[Congressional Record Volume 171, Number 22 (Monday, February 3, 2025)]
[Senate]
[Pages S536-S539]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                 Unanimous Consent Request--S. Res. 51

  Mr. COONS. Mr. President, as if in legislative session and 
notwithstanding rule XXII, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate 
proceed to the consideration of S. Res. 51, which was submitted earlier 
today; further, that the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be 
agreed to, and the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid 
upon the table with no intervening action or debate.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
  The Senator from Idaho.
  Mr. RISCH. Mr. President, reserving the right to object, I want to 
rise today to talk about what Senator Coons is attempting to do here.
  I have to say, a lot of us have said for years that the greatest 
national security threat that Americans face is our skyrocketing 
national debt.
  President Trump agrees with us and is committed to doing something 
about this. We must confront this, and to do so, hard choices are going 
to have to be made, and all--all--parts of government will have to be 
looked at very closely.
  The idea of merging USAID and the State Department is not new and has 
been floated by nearly every administration since the latter part of 
the last century.

[[Page S537]]

  I am supportive of the Trump administration's efforts to reform and 
restructure the Agency in a way that better serves U.S. national 
security interests.
  I am fortunate enough to talk with Secretary Rubio virtually daily, 
sometimes multiple times a day, and I was aware this was coming. As I 
said, I have encouraged that this be looked at. Today, along with a 
number of my colleagues on relevant committees on both sides of the 
aisle and the Hill, I received notification that Secretary Rubio is 
beginning the process of merging USAID into State. I had received this 
informal notice earlier than this.
  There is a lot of work to do in this effort, and there is a process 
set up for doing this. Secretary Rubio is following that process and 
looks forward to working with all of us as he goes through that 
process. It is my hope that all of my colleagues in both parties will 
help to do this important work.
  I have to say that this is just one Agency. There are many, many, 
many Agencies out there, and this is going to be coming down the pike 
on every amount of government spending. Elections have consequences, 
and this is one of the consequences, that we are going to do our best 
to reduce spending--do it by efficiencies, by combining where it is 
necessary.
  I will continue to be in close coordination with Secretary Rubio on 
this as it moves forward. As a result of that, I object to the proposed 
S. Res. 51.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The objection is heard.
  The Senator from Delaware.
  Mr. COONS. Mr. President, if I might further expound on the 
resolution and respond to the comments by my colleague, the chairman of 
the Foreign Relations Committee, on which I serve, the resolution I 
sought to advance today is a simple statement of fact. It reviews the 
history of USAID--its creation as an independent Agency and its 
recognition in a law I helped write just last year, that to reorganize 
it explicitly requires congressional consultation and notification in 
advance.
  The statement of the resolution, the core point of it, is that AID is 
central to advancing the national security of the United States because 
it mitigates threats abroad before they reach us here; it promotes 
global stability; and it addresses the root causes of migration and 
extremism and secures the leadership and influence of the United States 
in an era of strategic competition with the People's Republic of China.
  Let me speak to a few points, if I might: the power of the purse, 
process matters, 1 percent, and who wins.
  Rolling back the decades of work and relationships that the 
nonprofits and AID do around the world is creating a vacuum--a vacuum 
that will be filled by bad actors. So in a country where we have long 
funded the PEPFAR Program--started by President Bush, long supported on 
a bipartisan basis--that provides antiretrovirals and testing and 
nurses and support and clinics--to abandon that, to defund that, to 
shut that down simply creates an opening for a bad actor to come in and 
say: The Americans abandoned you. Sorry for your luck. Here we are. We 
want to help.
  The Chinese have invested hundreds and hundreds of billions in 
advancing their interests through investing in infrastructure, building 
partnerships in critical minerals, becoming the leads on port 
operations, and delivering humanitarian aid.
  We should not shut down our assistance to the world in a way that 
creates this vacuum.
  Who wins? is the first question. My concern is, our adversaries.
  Second, process matters. As those of us who are lawyers know, it is 
backward to start with an Executive order that shuts down the funding 
for an organization and an entity, to invade and occupy its 
headquarters, to have an unelected Department get into its systems, to 
lay off and furlough its senior leadership, and then notify Congress of 
the intent to begin a conversation about reorganization.
  I welcome a chance to have a conversation about the future of our 
development assistance around the world, and my hope is that it will 
continue because I have case after case to review here about the good 
work it does. But to shut down the funding and to cause lots of our 
partners to lay off their key staff and then begin a conversation about 
reorganization is to get it backward in terms of process and the law.

  I am an appropriator. Why should we bother coming to an agreement on 
appropriations here in the Senate, pass a law, send it to the 
President, he signs it, and then in the next Congress, the next 
President--they can shut it down and claw it back. It gets to the very 
question of the power of the purse, which, in article I of the 
Constitution, is the power of this body.
  Going forward--of course, as my colleague said, elections have 
consequences. It is true that President Trump and the new majority here 
will put their imprimatur on the policy priorities across a wide range 
of Agencies and programs--absolutely--and I expect that discussion and 
that fight. But this is reaching back and shutting down.
  One percent. One percent--actually, less than 1 percent of the total 
Federal budget goes to these vital humanitarian programs around the 
world. I will give you a few examples of what has been stopped in its 
tracks.
  A U.S. organization funded through AID has stopped its 
counterterrorism work in the Philippines that was reducing the appeal 
of terrorist recruitment and radicalization. We have walked away from 
that work.
  In Mexico, an organization that reduces the number of children 
recruited by gangs to help move drugs and migrants across our border 
has had its funding cut off.
  I remember trips that I took, bipartisan delegations I was a part of 
that went and visited AID-funded work where folks were delivering 
critical care. St. Mary's Clinic in Kibera in Nairobi, Kenya--one of 
the worst informal resettlement slums I have ever been in my life, and 
these dedicated, caring, capable folks were delivering vital life 
assistance. In Liberia, during Ebola, I will never forget meeting with 
the nurses, the doctors, the volunteers, the Liberians, who were 
helping save lives.
  Why does this matter? Today, there is an Ebola outbreak in Kampala, 
Uganda. There is a Marburg outbreak in Tanzania. It is the disease 
monitoring and testing, it is the clinics and the nurses that keep 
these diseases controlled and managed on the other side of the world 
before they come here.
  Failing to sustain this work in an efficient and effective work way 
is to fail to show the values of the United States, is to show we are 
not a reliable partner, is to show that the decades of bipartisan 
support for critical initiatives like PEPFAR have been abandon because 
they are no longer considered a smarter strategic investment by one 
party, while the other party will fight for it.
  My fondest hope is that we will yet find there is bipartisan support 
for continuing and sustaining these investments, but it is unclear 
because the unelected leader of DOGE, Elon Musk, is even now tweeting: 
Shut it down. Close it off.
  My hope is that Secretary Rubio's comments today on television about 
sustaining many of the critical functions of AID will win out, but I am 
not confident because it is unclear to me who is really driving this 
initiative.
  Let me close. We know that diplomacy and development stand alongside 
defense in being critical to our national security. President Trump's 
first Defense Secretary, Gen. James Mattis, said to us in a hearing 
that if foreign aid were to get cut, he would need to buy more bullets 
because foreign aid around the world helps us build relationships of 
support, combat terrorism and extremism, advance our values and 
priorities, and makes us safer and more secure.
  I cannot think of a more troubling development than that this long-
trusted, capable, bipartisan effort at helping bring our values to the 
world and helping secure our Nation would be cut off abruptly, roughly, 
in a way that violates the law and the spirit of our long bipartisan 
compromise.
  Who wins if we do, in fact, shut this all down? It is our 
adversaries. It is terrorists. It is drug cartels. It is Russia. It is 
China. It is those we have held at bay through the great work of this 
organization and its dedicated servants for decades.
  My hope is that even though this resolution was opposed and thus 
defeated

[[Page S538]]

tonight, the determination to support this great work will survive and 
thrive and prevail.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Idaho.
  Mr. RISCH. Mr. President, first of all, to my good friend from 
Delaware, I know that he is aware that a number of the programs here 
have already received a waiver because the case was made for those 
programs, and that is appropriate.
  But, look, as I started to say at the beginning, this is about the 
debt of the United States. The fact that we are borrowing $1 trillion 
every hundred days--it can't go on.
  This institution, as long as I have been here, has been trying to do 
something about it. We have tried over and over and over again to make 
something happen. What do we do? We create a study group. The study 
group sits down, they talk for 2 years, they create a great big report, 
and nothing ever comes of it. This President is making things happen.
  One of the Agencies that a lot of us have had concerns about over the 
years is USAID and how the money was being spent. We are going to have 
a look at it. I have no doubt that when we are done with that, everyone 
is going to have a say, and at the end of the day, we will, as we do in 
a democracy, vote, and that will be the end of it.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Delaware.
  Mr. COONS. Mr. President, if I might, one of my own pressing concerns 
I have raised with colleagues here on the floor tonight is that even in 
cases where Secretary Rubio has given a waiver to try to keep programs 
like PEPFAR going, money is not flowing. Several Republican Senators 
have posted and spoken to this issue today.
  If Secretary Rubio is in charge of this initiative, those waivers 
should lead to funding being restored. If he is not, if this is really 
Elon Musk's vision of ``shut it all down,'' then what is happening on 
the ground today in country after country will show us where we are 
really headed, which is the complete abandonment of our global 
leadership in humanitarian relief and development.
  I pray that we can work together to ensure that the critical work of 
dozens of household-name nonprofits is not abandoned and that what is 
left of AID is not allowed to bleed out while we here in the Senate 
debate it.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Hawaii.
  Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, I want to thank Senator Coons for his 
leadership on trying to restore international order. And that is what 
we are talking about.
  The chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee is talking about 
reforms to the way we deliver aid. Look, 10 days ago, I had a 
conversation with Senator Graham, who is the chairman of the committee 
that has jurisdiction over spending in the State Department--I am now 
the ranking member of that committee--and we talked about the 
opportunities for reform. We talked about the need to align American 
foreign policy with USAID.

  And to the extent that we are all alarmed at the Belt and Road 
Initiative, to the extent that we watch what China does internationally 
and we think, ``How smart of them; we should do something like that,'' 
the response should be to better align USAID with the State 
Department's objectives, with our geopolitical strategy, but not to 
eliminate our power internationally.
  And I think the point that has to be--has to be--understood right 
now--because some Republicans that I am talking to kind of agree that 
we don't want to get rid of foreign aid, we don't want to get rid of 
USAID, but they want to institute some reforms; they want to have a 
negotiation. Fine.
  Understand two things: One, this freeze is just flatly illegal. Let 
me explain what I mean. Every year, we pass an appropriations bill. And 
unlike in State governments where, if you appropriate money to 
something, a Governor can actually restrict those funds, our 
Constitution provides and our statutes provide that when we appropriate 
money as the article I branch, the executive branch has the obligation 
to see to it that it is done in a way that is meritorious. But they 
don't get to decide not to spend the money.
  If they didn't like a particular provision in a bill, they could have 
threatened a veto or been part of the negotiation or whatever. But once 
it is enacted, it is literally the law of the land.
  The other thing is: USAID is a creature of Federal law. It is true 
that it was originally established by an Executive order. That is true. 
But that sort of misses the point. There was an Executive order. Look, 
if you establish something by an Executive order and nothing follows, 
then the next President gets to revoke that Executive order. The thing 
vanishes. That is a total authority that a President has.
  But what happened was USAID was established by Executive order, and 
then Congress made a law. So it doesn't matter whether it was 
originally made by Executive order or memo or speech or that someone 
sang a jingle to establish USAID. It is now a Federal law, and you 
don't get to waive it because you don't like it.
  I just don't understand--look, there will be a Democratic President, 
and I want people to do the thought experiment of how unbelievably 
angry you will be when President whoever comes in and says: I am 
canceling the F-35. I am canceling a road in your community because I 
don't like it, because it doesn't fit with my ideology, because I won.
  That is not how this works. And it is sometimes very frustrating, 
especially when you are the majority party, to understand that all you 
did was you just won to be at the helm of the executive branch and to 
be at the helm of the legislative branch. But that didn't mean that you 
won a monarchy. That doesn't mean that you get to start just issuing 
memos and that is the new law.
  I think one of the problems right now is that there really are a 
bunch of billionaires who really do think: Ah, it ought to run like a 
business.
  If what you mean by that is things ought to be efficient and that we 
ought to be good stewards of the taxpayer dollar, count me in. But if 
what you mean by that is that there is one CEO and that CEO tells 
everybody what to do, and it doesn't matter what anyone else thinks or 
what the rules or the laws are, that is not our system of government. 
That is not the way this works.
  So that is No. 1. This thing is illegal. You can hate USAID and still 
hate what is happening to it because, if this is allowed to stand, it 
will happen to a Department you like. It will happen to an initiative 
you like. It will happen to something that you want to protect in your 
community or that you consider important for the country.
  So this isn't about the particulars of USAID. Let's have a debate 
about USAID, but let's have it in the context of the constraints of the 
Constitution and the laws of the United States. That is not a 
provocative partisan statement. It is a statement of fact that we all 
swear an oath to the Constitution and laws of the United States. And 
the context in which we have fights about things is within the four 
corners of statutory law. And if you hate a statute, we all know what 
to do.
  There is still literally--you know they say put a bill in a hopper? 
It is the year 2025. We still have a hopper. You can still drop a 
physical bill in the hopper.
  You have a proposal--great. But not: I have a proposal; let's draft 
an executive memorandum and start acting like there is a chief 
executive officer of the whole country. That is not how this works.
  The second point is this: People are dying now. People are dying now. 
So as we think about, ``Oh, what kind of reforms do we want to make? 
Why don't we align this better with U.S. foreign policy? I want to 
target wokeism''--or whatever the hell someone wants to think about the 
USAID budget, all of that is the kind of thing that you can do while 
you keep the Agency open--my God.
  I talked to Lindsey the other day, and I said: You know what would be 
really interesting--because we know administrative tasks are going to 
get easier and more efficiently done with the advent of AI. And I 
thought it would be pretty cool to figure out if we could drive the 
overhead rate in the USAID budget down over a period of time so that 
more aid goes to the people and the places that we intend it to go to.

[[Page S539]]

  Now, if there was a for-profit or a nonprofit and you were in the 
process of trying to become more efficient, right, and you were looking 
at a bunch of people who did a bunch of things and you think, ``You 
know, we need an electronic system for this, or we need a better way to 
do this; we need a better mousetrap,'' you don't shut the whole thing 
down and then figure it out.
  I am looking at the Presiding Officer. I am looking at the Senator 
from Delaware. Both of you have run big operations--private sector, 
public sector--and you know this is no way to run a railroad. You don't 
shut something down in order to reform it. You take seriously the 
proposition that there should be reform. You get aggressive. There 
should be no sacred cows--all of that.
  But what they did was they stormed into the offices of a Federal 
building, sent everybody home, broke into the secure conference 
facilities, broke into the SCIFs, locked people out of their emails.
  Does that sound like the United States of America? It really, 
honestly, does not sound like the United States of America to me. These 
people were not elected. There is a law in place.
  And it doesn't matter what you think about this particular Agency. I 
have got Agencies I don't like. I have got Agencies that I think are 
spending too much money or too little money. You know what I do about 
that? I introduce a bill to change it because I believe in the American 
system of government. And part of what we have to establish here is, Do 
we believe in the American system of government or has the internet 
broken our brains to the point where this is just another partisan 
fight?
  They stormed into a Federal office and purged employees. Think about 
how you would view that if it were some faraway place. Think about how 
the press would cover that if it were in Africa or Central Asia or 
South America or Central America. They would characterize it, 
appropriately, as autocratic behavior.
  So this isn't some small, little partisan dispute among a bunch of 
progressives who are bleeding hearts and worried about people and 
suffering and all that. This is about literally: Do we uphold the rule 
of law in the United States?
  So many people are in the U.S. Senate who care about this country and 
fled that kind of authoritarianism: my grandparents, my wife's 
grandparents. I won't presume anyone else's personal history, but, 
frankly, most people come to the United States to flee those kinds of 
behaviors.
  And so we are here to uphold the Constitution and laws of the United 
States.