Statement from Senator Peter Welch
Printed in the Congressional Record
March 4, 2025
Mr. President, every President of the United States has a right to review and realign programs funded by Congress, but only if the President acts in a way that complies with the law.
In the past five weeks, President Trump, Elon Musk, and Secretary of State Rubio have done away with even the pretense that they are conducting a review of programs administered by the U.S. Agency for International Development. It’s not a review, and it never was. It’s the destruction of an entire agency.
If it was, in fact, an honest review I would support it. We should be looking for ways to maximize the results we get from spending taxpayer funds across the federal government.
If this was an honest review, they would not have announced the closure of USAID and put virtually the entire domestic staff on leave. The Trump Administration cut off their communication with the global workforce and required staff who were temporarily reinstated by court order to work remotely because they were locked out of the (now former) headquarters.
If this was an honest review, the Trump Administration would not have recalled 95% of USAID’s global workforce after cutting off their email access without warning and putting their security at risk, while those staff were waiting for instructions to conduct the so-called ‘review’.
They would not have, prior to any review, forced American businesses and nongovernmental organizations to lay off thousands of workers by illegally withholding funds previously appropriated for USAID programs.
USAID supports programs that serve U.S. national interests overseas, but it’s farmers here in America who grow the corn, wheat, beans, and peanuts. It’s dairy farmers in Vermont who produce the powdered milk that USAID uses to feed millions of hungry children in Africa, Central America, and Asia.
It’s American companies that manufacture the generators, water pumps, trucks, and computers for USAID’s programs, and American workers—in blue states and red states—that implement those programs.
Thanks to Elon Musk—an unelected billionaire—those American farmers and companies have lost their business with USAID, and the workers are losing their jobs.
Mr. President, if the Administration was serious about rooting out wasteful spending, they would not have stopped programs in countries like Somalia where USAID is a key partner in counterterrorism efforts with the U.S. military.
They would not have shut down the Famine Early Warning System, risking medicines and American-grown food aid to spoil in the supply chain.
They would not have put more than a half dozen USAID lawyers on leave, including its ethics lawyers.
They would not delay payment of invoices for work already completed on behalf of the U.S. government, incurring needless fees for violating the Prompt Payment Act.
If this were truly about preventing waste, fraud, and abuse, if this were truly about rooting out corruption, they would not empty U.S. embassies, leaving virtually no one trained in financial management and oversight.
If there were any truth to their hyperbolic claims of corruption – for which they’ve offered no credible evidence, they should have asked the USAID Inspector General to investigate, rather than fire him without cause.
And if they actually did discover programs they don’t support, they could have reprogramed the funds consistent with congressional requirements and past practice. They also could have asked Congress to change the law.
What is taking place right now is not about conducting a review, policy realignment, or addressing waste, fraud, and abuse. The Administration instead has made every one of those goals impossible to achieve.
President Trump, who claims a mandate but who won by the narrowest of margins, does not have a mandate to illegally destroy federal agencies and the careers of thousands of dedicated federal employees. He does not have a mandate to break the law.
But President Trump and Secretary Rubio are forging ahead, using Elon Musk to provide cover through lies and misinformation on the social media platform he bought and broke.
They highlight select examples of programs they deem wasteful which amount to a fraction of a penny of the foreign aid budget—some of which began under the first Trump Administration—and they make baseless claims of fraud and insubordination, blaming anyone else but themselves for the chaos they are causing.
And while they say they favor transparency, they’re doing this after taking USAID’s website down with all its previously publicly available reports and data. Congress, the media, and the public are in the dark about what they’re doing.
We don’t know which Congressional spending directives they are violating when they say they’ve terminated $1 billion in programs. It could impact every single state.
We don’t know how many HIV/AIDS patients have become sick because the Administration cut off funding for treatment, or how many children are sick with malaria or other preventable causes, or how many malnourished women and children have no emergency food rations because the funding was stopped. We don’t know how many thousands of girls can no longer go to school in countries where they are traditionally denied access to education, because the funding was frozen. We don’t know how many organizations working to stop sex trafficking, child labor, and gang violence are no longer functioning, because the funding was cut off. We don’t know how many deminers we’ve trained and equipped to locate and destroy unexploded mines and bombs in Vietnam, Laos, Lebanon, and Ukraine are no longer working because the funding was stopped.
But before long, we will know, and our constituents will know. And they will know that this Administration is responsible for the chaos and life and death impacts that are reverberating in the United States and around the world.
How does cutting off infectious disease surveillance and treatment during outbreaks of Ebola, Bird Flu, and the deadly hemorrhagic Marburg virus disease make Americans safer?
It doesn’t. How does abandoning our allies and partners and ceding ground to Russia and China, and to ISIS and other terrorist organizations, make America stronger? It doesn’t. How does cutting off funding for joint USAID—DoD programs with Vietnam, on the 30th anniversary of the normalization of relations with that former enemy, which is now a Comprehensive Strategic Partner, advance U.S. national security? It doesn’t.
Anyone can see that Moscow is celebrating these reckless actions, while Beijing plots how to fill the void to advance China’s interests.
This wholesale, thoughtless, and illegal destruction of USAID is playing out across the government. DOGE has told the U.S. African Development Foundation and the Inter-American Foundation, agencies established and funded with direct appropriations by Congress, that their budgets are being slashed.
Elon Musk doesn’t know and doesn’t care why Congress established these agencies, what they do, or the positive impact they’re having on the lives of millions of people. To Musk and his DOGE agents, the law be damned. Congress be damned. The American people be damned. The world be damned.
The precedent being set by these illegal actions is a lasting threat to the American people, to our global leadership, our national security, our reputation around the world, and to the checks and balances that are the foundation of our democracy.
Mr. President, Vermonters are outraged by what is happening. Dozens have already lost their jobs. They want the United States to be a leader for good in the world. They care about the image of the United States as the world’s oldest democracy. They are smart enough to know that abandoning friends and allies is how you lose friends and allies.
The destruction of USAID and these other agencies will reverberate around the world and cause lasting damage. I urge Secretary Rubio, senior Pentagon officials who know the invaluable role that USAID plays in preventing conflict, and my Republican colleagues who in the past have supported USAID, the Inter-American Foundation, and the U.S. African Development Foundation, to stop this.
Because if the Congress, especially my friends in the Majority party, allow this to happen, people will soon realize that it wasn’t China or Russia that did this, we did it to ourselves.