Mr. Speaker, this rescissions package is disastrous. It cuts $8 billion in life-saving and critical U.S. foreign assistance, including food assistance, access to clean water, and lifesaving medicine.

Let’s stop pretending this is about fiscal responsibility. This package is not about saving money—it’s about selling a con, yet again, to the American people.

The President claimed the United States was wastefully sending condoms to Gaza. In fact, they were going to Mozambique to help stop the spread of HIV and AIDS.

The President claimed there was a wasteful 21-million-dollar grant to India. That grant never existed. 

And it goes on from there. He claimed there was a national emergency in Brazil to justify slapping a 50 percent tariff on a country where the US has run a trade surplus for over a decade. There is no emergency.

He shouted about the Epstein files, and now his administration is saying there are no such files.

This is all, once again, in service to a con.

Let’s be clear about what Republicans are voting to defund today: Programs that help educate women and girls. Programs that fight deadly diseases.

Food, clean water, and humanitarian relief for the world’s most vulnerable. Are we really voting to take these things away from the most vulnerable—and with it, America’s credibility and global leadership—just to further the con?

Here's the truth: the Administration’s foreign assistance cuts were completely haphazard, based on simple word searches for terms they don’t like as part of their culture war: but this wasn’t about addressing waste, fraud, or abuse. This wasn’t a serious, thorough review.

The real waste? It’s incinerating 500 metric tons of expired aid sitting in warehouses meant to feed suffering children in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The real fraud is telling the American people these cuts will help them when they won’t.

The real abuse is letting Elon Musk and his DOGE minions wreak havoc at State and USAID after President Trump fired the independent watchdogs at those agencies.

This is not how you lead a country. This is how you run a scam.

So Mr. Speaker, let’s call this for what it is: a con. Republicans claim they are doing this to save taxpayer money. Yet, while they cut this $8 billion in foreign assistance, they have added AT LEAST $3 trillion to the national debt with their Big Ugly Bill, cutting off the most vulnerable Americans from their health care to give tax breaks to the wealthy.

I urge my colleagues to reject this package and not rubber stamp cuts to U.S. foreign assistance that will certainly lead to more unnecessary deaths and forfeit U.S. leadership abroad.