00:03Secretary Rubio, I want to thank you for your efforts to really refocus,
00:07as you've talked about, the State Department and its foreign aid programs,
00:10and what their core mission should have been all along,
00:13should be now going forward,
00:14safeguarding US interests abroad as a first line of defense.
00:18I agree with you wholeheartedly,
00:19we must see some return to the United States of America on these programs.
00:23Foreign aid is not, never should have been a private charity.
00:27While we lap the world in humanitarian aid,
00:31we have to make sure that these taxpayer funds are spent in accordance with security needs.
00:36That's why Chairman DSBR and Chairman Cole renamed this subcommittee,
00:40National Security Department of State and related programs,
00:43to better reflect what we're doing here.
00:46That's why I would like to propose to you, sir,
00:48that we reorganize the best, most impactful foreign aid programs that remain
00:53into national security investment projects.
00:56Basically, sir, if it doesn't have to do with our national security interests,
01:00we shouldn't be spending taxpayer money on it.
01:03A lot of those things fall into this bucket, though, sir, of national security investment projects.
01:09In Jordan, we were in Jordan last October.
01:12I was honored to go with Ms. DeLauro and Chairman Cole on this congressional delegation trip.
01:18There's a desalinization plant that takes water out of the Red Sea, as you know.
01:22We've invested millions of dollars in this, supplies drinking water to Amman, Jordan.
01:26That country, as you know, is growing.
01:28The parliament is growing number of Muslim Brotherhood members.
01:33King Abdullah, we met with him, and he's very concerned about the state of that country.
01:37The folks of Amman spend one-third of their paycheck on drinking water.
01:42And so it's in our national interest, I feel, projects like these to go forward.
01:46So these friends of ours that we rely on, and they rely on us, can have great relationships.
01:54But, as you know, this whole program has gotten screwed up.
01:59We spent $50,000 in taxpayers' money to fund transgender opera in Colombia, $2 million for sex changes in LGBTQ activism in Guatemala, $70,000 for a DI musical in Ireland.
02:13Mr. Secretary, we're getting a handle on how this all happened, okay?
02:17I'm still trying to get my head wrapped around this.
02:19How did we get this screwed up with these programs?
02:21How do we keep it from happening again, sir?
02:24Well, I think that's precisely the point of these reforms.
02:26Someone has to speak up and say they own these projects and they think it's going to make a difference.
02:29You highlighted a few.
02:30I just look in here on my papers because I wanted to read you a few from the, you know, the greatest hits of some of the programs that we have identified.
02:38That, I mean, look, this is not fully representative of it, but, you know, $10 million for voluntary medical male circumcision in Mozambique, $227,000 for Big Cat's YouTube channel.
02:51I don't know what that is, but $20 million for fiscal federalism in Nepal.
02:56$1.5 million for voter confidence in Liberia, $14 million for social cohesion in Mali.
03:03You know, the list goes on and on.
03:06I mean, there's more here, but the point being is that some of these programs, look, there are programs that are really good in our national interest.
03:11You spoke about the desalination programs in Jordan.
03:14We brought most of those back right away.
03:16They actually were part of the initial carve out that was an error made.
03:19Those were added in and the remaining two programs are coming online.
03:22There are programs that are not bad, but are not necessarily core to our national interest.
03:26And then there are some that were just absurd and ridiculous.
03:28And nobody owned them.
03:29And no one could raise their hand and say, that's my program.
03:31This is why I think it's important.
03:33And in many cases, we're coming at the expense of something else that could have been spent on.
03:37That's what we're trying to avoid.
03:38And that's why driving these decisions and this ownership of what we fund down to the front lines at our embassies and regional bureaus is so critical to preventing this from happening again.
03:48Since its inception in the 1980s under President Bush, PEPFAR has saved more than 25 million lives.
03:53This is a program that is critical, but it was never meant to be a permanent program.
03:58How do we work to ensure, and I've got a plan to curtail this U.S. spending over a period of years, not to just cut it off entirely,
04:06but to turn it over to secular entities rather than being taxpayer funded through these programs.
04:14We've got to keep this program going until it can gain other legs from other sources.
04:19What is your thought on that?
04:20Well, 85% of beneficiaries under PEPFAR are back on and have been, so that's the good news.
04:25You're right about the program.
04:27And that is that, ideally, foreign aid and development programs are programs that end, and they end because they achieve their goal.
04:33And the goal here is to either, A, end the transmission of the disease, which is critical, and also to improve our partner capacity,
04:39basically the nation state's ability to deal with it themselves, what cannot be the foreign policy of the United States,
04:45is that we are for an undefined period of time, or in perpetuity, we're going to fund every great cause on the planet.
04:53We just can't do it. We can't afford it. And we're not going to continue to do that.
04:58We can't continue to approach foreign aid in that way.
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