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Source: Congress.gov
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The Committee on Foreign Affairs will come to order. I ask everybody to rise. Join me in reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Thank you everybody for your attendance.
The purpose of this hearing today is to identify structural challenges and functional deficiencies that impede the Department of State's ability to fulfill its mission and to work to find solutions to those issues. And I will now recognize myself for an opening statement. As I said, I called this hearing really to establish a simple fact. The State Department has many broken parts, and it's been in many ways a broken part of our government for many years. It's been too big. It's had no clear mission or definition for public diplomacy. It has very little command and control over the dollars that it sends across the globe. It's spent your tax dollars in ways that would have been better if the State Department just lit the money on fire in many cases. Right now, more than 80% of the State Department is not authorized by Congress. That includes Bureau of International Security and Non-Proliferation with a budget of $57 million and 247 employees. The Bureau of International Organizations with a budget of $90 million and 370 employees. The Bureau of Administration with a budget of $394 million and a staff of 700. Now despite 80% of it not being authorized, the State Department's bureaus, offices, and programs, they continue to grow each and every year. Last year, the State Department employed more than 80,000 people across the globe. Between the year 2000 and the year 2024, the State Department's budget grew from roughly $9.5 billion to more than $55 billion over the course of that time. Where did that money go? Does our foreign policy feel like it's five times more effective as we've spent five times more dollars? Instead, we've had a State Department with plenty of duplicative programs, but again, not a clear mission and a clear outline on how to go out there and affect the missions positively on behalf of the American people and all of our interests. The largest operation of the State Department in any of our lifetimes was the withdrawal from Afghanistan, which was an abysmal failure.
The State Department failed to plan everything from how many people would be requesting visas to how many people would be needed to process those visas and a thousand other things. The State Department is too big and it's also unaccountable because we've not conducted a comprehensive standalone reauthorization since 2002. It's also prioritizing the wrong things in my opinion. That is why we saw American dollars going out the door to foreign companies, foreign countries, foreign NGOs, and foreign adversaries like the Taliban with less oversight than it takes the average American citizen to get a driver's license at the DMV. Don't take my word for it. Listen to what the State Department's funded with your tax dollars. And many of you heard me give lists of hundreds and hundreds of items. I'll list just a couple, $14 million cash vouchers for migrants at our southern border, $24,000 for a national spelling bee in Bosnia, $1.5 million to mobilize elderly, lesbian, transgender, non-binary, and intersex people to be involved in the Costa Rica political process, $20,000 for a drag show in Ecuador, $32,000 for an LGBTQ comic book in Peru. I would challenge anybody in here to refute that American tax dollars were not spent in this way. I don't see anybody refuting that. I have hundreds of more examples of these, if not thousands. We have proof that these things happened. We have the documents, we have the photos, we have the receipts. These things are too stupid for us to try and make up, really. But this is not about scoring political points with each of those, otherwise I'd give the full list. These programs were funded with American tax dollars because somewhere, some person down the line at the State Department thought that programs like that were actually public diplomacy. This spending was not lifesaving. It didn't make American citizens visiting those countries safer or American businesses operating there more prosperous or a better partner.
It didn't bring any of the countries in which the money was spent closer to America. In fact, many of these countries actively opposed what the State Department was actually doing. Yet State Department officials thought this was public diplomacy and exactly what America should be doing. Again, I personally disagree with that definition of public diplomacy, but we should have this debate And we should figure out what American tax dollars should and should not be used for abroad. And that's what the debate about a State Department reauthorization is all about. That's what this hearing and a reauthorization process will accomplish.
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