[Congressional Record Volume 171, Number 212 (Tuesday, December 16, 2025)]
[House]
[Pages H5908-H5909]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                REESTABLISHMENT OF FOREIGN AID PROGRAMS

  (Mr. Whitesides of California was recognized to address the House for 
5 minutes.)
  Mr. WHITESIDES. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to call for the immediate 
reestablishment of funding for PEPFAR and our public health support for 
poor countries.
  I do so with a heavy heart, holding in my hand three documents that 
every Member of this body should read. One is a legal brief filed just 
days ago by Physicians for Human Rights. Another is a devastating new 
investigation released by ProPublica. The third is a status report on 
PEPFAR from the Kaiser Family Foundation.
  Taken together, these documents paint a picture of moral abdication 
that should keep every single one of us awake at night.
  I want to talk about the data in these reports, Mr. Speaker, but 
first I need to speak from a place that goes beyond policy. I need to 
speak with you as a Christian.
  Scripture teaches us that our responsibilities to one another are not 
limited by borders. In the Gospel of Luke, we are told: ``From everyone 
who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who 
has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.''
  The United States has been entrusted with much. We are the 
wealthiest, most powerful Nation on Earth. With that blessing comes a 
profound responsibility to the least of these. Today, we are failing 
that responsibility in a profoundly immoral way.
  The legal brief I hold warns that the dismantling of our public 
health support for poor countries is causing irreversible losses. It 
estimates that the shutdown of USAID assistance has already cost 
600,000 people to die, two-thirds of them children.
  The numbers can be numbing, Mr. Speaker, so let me tell you about the 
people behind these numbers as detailed in this new ProPublica 
investigation.
  While political appointees in Washington were literally celebrating 
these budget cuts with a sheet cake in a conference room, a 38-year-old 
man named Tor Top was in a canoe in South Sudan. He was paddling 
desperately trying to get his sick mother to a hospital 8 hours away. 
Why was he in that canoe? Because the local clinic, funded by U.S. 
humanitarian aid and run by Christian missionaries, had been forced to 
close its doors.
  The IV bags needed to treat cholera cost just 62 cents, but because 
we cut that funding, his mother died in that canoe halfway to help.
  ProPublica tells us about Rebecca Nyariaka, a 28-year-old mother 
living in a refugee camp. Cuts to these vital programs had stopped the 
sanitation services that kept the camp clean. Overflowing latrines 
spread disease. Rebecca died of cholera just days after

[[Page H5909]]

giving birth to a son she named ``God is with us.''
  It is not just cholera. Look at the KFF report on PEPFAR. PEPFAR is 
not a partisan project. It was created by President George W. Bush in 
2003. It is perhaps the single greatest humanitarian achievement in 
modern history, credited with saving 26 million lives.
  The report shows that the current administration's stop work order 
has frozen payments and services. They have canceled 86 percent of all 
awards for this assistance. The result: We are losing thousands of HIV 
health workers in Kenya, Malawi, and South Africa. The KFF report warns 
that ending this funding could result in 565,000 new HIV infections 
over the next 10 years in sub-Saharan Africa alone. We are undoing 
decades of progress. We are actively allowing a plague to return.
  In the Democratic Republic of Congo, doctors are reporting that 
without USAID, they cannot even release Mpox vaccines that are 
currently locked in storage rooms. In Uganda, babies are being born HIV 
positive again after years of near elimination of mother-to-child 
transmission.
  Some might ask: Is this our problem?
  To that I answer with the words of my faith: We are our brother's 
keeper.
  To my colleagues who prefer a strategic argument, I say this: These 
diseases don't respect borders. The legal brief explicitly warns that 
infectious disease knows no borders. When we stop treating tuberculosis 
or cholera abroad, we allow outbreaks to grow until they threaten us 
here at home. Our American global health surveillance was the reason 
the 2004 Ebola outbreak was contained, with only eleven cases ever 
reaching U.S. soil. We are dismantling the very fire alarm system that 
protects our own house.
  Mr. Speaker, we are losing twice. We are losing our moral standing, 
and we are losing our physical security. Taxpayers will pay once for 
the dismantled programs, and then they will pay again, much more 
dearly, when these preventable crises reach our shores.
  We cannot be the nation that celebrates savings with cake while 
mothers die in canoes for lack of a 62-cent IV bag.
  I urge this body to reverse course. We must reestablish funding for 
PEPFAR. We must restore our lifesaving public health support for poor 
countries. Let us do it because it is the smart thing to do for our 
safety. But more importantly let us do it because it is the right thing 
to do. Let us not be the generation that walked away when we had the 
power to save millions of lives.

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