Rebuilding Usaid
Floor Speech
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Mr. AMO. Mr. Speaker, 19 months ago, President Trump took an axe to our foreign assistance, illegally freezing aid and demolishing the United States Agency for International Development. Thirteen days later, he ranted that USAID was ``run by a bunch of radical lunatics.'' The very next day, Elon Musk bragged that DOGE had ``spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.'' Well, the chips fell, and kids died.
When I asked Secretary Rubio about the consequences, he told me: No children are dying on my watch. A year later, the hatchet men were still lying. Children are still dying.
Elon Musk recently proclaimed that he cannot cite a single name of someone who died because of aid cuts. Just because Elon can't name one of the 700,000 people killed by his cruelty doesn't mean they didn't exist. We know their names.
Abdullahi Ibrahim was 10 years old when USAID-supported asthma treatment disappeared from his clinic in Nigeria. His family could no longer afford his medication. He suffered a fatal asthma attack.
Mohammed Hashim was 2 years old. When food assistance disappeared from his refugee camp in Myanmar, he died of starvation.
Gbessy Kiadu was only a 1-year-old. He died of malaria after clinics in western Liberia ran out of malaria medication because of USAID cuts.
These are not just statistics. These are children. They had parents, dreams, and full lives ahead of them.
Today, the warning signs are flashing that if these cuts continue, hundreds of thousands of additional children could die every year.
Abdullahi, Mohammed, and Gbessy are three of the more than 700,000 no longer with us because of Trump's choice to close USAID and decimate U.S. foreign assistance programs.
We are seeing the consequences in Nepal, where deaths have risen after Trump's cuts to lifesaving maternal health programs.
In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, cuts to USAID-funded disease-detection systems delayed detection and response to the Ebola outbreak. It is now the worst outbreak on record, with nearly 3,000 people dead and over 6,000 confirmed cases.
Make no mistake, America is paying a price, too. Shuttering USAID eliminated more than 23,000 American jobs.
American farmers and manufacturers who supply food products to USAID were left struggling. From peanut farmers in Texas to sugar farmers in Florida, to American longshoremen moving food through our ports to manufacturers in my home State of Rhode Island, Trump's cuts left wounds across the country.
Cuts to USAID disease monitoring and prevention systems leave Americans at greater risk of disease. As the COVID-19 pandemic clearly showed us, disease does not care about borders. Eliminating global health programs puts us at greater risk of a future pandemic.
American security on the world stage is suffering, too, as Trump backs away from our strongest soft power tool: helping others.
American taxpayers lost the return on an investment that made our country safer and stronger. Our foreign assistance was never charity. It was about American leadership, security, and workers producing food, medicine, and lifesaving technology. It told the world something powerful: When America gives its word, America keeps it.
As the USAID logo reminded the world, it was from the American people. Now, that good will is gone because Trump threw that promise into the wood chipper. Our allies are left wondering whether they can trust us. Our adversaries are filling the vacuum. Families are burying children who might have lived.
Mr. Speaker, as we look to the future, let's be clear about what we must do. We must rebuild American foreign assistance, restore American leadership, hold accountable those who recklessly dismantle these programs, and remember every single life that was lost. Abdullahi was not a number, Mohammed was not a statistic, and Gbessy will not be forgotten. They were children. They were loved. They should be with us today.
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