Samantha Power<br/>Widely considered an authority on human rights and genocide thanks to her books, lectures, and scholarship arguing for expanding U.S. military presence, Samantha Power, the administrator of USAID during the Biden presidency, was a key figure in denying the human rights of Palestinians and the genocide in Gaza and burnishing the reputations of Israel and the United States.

Black and white photo of a woman with shoulder-length hair speaking into a microphone.

Samantha Power

Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (2021-2025)

Current: Anna Lindh Professor of the Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School; William D. Zabel '61 Professor of Practice in Human Rights, Harvard Law School

Samantha Power is widely considered an authority on human rights and genocide thanks to her books, lectures, and scholarship arguing for expanding U.S. military presence. Yet as an administrator of USAID during the Biden presidency, she was a key figure in denying the human rights of Palestinians and the genocide in Gaza, and burnishing the reputations of Israel and the United States.

Power took great pains to minimize Israel’s culpability in restricting aid—a known policy of Israel that was reported by Power’s own agency in 2024. The “biggest challenges” in delivering aid to Gaza, according to Power, were not Israel’s deliberate prevention, but “kinetic conflict, looting, access,” none of which she attributed to any actor. Power went on to praise the U.S. for being “the largest donor to the humanitarian response,” without considering the irony that it was the main funder of weapons to a state committing a genocide.

This came months after Power had defended Israel when it was criticized for withholding aid, and solely blamed Hamas, not Israel, for stalled ceasefire talks—another lie the State Department and related agencies knew to not be true.

In December 2024, when asked by Foreign Policy why she hadn’t “done more to stop the ongoing atrocities in Gaza,” Power offered a convoluted response that failed to address the urgency of the issue or lay out its true stakes, effectively patting herself on the back for advocating for “policies that I think will best advance the cause of trying to see less civilian pain.”

Even after December 2024—at which point Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, and numerous other organizations had concluded that Israel was committing a genocide—Power never used the word to refer to Israel’s actions. And when presented again with the word during an interview in January 2025, she used the question as an opportunity to center and applaud her own work at that of USAID staffers, adding, “Has it made enough of a difference? Without that pushing, a horrific situation would have been even worse.”