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Floor Speech

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Mr. COONS. 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.

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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 tonight, the determination to support this great work will survive and thrive and prevail.

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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.

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