'What The Hell Are We Doing Here!?': Brian Schatz Issues Emphatic Takedown Of Trump's Rescissions
Last edited Thu Jul 17, 2025, 10:30 PM - Edit history (1)
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Senator from Hawaii. Mr. President, it all started with the stroke of a pen. Within hours of taking
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office in January, the president signed what can only be called a death sentence
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to millions of people all over the world. Executive Order 14169 simply read,
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quote, "It is the policy of the United States that no further United States foreign assistance shall be dispersed in
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a manner that is not fully aligned with the foreign policy of the President of the United States." End quote. The order
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directed a 90-day pause in payments while foreign assistance was reviewed.
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But it became clear that this was not a process for reviewing or reforming
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programs. It was the beginning of the end, a wholesale destruction of the enterprise from top to bottom in
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defiance of the law and of logic. Presidents
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can save lives. They can also cost lives.
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And while almost every president has chosen to do the former, Donald Trump,
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aided by a band of loyalists and ideologues, had has chosen instead to
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inflict death and disease and starvation on the world's most vulnerable.
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We used to be the indispensable nation that people around the world counted on for help. People would see the American
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flag, whether on the side of a truck or a sticker on a food parcel, and think, "The good guys are here. Help is
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coming." But not anymore. We
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are causing death now. We are spreading disease now. We
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are deepening starvation now. And it's not because it's saving us huge
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sums of money or because saving lives somehow stopped being in our national interest. All of this suffering and
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misery is because a few people were hellbent on ransacking the government and tearing down whatever it is that
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they didn't like or they didn't understand to hell with the consequences. To them, the lives lost
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are just the cost of doing business. Move fast and break things is the ethos
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of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. But when you move fast and you break
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things in the United States Agency for International Development, tens of
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thousands of people perish. So let's start with how we got here.
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Following Trump's executive order, Secretary Rubio and Peter Morocco, the
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new director of the State Department's Office of Foreign Assistance, issued a stopwork order on all 6200 grants and
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contracts worldwide. They also ordered an immediate pause on new foreign assistance spending. That meant that
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partners who had already completed work were not getting paid. Contracts that
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had already been signed couldn't be executed. Days later, Morocco along with
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a bunch of Doge staffers, including a 19-year-old and a 23 year old,
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physically barged into US aid and forced dozens of sur senior career officials to be put on
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leave over so-called insubordination. These people were just doing their jobs.
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His issue seemingly was with payments that had been approved before the executive order and were then making
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their way through the US A payment system. Nevertheless, the career civil servants were escorted out of the
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building and locked out of their emails. Anyone who dared to push back or speak
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up was sidelined, including the acting administrator, who was pushed out to make way for Morocco to become deputy
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administrator.
....6:18 It's been only a few months and already the loss of US aid and its critical work around the world has been catastrophic.
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More than 360,000 people have died as a result of the cuts.
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360,000 deaths. And so I will be damned if I let a
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pundit or a Democratic strategist or Republican strategist tell me
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that the American people signed up for allowing 360,000 people to
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die on purpose
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for what? Deficit reduction. And to Patty Murray's point, two weeks ago, they just blew up the deficit by
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trillions, trillions of dollars. The amount of money that it's takes to save
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a starving child or to prevent the transmission of HIV AIDS from mother to
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child is minuscule. And we do this because we're the good guys. And we do this because it's cheap.
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And we do this because when we need something from a friend in a foreign land,
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they think of us well because we're always on the scene to be helpful.
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These are not hypothetical or distant outcomes. We are no longer arguing about what might happen in the future. We are
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talking about what is happening across the planet right now.
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People are dying right now, not in spite of us, but because of us. We are causing death. We have gone from being the good
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guys, flaws, mistakes and all to being a conduit for death and sickness and
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hunger. A 10-year-old boy named Peter in South Sudan had contracted HIV from his mother
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at birth. His parents died while he was young, but medication through PEPAR kept him alive.
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That was until February when without access to medication, Peter fell
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severely sick and later died. The health outreach worker who had cared for him said said simply, "If US aid
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would be here, Peter would not have died."
... Now let's talk about the specifics of what's in this package. And
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this point I want to make really clear and I made this this point in the appropriations
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committee. There were a bunch of controversial programs that precipitated this effort to cut US aid.
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Two points to be made. One, the total dollar amount of all the controversial
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programs was like in the$1 to200 million range.
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That's number one. Number two is all of those programs were discontinued.
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This is a budget that was enacted in March. This is Trump's budget. This is Trump's
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State Department. This is Trump's US Agency for International Development. And so there is not a single thing that
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was on that Fox Chiron that Marco Rubio is continuing to do. So this recisions
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package doesn't have any of that stuff. And by the way, some of my Republican colleagues who understandably weren't
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super engrossed in the details, I had to send them a line by line of what these recisions do. and they're sitting there
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going, "Where's the opera in Ecuador? Where's the cultural exchange program or the parade in in in in South Africa?
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Where's all the goofy sounding stuff?" And the answer is a lot of that stuff was made up in the first place. But even
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if you stipulate to the idea that there was inappropriate spending, it's literally not in this package.