Expiration of New Start

Floor Speech

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Mr. BEYER. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank Dr. Foster for gathering us here to help shine a light on what remains the most serious existential threat facing our country and our planet. It is too easy to forget in these days of polycrisis that we are on the brink of a new nuclear arms race.

Very soon, one of the last remaining pillars of the nuclear arms control regime, the New START treaty, is due to expire. This treaty restricted the U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals and provide some measure of stability in our bilateral relationship.

Sadly, the Trump administration has failed to do anything to get ahead of the expiration of New START and has done a lot to raise nuclear tensions. The President has made threats, endorsed insanely expensive plans to expand our arsenal, pushed for the resumption of explosive testing, and advocated for an impractical missile defense system that will only encourage our adversaries to accelerate their own weapons program.

I am particularly horrified that the President may choose to ignore the comprehensive test ban treaty which has given comfort and safety to the world for two generations.

Meanwhile, Russia has expressed an interest in maintaining New START restrictions on its stockpile for another year while the terms of a new treaty can be hashed out, but, unfortunately, the White House has not responded to their offer, and it has shown no interest in engaging with China either on nuclear arms reduction, this despite the danger China is dramatically trying to build up its nuclear arsenal. If ever there were a time to talk to China, it would be right now.

It is not hard to guess what happens next if nothing changes. Each side will be adding now weapons to their arsenal for the first time in decades. We would come back to 10,000 nuclear weapons aimed at the Soviet Union, 10,000 aimed at us, to 1,500 to 1,800 each.

Now we are going back to that feedback loop that was reminiscent of the first days of the Cold War. Not only will this cost a tremendous amount of money and put us on an even more dire fiscal trajectory, it will ratchet up the very real danger of a nuclear exchange.

Mr. Speaker, we can already destroy the planet many, many times over with our own existing nuclear stockpiles. Why on Earth do we need to spend more of our scarce resources on these incredibly expensive weapons? We have gone through this cycle before. We were very lucky, but I am terrified we will not make it through again.

This shouldn't be a partisan issue. It has never been partisan. Republican Presidents from Dwight Eisenhower to Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush have all led on arms control agreements.

I have been critical of my own party's approach to nuclear weapons. The Biden administration, despite campaign promises, refused to adopt a first-use or no-sole-use nuclear policy.

Currently, the U.S. President can order the launch of hundreds of nuclear warheads within 15 minutes, with no oversight or even conversations with the Speaker of the House, the Secretary of Defense, the chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and including Congress. Vesting this much power in one person, particularly this President, is irresponsible, dangerous, and unnecessary.

Given our massive conventional military advantages over our adversaries--think of Venezuela--there is no plausible circumstance that could justify the use of nuclear weapons to deal with a nonnuclear threat.

Removing the specter of the U.S. using nuclear weapons first in a conflict would go a long way toward slowing down this renewed global arms race. I am so glad to see my colleagues here share my concerns. I hope we can make a dent in the common sense here in this Congress.

While I have you here, today I voted against a funding measure that would enshrine the Trump administration's illegal destruction of the United States Agency for International Development, USAID.

Among the litany of illegal, immoral, and illegitimate acts committed by this administration, what President Trump and Elon Musk did to USAID will echo in our history as one of the most evil and pointless decisions made by this country.

Hundreds of thousands of the most vulnerable people in the world have died already because of this decision so far. Their premature and tragic deaths are the direct moral responsibility of Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Marco Rubio. They remind me of the comments of an unnamed French diplomat speaking of the horrors of World War I: The war I cannot find it to be so bad. The death of one man, that is a catastrophe; 100,000 deaths, that is a statistic.

Our global reputation and soft power around the world have suffered permanent damage. Our ability to fight future global pandemics and diseases has been crippled, and U.S. farmers have suffered needlessly on top of the hundreds of public servants who were harassed and thrown out of their jobs. Beyond the human cost, far from saving the taxpayer any money, the State Department's own assessments show that shutting down the agency will cost more than $6 billion.

The whole point of this misguided crusade against starving and sick children overseas was to find waste, fraud, and abuse that simply did not exist. This was a case of the very worst of us attacking the very best of us.

I have heard from hundreds of my constituents, former USAID public servants, who dedicated their lives to making the world a better place. Their overwhelming regret is not that they lost their jobs but that the critical work they did to help the poor, the sick, and the starving has stopped.

I am sickened by what this administration has done to USAID and to the world. I will do everything I can to reverse this awful decision.

Mr. Speaker, I thank Dr. Foster for convening us together and for his leadership.

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