Former USAID head grieves its closure while hoping for its future

Ambassador Samantha Power (C), former head of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), embraces fired employees and their supporters outside the agency's headquarters on February 27, 2025 in Washington, D.C. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images hide caption

When Samantha Power walked out of the United States Agency for International Development's headquarters in Washington, D.C., for the last time on January 20, 2025, she had no idea what was to become of the agency she had led for the Biden administration for the past four years.

Within days, the new Trump administration had put a stop work order on all U.S. foreign assistance, halting thousands of programs around the world — including emergency lifesaving ones — and began dismantling USAID.

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"I was as shocked as I was horrified," Power said in an interview with NPR. "I could not believe in the first instance that any human would suspend assistance, particularly life-saving assistance, without taking into account the human consequences or trying to do so in a manner that would allow people to make adjustments."

Power was the last confirmed administrator of the 64-year-old agency — USAID was officially shut down in July 2025. It had employed around 15,000 people globally, and managed thousands of programs aimed at fighting disease and poverty. Only a handful of former agency staff now work at the State Department, and most of the programs were terminated.

A year later, Power is still grappling with the loss and legacy of USAID and is filled with indignation over the administration's treatment of its staff.

"It was so cruel, and it was as if cruelty was the point," Power says of the way the administration went about the dismantling.

Still, Power is holding onto hope that there's enough bipartisan support for foreign aid in Washington that the agency could be reconstituted in some form in the future.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

When you realized what the Trump administration intended to do with USAID, what did you do?

I did what so many did, which is I went and appealed to the Republicans [in Congress], who I knew were both close to the President and huge champions of USAID. Initially they worked with me and others behind the scenes to try to restart this program and get a waiver for that, but at a certain point they clearly decided that it was in their self-interest to go along [with President Trump]."

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Many former USAID staff who spoke to NPR described feeling like they were in a prolonged grieving process in those six months since the Trump administration began dismantling USAID until its official shutdown in July, 2025. How did you feel during that time?

For a long time, I think I not only grieved the agency, but the sense of powerlessness that I felt toward the people who had faithfully worked in the Biden administration under my leadership, in partnership with me.

This was a mini cataclysm for 15,000 USAID workers all around the world. Every single one of them had served our country faithfully. They certainly weren't doing it for the money; they were doing it out of a sense of purpose and mission. And to be unable to support them, to know that they weren't going to be able to make rent, to know that some of them had to pull their kids out of daycare — the personal heartbreak they felt, compounded with the livelihood questions and the existential questions in terms of their careers that they were going through, I just wanted to be able to do something, and just felt massively ineffective in that period.

How do you think the loss of USAID is being felt around the world?

I think about that village that doesn't get electrified because Power Africa no longer exists , which had brought electric, broader, improved electricity to 150 million people in the short time it had been operating. What does it mean to not have U.S. funded election monitors in parts of the world when we know that many of the democratic trends are going in the wrong direction with mass job displacement coming with AI? What does it mean that there is far less independent media out there scrutinizing whether governments are stealing from their people and serving as a check and balance?

When you shut down anti-corruption civil society organizations, as has happened all around the world, because the USAID and State Department funding was pulled out from them, you lose things that won't be measured in the here and now, but that will cause really negative ripple effects over generations.

A year after the agency shutdown NGOs and aid groups appear to be moving on with the work. Why do you think we should still talk about what happened with USAID?

USAID was created by John F. Kennedy , and over the decades, the amount of goodwill that this agency has earned the United States and the American people is impossible to quantify, because it is just boundless.

Walking away from USAID is, on top of being cruel, just incredibly dumb. It's literally like having the best brand name and saying, let's invent a new brand name, even though this is the most popular, most beloved, most respected arm certainly of US foreign policy in the world. Though not without its flaws, Americans want to help, and that is what USAID really understood.

Trump administration officials say they are nimbler and more efficient at disaster response now than when USAID existed. When you look at the responses to the ongoing Ebola outbreak and the earthquake in Venezuela what do you see?

I see an improved response, not an adequate response, but an improved response from the U.S. State Department's response to the Myanmar natural disaster , and clearly getting quicker and dedicating more resources to the Venezuela response, in part, because of the major foreign policy and military investment made in Venezuela, in part because Marco Rubio definitely cares a great deal personally about Venezuela, but for whatever reason, doing more is better.

But I think the bigger gaps are not the ones that are causing or earning headlines like the earthquakes and the hurricanes and Ebola — it's the fact that so much is no longer even measured in terms of the health metrics. Around HIV, for example, or in some communities, the toll of losing U.S. assistance for girls' education around the world, that's not a metric that people, social scientists or economists, have yet quite figured out how to nail down.

Critics of USAID say the agency created dependency among low-income countries, and I know this is an issue that you were trying to solve during your tenure. The Trump administration is arguing that it is making countries more self-reliant by cutting off aid and by being transactional with governments. Do you think there's merit to the administration's argument there?

Government-to-government assistance, which is actually something that the Trump administration is doing more of, was something that I was very enthusiastic about, and we had launched a big new government-to-government strategy [during my term]. But it was really Congress's concerns from decades ago about whether governments were stealing USAID resources that caused USAID and other foreign assistance arms of the U.S. government to move through non-governmental actors .

So that shift toward government-to-government, I welcome it. It does require proper oversight to make sure that the dollars are going where they need to go, and laying off all of the USAID people who did the oversight isn't the solution.

Do you think there's a world in which USAID comes back?

It should come back. Will it be politically challenging for President Trump's supporters to embrace a return to [USAID]? Of course it will. So, can that happen? Can they put the letters back on the headquarters, hire everybody back, and say, "oh, whoops,"? That's very unlikely to happen soon. But this year the Republican-led House and Republican-led Senate sent a $50 billion foreign assistance bill to President Trump's desk for signature.

The supporters of this work are still out there, but it is going to take very delicate negotiations about how not only to build back, but to do so in a manner where majorities in both parties can rally around the cause in a manner where some can save face, because clearly a terrible mistake was made.

Do you hope to be part of that potential reconstitution of USAID?

Certainly. I'm doing everything I can to be part of the conversations about what the core of what comes back should look like. Not everything is going to come back at once, not every sector is going to be able to generate the same bipartisan enthusiasm as every other sector, but what is key is to be open to the question of where results have been achieved. USAID spent decades amassing those results, and the individuals involved in those programs need to be central to the dialog about what comes next, not just the politicians who can figure out what politics will allow, but the experts who can demonstrate the good that was done on behalf of the American people.

NPR reached out to the State Department for comment but did not immediately receive a response.