Schatz Presses Secretary Rubio On Foreign Assistance Cuts, Impacts On People, Partners Around The World
Schatz Calls On Rubio To Protect Foreign Aid, Work Together On Bipartisan Funding Bill
WASHINGTON – At two separate Senate hearings today, U.S. Senator Brian Schatz (D-Hawai‘i), questioned Secretary of State Marco Rubio, pressing him on his role in foreign assistance decisions and securing a commitment that Rubio and other foreign assistance officials come back before Congress and work together to write and pass a bipartisan funding bill that protects foreign aid and maintains U.S influence and leadership around the world.
At the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on State and Foreign Operations hearing, Schatz, the lead Democrat on the panel, said, “Fighting HIV/AIDS, helping partners defend themselves, responding to disasters, that is not ‘woke’ or ‘leftist’ or ‘radical.’ It is a foundation of American foreign policy. And they are all under threat. Any time we’ve asked for clarity about what the Trump administration is doing, we’ve gotten very little.” Schatz continued, “In order to put USAID under the State Department and better align it, we need a statute. In order to reform all of these programs, we need an SFOPS bill… If we can get to writing a bill, the country will be better for it.”
At the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, Schatz underscored the human consequences of the administration’s cuts to foreign aid, saying, “Mothers who have fled Boko Haram in Nigeria are watching their babies starve. Children in South Sudan are dying of cholera. Families are dying because they have been cut off from their HIV medication – there are 103 deaths an hour. And so we can talk about the reorganization of the State Department, but this becomes quickly not an abstraction, not a normal public policy tug and pull, because the way that this has been done, set aside our disagreement over whether it’s been done lawfully, has been done in a rather catastrophic fashion.”
Video of the Foreign Relations Committee exchange is available here. Video of Schatz’s opening statement and questioning at the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee hearing is available here.
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