Source: United States Senator for Hawaii Brian Schatz
WASHINGTON – As the U.S. Senate considers a rescissions package to codify $9 billion dollars in cuts to foreign assistance and public broadcasting, U.S. Senator Brian Schatz (D-Hawai‘i) spoke out against the Trump administration’s illegal dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the catastrophic consequences the elimination of aid has had on vulnerable people around the world. Schatz, who is the Ranking Member of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on State and Foreign Operations which oversees foreign assistance, noted that over 360,000 people had already died as a result of not having food and medication in the wake of the funding cuts. Schatz also noted that the none of the programs that Republicans have objected to are currently active, and that the funding being rescinded is valid through the end of the next fiscal year and can be reprogrammed by the Trump administration to reflect its priorities.
“Presidents can save lives. They can also cost lives. And while almost every president has chosen to do the former, Donald Trump, aided by a band of loyalists and ideologues, has chosen instead to inflict death and disease and starvation on the world’s most vulnerable,” said Senator Schatz. “We used to be the indispensable nation that people around the world counted on for help. People would see the American flag, whether on the side of a truck or a sticker on a food parcel, and think, ‘The good guys are here. Help is coming,’ But not anymore. We are causing death now. We are spreading disease now. We are deepening starvation now.”
Senator Schatz continued, “We are not going to prevent every death – we know that. We’re not going to be able to feed every child – we understand that. We cannot feasibly help every community that needs help – we accept that. But this is something different altogether. This is knowingly and willingly and needlessly inflicting horrific suffering on millions and millions of the most vulnerable people live anywhere on the planet. And for what? To save money? The idea that any of this is about finding savings, while at the same time, Republicans are exploding the national debt by $4 trillion to cut taxes for billionaires just doesn’t pass the smell test. And to top it all off, the administration is about to incinerate – is about to light on fire – 500 metric tons of food aid because they let it expire while sitting in a warehouse for months.”
“There were a bunch of controversial programs that precipitated this effort to cut USAID. All of those programs were discontinued. This is a budget that was enacted in March. This is Trump’s budget. This is Trump’s State Department. This is economic support funds. This is global public health. This is humanitarian assistance. This is helping our friends in Jordan and elsewhere to maintain the basic stability so that there is not a conflagration in a region. That is what’s being rescinded from this package,” Senator Schatz added.
A transcript of Senator Schatz’s remarks is below. Video is available here.
It all started with the stroke of a pen. Within hours of taking office in January, the president signed what can only be called a death sentence to millions of people all over the world. Executive Order 14 169 simply read, “It is the policy of the United States that no further United States foreign assistance shall be disbursed in a manner that is not fully aligned with the foreign policy of the president of the United States.” The order directed a 90 day pause in payments while foreign assistance was reviewed. But it became clear that this was not a process for reviewing or reforming programs. It was the beginning of the end, a wholesale destruction of the enterprise from top to bottom, in defiance of the law and of logic.
Presidents can save lives. They can also cost lives. And while almost every president has chosen to do the former, Donald Trump, aided by a band of loyalists and ideologues, has chosen instead to inflict death and disease and starvation on the world’s most vulnerable. We used to be the indispensable nation that people around the world counted on for help. People would see the American flag, whether on the side of a truck or a sticker on a food parcel, and think, the good guys are here. Help is coming.
But not anymore. We are causing death now. We are spreading disease now. We are deepening starvation now. And it’s not because it’s saving us huge sums of money, or because saving lives somehow stopped being in our national interest. All of this suffering and misery is because a few people were hellbent on ransacking the government and tearing down whatever it is that they didn’t like or they didn’t understand, to hell with the consequences. To them, the lives lost or just the cost of doing business. Move fast and break things is the ethos of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. But when you move fast and you break things in the United States Agency for International Development, tens of thousands of people perish.
So let’s start with how we got here. Following Trump’s executive order, Secretary Rubio and Peter Marocco, the new director of the State Department’s Office of Foreign Assistance, issued a stop work order on all 6,200 grants and contracts worldwide. They also ordered an immediate pause on new foreign assistance spending. That meant that partners who had already completed work were not getting paid. Contracts that had already been signed couldn’t be executed. Days later, Marocco, along with a bunch of DOGE staffers, including a 19-year-old and a 23-year-old, physically barged into U.S. aid and forced dozens of senior career officials to be put on leave over so-called insubordination. These people were just doing their jobs. His issue seemingly was with payments that had been approved before the executive order and were then making their way through the USAID payment system. Nevertheless, the career civil servants were escorted out of the building and locked out of their emails.
Anyone who dared to push back or speak up was sidelined, including the acting administrator, who was pushed out to make way for Marocco to become deputy administrator. As he and his team looked for not just savings or efficiencies, but what they called “viral abuse” that would be easy to mock out of context, Fox Mews stepped into the breach to help for days on end. Their chyrons blared: “Viper’s Nest: USAID Accused of Corruption Long Before Trump Administration Took Aim.” “More Ridiculous USAID Spending Revealed.” “Elon Purged DC’s Slush Fund.”
As the smear campaign kicked into overdrive. DOGE locked out all of the agency’s employees, including those working in conflict zones, from their phones and emails. And in early February, Musk tweeted, “USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die.” Days later, after carrying out the destruction, he wrote, “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the woodchipper.”
And just like that, one of the United States’ primary instruments of soft power over the last 60 years, which has done everything from curing diseases to thwarting terrorism, was decapitated overnight. USAID’s success in moral, political, economic, and security terms was made possible by scores of public servants who felt a responsibility to alleviate suffering, even if that meant putting themselves in harm’s way. But in the end, it was torn down by a bunch of crazed ideologues who saw foreign assistance as an easy target to test drive their project of crippling the government.
Perhaps abolishing the health department or the VA in the first few weeks was a bridge too far. But here was money going to help people in, as Madeleine Albright used to say, faraway places with hard to pronounce names. And no matter how much good it was doing for the people whose lives were saved and communities were built, but also for our national security – none of that mattered when all you had to do was make up some lies to justify the vandalism.
It’s been only a few months and already the loss of USAID and its critical work around the world has been catastrophic. More than 360,000 people have died as a result of the cuts. 360,000 deaths. And so I will be damned if I let a pundit, or Democratic strategist, or Republican strategist tell me that the American people signed up for allowing 360,000 people to die. On purpose. For what? Deficit reduction? And to Patty Murray’s point, two weeks ago, they just blew up the deficit by trillions of dollars. The amount of money that it takes to save a starving child, or to prevent the transmission of HIV/AIDS from mother to child, is minuscule. And we do this because we’re the good guys. And we do this because it’s cheap. And we do this because when we need something from a friend in a foreign land, they think of us well, because we’re always on the scene to be helpful.
These are not hypothetical or distant outcomes. We are no longer arguing about what might happen in the future. We are talking about what is happening across the planet right now. People are dying right now, not in spite of us, but because of us. We are causing death. We have gone from being the good guys – flaws, mistakes and all – to being a conduit for death and sickness and hunger.
A ten-year-old boy named Peter in South Sudan contracted HIV from his mother at birth. His parents died while he was young, but medication through PEPFAR kept him alive. That was until February, when, without access to medication, Peter fell severely sick and later died. The health outreach worker who had cared for him said simply, “If USAID would be here, Peter would not have died.”
A pregnant woman in a Liberian village hemorrhaged and began to bleed heavily while in labor. But without gas, because of funding cuts, USAID ambulances stood idle, unable to help. And despite her neighbors’ best efforts to carry her ten miles on foot through the jungle to the nearest hospital, she died mid-journey, along with her unborn son.
Dorcas, a ten-year-old in Zambia, had gotten so used to her routine of taking HIV medication every night with her mom that she was confused when it ran out a few months ago. Her mom recounted: “In the past week, she’ll open up the tin and find that it’s empty. So she’ll run down to the clinic and go check if she can collect her medication, and she’ll come back and say, oh, you’re right, the clinic is closed. They’re not there anymore.”
In Sudan, which has been ravaged by war and gripped by famine, a mother watched two of her children under the age of three wither from malnutrition and die after a soup kitchen that had been supported by USAID closed overnight. Days before he died, the older of the two children had asked for porridge. “I told him, we don’t have any wheat to make that,” his mother recalled, adding that the soup kitchen’s daily meal – which the family was shared – was a godsend.
A mother in Nigeria worried about how she would keep her infant alive, having just lost the other twin to malnutrition in the wake of funding cuts. A peanut paste supplement that had been paid for by American foreign assistance had been used to treat her newborns for malnutrition. She wondered about how she’d feed her child. And she said, “I don’t want to bury another child.”
There are thousands and thousands of gut-wrenching stories just like these – from every corner of the planet; with newborns and children and families and communities. And this is only what’s happened in the last few months. Just imagine what’s going to happen if we codify these cuts.
We are not going to prevent every death – we know that. We’re not going to be able to feed every child – we understand that. We cannot feasibly help every community that needs help – we accept that. But this is something different altogether. This is knowingly and willingly and needlessly inflicting horrific suffering on millions and millions of the most vulnerable people live anywhere on the planet. And for what? To save money? The idea that any of this is about finding savings, while at the same time, Republicans are exploding the national debt by $4 trillion to cut taxes for billionaires just doesn’t pass the smell test. And to top it all off, the administration is about to incinerate – is about to light on fire – 500 metric tons of food aid because they let it expire while sitting in a warehouse for months.
They are lighting food on fire. Food grown in the United States, manufactured in the United States, to be sent out to the most vulnerable people on the planet with a sticker with the United States emblem on it. And Making America Great Again, apparently, is doing all of that and then letting it rot in a warehouse and then incinerating it. What the hell are we doing here? You want to have a conversation about debt and deficits? You want to have a conversation about aligning our foreign policy better? You want to have a conversation about whether or not the State Department – not the USAID agency – should have been funding operas and cultural enterprises in foreign countries. Fine. We can have that conversation. But I dare you to justify lighting food on fire.
It wasn’t so long ago that a Republican senator stood on this very floor, talking about those in his party who claimed that cutting foreign aid was an easy way to save money. “A lot of times people will say, well, ‘Cut foreign aid.’ But foreign aid is less than 1% of our budget. Foreign aid can make a difference when properly used. And if you ever have a chance to travel to the African continent, you will meet people who are alive today because the American taxpayer funded antiviral HIV medications that kept them alive. It is not easy to radicalize people who are alive because of the American taxpayer.” That was Secretary Rubio as Senator Rubio.
Why is this happening at all? I worry that there is a very specific and rather dark view about what the United States is capable of. It’s a view of our military. It’s a view of our economic power. It’s a view of our cultural power. And it’s a view of our moral authority. Which is the best path forward, as we decline, is to lock it down, is to not engage with the world, is to not project power militarily, culturally, economically, morally.
We are going from the indispensable nation. And by the way, this is a real thing. If you ever do foreign policy trips, people hang on the words of United States senators who sit on the Foreign Relations Committee. First among equals. People want to know, what’s the United States doing? What’s the United States doing? It doesn’t matter what the issue is. It could be it could be fighting malnutrition. It could be economics and trade. It could be military strategy. Everyone wants to know: what’s the United States doing? You know what has changed in the last six months? They’re moving on from us. They’re not waiting to hear what the United States is doing. They’ve seen what the United States is doing. In Trump 1.0, we could basically be reassuring and say, ‘We’ll be back, don’t worry. We’re going through a rocky time.’
Now, China is in the breech. China has stepped up. It’s not just that America’s retreat is bad for us. It is really good for China. It is great for Russia. It’s great if you’re Hungary. The Kremlin was nearly instantaneous with its praise calling the dismantling of the foreign aid enterprise a smart move. Autocrats in Hungary and El Salvador also celebrated USAID’s demise. Now there’s a basic principle in political campaigns, which is if you are doing something that your opponent loves, you may want to reconsider whether it’s a good strategy. The moment we did this, all the bad guys were like, ‘Very smart. Good job. We’re very happy for you. Excellent.’ China has seized this opportunity with a little more specificity because they have the opportunity to step into this role. They are working on child nutrition and landmine clearing in Cambodia. Health and education in Nepal. Disaster response in Myanmar. Climate resilience in Mongolia. And it doesn’t take a great deal of imagination to understand what this will look like in a few years’ time. China will become the partner of choice for countries, big and small, all around the world. It will have increased its funding to global bodies like the World Health Organization, enabling it to win leadership posts and rewrite the rules in its favor. And we will have facilitated that process.
So that’s the background. Now let’s talk about the specifics of what’s in this package. And this point I want to make really clear. And I made this point in the Appropriations Committee. There were a bunch of controversial programs that precipitated this effort to cut USAID. Two points to be made. One, the total dollar amount of all the controversial programs was like in the $100-200 million range. That’s number one.
Number two is all of those programs were discontinued. This is a budget that was enacted in March. This is Trump’s budget. This is Trump’s State Department. This is Trump’s USAID. And so there is not a single thing that was on that Fox chyron that Marco Rubio is continuing to do. So this rescissions package doesn’t have any of that stuff. And by the way, some of my Republican colleagues who understandably weren’t super engrossed in the details, I had to send them a line-by-line of what these rescissions do. And they’re sitting there going, ‘Where’s the opera in Ecuador? Where’s the cultural exchange program or the parade in South Africa? Where’s all the goofy sounding stuff?’
And the answer is a lot of that stuff was made up in the first place. But even if you stipulate to the idea that there was inappropriate spending, it’s literally not in this package. What’s in this package is stuff that 90 out of 100 of us have asked for. And what do I mean by that? I mean, as the ranking member of the State and Foreign Ops Subcommittee – basically as a chair or ranking member of any of the subcommittees – you get a bunch of letters from your colleagues saying: ‘This program is important to me. Could you please take care of it in the coming appropriation cycle?’ And these letters are private and I will protect the confidentiality of these interactions. But suffice it to say, a lot of the people voting for the rescissions are also privately asking for me to fund the thing that they are defunding. So this is all about the momentum that came from DOGE and Trump and some tweets and some animus – real animus – to the foreign aid enterprise.
So let’s go through what’s in it. $4.15 billion for economic support and development assistance. Our economic and development assistance is not charity. It is for countering the influence of the People’s Republic of China or promoting regional stability. This work is in our economic and security interests. If this administration disagrees with some of the projects pursued by the previous administration, the good news is they have pretty broad authority to reprogram the money. Like if we’re doing a program, I don’t want to name a country because it’ll have foreign policy implications. If we’re doing a program in a country and this administration says, you know, that’s not as important. They don’t have to rescind the money. They can reprogram it to China or Russia or Ukraine or whatever it is. They have that flexibility. What they are saying is they want less money to counter foreign influence.
$563 million for treaty dues. Now we’re members of organizations with whom we disagree. That’s kind of the deal, right? Because if we want to be in an international forum, even arguing for our interests, even arguing against other countries, or being frustrated with the body with which we’re interacting, we have two choices. We can either participate. Or if we don’t pay our dues, we relegate ourselves to something called observer status, which basically means we’re on the outside looking in. In order to get in the room, you got to pay your dues to the relevant organization. And that is what we’re doing here. We’re rescinding all the funds for all of the payments to all these international organizations.
Why? Not because it’s in our foreign policy interests. It’s actually not, but because a bunch of ideologues don’t actually understand how foreign policy works. And that’s the thing here. You can have a different view under whatever it is to have an America First foreign policy. But this isn’t that. This is just vandalism, right? I’m not having a disagreement with Jim Risch about how hawkish to be or how much to prioritize global health versus something else. We’re just literally cutting off our nose to spite our face, because what they want is vandalism to the enterprise. And the tools of foreign policy are being shredded. So this isn’t about policy unless you think the policy is: I wish my State Department were weaker. I wish the tools in our toolkit were more limited. I wish our ability to prevent war and keep nations stable were less well funded. I wish that the only tool in our toolkit was military might.
And it is not a small thing that many former Secretaries of Defense have said something along the lines of if you defund foreign aid, I’m going to need more ammunition because this is the cheapest way to prevent war.
$500 million from global health programs. Now, the new Republican proposal protects some of those programs funded by this account, but it leaves out pandemic prevention, family planning, and work on a wide range of issues.
$1.3 billion for migration and refugee assistance and international disaster assistance. This funding supports our efforts to help refugees and other displaced people in conflict zones around the world. You know, most of us at some point out of the 100 of us do some sort of CODEL, some sort of foreign travel, and this is the kind of stuff we visit. And this is the stuff on a bipartisan basis that we all nod approvingly about. It’s great that we’re doing this. It’s great that we’re providing this kind of assistance. And $1.3 billion for refugee assistance is being cut.
And I’ll tell you why. It’s because it’s got the word refugee in it. I mean, that’s how they figured out what they wanted to cut, right? They ran word searches. They’re pretending it’s sophisticated. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. But all they were doing was looking for words like gender. Or looking for words like climate. Looking for words like equity. Looking for words like refugee. And if the program was named in such a way that it mentioned it, just use those words. It was out. Just totally preposterous.
Our contributions to and participate to participation in organizations like UNICEF is being cut. I mean, good luck explaining why you cut UNICEF. I’m pretty good at like imagining what my political competitors on the other side of the aisle would say. But why did you cut UNICEF? Like, are you trying to pretend that some number of hundreds of millions of dollars to prevent starvation among children is like going to do the trick in terms of getting debt and deficits under control? Nobody actually believes that. Why are you cutting UNICEF? If this is about tightening our belts? Why would you cut UNICEF?
$460 million for the assistance for Europe, Eurasia and Central Asia. This account funds a whole bunch of bipartisan foreign policy priorities, including energy security in Ukraine, that will be cut completely if this recession is enacted. If there were programs under the previous administration that the current administration disagrees with, good news: they literally have the authority to reprogram those dollars. This is two-year money. It doesn’t actually have to be spent by the end of the federal fiscal year. They have pretty good authority to reprogram it, but they don’t want to reprogram it to something that they consider important. They want to shred the enterprise.
$125 million for the U.S. Agency for International Development operating expenses. Now, this administration is illegally dismantling USAID and functionally merging it under the State Department. Here’s the problem with the $125 million. And yes, it’s admin expenses. I’ve been in the nonprofit sector and I’ve been in the grant giving side, and nobody loves the idea of paying for administrative expenses. But I know for a fact the State Department didn’t want this in the rescissions package. Because now that they have merged USAID under the State Department, they literally don’t have the money, and they’ve got to absorb $125 million hit.
$100 million for the Transition Initiatives in the Complex Crisis Fund. This is flexible funding and contingency accounts that didn’t expire, and the administration can program it in any way they want.
$83 million for the Democracy Fund. $83 million. Promoting democratic values is directly in our interest and supporting resistance to dictators – resistance to dictators. We’re cutting resistance to dictators. Good for us. Make America Great Again. Ronald Reagan would be proud. The party of Cold Warriors, the party that vanquished the Soviet Union, the party that claims a hawkish mantle is now saying, you know what? This thing which is probably 0.00 whatever of the entire federal spend and an even tinier amount of the debt and deficit of the United States. Let’s defund that, because it’s not our business if dictators maintain power. It’s a real change in policy here.
$27 million for the Inter-American Foundation. This provides small, cost effective grants and technical support for locally led development projects. Strengthening stability and self-reliance in partner countries is in our interest. And this is another one that I get a lot of letters from these guys saying, ‘Please fund it. Dear Ranking Chairman Graham and Ranking Member Schatz, this program is super important. And would you please fund it in the next appropriations cycle?’ That’s the private letter that we get. The public action is to rescind the money.
$22 million for the African Development Foundation. The administration says the African Development Foundation’s work is duplicative of the State Department’s work. But the kind of grants and technical support that the African Development Foundation provides is not available through the State Department.
15 million bucks for the United States Institute of Peace. A creature of statute. A creature of one of the first senators from the great state of Hawai‘i. Mr. Spark Matsunaga.
The through line between all of this is that there’s no correlation between the rationale provided by the administration for these cuts, and what’s actually in the package. And I’ve talked to Eric Schmidt, with whom I have a reasonable, functional working relationship. But we’re like talking past each other. Because every time I talk about what’s actually in this package, he pivots back to what’s actually not in this package and starts naming line items on things that are not in the eight-page rescissions bill. This is not the BBB which took 11.5 hours to read. This thing is eight pages. You can go and see there is no line item for $1.8 billion for operas and festivals and underwater basket weaving and whatever else nonsense people wanted to characterize as the U.S. foreign aid enterprise. This is economic support funds. This is global public health. This is humanitarian assistance. This is helping our friends in Jordan and elsewhere to maintain the basic stability so that there is not a conflagration in a region. That’s what’s in this package. That is what’s being rescinded from this package.
I understand that there is some obligation as a party member to oblige the requests of this party’s president. I get it. But we are still a system with separate, co-equal, independent branches of government. The problem is, if you don’t assert your authority, you don’t functionally have it. So it’s true that we hold the purse strings. It’s true that we’re the Article One branch. It’s true that we’re in charge of whether a bill passes or not. But I will tell you, the thing that is most alarming to me is not the bad policy outcomes – and there are terrible policy outcomes. The thing that is most alarming to me is that I have not yet seen in the last six months, in this final term of Donald Trump, what I saw in the first term of Donald Trump. Which is quietly, not rudely, not provocatively, but occasionally, this branch of government, on a bipartisan basis, stood up for itself and said – and those guys would say – ‘Look, we love you, Mr. Trump. We love you, Mr. President. But on this one, I can’t be with you.’
And on BBB, I understand, like it’s very hard to reject the president’s signature policy accomplishment. But this seemed like one where we could have gotten four no votes. This really did, to me, seem like one where it would be a good opportunity to stand up to the president and just say, like, we’re going to do the appropriating over here. Like, let me show you what Article One says and what Article Two says, and we’re going to defer to you on lots of matters, but not 100% of matters.
And so my question is if they’re going to have the votes to enact this rescission package. When is it that Republicans are going to stand up for their own prerogatives? And why would you run for office? Would you put your family through all of that? Would you go through the difficulty of a campaign? Would you go through the difficulty of being a public figure and subject to scrutiny and criticism, and all of the late nights and the kind of uncomfortable interactions and all that? It really is a sacrifice. It’s certainly an honor, but it’s also a sacrifice. Why would you do that if you don’t get to make up your own mind?
I don’t pretend to be able to get into the mind or the position of a Republican colleague of mine. I’m from Hawaii. It’s different. But I do think that there’s a point at which it’s just not worth it to give this guy every single thing that he wants. And it would be important, and it will age well, and your family will be happy and your staff will be secretly happy, at least some of them, if at some point you establish that there are some limits to the executive branch’s power.