US Senate confirms Biden pick Samantha Power to head USAID

FILE PHOTO: Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power, who is President Joe Biden’s choice to lead the U.S. Agency for International Development, speaks at a U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee confirmation hearing in Washington, DC, U.S., March 23, 2021. Jim Lo Scalzo/Pool via REUTERS

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Senate voted on Wednesday to confirm Samantha Power, the former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, to lead the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

Power, who was nominated by President Joe Biden, was confirmed in a bipartisan vote of 68-26.

“I’m confident her experience, tenacity and drive to build a better, more prosperous, peaceful world are exactly what USAID and our country need at this moment,” Bob Menendez, the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said on the Senate floor ahead of the vote.

Power, 50, a longtime human rights advocate, is a public policy professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and also served on the National Security Council.

A former journalist, Power also won a Pulitzer Prize for her 2002 book “A Problem from Hell,” which argues the United States has failed to prevent genocide.