The United States Agency for International Development no longer exists. As of July 1, what’s left of it has been absorbed into the State Department. President Trump and Elon Musk dismissed the agency as wasteful spending. But on a reporting trip to West Africa, the columnist Nicholas Kristof found that by eliminating U.S.A.I.D., America has left lifesaving resources to deteriorate — with deadly consequences.

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The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Nicholas Kristof: I am Nicholas Kristof. I’m a columnist for The New York Times. This year I’ve been reporting a great deal on the cuts in American aid funding. U.S.A.I.D. has provided humanitarian assistance all over the world, and it’s had an enormous impact. By one count, it saved more than three million lives each year, and then this year it was dismantled over a weekend by Elon Musk.

You know, I keep thinking that Elon Musk and Donald Trump promised that they were rooting out waste in U.S.A.I.D., but instead what I see is that they created it.

I am just back from Sierra Leone and Liberia in West Africa, and they are two countries where you see, as you walk through the villages and go to clinics and schools, the impact of U.S.A.I.D. cuts. You see kids dying. You see aid not being available. And in Sierra Leone, I just spent a morning in villages where kids were not getting the medicine they needed. I went to a warehouse behind a fence, and a security guard let me in, and I found millions of doses of medicines that had been donated to Sierra Leone.