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Floor Speech
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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.
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.
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