Remarks by Samantha Power Receiving the Foreign Policy for America “Extraordinary Public Service Award” on behalf of USAID Workers

Foreign Policy for America Summit | May 19, 2025

On February 27, 2025, I joined several other former USAID administrators and countless USAID alums at the Ronald Reagan Building to greet USAID workers being ousted from the agency as they exited their offices for the last time.

I saw many tears that day, and shed many of my own, as principled public servants who had dedicated their lives to helping the world’s most vulnerable were given 15 minutes in assigned time slots to pack up their desks, as police stood ready to escort them out.

Less than six weeks before, when I reluctantly wound down my four years as administrator because of the change of presidents, I had walked out those same doors. But I had been overcome by a profoundly different emotion: awe.

Awe over the work that I had seen the world’s premier development and humanitarian agency do, and above all awe toward the individuals – the Foreign Service Officers, the Civil Servants, the Personal Service Contractors, the Foreign Service Nationals, and the Institutional Support Contractors – who did that work. The individuals you are honoring tonight.

In all honesty, my first year as USAID administrator wasn’t easy. Before I joined USAID, I hadn’t understood how all-encompassing and restrictive Congress’s earmarks could be – how little discretion the President had to move resources in the manner he (or we) saw fit.

I also hadn’t fully internalized the ways the surge in real world needs had caused USAID to hire thousands of contractors, who – even though they often went to the world’s most dangerous places – were not given life insurance or other basic benefits that they deserved.

I’ll be honest – in my first few weeks at USAID, I wondered if maybe I should have stuck to diplomacy.

But everything changed when I visited our missions out in the world and saw the work up close. When I came back from my first trip – to Northern Central America – I exclaimed to my husband Cass, “I. Have. The. Best. Job.” There was not a hard problem on this earth that USAID’s team-members weren’t working day and night to figure out how to solve.

• Pathogens without passports that could kill millions? USAID teams were on the case, trying to figure out to how to strengthen lab surveillance and testing.

• More than a decade of gains by authoritarians and oligarchs? USAID teams were building new tools to help independent media survive and to provide insurance so anti-corruption NGOs could fight back against specious lawsuits.

• Extreme weather caused by climate change that was wiping out livestock and farmland and driving the mass migration of millions? USAID teams were helping scientists and farmers experiment with different varieties of drought resistant seeds, while hustling up private sector partnerships to try to stay ahead of the devastating droughts and the floods.

• An American over-reliance on Chinese supply chains? USAID teams were out there identifying opportunities for near-shoring, critical mineral partnerships, and they were building whole new transparent supply chains, so the United States could wean itself of too much reliance on an unreliable, authoritarian geopolitical adversary.

Now, if this description that I’ve just given of USAID bears no resemblance to the USAID you may have heard Elon Musk boast that he was feeding to the wood chipper, it is because the people who have dismantled USAID and slandered its workforce have lied.

Indeed, to paraphrase the writer Mary McCarthy, “every word they have said about USAID is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’”

Every person who has seen USAID’s work in the world knows why the Trump administration’s first strike was against the USAID website. The tens of thousands of projects documented on the website constituted highly inconvenient facts about the amazing, impactful work USAID staff had been doing on behalf of the American people.

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The USAID workforce being honored tonight is comprised of really special people. At one of my last staff gatherings, I marveled with the team:

“How incredible is it that at USAID we come to work every day and say out loud that we want to try to change the world? And at this agency we are surrounded by people who don’t laugh at us or roll their eyes. Instead, they just ask matter-of-factly how we plan to go about it.”

Killing USAID required creating a caricature. This meant defaming the work itself, but it also meant defaming the people that the Trump administration chose to purge — USAID’s lawyers, agricultural specialists, logisticians, TB and malaria and HIV experts, human resource professionals, security experts, IT professionals, private sector deal makers and on and on.

We would all do well to learn not from the destroyers of USAID, but from those who have served the agency with such distinction. Indeed, recent months offer up a study in contrasts.

• On the one hand, we have seen the cowardice of Marco Rubio and all the members of Congress who have been too afraid to raise their voices to defend the work that they themselves had rightly praised – and (through earmarks) insisted upon. This cowardice stands in marked contrast to the bravery of the workers of USAID who put themselves in harm’s way and risked their lives to answer this country’s call.

• We have seen the ignorance of DOGE and its refusal to examine what USAID was actually doing in the world. This stands in marked contrast to the curiosity and rigor of the workers of USAID who asked questions constantly and who knew not only the importance of the effort, but the importance of constantly learning and changing and iterating, so they could make each precious dollar go further.

• And we have seen the hostility and hate heaped on the workers of USAID. This stands in marked contrast to the joy and the love USAID workers brought to their labors, every single day.

That was USAID: bravery, curiosity, rigor, joy, and love. That is USAID.

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In late February, as USAID’s public servants were forced out of the Ronald Reagan Building, I heard many things from my former colleagues.

“I saw this overseas,” one person terminated in the democracy bureau marveled. “But I never thought my own government would attack its own workers.”

“Thirty-five years! That’s what’s in this suitcase right here,” said one woman from HR, as she rolled a carry-on through the turnstiles.

And over and over again, I heard this:

“It was never a job.”

“It was never a job.”

“It was never a job.”

Thank you, workers of USAID near and far, for letting Andrew and me, and Henrietta and Raj, and Gayle and Mark, and Peter, among hundreds of other political appointees from both parties, join you and learn from you and take inspiration from you.

This is not over. As this award recognizes, what you have done matters too much.

The needs are too great, and the costs of stepping back — to the United States and to interconnected humanity — are too steep.

Because of you and the difference you have made, the truth will out, the work you did will be embraced and scaled, and no matter what, the ripple effects of what you started will change millions of lives for generations to come.