Rebuilding Usaid

Floor Speech

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Mr. SHERMAN. Mr. Speaker, I thank Congressman Beyer for bringing us together.

Mr. Speaker, foreign aid has been a political whipping boy in this country for decades. The American people believe, if you poll them, that we spend 25 percent of our Nation's budget on foreign aid and they want it reduced to 10 percent. It is already less than 1 percent, less than a quarter percent of our GDP.

Obviously, if you are moral, if you care about the world, these programs should be fully funded and that should increase. But what if you are only focused on America? What about our soft power that is dependent upon our image in the world? What about preventing enormous migration caused by desperation?

But let's focus on public health because what USAID does more than anything else is fight malaria, Ebola, tuberculosis, and HIV-AIDS. If we don't fight those diseases over there, they replicate, mutate, and migrate.

Every one of these diseases replicates in every body that it infects. Then one out of a thousand times or one out of a million times it mutates into a new strain that is either more drug resistant or more communicable, and then those diseases migrate back to the United States. Every one of those diseases is found here and none of them started here.

Mr. Speaker, I thank 120 Members of the House who joined with my letter urging the Appropriations Committee to fully fund foreign aid. I thank every member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee on the Democratic side for cosponsoring my Evan Anzoo Memorial Act.

Who is Evan Anzoo? This was the first child killed by Elon Musk who took away his HIV-AIDS medicine in the first month of the Trump administration. This bill requires us to ask the GAO to calculate for us how many have died in the last year and a half. A Harvard professor says hundreds of thousands of deaths have already occurred. Boston University calculates that we have lost 781,000 people in the world, most of them children. A peer-reviewed study led by UCLA says that we are looking at over 14 million who will die if we continue these policies through the end of this decade.

Hundreds of thousands have died already, millions will die in this decade if we don't change course, and untold hundreds of thousands of Americans will die if we don't fight the disease over there and instead give that disease a chance to replicate, mutate, and migrate back here.

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