Administrator Samantha Power at a Swearing-in Ceremony for Rebecca Chalif as Chief of Staff

ADMINISTRATOR SAMANTHA POWER: So, I want to start by saying a few words of thanks, to Dennis [Vega], for giving so much of himself. I wrote down what you said, because I don't have your photographic memory: "There is no winning, there is no finish line." And yet, every day for these last years, you've just thrown yourself at every problem. No problem is too small to say, well, "Does that really need to rise to the level of the Chief of Staff?" And no problem is too big or too daunting to be cowed by, by - you just throw yourself into the tracks on behalf of the outcomes you want to see in the world. So, you've just done a tremendous job. I miss you. The track record I think speaks for itself.

I want to thank Rebecca's family for being here. This is a thrilling part of today, for us, and you really honor us and you honor this occasion, you honor your incredible daughter and sister by being here. You clearly have a tremendous daughter - very, very special daughter, sister.

What you may not know, is just the extent to which each of you in different ways is present here at USAID every day. It's very, very unusual. Only maybe sort of obnoxious parents like me who are like, "My son did this on the tennis court this week," you know - but that's different, like that kind of parental pride stuff. The way you all are present here is the way Rebecca talks about the advice that you have given her, or really seeks guidance and solidarity from each of you in different ways. I mean, really, meeting you today felt like the most natural thing in the world, because you've just been here, basically since the beginning, with Rebecca. It's very, very unusual. So thank you specifically, to David and Gail, Rebecca's parents; and her sisters Julia and Jackie - I'll say more about you in a minute.

Rebecca's friends are also here, and you might be wondering how we were actually able to have this ceremony in this room and not at [the Washington] Nats Stadium, given the sheer number of friends Rebecca has amassed over the years because of the quality of friendship that she gives. But obviously it's her core who are here. You don't just show up for each other for, you know, themed dinner parties, and for each other in hard times, but clearly you have an incredibly special nucleus of friendship that keep each other going in so many milestones like this one. So thank you also for being so present - Rebecca's friends are really present here at USAID, even if they're in some other state or down the street.

And I will say that Rebecca will have many legacies here, but one of the things that she is in fact famous for is always having a snack - for people in need, and given the hours she keeps, and that her teammates keep, this is very, very valuable.

Rebecca is one of - the first of three daughters. And I gather sisters, that she is the quintessential oldest sister: responsible, organized, protective - three qualities that I personally look for in a chief of staff, particularly the protective part. But, it must've been - let's be real, it was probably frustrating for her to be delivering that perpetual excellence and [inaudible] throughout your lives. You've been very tolerant. Thank you.

Rebecca was precocious, I gather, from a very young age. Fully formed sentences at age one. Studying the globe in her room at a year and a half, declaring - rightly, it turned out - that she would one day travel that globe.

In school, an annoyingly high achiever. Her sisters recall partially dreading the start of a new school year, as they would inevitably encounter the same reaction from all their big sister's former teachers: an exuberant, "Ohhh, CHALIF!" followed by what they perceived to be gradual disappointment in their inability to replicate the feats of THE Rebecca Chalif. Of course, Jackie and Julia are far too humble. Jackie went on to become a doctor, and Julia a teacher. A teacher, a doctor, and a government official - public servants one and all. So thank you, all three of you, for your service. And thanks to your parents for inculcating in you this desire to make other people's lives better.

Rebecca's sisters, in their generosity, remember Rebecca always looking out for others, eager to help people who were struggling - and again, very protective over her sisters. Her middle sister, Jackie, recalled how she would get bullied on the school bus whenever "Becky" - as her sisters call her - wasn't around. But - as she put it, I think movingly, she said whenever Becky was around and on the school bus, "I felt safe." And I think that's how all of us feel here when Rebecca's in the room and on the job, we feel safe and secure.

Inspired by Rebecca's father, a surgeon, Rebecca attended Duke, set on becoming a doctor. But she soon realized that all her favorite classes fell outside her major: literature, history, government. So, she switched her major to American History - but brought the surgical decisiveness that she learned from her dad to her work. To this day, whenever she's faced with a tough choice - which now is basically every day, every hour of every day - she remembers the wise words of her father: "Just make a decision. Cut the vein or don't." But she has better bedside manner than most surgeons.

During two summers back home, she worked for then-Senator Hillary Clinton. And during the 2008 election, she was enthralled by the news coverage - fascinated by the media's influence on how people understood the stakes of a campaign and the issues of a campaign. So she moved here to Washington to pursue a Masters in Media and Politics at Georgetown, and she started working at the Democratic National Committee.

When Secretary Clinton began exploring the idea of a 2016 presidential run, Rebecca was among the very first her campaign called, well before the official launch. Their team of thirty staff members crammed into a makeshift office designed to hold no more than six and they got to work. The teams would often find themselves sitting on the floor of Secretary Clinton's tiny personal office building a communications strategy from the ground up.

As we all know, the team's hopes of electing the first woman president of the United States were ultimately dashed. But Rebecca responded to that by working for a series of other powerful women looking to make a positive change.

First, Sheryl Sandberg - who called her asking her to help lead the Lean In Foundation. Soon, Rebecca was managing the foundation's communications, running a very successful book tour, and traveling the world. Then, in the primary for the 2020 election, she served as deputy communications director on the Harris presidential campaign for now-Vice President Kamala Harris.

When we began staffing our Administration, Rebecca's name rose to the very top of the list for our new Spokesperson here at USAID. When I was vetting Rebecca for this job, I called her former supervisor, who some of you know from MSNBC, Jennifer Palmieri. And talking to Palmieri, you always get very unvarnished feedback, but what was so extraordinary in this instance was the way she just talked about Rebecca in a manner that is just so, so unusual. And it was, "Chalif this", and "Chalif that" - and to me, she was still Rebecca, she wasn't yet "Chalif" - but it was just, "trust Chalif," "Oh, just give it to Chalif," anything that came up, just, "hand it to Chalif," "Chalif will take care of it - Chalif, Chalif, Chalif." And it was just so clear what a go-to asset Rebecca had become on what was a very intense and very difficult campaign.

A few weeks into the job, we took a trip together to Sudan and Ethiopia, and she got that very first hard assignment. She was thrown into the lion's den, with no - we were still working out the kinks, I guess, of our systems here, because somehow, we didn't talk about the trip before we went on the trip, we didn't really surface messaging ideas, we didn't, we just, I just assumed it would be crystal clear how one would travel and work in a country. We also, because the Embassy was so small, because the country of Sudan had been isolated for so long, we were entering a country where we would get very little communications support on the ground.

And it turns out that communications in the country of Ethiopia and the country of Sudan are different from communications in Iowa, Virginia, Pennsylvania. And domestic political campaigns, it turns out, are different from other countries. So the trip was a learning experience for us all. But, to Rebecca's credit, she - I doubt she slept the entire time we were on the road as she scrambled to make things happen, and really did corral press somehow on the fly to cover some of the actually very, very moving stops that the team had planned for us, including meeting with youth protest leaders who had brought down a dictatorship and some of whom had been very badly injured. To this day, I wonder if those journalists who were commandeered were actually journalists or just people Rebecca had met at the hotel and convinced to show up and pretend that there was a press strategy.

But suffice it to say, we had a very impactful trip, but Rebecca, always so self-critical, and always so hungry to improve - Rebecca felt a little bit, I gather, like the trip hadn't gone very well. And she found herself looking out the plane window and thinking to herself - and this is very moving, "This is the part in the story where things can change." And that is the spirit that Rebecca brings really to just about everything: "This is the part in the story where things can change."

I think we believe this about the places in which really terrible things are happening in the world day to day: "This is the part in the story where things can always change." And, in that instance, she resolved to do everything in her power to learn from that first outing and she is the quickest study, I think most of us have ever had a chance to work with, on any file, and she got really smart at the very specific beast of doing international communications, USAID communications.

As one colleague put it, "She has a joy and determination to get to the bottom of things, and not just at a high level, but to a second, third, and fourth level, beyond the headlines." And, as Dennis alluded to, that digging into the work that we do, to figure out not only how best to translate it. Well, first, how best to understand it, then how to translate it, but also to understand how others can go through that progression and get better at telling our story, because the measure of the story that we have to tell is those of us who are privileged enough to get to travel, how moved we are when we see the work on the ground, and that instills in us the knowledge that if we could only shorten the distances between people who aren't with us in those fields, or who who aren't with us with those democratic protestors, if we can collapse that distance and have that experience distilled for others, how much more impactful our constituency will be, and how much bigger it will be.

Fertilizer became a topic of great interest. And I'm sure each of Rebecca's family members and all of her closest friends have spent a lot of time talking with Rebecca about fertilizer, specifically Urea, and the components of fertilizer. But this was, for many of us, just a flagship example of how Rebecca decided to learn just everything there was to know about fertilizer. She has not yet canceled her online subscriptions to various farm publications and fertilizer associations, but by drilling into the details, she knew that she could actually sound a global alarm with sophistication.

And she not only read everything there was to read, dug into the expertise that we have here, at USAID, but that is often hard to find, you know there isn't any one-stop-shop, 1-800-fertilizer, so you have to find people who know people who know people here and around the world - and then she, you know, even met with soil scientists outside of USAID. So determined was she to tell the story, which can again sound like a fertilizer story but fundamentally is a human story about food shortages and how people are not going to have enough to eat if we can't address the fertilizer challenge.

This is part of what Rebecca has brought here, which is an understanding that communications is a design feature, should be a design feature, of everything we do across this Agency. It is not something that should be relegated to communicators, who have that in their title, although building up that team and working with that team is something that Rebecca has done brilliantly. But each of us is a communicator, each of us has a chance to broaden that constituency for this work and to be an "explainer in chief" of what we do. She has empowered our agency communicators, our Mission Development outreach coordinators or so-called DOCs - a different kind of "doc" that Rebecca gets to work with every single day. And that has shown, as they come forward now, with more and more ideas now of how to tell our story.

She's taken on an incredibly important road show on strategic communications. Many of our bureaus here have sat down with Rebecca and themselves rethought how they do communications because of the sophistication of this plan and how she has helped. Again, I think our staff understand how telling our story effectively is not just about external communications, or even how we talk to one another - it is also how we succeed in the interagency. It is how we get other donors to come to our side. It is how we get more money out of Congress to do our work. And fundamentally, it is about how we build support in the countries in which we work and enhance our soft power, but also thicken the partnerships that we need with the community. So that we know what they need. And so that trust, that being able to tell our story, is a huge part again of the legacy of her communications.

The Black Sea became something also iconic in Rebecca's repertoire in terms of understanding that Putin was doing lots of terrible things in Ukraine, to cut off access for grains to reach the rest of the world. That was something that lent itself to strategic communications. It was the universe in a grain of sand, capturing the brutality, capturing the cascading effects to other countries, but again digging into the specifics - reaching out to the Ukrainians at our Mission and beyond, who knew firsthand what the cost of Putin's aggression was - and things we now take for granted, which is how well known it is that Ukraine does feed the world, how well known it is that Putin's blockade hurt people in sub-Saharan Africa. We shouldn't take that for granted. That comes about because of concerted communications campaigns like the one Rebecca and Tessa [Wick] and the Ukraine team and our food security team undertook together.

USAID's work has the power to be transformative to the world. And what is so remarkable about watching Rebecca's journey here is how protective she has become of the work of the Missions - it is her job. It is her abiding frustration. When we cannot articulate in a compelling way just how important this work is, or just what those impacts are in the world.

When an article comes out, which happens just about every minute, spreading misinformation about USAID, Rebecca, all these years now into working with USAID, responds with a kind of indignation, a capacity still for surprise that speaks to the depth of how much she cares, how protective she is of this Agency. She'll say things like: "It's not just bad, it's also untrue. My job would already be to hate it, but I hate it extra."

As Rebecca transitioned from Spokesperson to Deputy Assistant Administrator and Chief Communications Officer, she has also just been one hell of a nurturer of a team, and really built a sense of community among her staff.

When things go well, and I can vouch for this personally, Rebecca always passes on praise, purposefully and immediately. When I say, "Oh, you know, you did a great job on X or Y," there's always three or four names of people on her team. She says no, no, no, its so and so and so and so. That is how she manages. One of her colleagues talked about how, also, her hyper-competence creates what this colleague called a "trickle down of trust." She routinely gains the trust, of course, of the people she works for, but then empowers her staff with that same level of trust so that they feel confident, stepping out and taking risks.

And when things get tough, she brings her sharp strategic mind. She makes these tough decisions. It's really, actually incredible to be in a room, even in a large gathering, when a tough issue arises, and watch the eyes of every single person around the room turn to Rebecca, and believing instinctively that if anyone is going to have an answer, Rebecca's going to have that answer. She is a trusted advisor to seemingly everyone on seemingly everything. As one colleague put it, "Rebecca has exceptional judgment. I can ask her anything from "what's up with the Black Sea Grain Initiative?" to 'How do we avoid a diplomatic incident?" to 'What entrée should I order?" to "Are these pants cute?'" and she will have an answer.

So, as many of you know, my motto for a long time has been "If you care more and work harder, you will prevail in the end." That's Rebecca. I've captured how much she cares, I've hinted at how hard she works. There are show horses and workhorses in government. I just don't think any of us have met a harder worker than Rebecca. There's just no time where anything can happen and you can't reach Rebecca. Get a decisive, thoughtful response. Making herself available because again, she cares so very much, and I think she cares because she believes in the work that this Agency does. She believes that this Agency has the proven capacity to do incredible things.

And she is exactly who we need to help us build that capacity, even further building on the incredible work of Dennis and the team. We're now in the final stretch of this first term of the Biden Administration's work to institutionalize the reforms that we have made, empower our staff to do their best work, improve life for a workforce that has been running a mile a minute since the COVID pandemic, climate emergencies, Putin, and more. We'll continue to bring a communications lens as a design feature to every policy and programmatic issue of the day that will magnify our impact and influence around the world.

And we'll work to meet the crises of the moment, whether in Gaza, in Sudan, in Ukraine, and meet the needs of our partners in the communities that depend on us with Rebecca's trademark, compassion and hyper-competence. And we'll continue to stretch our dollars to meet growing needs by pushing for progress beyond our programs and catalyzing broader movements for change, in part because we are so convincing in the way we describe our impact. Rebecca is the trusted advisor, the scrappy learner, and the clear-eyed leader we need to steer our work. And we are so grateful, Rebecca, to you - this is no easy job. Dennis made it look easy somehow. But it is really not an easy job. But you are an ideal leader to occupy this role. Thank you for helping lead USAID, and thank you to your family and friends for having your back always. Thank you.

And now, let's make this official. Please let me swear you in.

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