United States Agency for International Development (Usaid)
Floor Speech
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Mr. GARAMENDI. Mr. Speaker, we now know what a $280 million investment in the presidential campaign will give you--the opportunity to totally destroy one of America's most important soft power institutions, that is the United States Agency for International Development.
What has happened over the last 17 days is an extraordinary display of contempt for the American government. If you think about this in totality, right off the start, all federal funding stopped. What does that mean to the programs that Americans depend upon? Programs that gave people access to health care, education, programs that funded valuable medical research and infrastructure programs. For what purpose was that done? Perhaps to set up the next step, which is the dismantling of extraordinarily important programs.
For me and for my wife, more than almost 58 years ago, we participated in a USAID program which at that time was just four years old. Set up by then-President Kennedy. We volunteered for a vaccination program. An effort created by the United Nations funded by the American government, through USAID, to eradicate smallpox. We spent a month in rural Ethiopia doing vaccinations. Then as our life moved on, we continued working to provide the necessary services so that people could survive.
The Food for Peace program, my wife Patti actually ran that when she was at USDA as an assistant administrator. The famine camps, we were there. We saw the children that were dying of starvation, and we saw when the American grain finally arrived. I remember clearly one evening at the famine camp in Ethiopia in the mid 1980's, a woman literally in rags picking up individual grains of wheat that had spilled from the bags. She was trying to fill a cup so that there would be enough food that she could take back to her children. They died that night of starvation.
The richest man in the world invested over $250 million in a presidential campaign, and he was given the keys to the American government and the opportunity to destroy things that he didn't like. USAID is not only providing the necessary food to allow people to continue to live, but also to thrive. Programs, agricultural programs, economic development programs around the world. People that didn't have the opportunity were given it and they were given this opportunity by the generosity of the American people.
So, Mr. Speaker, what we have is here is a billionaire Elon Musk, who has the greatest wealth of any individual in the world, who seems to think he has the right to destroy people's lives. Before Musk does this, Mr. Speaker, before our president gives him the power to do that, I would ask Musk and President Trump to get on their private jets or get on Air Force One. I urge them to go to one of the famine camps in southern Sudan and hold a starving child in their arms. I urge Musk and Trump to look at the extended belly, the vacant stare, look at this child who cannot even to hold up their own head up and know that the American people have developed an emergency supplemental food program that can revive that child. And then and only then can they both come back and decide whether to put USAID into the wood chopper.
If Musk or President Trump have just a modicum of humanity or any sense of compassion, they would never ever have taken USAID and destroyed it. Mr. Speaker if President Trump and Musk had any sense that both of their actions are doing to the thousands, indeed, millions of people around the world they both would decide to reverse what they are both are doing to USAID.
There are other programs that are out there, and we will be talking about those programs. The Department of Education, labor department, giving the richest man in the world the keys to the U.S. Treasury? What is going on here? What information has been gathered? Where did that information go? What will it be used for? Who owns that information now, the U.S. Government or Elon Musk? These are serious questions that my colleagues and I will continue to raise.
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