Samantha Power is the Administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development [USAID]. She was appointed to this position by Joe Biden. Power previously held various high-level positions during the Obama administration relating to foreign policy.
USAID is supposed to administer non-military foreign aid and development assistance to needy countries. It has an annual budget of over $27 billion, with about $15 billion coming from taxpayer dollars. USAID has been widely accused of using its vast funding to influence and manipulate foreign governments and to fund political movements in foreign countries. For example, the Obama administration pumped $4.8 million directly into George Soro’s far-left activist group Open Society Foundation of Macedonia.
During her recent trip to Budapest, Power boasted on Twitter that USAID would “relaunch” a program to “help independent media” in Hungary. This means left-wing activist media that will support the political objectives of the Biden administration, which is openly hostile to the Hungarian Prime minister and the ruling party.
Previously, in 2017, USAID announced that it would give out a grant of up to $700k to an independent media outlet in rural Hungary. The grant specified that the recipient must not be in the Budapest area, which is where the Hungarian left is the most powerful. It had to be a rural area where the ruling Fidesz party is most popular. An application process was carried out. However, Trump officials shut down the grant before the money was actually awarded.
At the time, twenty-two Democrats signed a letter of protest against the cancellation of the grant. This further demonstrates that the grant was motivated by politics in the first place.
This grant may be what Power is referring to when she said, “relaunch.”
