At a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on Wednesday, Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX) spoke to Sec. Marco Rubio about negotiating with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
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00:00I'm going to begin by recognizing Representative McCall of Texas.
00:03Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Let me express my deep sympathy to the family of Jerry Connolly. He's a dear friend of mine.
00:11I will miss him dearly and the Irish twinkle in his eye.
00:16Mr. Secretary, thanks for being here today.
00:18Under the last four years, under President Biden, the world is on fire now.
00:23From the debacle, the evacuation, poorly executed from Afghanistan, which then led, I believe, to Putin's invasion of Ukraine, the largest land invasion since World War II in Europe, to the Middle East on fire now, October 7th.
00:42I commend you for trying to seek peace in these hot spots, including the Indo-Pacific, which probably presents the greatest threat.
00:53I would be clear-eyed with Mr. Putin.
00:56I personally don't think he's negotiating in good faith.
01:00The Ayatollah cannot be trusted.
01:02In fact, it was recently reported that they got their proxy Amash to invade Israel on October 7th to derail the normalization talks between Israel and Saudi Arabia.
01:14Let me go to the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act.
01:17It was initially created to counter the rise of the Soviet Union.
01:22Today, I believe it should be used to counter the influence of communist China around the globe.
01:28And that's a core mission I know you support, as do I.
01:32When I was chairman of this committee, I put holds on the programs the current chairman's talking about,
01:38that being the drag shows in Ecuador to grants to advance atheism in Nepal.
01:43These are not in the interest of the United States or our national security interests.
01:50So I think we need to return these agencies and programs to their core mission.
01:54I believe that you're trying to do that by bringing them under your supervision at the State Department.
02:02It's not a new idea.
02:04Madeleine Albright tried to do that many years ago.
02:06And I do think, under your supervision, that we'll have transparency and accountability with the foreign assistance programs.
02:16We are engaged in a reauthorization of the State Department.
02:21Sir, can you tell me how this would assist you with respect to reorganization of these important agencies under your department?
02:31Well, I think the key to reorganization, and by the way, we never did it in all the years that I was in the Senate either.
02:36It never happened.
02:36It needs to happen.
02:37We want it to happen.
02:38As you know, in our reorganization, we didn't touch any of the statutory offices because we can't.
02:42But there's two advantages to it, or three advantages.
02:44The first is it becomes permanent.
02:46We can create an organizational structure that becomes enduring, especially if it's one that we believe in.
02:51Second, I think that it will help us with the input and ideas.
02:54Look, we notified.
02:56We provided the initial preliminary indication to Congress.
03:01We've been taking input, including from many, on the minority.
03:04And some of those are going to be reflected when we put out our final approach that we want to take.
03:08But ultimately, we would love to work with the committee to find ways to improve on the streamlining.
03:13By the way, we're also taking input from inside our building.
03:15Some of the ideas in our reorg, many of the ideas from our reorg, came from inside the State Department, from career officials,
03:22including some that are still providing input for us in sort of how to structure it.
03:26But I think the advantage of doing it statutorily is that it becomes enduring and permanent and provides certainty in the days to come.
03:33Otherwise, you know, it can change over time and continue to bloat and expand to levels that it got to.
03:38It was an unreadable org chart.
03:40The org chart that I showed you, the initial org chart that I inherited was just the top line.
03:44Within each one of those boxes, there were multiple boxes, some of them duplicative, redundant.
03:49In many cases, no one could even tell us what they were doing because it's easy to grow.
03:53It's much harder to reorganize and to streamline activity.
03:56And that's what we want to do.
03:58Well, it's a very noble effort.
03:59With my one-minute remaining, I have authorized the Remain in Mexico program in this committee.
04:09I commend the administration.
04:12Within a matter of months, have restored order to the border, taken chaos, and turned it into a safe border.
04:22I mean, the crossings have gone down 95%.
04:27There's no longer a catch and release.
04:30And I do think the executive order on Remain in Mexico is very important.
04:34I know you share that responsibility with the Department of Homeland Security, a committee I chaired as well.
04:40What is the latest in your negotiations with Mexico to bring that important program back?
04:47Well, as you're aware, I'm sure that we've had a number of what I would call both irritants but also areas of cooperation with the Mexican government.
04:55It's been actually pretty positive.
04:56They have been very responsive on our security concerns.
04:59They've increased their security cooperation with us in ways that have been very productive.
05:03In fact, at some point here over the next few weeks, I intend to travel potentially to Mexico along with a couple other cabinet members to sort of finalize some of these areas of cooperation.
05:12This may be one we talk about.
05:14But we've been primarily focused with Mexico on two things.
05:17One is on trade, which is not my department, but obviously our trade representative, Mr. Greer, and also Commerce Secretary Lutnik's been engaging with them.
05:26And then the other is on security cooperation.
05:28We have a mutual interest in Mexico.
05:29In essence, the cartels that operate within Mexico and threaten the state are armed from weapons that are bought in the United States and shipped there.
05:37We want to help stop that flow.
05:39The reverse is those cartels threaten the state.
05:42There are parts of Mexico that are governed by cartels.
05:44In fact, I think I heard last night two more people were murdered in Mexico City associated with the mayor of Mexico City.
05:51The political violence there is real.
05:53They have a vested interest and a desire to go after these cartels.
05:57And we want to help equip them and provide them information.
06:00They've also been increasingly cooperative more than ever before in bringing back and extraditing people wanted in this country for crimes who are in their custody.
06:08So I think we've got good areas of cooperation.
06:10We still have some more work to do on migration, but they've been cooperative.
06:13Chair, Mr.