"Samantha, Look In The Mirror! The Reason The USAID Is Going To Cease To Exist Is Because It Should!"

Sen Lindsey Graham announces he's been red-pilled over USAID. and at 1:51 above, he says,

Samantha [Power] has been texting me morning, noon, and night, Samantha, look in the mirror! The reason USAID is going to cease to exist as it did before is because it should!

Sundance at Conservative Treehouse says "We can officially say this moment achieves ‘peak Graham.’" Graham has in fact been a chief advcocate of USAID up to this point, when Elon Musk has suddenly exposed the grift and Graham realizes he'd better get on the right side of the issue.

Sounds very fishy https://t.co/68ToeBRN6d

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 9, 2025

I've looked at Samantha Power's career now and then, and irrespective of the latest allegations of her net worth, she's always struck me as among the privileged for being special. According to Wikipedia,

Samantha Jane Power (born September 21, 1970) is an Irish-American journalist, diplomat, and government official who served as the Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development from 2021 to 2025. She was the 28th United States Ambassador to the United Nations from 2013 to 2017. Power is a member of the Democratic Party.

Power began her career as a war correspondent covering the Yugoslav Wars before entering academic administration. In 1998 [age 28], she became the Founding Executive Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, where she later served as the first Anna Lindh Professor of Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy until 2009. She was a senior adviser to Senator Barack Obama until March 2008.

A later paragraph expands on her early career:

After graduating from Yale, Power worked at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace as a researcher for Carnegie's then-President Morton Abramowitz. From 1993 to 1996, she worked as a war correspondent, covering the Yugoslav Wars for U.S. News & World Report, The Boston Globe, The Economist, and The New Republic. When she returned to the United States, she attended Harvard Law School, receiving her J.D. in 1999.

There's still a great deal left unsaid here. Born in Ireland, she lived there until she was nine, when her mother separated from her father and took her to Pittsburgh. She resurfaced in high school in Atlanta, after which she went to Yale. I can only assume something happened at Yale that put her on the fast track; the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace is a bastion of old-money power and wealth that doesn't hire just any bright young thing. Ferdinand Lundberg has much to say about such foundations in The Rich and the Super-Rich:

To what extent are the wealthy giving their money away for good works if they are giving it away at all? This is somewhat similar to the question faced in the last chapter: To what extent are the wealthy being taxed out of existence? And, if they are not giving wealth away, what is it that they are really doing with their numerous foundations?

. . . A third effect is the corporate-control effect. Corporate control, which would otherwise be undermined by the tax laws, is preserved to perpetuity by many foundations, permitting the hereditary transmission, tax free, of vast corporate power.

A fourth effect is that the foundations extend the power of their founders very prominently into the cultural areas of education (and propaganda), science, the arts and social relations. While much that is done in these areas under foundation auspices meets judicious critical approval, it is a fact that these dispensations inevitably take the form of patronage, bestowed on approved projects, withheld from disapproved projects. Recipients of the money must be ideologically acceptable to the donors.

Somehow, the right people seem to have decided early in Power's career that she had a knack for picking the right recipients of foundation money, and they put her in increasing positions of trust that she would do this. Wikipedia notes that In 2016, she was listed as the 41st-most powerful woman in the world by Forbes. Time has listed her as one of “100 Most Influential People,” and she's one of Foreign Policy’s “Top 100 Global Thinkers.” All we can think is she does all the right things and has all the right opinions.

There can be no question that her approval of any project can mean multimillions in grant money to the recipient, and throughout her career, she seems to have been able to place herself in positions where she can do this. There can be little question that someone in that sort of position would have enormous opportunity to reap all sorts of rewards from the grateful beneficiaries of her largesse. The USAID would be just the most recent, and probably by far the most lucrative, of her opportunities.

I would also assume that someone in so prestigious a position would have the resources to legitimize or conceal disbursements that might otherwise be interpreted, however uncharitably, as kickbacks. We'll have to see what the DOGE boys come up with.