Foreign aid isn’t just charity. It’s power. That was the original idea behind the United States Agency for International Development, which J.F.K. set up in the early 1960s to win the support of developing countries that might have otherwise drifted into the Soviet sphere. Elon Musk dismantled it in recent weeks. For now, most of its work has stopped and its worldwide staff has been called home.

President Trump and his team have criticized a few progressive State Department programs, like a Colombian opera about a trans character and a D.E.I. music event in Ireland. But the core of U.S.A.I.D.’s mission has been helping the world’s poor, and it was a means to an end. “You have to understand,” a veteran American diplomat told me, “we didn’t do this work because we’re all a bunch of bleeding-heart liberals. We did it for influence.”

In today’s newsletter, we’ll examine that effort — and the results it got.

Good works

How do you measure influence abroad? Experts have come up with the acronym DIME — diplomacy, information, military, economic — to describe the traditional levers of power. U.S.A.I.D. covers every aspect but the military one.

When I was covering East Africa, I ran into U.S.A.I.D. all the time. I saw sacks of wheat stamped “U.S.A.I.D. From the American People” trucked out to famine areas in Somalia. I saw thin-walled, U.S.A.I.D.-funded schools in South Sudan giving kids their first crack at education. I met bright young people who won scholarships to study in the U.S., planting little seeds of pro-American sentiment everywhere. I wrote about American aid being stolen and misused, too, and there’s no doubt that U.S.A.I.D. was ripe for reform.

There is a long-running debate about the effectiveness of foreign aid. Scholars have criticized it for failing to reduce poverty or stimulate economic development. There are infamous examples of expensive disasters — like a Norwegian-backed frozen fish factory in a very hot part of Kenya. But that was in the 1980s. These days, most aid for Kenya goes toward food security and health programs, which even critics acknowledge save lives.