00:00Senator Schatz. Thank you. Just to follow up on Senator Collins' line of questioning, I guess the analogy is, you know, say a hospital that's running inefficiently and a turnaround guy comes in and says, I got a plan for reorganizing this hospital.
00:20We're going to do delivery system reform. We're going to use technology. We're going to be aggressive. We're going to be fearless. And in the meantime, we're going to lay off half of our staff because this thing doesn't work efficiently.
00:35The practical impact of that is death. And that's what we're talking about. And so every time we talk about the practical, near-term, immediate, real-world, geopolitical and humanitarian impacts of what has happened, especially to USAID, you pivot very skillfully and maybe even correctly to what needs to be reformed in the State Department itself
01:03and in the interaction and relationship between aid and state. That's not what I'm asking you about. I'm asking you about why in the world we wouldn't do this in the regular order.
01:16In order to put USAID under the State Department and better align it, we need a statute. In order to reform all of these programs, we need an SVOPs bill.
01:27You can't just come in and light the place on fire and say, well, it was a mess. And so I just want to understand what's the path forward because people really are dying.
01:39It's not as though Catholic Relief Services or CARE or the World Food Program or a bunch of leftists coming out and complaining about everything that's happening because they want to get you.
01:49This is actually happening. People are vacating where they work. And then in some instances, the Chinese government comes in and provides the exact same service, not a similar service, but the same program.
02:02They just do it. We'll do it. And then in some instances, nobody does it. And as a result, people die.
02:08And so I'm just wondering, where do you think the path forward is for us to work Article I, Article II, former colleagues to get this thing back on track?
02:17Well, I think the first path is, let me just say on the regular order part, sure, we want to do that.
02:21It would be great to make all these things statutory and codify them. That would be ideal.
02:25I will say I was a member of this body for, I don't know, 6, 12, 30, 40, 16 years.
02:30And we always talked about doing it by regular order. We never got to it.
02:33So now is the time to do it because we really have to do it now.
02:36The second point I would make is the U.S. is going to continue to be a very generous donor for humanity.
02:40And I would venture to guess that for the rest of our lifetime, no nation on Earth, if we can still afford it,
02:46no nation on Earth will continue to do more for humanitarian assistance, for food and medicine and life-saving services,
02:51and even for developmental assistance.
02:53But I also think we have to recognize this.
02:55We cannot be, we cannot continue to be the foreign aid provider for everyone on everything.
03:01We just can't do it. We can't do it efficiently, and we cannot afford to do it either.
03:05And if we're going to, we have to, we do not have unlimited resources, and so we've now entered an era,
03:10particularly of geopolitics, where we have to be very careful about where we invest our money,
03:15where we provide aid, humanitarian assistance aside.
03:18Okay, you have a mudslide somewhere, an earthquake, a hurricane, and we're going to help people.
03:24I don't know how much we would want necessarily geopolitics to play into those sorts of decisions.
03:29What's the proposed budget cut in the humanitarian accounts?
03:33Well, it's not, the humanitarian account right now basically is,
03:36the rest of it is reflected at over 50% in the proposed amount that you have right now before you.
03:42But we believe that we can provide these essential services while reducing some of the redundancies
03:46that were happening through this, for lack of a better term, this foreign aid industrial complex.
03:52Some of these projects, so you, I think you understand this perhaps better than most,
03:56some of these projects had a prime contractor who had a sub, who had a sub,
03:59who had a sub, who had a sub, who had a local provider.
04:02That's crazy. That's lunacy.
04:05Why do I need six subs to pass one to the other to ultimately get it down to the ground?
04:08I think we can get it maybe from the prime to the sub,
04:11in some cases directly to the group on the ground through our embassy.
04:16Our embassy can say, we want to provide food in this community,
04:18here's the best people to do it, and I can avoid all those layers of NGOs.
04:22Part of the problem, right, is our tolerance for risk because if we establish a bunch of criteria
04:29and requirements and pre-audit, then you increase administrative costs, right?
04:35And I'm one of these people who thinks that it's not unreasonable to start to capitate
04:40or slowly ramp down administrative costs.
04:43But administrative costs are not 88%, right?
04:46That 12% versus the rest of it cut is what money goes to local NGOs in Africa or Asia
04:55or Pacific Islands or wherever.
04:58And we should be increasing that number, and we have been increasing that number.
05:02But it is the precipitousness with which this is all being done
05:06that is actually causing reputational damage.
05:09A lot of us are doing CODELs.
05:10And when we sort of go overseas and we sort of, you know, temporarily take off our partisan hats,
05:20we interact with the same providers, and we see kids on half rations getting smaller and smaller.
05:29We see kids getting HIV-AIDS from their parents, and nothing you said, nothing you said.
05:35In order to implement anything that you're talking about, is it necessary for us to allow children to die?
05:46And yet that is what's happening.
05:49And so can we please separate these two questions of should we reform the State Department?
05:54Should we reform the foreign aid enterprise?
05:56And should we do it in such a catastrophically unlawful way that people around the world die
06:03and people come to believe that they can't believe that America is a reliable partner anymore?
06:10And so I just, if we can please separate these questions and get to writing a bill,
