At a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on Wednesday, Rep. Greg Meeks (D-NY) spoke to Sec. Marco Rubio about his moves at the Department of State.
00:00Thank you Mr. Chairman. Secretary Rubio, I'm glad you are finally before this committee.
00:10Your testimony actually comes long after the State Department under your leadership took actions
00:15without required congressional consultation or that were contrary to the law. But I guess it's
00:23better late than never. But let me be clear, showing up months after the fact and refusing to stay
00:31until every member has questioned you for five minutes as entitled to under House rules are not
00:38the standards to which we hold the Secretary of State. Mr. Secretary, I've known you for a while
00:44and I respected very much Senator Rubio, even when we disagreed. Senator Rubio was a principal
00:54statesman. Secretary Rubio, however, as we've seen in the past few months, is something different
01:01entirely. As a senator, you spoke often and forcefully about the dangers of executive overreach.
01:08You warned America not to lose its moral clarity or sacrifice democratic principles for short-term
01:14gain. Senator Rubio recognized that we cannot allow the executive branch to unilaterally determine
01:21the direction of the United States foreign policy without accountability to Congress.
01:27Secretary Rubio is doing precisely what Senator Rubio feared, withholding congressional appropriated
01:34funds, stonewalling oversight, and acting as if laws passed by this body are optional.
01:40Secretary Rubio has presided over the dismantling and destruction of everything Senator Rubio once
01:48defended. So although you may be the Secretary of State, the acting head of USAID, the National
01:56Security Advisor, the Archivist of America, the empire you have stumbled upon is not one of influencer,
02:05it is a kingdom of ash. So I ask, was it worth it? Was it worth it to allow the near extension of U.S.
02:13foreign assistance and USAID, which Senator Rubio said, and I quote, is a very cost-effective way,
02:20not only to export our values and our example, but to advance our security and our economic interests?
02:26And lie is exactly what this administration has done again and again. Each time Elon Musk and his
02:35Department of Arsonists brag and mislead the American public about massively inflated savings
02:41or lie about the program they have cut and their purpose, they're not telling you about the food that
02:46rotted on the shelves while people went hungry, or the medicine that was undistributed to children
02:51needlessly suffering or the trust that was lost by your actions. But I believe you know better
02:57because you've said as much. And yet here we are. In 2022, Senator Rubio warned about the urgent and
03:07growing threat posed by China and called for a fully funded State Department and USAID. Senator Rubio
03:16wrote that soft power tools and alliances were vital to our national security. And today,
03:23Secretary Rubio is here to defend an 84% cut of the foreign affairs budget. How does hollowing out
03:31our State Department and dismantling USAID help us compete with China? How does the America alone budget
03:39project American strength? On human rights, the contrast is even stalker. Senator Rubio built his political brand on the cause of freedom and dignity. You condemned autocrats in Caracas, Havana, and Beijing for silencing dissent.
03:56But Secretary Rubio? He looks the other way when strongmen commit similar abuses. Secretary Rubio even defied a Supreme Court order to facilitate the return of a wrongly detained spouse,
04:08of an American citizen. And when Senator Rubio became the first Hispanic American to serve as Secretary of State,
04:15he made sure to pull the ladder up behind him. In the name of dismantling efforts to making hiring and promotion fair, as you call it, wokeness, you have unlawfully dismantled programs designed to address decades of historical exclusion.
04:31historical exclusion. These are not political experiments. They were congressionally supported efforts,
04:38rooted in bipartisan recognition that our diplomatic core must reflect the diversity and the strength the nation it represents abroad.
04:47These are initiatives that Senator Rubio supported. You replace experienced career employees with ideologues and political loyalists.
04:58Under your watch, sir, America's diplomatic and development cores have suffered the greatest brain drain in history,
05:05and America has been weakened and made more isolated by the actions of an administration that has abandoned its allies,
05:12cozied up to dictators, and conducted a foreign policy driven not by interests of the American people,
05:17but in support of the personal enrichment of the President and his family. And with that, I yield back.
