Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaks throughout a Senate International Relations Committee listening to within the Dirksen Senate Workplace Constructing in Washington, D.C., Tuesday.
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Anna Moneymaker/Getty Photos
Secretary of State Marco Rubio is defending main cuts within the overseas affairs price range as he testifies on Tuesday earlier than the Senate committee the place he was a member.
“America is back,” he mentioned in his assertion to the Senate International Relations Committee. However the committee’s rating Democrat warns that price range cuts, and the dismantling of the U.S. Company for Worldwide Growth (USAID), imply the US is ceding floor to China.
“As Elon Musk took a chainsaw to USAID and you proposed cutting 83% of foreign programs, China has proposed increasing its diplomatic budget by 8.4%,” New Hampshire Sen. Jeanne Shaheen mentioned in ready remarks. “As we move to reduce our diplomatic workforce and discuss closing U.S. embassies, China has more diplomatic missions than any other nation on Earth.”
Since Rubio’s affirmation listening to in January, when he appeared earlier than his colleagues as a senator, the Trump administration has dismantled USAID. Now, Rubio is defending a $28.5 billion overseas affairs price range, about half of what it has been lately. He is reorganizing and downsizing the State Division and contemplating closing some overseas missions.
Republicans on the Senate International Relations Committee have backed the adjustments he is making. Republican Chairman Jim Risch of Idaho, in a earlier listening to final month, mentioned he has been “crying out” for reforms at USAID, which Risch hopes “does not survive.” He helps the thought of folding what stays of it into the State Division.
Hawaii Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz says the reforms might have been accomplished in a extra considerate, bipartisan approach.
Rubio is “someone who, up until four months ago, was an internationalist, someone who believed in America flexing its powers in all manners, but especially through foreign assistance. And yet, he is now responsible for the evisceration of the whole enterprise,” Schatz instructed an viewers on the Council on International Relations in New York final week. Schatz referred to as on the prior model of Rubio, whom he permitted for secretary of state, to “reemerge, reassert himself and save the enterprise.”
