A resolution expressing the sense of the Senate that the United States Agency for International Development is essential for advancing the national security interests of the United States.

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.

Mr. President, as if in legislative session and notwithstanding rule XXII, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the consideration of S. Res. 51, which was submitted earlier today; further, that the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, and the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.

Mr. President, if I might further expound on the resolution and respond to the comments by my colleague, the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, on which I serve, the resolution I sought to advance today is a simple statement of fact. It reviews the history of USAID--its creation as an independent Agency and its recognition in a law I helped write just last year, that to reorganize it explicitly requires congressional consultation and notification in advance.

The statement of the resolution, the core point of it, is that AID is central to advancing the national security of the United States because it mitigates threats abroad before they reach us here; it promotes global stability; and it addresses the root causes of migration and extremism and secures the leadership and influence of the United States in an era of strategic competition with the People's Republic of China.

Let me speak to a few points, if I might: the power of the purse, process matters, 1 percent, and who wins.

Rolling back the decades of work and relationships that the nonprofits and AID do around the world is creating a vacuum--a vacuum that will be filled by bad actors. So in a country where we have long funded the PEPFAR Program--started by President Bush, long supported on a bipartisan basis--that provides antiretrovirals and testing and nurses and support and clinics--to abandon that, to defund that, to shut that down simply creates an opening for a bad actor to come in and say: The Americans abandoned you. Sorry for your luck. Here we are. We want to help.

The Chinese have invested hundreds and hundreds of billions in advancing their interests through investing in infrastructure, building partnerships in critical minerals, becoming the leads on port operations, and delivering humanitarian aid.

We should not shut down our assistance to the world in a way that creates this vacuum.

Who wins? is the first question. My concern is, our adversaries.

Second, process matters. As those of us who are lawyers know, it is backward to start with an Executive order that shuts down the funding for an organization and an entity, to invade and occupy its headquarters, to have an unelected Department get into its systems, to lay off and furlough its senior leadership, and then notify Congress of the intent to begin a conversation about reorganization.

I welcome a chance to have a conversation about the future of our development assistance around the world, and my hope is that it will continue because I have case after case to review here about the good work it does. But to shut down the funding and to cause lots of our partners to lay off their key staff and then begin a conversation about reorganization is to get it backward in terms of process and the law.

I am an appropriator. Why should we bother coming to an agreement on appropriations here in the Senate, pass a law, send it to the President, he signs it, and then in the next Congress, the next President--they can shut it down and claw it back. It gets to the very question of the power of the purse, which, in article I of the Constitution, is the power of this body.

Going forward--of course, as my colleague said, elections have consequences. It is true that President Trump and the new majority here will put their imprimatur on the policy priorities across a wide range of Agencies and programs--absolutely--and I expect that discussion and that fight. But this is reaching back and shutting down.

One percent. One percent--actually, less than 1 percent of the total Federal budget goes to these vital humanitarian programs around the world. I will give you a few examples of what has been stopped in its tracks.

A U.S. organization funded through AID has stopped its counterterrorism work in the Philippines that was reducing the appeal of terrorist recruitment and radicalization. We have walked away from that work.

In Mexico, an organization that reduces the number of children recruited by gangs to help move drugs and migrants across our border has had its funding cut off.

I remember trips that I took, bipartisan delegations I was a part of that went and visited AID-funded work where folks were delivering critical care. St. Mary's Clinic in Kibera in Nairobi, Kenya--one of the worst informal resettlement slums I have ever been in my life, and these dedicated, caring, capable folks were delivering vital life assistance. In Liberia, during Ebola, I will never forget meeting with the nurses, the doctors, the volunteers, the Liberians, who were helping save lives.

Why does this matter? Today, there is an Ebola outbreak in Kampala, Uganda. There is a Marburg outbreak in Tanzania. It is the disease monitoring and testing, it is the clinics and the nurses that keep these diseases controlled and managed on the other side of the world before they come here.

Failing to sustain this work in an efficient and effective work way is to fail to show the values of the United States, is to show we are not a reliable partner, is to show that the decades of bipartisan support for critical initiatives like PEPFAR have been abandon because they are no longer considered a smarter strategic investment by one party, while the other party will fight for it.

My fondest hope is that we will yet find there is bipartisan support for continuing and sustaining these investments, but it is unclear because the unelected leader of DOGE, Elon Musk, is even now tweeting: Shut it down. Close it off.

My hope is that Secretary Rubio's comments today on television about sustaining many of the critical functions of AID will win out, but I am not confident because it is unclear to me who is really driving this initiative.

Let me close. We know that diplomacy and development stand alongside defense in being critical to our national security. President Trump's first Defense Secretary, Gen. James Mattis, said to us in a hearing that if foreign aid were to get cut, he would need to buy more bullets because foreign aid around the world helps us build relationships of support, combat terrorism and extremism, advance our values and priorities, and makes us safer and more secure.

I cannot think of a more troubling development than that this long- trusted, capable, bipartisan effort at helping bring our values to the world and helping secure our Nation would be cut off abruptly, roughly, in a way that violates the law and the spirit of our long bipartisan compromise.

Who wins if we do, in fact, shut this all down? It is our adversaries. It is terrorists. It is drug cartels. It is Russia. It is China. It is those we have held at bay through the great work of this organization and its dedicated servants for decades.

My hope is that even though this resolution was opposed and thus defeated

tonight, the determination to support this great work will survive and thrive and prevail.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, if I might, one of my own pressing concerns I have raised with colleagues here on the floor tonight is that even in cases where Secretary Rubio has given a waiver to try to keep programs like PEPFAR going, money is not flowing. Several Republican Senators have posted and spoken to this issue today.

If Secretary Rubio is in charge of this initiative, those waivers should lead to funding being restored. If he is not, if this is really Elon Musk's vision of ``shut it all down,'' then what is happening on the ground today in country after country will show us where we are really headed, which is the complete abandonment of our global leadership in humanitarian relief and development.

I pray that we can work together to ensure that the critical work of dozens of household-name nonprofits is not abandoned and that what is left of AID is not allowed to bleed out while we here in the Senate debate it.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, reserving the right to object, I want to rise today to talk about what Senator Coons is attempting to do here.

I have to say, a lot of us have said for years that the greatest national security threat that Americans face is our skyrocketing national debt.

President Trump agrees with us and is committed to doing something about this. We must confront this, and to do so, hard choices are going to have to be made, and all--all--parts of government will have to be looked at very closely.

The idea of merging USAID and the State Department is not new and has been floated by nearly every administration since the latter part of the last century.

I am supportive of the Trump administration's efforts to reform and restructure the Agency in a way that better serves U.S. national security interests.

I am fortunate enough to talk with Secretary Rubio virtually daily, sometimes multiple times a day, and I was aware this was coming. As I said, I have encouraged that this be looked at. Today, along with a number of my colleagues on relevant committees on both sides of the aisle and the Hill, I received notification that Secretary Rubio is beginning the process of merging USAID into State. I had received this informal notice earlier than this.

There is a lot of work to do in this effort, and there is a process set up for doing this. Secretary Rubio is following that process and looks forward to working with all of us as he goes through that process. It is my hope that all of my colleagues in both parties will help to do this important work.

I have to say that this is just one Agency. There are many, many, many Agencies out there, and this is going to be coming down the pike on every amount of government spending. Elections have consequences, and this is one of the consequences, that we are going to do our best to reduce spending--do it by efficiencies, by combining where it is necessary.

I will continue to be in close coordination with Secretary Rubio on this as it moves forward. As a result of that, I object to the proposed S. Res. 51.

Mr. President, first of all, to my good friend from Delaware, I know that he is aware that a number of the programs here have already received a waiver because the case was made for those programs, and that is appropriate.

But, look, as I started to say at the beginning, this is about the debt of the United States. The fact that we are borrowing $1 trillion every hundred days--it can't go on.

This institution, as long as I have been here, has been trying to do something about it. We have tried over and over and over again to make something happen. What do we do? We create a study group. The study group sits down, they talk for 2 years, they create a great big report, and nothing ever comes of it. This President is making things happen.

One of the Agencies that a lot of us have had concerns about over the years is USAID and how the money was being spent. We are going to have a look at it. I have no doubt that when we are done with that, everyone is going to have a say, and at the end of the day, we will, as we do in a democracy, vote, and that will be the end of it.

I yield the floor.