00:02Thank you very much, Madam Chair, and welcome, Director Vogt.
00:08You mentioned that your pocket rescissions were misunderstood.
00:12Are you pledging us today that you will do not submit rescissions within 45 days of the end of the fiscal year?
00:19I'm not making that commitment.
00:21I'm saying that no decision has been made with regard to any additional rescissions package or the timing of those rescissions package.
00:28Well, colleagues, I really want to emphasize that this strategy of using delays and freezing and impoundments and slow-walking contracts
00:39and rescissions, partisan rescissions, pocket rescissions at the end of the fiscal year
00:45are all part of an unconstitutional plan to steal the power of the purse from Congress as stated in the Constitution
00:54and put it in the power of the President.
00:57Mr. Vogts previously told me that he strongly believes that the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 was unconstitutional.
01:07That will get to the Supreme Court.
01:09But I want to be clear.
01:10The U.S. Supreme Court has already ruled twice on the question of whether or not the power of the purse resides with Congress.
01:17And I consider this multifaceted strategy to be a huge attack on our Constitution.
01:23And I regret that you've undertaken it as in you'd made a pledge to the Constitution, an oath to the Constitution, not to the President of the United States.
01:32I did find it concerning in your testimony that no life-saving treatment will be impacted by this package.
01:42Do you consider any life-saving treatment to have been halted by the January 25th 90-day freeze on AID?
01:54We do not believe that life-saving treatment was halted through the various reviews.
02:00Certainly not the direction of policy officials.
02:03Throughout the first month there was malicious compliance at times and we worked through those as an administration.
02:09But this certainly was never intended to be halted.
02:13Well, I consider that to be a huge deception that does not do justice to the truth.
02:18On January 25th, a 90-day freeze was announced halting PEPFAR.
02:2360% of the PEPFAR staff was fired.
02:26Rubio announced that he was ending 5,200 of the 6,200 USAID programs.
02:34He then announced that 82% of USAID program was being shut down and the remaining 18% would be transferred to the State Department.
02:43This resulted in a sudden collapse of malnutrition programs, tuberculosis programs, malaria programs, AID and HIV programs.
02:52And Boston University has put together a tracker of the impact of this sudden shutdown of these programs around the world.
03:00Let's review the child death count from the Boston University School of Public Health tracking of the impact of your shutdowns.
03:0977,000 children have died up to today, their estimate, from pneumonia as a result of the shutdowns.
03:1770,000 children have died from malnutrition.
03:2059,000 have died from diarrhea.
03:2333,000 have died from malaria.
03:257,000 infants have died from HIV.
03:30Plus 118,000 adults.
03:33We are talking a quarter million children because of your irresponsible shutdown of programs that Congress had fully authorized
03:41and you unconstitutionally shut down in partnership with Elon Musk and the Secretary of State.
03:48How do you feel about being responsible for hundreds of thousands of children dying because of your sudden interruption in these key programs?
03:57I reject the assertion.
03:58I'm happy to take a look at the tracker that you describe.
04:02Every administration has the ability to do a programmatic review when they come into office.
04:07In fact, that was articulated earlier by one of your colleagues.
04:11The extent to which new administrations come in with new spending priorities, that's what we were doing.
04:16There was great malicious compliance with regard to the funding halt that you're referring to.
04:21I find your response both ignorant and callous.
04:24And the interruption of these programs was carefully detailed by Secretary Rubio.
04:30Elon Musk addressed them as well.
04:32When I asked Rubio here in the Senate about whether it was Elon Musk that drove these shutdowns, he said no.
04:39He had personally reviewed these contracts himself and his own statements about shutting down 5,200 of these programs.
04:46For you to come before this body and say that this vast shutdown of 82% of what USAID had no impact on human life just goes that you chose to make decisions.
04:58Decisions totally, totally out of sync with the Constitution.
05:02You were plenty welcome to put forward a budget for the next year.
05:07You were plenty welcome to veto any bill that we passed in the House and Senate.
05:12You could use your influence in all kinds of ways in the future.
05:16But you chose to shut down programs in the middle that have resulted in hundreds of thousands of children dying in the last few months.
05:25I find that abhorrent and few Americans have ever had such a devastating and disasterly impact.
