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Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaks during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing in the Dirksen Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C., Tuesday. Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images hide caption
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Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
Secretary of State Marco Rubio is defending major cuts in the foreign affairs budget as he testifies on Tuesday before the Senate committee where he used to be a member.
"America is back," he said in his statement to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. But the committee's ranking Democrat warns that budget cuts, and the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), mean the United States is ceding ground 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 said in prepared 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 confirmation hearing in January, when he appeared before his colleagues as a senator, the Trump administration has dismantled USAID. Now, Rubio is defending a $28.5 billion foreign affairs budget, about half of what it has been in recent years. He's reorganizing and downsizing the State Department and considering closing some foreign missions.
Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee have backed the changes he's making. Republican Chairman Jim Risch of Idaho, in a previous hearing last month, said he has been "crying out" for reforms at USAID, which Risch hopes "does not survive." He supports the idea of folding what remains of it into the State Department.
Hawaii Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz says the reforms could have been done in a more thoughtful, bipartisan way.
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 told an audience at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York last week. Schatz called on the prior version of Rubio, whom he approved for secretary of state, to "reemerge, reassert himself and save the enterprise."
