the interesting thing that Johnson kept saying was evaluate.

That's not what's happening here, right?

Sure, I don't think anyone would have a problem with the branch looking into and talking to the people that work there and say, is there waste, fraud and abuse here?

That's not what's happening.

They're destroying things and talking about them and eliminating them.

And Congress, Republicans in Congress that I've talked to, many of them are hoping, fingers crossed, that they don't have to take on this fight and that this will be taken care of through the courts.

And I think that -- one, that's sometimes a fool's errand, depending on how the -- where these cases go through, but also, that is not what the Constitution tells them to do.

They are supposed to be there to check on this.

ASMA KHALID: But if I can say, the courts have been, I think, one of the only places that we're seeing any pushback to anything we're seeing.

I mean, if you look at the federal freeze on broad funding, that was a court case.

You look at the federal workers, that's a deferred resignation program, court case, birthright citizenship, court case.

I mean, that's the only place you're seeing any pushback.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: But, traditionally, legislators are interested in exercising their power over the executive branch.

This is just an unusual situation.

You've written a lot about the impulses that cause people to go along with things that they know structurally they shouldn't necessarily be going along with.

ANNE APPLEBAUM: So, we're now at a really weird moment in history where powerful U.S. senators who are elected for six years, who have huge staffs and money and great futures ahead of them if they leave the Senate at the Harvard Kennedy School or, you know, on television, are more cowardly than unnamed USAID bureaucrats, several of whom have done very brave things in the last few days, who've tried to stop orders, even knowing they would lose their jobs.

And the only conclusion I can come to is that they are all terrified, and they're afraid of Twitter, they're afraid of Musk, they're afraid of their constituents, they're afraid of threats of violence that they get against their families.

This is a very, very strange moment in U.S. politics where we have, you know, members of Congress elected politicians who are afraid to speak their minds and afraid to do their jobs.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Michael, I want to end with you and talk about, again, it's been -- the cliche is the fire hose this week.

You just broke a story with Ashley Parker earlier today about the Kennedy Center.

Donald Trump is taking over the Kennedy Center.

MICHAEL SCHERER: Yes.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: He wants to be the chairman of the board.

What's going on and what does it mean?

MICHAEL SCHERER: So, I think it fits into a broader pattern.

If you remember the first few months of 2017, Donald Trump arrived in Washington not knowing anybody and not really knowing what he wanted to do.

He had a bunch of slogans.

He had like a vague sense, but he didn't have personnel who liked him even, and he couldn't execute on anything.

This is a Donald Trump coming in who spent literally four years working with think tanks, writing E.O.s, preparing for this moment.

And what he's doing with the Kennedy Center is what he's been doing in other parts of the government as well.

He basically was shunned by the Kennedy Center in 2017.

He's the only president since the Kennedy Center started doing Kennedy Center honors in the late 70s, who's never been to the building.

And I think it embarrassed him.

Artists rebelled against the first term of President Trump, so he's going to take it over.

And he's showing some muscle.

But it's part of -- you know, there's so many places right now in government where he knows exactly what he's doing and he has a way of actually executing it.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: He's putting RFK Jr., trying to put him in the cabinet.

He's taking over the Kennedy Center.

It's almost as if he's glomming on to the name and the luster of the establishment.

MICHAEL SCHERER: Oh, he loves the sheen of Bobby Kennedy and Tulsi Gabbard.

That's another thing he's doing.

He's building this coalition, the Republican coalition.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

Well, I'm sorry to say we have to leave it there for now.

I want to thank our panelists for an excellent conversation.