Stephen Colbert Hosts Former USAID Head Samantha Power

A month ago Samantha Power wouldn’t have sounded like much of a get for late-night show, but in yet another indication of the shifting sands that have accompanied Donald Trump‘s first 16 days in office, she was Stephen Colbert‘s lead guest Tuesday night on CBS’ The Late Show.

That’s because, in addition to serving as the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations under Barack Obama, Power was the most recent head of USAID, the government agency that the Trump Administration—and specifically Elon Musk—has been actively working to dismantle.

For sixty years, USAID has operated as the humanitarian arm of the U.S. government, helping to address hunger, disease and poverty in nations worldwide.

Though it would officially take an act of Congress for USAID to be dissolved, at Musk’s direction, the agency’s offices and computer systems were shut down this weekend and employees overseas recalled back to the U.S., effectively halting any hope of agency’s operations resuming anytime soon.

(Trump himself signed an executive order defunding the organization on January 20th, and later put most of its employees on leave.)

For a joke-free eight minutes Tuesday night, Colbert and Power engaged in a conversation about the history of USAID, the immediate effects of the Trump Administration’s actions, and the long-term repercussions for the U.S. and the world were they to become permanent.

“We have stories of kids who were going in for their TB medicine [as Trump signed the executive order],” Power shared.

“The first three kids in a long, long line waiting in the hot sun got the TB medicine. Everybody else was told to go home… They were shuttered from the minute the executive order went out. It didn’t say ‘Hey, let’s review programs going forward. It said stop everything you’re doing globally. Right now. Stop it, no matter the human consequence.'”

Power went on to describe the agency’s work as it benefits the security and prosperity of the United States, terming USAID’s work “the face of American values” and “the ground game for American foreign policy, adding that “the countries that stand most to benefit [from the U.S. withdrawing humanitarian support] are authoritarian nations, nations that thrive on corruption and thrive on chaos… Because they are showing up and trying to bring countries into their orbit in order to be able to access critical minerals, in order to be able to have their supply chains reside in these developing countries.”

Watch Colbert’s entire Tuesday night segment on USAID including his interview with Samantha Power at the top of this post.

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