Dina Powell
Dina Powell, also known as Dina Powell McCormick is an Egyptian-American financial executive, philanthropist, and political advisor, best known for having been the United States Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategy to President Donald Trump.
Born in Cairo, Egypt, she came to the United States as a child. A lifelong member of the Republican Party, she became involved in Texas-oriented Republican politics during and following her time at the University of Texas at Austin. During the George W. Bush administration, Powell served in several roles, first as an Assistant to the President for Presidential Personnel and then as Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs and Deputy Undersecretary of State for Public Affairs and Public Diplomacy. In 2007, Powell joined Goldman Sachs, where she became a managing director and eventually a partner at the firm, as well as president of its non-profit subsidiary, the Goldman Sachs Foundation. In that capacity she ran the foundation's 10,000 Women program.
Powell joined the Trump administration during the transition period 2016/2017 and remained thereafter. As a Deputy National Security Advisor she had a role in determining the first year of the administration's foreign policy, especially in regard to Middle East policy. She was also an Assistant to the President and Senior Counselor for Economic Initiatives, a position – demanding about 20 percent of her time – that continued after her security appointment.
She left the administration in early 2018, returning to work for Goldman Sachs, where she was a Partner and served on the Management Committee. In October 2018, Powell was a leading candidate for the position of United States Ambassador to the United Nations, but withdrew from consideration and remained with the financial firm. In 2022 she was named the new chair of the Robin Hood Foundation, to begin in 2023. Powell departed Goldman Sachs in 2023 to join BDT & MSD Partners. Powell was a board member of Meta Platforms from April to December 2025, resigning without specifying a reason, before being named president and vice chair of the company in January 2026.
Early life and education
Dina Habib was born in Cairo, Egypt to a middle-class, Coptic Christian family. Her father was a captain in the Egyptian Army, and her mother had attended American University in Cairo. Her parents brought her younger sister and her to the United States as children. Habib arrived knowing no English.The Habib family settled in Dallas, Texas, where they had relatives within the Coptic community. The parents ran a convenience store, and her father also worked at times as a bus driver and in real estate, while her mother sometimes pursued a career in social work. A third daughter was born once the family was in North America.
Habib learned English at school, but her family insisted that she be raised with Egyptian culture and language, hence, she is fluent in Arabic. Of her parents' actions, she later said, "I so desperately wanted a turkey and cheese sandwich with potato chips, and instead I always got grape leaves and hummus and falafel, not even in a cool brown paper bag. And now, of course, I appreciate so much that I did." Each of the family members born abroad became a naturalized citizen of the United States. She attended the prep school for girls Ursuline Academy of Dallas, from which she was graduated in 1991.
She then attended the University of Texas at Austin College of Liberal Arts where she enrolled in the Plan II Honors program. She performed community service as part of her program and joined the Delta Delta Delta sorority.
Habib helped pay for school by working as a legislative assistant for two Republican members of the Texas State Senate: Ike Harris and Jerry E. Patterson. With them, she worked on a number of policy matters, including juvenile justice reform.
Her family strongly identified with the Republican Party and greatly admired Ronald Reagan. She adopted the same views, later recalling that "... when I started to work with Republicans I realised that I agree with the views of personal empowerment, of less government involvement, of having the ability to talk about things without the government necessarily being involved. And on the economic side I'm definitely a believer that people should spend more of their money and spend it the way they think so and invest it wisely."
For her honors thesis, she wrote about the value of mentoring juvenile delinquents. She graduated from the University of Texas with honors with a bachelor's degree in humanities from its College of Liberal Arts in 1995.
Early political career
Habib had applied to, and had been accepted by, a law school. However, in part due to her Arabic fluency,she received an offer of a year-long internship with the U.S. Senator from Texas, Kay Bailey Hutchison. She deferred the school and accepted the internship, moving to Washington, D.C. in the process. She never returned to law school.
After the year-long internship concluded, she took a job with Dick Armey, the Republican Majority Leader in the U.S. House of Representatives. There, she worked as a member of his leadership staff. This role lasted four years.
After that, she took a job with the Republican National Committee where she was Director of Congressional Affairs and helped to find positions for Republicans in lobbying firms. As part of this role she became involved in the George W. Bush presidential campaign, 2000.
First marriage and family
Powell married Richard C. Powell on January 10, 1998. A public relations professional, he became a managing director of the Washington-based Quinn Gillespie & Associates and later became employed by Teneo as the president of Teneo Strategy. After the marriage, she began using his last name professionally.The couple had two daughters, born in 2001 and 2006. In 2007 the couple had purchased a $3.85 million condominium apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
Bush administration
White House Personnel Office
While working at the RNC, Powell was spotted by Clay Johnson III, who would come to be in charge of hiring for the George W. Bush administration. The day after the election Johnson called Powell regarding the presidential transition.Once in office, Johnson took her on as a Deputy Assistant to the President for Presidential Personnel.
Beginning in January 2003, Johnson moved up and elsewhere in the administration and Powell took on his role, thereby serving as the Assistant to the President for Presidential Personnel, a senior staff position at the White House. In this role, she was responsible for assisting the President on the appointments of the cabinet, subcabinet and ambassadorial positions across the U.S. Government. She had a staff of 35 reporting to her; once the second term of the Bush presidency began in January 2005, was part of hiring some 4,000 people. She participated in some of the recommendations process as well as processing the applications. At age 29, she was the youngest person ever to hold this position.
Some of the recommendations she made for the U.S. State Department put her in good stead with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
Department of State
In March 2005, Powell was nominated as Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs, an assignment that included becoming an ambassador to the Arabic-speaking world. News of the nomination landed on the front page of Al-Ahram and made her notable in Egypt. Powell served in that position from July 11, 2005, through June 6, 2007. Powell was also designated by Secretary Rice to the office of Deputy Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. In addition, Powell led the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, in whose responsibility fell the Fulbright Program and similar foreign endeavors. In her role, Powell traveled worldwide with Secretary Rice, but mostly focused on going to the Middle East.During this period, Powell established several public-private partnerships between American corporations and foreign entities, including a U.S.-Lebanon partnership in the wake of the 2006 war that sought to help rebuild the local economy. These may have been under the protection of the Middle East Partnership Initiative. She helped create some cultural exchanges between the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran, including Iranian doctors coming west and a U.S. wrestling team going east. She was also responsible for bringing in scholars from other nation-states. Powell worked to establish the Fortune/U.S. State Department Global Women's Mentoring Partnership, which connected up-and-coming female leaders with the community of Fortune's Most Powerful Women Summit, a joint venture between the State Department and Fortune magazine that received praise over the next decade.
In 2007, she left the White House and government service, saying "It's the right time for me and my family." She had been the highest-ranking Arab-American in the Bush administration. The Washington Post assessed that Dina Habib Powell had "played a critical role in the administration's efforts to bolster public diplomacy in the face of the wave of anti-Americanism that has swept the Arab world since the U.S. invasion of Iraq." Powell would later join the Advisory Council of the George W. Bush Presidential Center.
Goldman Sachs
Powell joined Goldman Sachs in 2007 as a managing director, having been hired by John F. W. Rogers, a longtime Goldman figure with experience with past Republican administrations. Powell was then named partner in 2010. Powell has conceded that she joined Goldman Sachs despite having no background in the subject of finance; she has said that her entire career has been guided by the notion of not planning a lot but rather "just taking that leap of faith."Powell oversaw the firm's impact investing business and served as the president of the Goldman Sachs Foundation beginning in 2010. This was in addition to her responsibilities as global head of the Office of Corporate Engagement and a member of the Goldman Sachs Partnership Committee.
As the leader of Goldman Sachs Impact Investing, Powell was responsible for a business with more than $4 billion in housing and community development investments across the United States.
In her role as president of the Goldman Sachs Foundation, Powell led one of the world's largest corporate foundations. Powell helped build and was responsible for all the Foundation's initiatives supporting and developing entrepreneurs around the world, including 10,000 Women and 10,000 Small Businesses. 10,000 Women provides women entrepreneurs in developing countries with business education, access to capital and mentors. Under Powell, Goldman Sachs partnered with International Finance Corporation and Overseas Private Investment Corporation to raise 600 million dollars to provide access to capital for more than 100,000 women worldwide. To realize this project, Powell worked closely with the State Department.
Powell also led Goldman Sachs Gives, a fund established in 2007 and structured as a vehicle to consolidate Goldman Sachs partners' charitable giving.
During her time at Goldman Sachs, Powell joined the boards of directors or trustees of Harvard Kennedy School's Social Enterprise Initiative, the American University in Cairo, the Center for Global Development, Vital Voices, and the Nightingale-Bamford School. Powell is listed as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a member of the Trilateral Commission.
Powell has worked with Democrats such as Obama administration advisors Valerie Jarrett and Gene Sperling.