President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk have suggested without evidence that officials at the U.S. Agency for International Development may have siphoned off taxpayer money for themselves, echoing false social media claims about the former administrator’s net worth.
The Trump administration — largely through the new Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE — has targeted USAID for closure, and we’ve written about several false or misleading claims from the administration aimed at discrediting the agency or foreign aid.
On Feb. 11, Musk, who has publicly taken on the role of leading DOGE, appeared in the Oval Office with the president to provide updates to the press on the department’s progress.
There, Trump asked Musk, “Could you mention some of the things that your team has found? Some of the crazy numbers, including the woman that walked away with about $30 million?”
“Right,” Musk said, “we do find it rather odd that there are quite a few people in the bureaucracy who have, ostensibly, a salary of a few hundred thousand dollars, but somehow manage to accrue tens of millions of dollars of net worth while they are in that position, which is, you know, what happened at USAID. … I think the reality is that they’re getting wealthy at the taxpayer expense.”
But Musk didn’t provide anything to back up that statement. The White House didn’t respond when we asked which government employees Musk was citing.
He and the president appear to be referring to the former USAID administrator Samantha Power, who had recently been the subject of social media claims that her net worth had increased from about $7 million when former President Joe Biden appointed her to the position in 2021 to $30 million when she left the agency in 2025.
Musk reposted a version of the claim on his social media platform, X, the day before the press conference. “Sounds very fishy,” he wrote.
But no one making the claim has provided evidence that Power’s net worth increased by $23 million during her four years at USAID.
The claim that Musk reposted referenced a website called Inside Biden’s Basement, which has been posting details from the financial disclosures of Biden administration officials since 2022. It has a page on Power.
Two things are important here:
First, the financial disclosures required of federal officials aren’t meant to calculate a person’s net worth. Rather, they are intended to identify potential conflicts of interest among high-level government employees, as the Congressional Research Service explains in a 2023 report. Disclosures require officials to list gifts, property interests, and income from interest and capital gains, among other things, as well as liabilities. Most of these assets and liabilities are listed in ranges — sometimes wide ranges — rather than in specific figures. One investment fund listed on Power’s 2024 disclosure, for example, has a reported value of $1 million to $5 million.
Second, the disclosures filed by Power show that the range for her wealth stayed pretty much the same from the time she entered office to the time she left.
Power, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author who has written several books and served on the National Security Council and as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations during the Obama administration, listed the royalties from those books and the value of retirement and investment accounts, for example. Officials are also required to disclose the assets for their spouses. Power is married to Cass Sunstein, a well-known author and scholar who has reported income from royalties, academic positions and speaking engagements.
On the form she filed before becoming administrator of USAID in January 2021, which covered the previous year, Power reported between $8.8 million and $29 million in shared wealth with her husband. On the most recent form, which was filed in 2024 and covers the previous year, Power reported between $12 million and $30.5 million.
So, it appears that the social media posts Musk echoed had taken the low end of the range for her reported wealth from when she took the position and compared it with the high end of the range from her final disclosure form to make the distorted claim that her net worth increased by tens of millions.
You can see here the forms she filed in 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024.
We don’t know exactly how Power’s and her husband’s net worth changed while she was head of USAID — the financial disclosure forms don’t tell us that. But we know the range for her wealth stayed about the same, and the forms don’t support the claims on social media.
And, as Forbes pointed out in a recent article, many government officials come to Washington already wealthy.
Accusing a political opponent of suspiciously increasing their wealth while in office is a common tactic, and we’ve written about similar claims many times before.
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