Washington, DC
ADMINISTRATOR SAMANTHA POWER: Thank you, Paloma – and thank you to Michele’s friends and loved ones, so many of whom are out there in the ether tuning in from all around the world. Michele has built legions of relationships and friendships across all of the various domains where she has worked and lived, and we are thrilled that we can have a day like this.
If you start crying now – no. You have to wait. You can’t cry when I say thank you, that’s worrying. But it really strikes me that Michele has lived a life of service and not one that has ever sought the spotlight for herself. And so today is her worst nightmare. But it is so deserved that we just step back and reflect on this remarkable life that has led her and us to this juncture – where we have the absolute perfect person to be performing one of the most important roles across the U.S. government. This is really going to be, I hope, a great time together and it feels long overdue in many ways.
I want to welcome Michele’s husband, David, and thank him for all of his support for Michele’s life of service. Michele's children, they are sitting next to each other, Thomas and John. Thomas is a maestro already, despite being still a college student at Occidental, a maestro at political campaigns, and who has been incredibly impactful already at a young age and is incredibly knowledgeable about how American politics works. And he was describing for me the next race he has zeroed in on in Montana no less. John at Washington University in St. Louis, a scientist, hopefully, a doctor – although he’s lowering expectations. You are the people that Michele brings to work every day in her heart and regales us with stories about your achievements and your time together and so much of the work she does, she does for you, so thank you so much for being here. Michele’s brother Neil; and amazingly Michele’s parents, Joe and Alicia. Welcome, as well, to Michele’s other brother Paul, who is tuning in with his family from California, so it’s so great to have the whole clan here.
Michele grew up, very nearby, in suburban Maryland, the oldest of three children and the only girl. She comes clearly from a tight-knit family, all of whom lived from Maryland to Massachusetts, and all of whom understood from the earliest age the importance of family and community. According to her brother Neil, Joe and Alicia – and this was reflective in the short meeting we just had – Joe and Alicia modeled the importance of public service, giving back – and also modeled how to stay connected across generations from the time their kids were really young.
Alicia was a dietitian in long-term care facilities – and as Alicia just described that was not a job but a calling, and one, I think, you served in for five decades. It’s just incredible to think of the number of lives that you touched in that time. Obviously inspiring Michele to want to give back and to want to serve – very specifically at the time a desire to want to serve in the field of geriatric medicine.
Joe, meanwhile, spent over four decades at the NSA. Joe’s job took the family to Stuttgart, Germany, when Michele was in fifth grade. Michele, being Michele even then, threw herself into this new culture and country visiting churches, going to Christmas markets, and celebrating three consecutive Oktoberfests – without the beer, of course, she was very young. But she does credit these years in Germany with planting the seeds of desiring for a career of international service – or at the very least a life in travel.
Back in high school in the U.S., Michele became a newspaper reporter – which again, given her curiosity and appetites stands to reason – as a way of learning about her community and writing about issues really important to her fellow students. It was in high school that Michele started dating a boy named David, who would eventually become her husband. For their first Valentine’s Day together, David gifted Michele a tiny Sheltie puppy named Sebastian, who Michele happily spoiled – until she adopted a stray kitten she named Rizzo, after the Mayor of Philadelphia. This was probably a rude awakening for Sebastian, but in the first major diplomatic breakthrough brokered by Michele, Sebastian and Rizzo became best friends. Proving that Michele can make even cats and dogs get along.
In college at Mount Holyoke – and again, this testifies to her uncanny leadership skills – she was elected Student Government president. Her college roommate, Jennifer, remembers Michele’s talents at bringing together strong personalities and opinions to come to resolutions on even the toughest subjects, and that included issues related to diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility, which, certainly back in the 90s, were not always front of mind.
Her career plans were shifting. A summer job with the Ombudsman for nursing homes here in Washington showed her how policies governing everything from medication to hygiene to exercise could protect patient health – and how those policies sometimes fell by the wayside for patients without family to advocate for them – or of course without resources. By her senior year, Michele wanted to change or enforce laws to better protect the rights of individuals – so that, in her words, “the elderly live the last years of their lives with dignity, and die with dignity.”
But even as she sought a career in domestic health policy, she did whatever she could to travel overseas. Her husband David remembers one year when the two of them – twenty-somethings living in an overpriced D.C. apartment – were saving up for a big trip to Europe. Every night, for weeks, David would come home to find Michele eating just two things, grapefruit and Grape-Nuts, the cereal. “They’re cheap and filling,” Michele would say – and in her eyes, it was worth it to visit Prague, Budapest, Vienna, and Munich.
Eventually, Michele found a career path that combined all of her passions, travel, public health, and service. She joined the Global Health Council and later the Gates Foundation, spending nearly a decade lobbying Congress to fund PEPFAR, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria; and the President’s Malaria Initiative. She also helped develop what would be the foundation of USAID’s Neglected Tropical Diseases program.
And boy, do we value this experience. She went on to work for former Representative Nita Lowey – a hero to so many of us – on the House Appropriations Committee, where she gained the budget chops and deep knowledge of the Hill that would ultimately bring her to USAID in 2011 as a budget analyst. It was on the Hill that she fully recognized the connection between budget, policy, and strategic planning – specifically, that policies and strategies could only be effective with financial resources to implement them and even as we all believe I hope in progress beyond programs, we really still believe in our programs and the need to resource those programs and that is why again Michele is so ideally suited to the role that she holds.
This lesson served her well once she came to USAID, where she was Deputy Chief of Staff at one of the most important crisis moments in this agency's history – and that so many of you remember was 2014 when the Ebola outbreak occurred in West Africa. It’s hard to remember now, especially after COVID, just the terror that people felt at the time – the sense of something that was spreading like wildfire that could not be contained. The polarization politically here in Washington and the temptation toward collective punishment that was often racially inflicted. It was a very difficult time – and very hard to mobilize consensus around what should be done as an executive branch nevermind to mobilize bipartisan consensus to secure the needed resources to respond adequately.
USAID Missions and humanitarian staff – of course, as everyone else was running away from the fire, they – you – were running towards the fire. It was USAID on the front lines identifying local partners who could train health workers on using protective equipment, support partner clinics trying to treat infected patients and isolate them so more people would not get infected, and funding those who were communicating new burial rituals, so healthy people would stop getting exposed to the virus as they buried those they loved most. This was incredibly important work. It was work that so many were doing for the very first time and it was work that nobody had budgeted for. Nobody had budgeted for a once-in-a-century – at that time – epidemic that was moving at such a pace through humanity.
Michele knew that securing additional resources would be the difference between saving lives and ending the epidemic or not. She helped the Agency draft a government-wide supplemental budget request, in coordination with the interagency, that eventually helped secure more than $5 billion to stop the spread of Ebola – nearly half of which came to USAID, and which helped fund community-based efforts. She was so effective in the role of Deputy Chief of Staff that unsurprisingly she was promoted to Chief of Staff, where her black belt in bureaucracy – which we see deployed to great effect today was of course – incredibly useful.
Michele has proven herself to be a policy expert, as well. She played a key role in turning this agency’s Policy Framework, which launched last year, from a laundry list of priorities into a vision statement that has helped everyone at the Agency see themselves as crucial in advancing reforms. And she helped eliminate already hundreds of thousands of personnel hours spent on bureaucratic red tape, leading an assessment that ultimately retired 11 USAID policies that were creating unnecessary administrative work for our Missions.
We have seen her put the diplomacy skills that she honed with Sebastian and Rizzo all those years ago to make a real impact out in the world, and this has been really satisfying to see and really important for the administration and for President Biden. In October – this is just one example – Michele spearheaded the first-ever Japan-South Korea-USAID trilateral development dialogue on humanitarian assistance and development – and this again came at the specific request of President Biden. The meeting resulted in agreements to launch a whole series of flagship programs, supported by all three countries, and this in turn is facilitating greater collaboration and stronger relations between Japan and South Korea – a major strategic priority for the United States and no easy task given recent history. It was a prime example of development diplomacy – and South Korean officials were so impressed that they personally requested that Michele fly to Seoul to attend a Symposium celebrating the 70th anniversary of the US-South Korean alliance.
Here in Washington, as Paloma spoke to, she is known as a standout mentor, advocate, and community builder. Her colleagues speak of how she arranges one-on-ones with every new team member – from executive assistants to program analysts to department heads. She has mentored many senior leaders at this Agency – from Deputy Assistant Administrator Roman Napoli to Deputy Assistant Administrator Anka Lee, to several Front Office leaders – Paloma you’ve already heard from, Nikole Burroughs, Dennis Vega, Sonali Korde – our new AA [Assistant to the Administrator] for Humanitarian Affairs. The list goes on and on.
I, myself, was mentored by Michele during transition when she walked me step by step through the process – also informed me what my priority list should look like, and came very much to transition with her vision on how we would help this agency heal, but also set it on a path of being able to meet this moment and so much of what we are doing Michele was out of those early conversations really absolutely pivotal. I also must thank Thomas – who somehow enlisted, either because of his deep dedication to service or because his mother gave him no choice in preparing my binders for transition, so Michele introduced Thomas today as binder boy, but those were thick binders and I still feel guilty about the amount of paper that we employed – but they were all read I promise you from start to finish. But I think that what is amazing to see is that all of these aspects of her life come together and how much she has to offer as a mentor. How many aspects of the policy-making process of the impact securing exercise she has been involved in over the life of her career, so there is really nothing you can’t ask her and get a really informed experiential account of how to think about next steps.
She also has become famous for her annual Oktoberfest parties, decking out her house in Bavarian blue and white, serving four kinds of sausages and eight kinds of beer – now she can drink – and renting a moon bounce and video game truck for the kids.
As one coworker said, “Michele is a rare gem of a person, unfailingly mission-driven, direct, smart, strategic, and generous – all at the same time.” And in the words of another: “Her passion, compassion, intelligence, and political acumen make the world better again and again, whatever band Michele is playing in, I’m a front-row fan.” said her colleague.
Michele’s budget, policy, and people skills again bring her to this moment – and make her the only person if we did an intergalactic search that should be occupying this role at this time, which is heading up the new Bureau of Planning, Learning, and Resource Management. This new bureau is bringing together USAID’s strategic planning, budgeting, programs, and policy implementation functions into one unified Bureau – making it easier to work across the interagency and to keep USAID priorities aligned. The merger recognizes what Michele has known her entire career; that budgeting and planning are inherently political; that strategic planning and programming must take into account existing resources; and that USAID is most effective when these teams can coordinate and collaborate with each other.
This role is especially important at a time when our challenges are outstripping our resources – even with the substantial resources that we have been blessed to have at our disposal. Michele is already advocating incredibly effectively on the Hill, with our colleagues at the State Department, with the interagency, and with OMB for additional funding – we know we need it. We know we have exactly the right person to champion our causes. She is creative in designing policies that can help bring in new partners and stretch our impact beyond our programs. As the multilateral work with the Koreans and the Japanese is already showing and on a more practical level, she is breaking down bureaucratic walls and facilitating collaboration between what used to be separate offices – and that is no small feat in government!
Michele is bringing immense expertise. A lifetime of expertise – a toolkit and skillset that is unrivaled at this agency, and unparalleled dedication to USAID’s mission and to our team. I can not think of a greater privilege for me, Michele, than to have the chance now to swear you in as our Assistant Administrator for Planning, Learning, and Resource Management. Thank you so much and congratulations!