Former USAID Administrator Samantha Power is once again at the center of a growing political firestorm after comments she made defending the agency sparked a fierce response from former Trump administration official Mike Benz.
Power recently appeared on Bloomberg’s Big Take podcast, where she criticized the Trump administration’s dismantling of USAID and argued that cuts to foreign aid programs have had devastating humanitarian consequences around the world. During the interview, she cited reports claiming hundreds of thousands of deaths could be linked to the loss of aid funding and warned that critical health programs had been severely disrupted.
But Benz, a former State Department official in President Donald Trump’s first administration and current executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, says Power’s public defense of USAID leaves out a major part of the story.
