00:04Mr. President, eight times since 1974, when Congress created the rescissions process,
00:12one party has controlled the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives.
00:18Eight times.
00:20It's actually four times Democratic control and four times Republican control.
00:25Eight times one party had total control over the elements of the federal government necessary
00:31to pass legislation.
00:33And never before has either party done what Republicans are doing today, pass a partisan
00:42rescissions bill, double-crossing the minority party and canceling spending that just months
00:51before both parties shook hands on.
00:54Why?
00:56Why has this never happened before?
01:00Well, because this is just an old-fashioned double-cross.
01:05It's a con job.
01:06Republicans and Democrats agreed on spending levels.
01:10First, in a bipartisan appropriations bill passed in March of 2023, and then again in multiple
01:17bipartisan continuing resolutions.
01:19When a party controls the White House and both houses of Congress, it always has the power
01:27to use the rescissions process to pull a fast one, to agree with the minority party on a budget
01:35because the rules say that you need 60 votes to pass a budget, to get majority party priorities
01:43funded in exchange for funding minority party priorities, and then to use the rescissions process
01:50to just double-cross the minority by using that process, which only requires 50 votes, to just then cancel
01:58the minority party's priorities.
02:02That's immoral.
02:05It's unethical.
02:06Suckering your partner into a deal in which you get something, and they get something, and then using the back door to cancel the part of the deal that you don't like.
02:18That's bad faith.
02:19It's why no party has done it since 1972.
02:24The power has always existed eight different times.
02:29Either the Democratic Party or the Republican Party could have cut a bipartisan spending deal
02:34and then used the rescissions power to just cancel the parts of the deal they don't like.
02:40But it's never happened because it's bad faith, because it destroys the ability of the Senate to function in a bipartisan way.
02:54It's kind of like if you traded baseball cards as a kid, and you made a trade with your best friend,
03:02and then in the middle of the night you snuck into his house and you took your cards back
03:06so that you had his cards, and now you had your cards as well.
03:13Nobody would think that's right.
03:16But that's exactly what's happening here.
03:19It will become hard, maybe even impossible, and Senator Tillis laid this out very well,
03:26to write a bipartisan budget ever again, because the minority party now knows that they can get double-crossed.
03:33And believe me, if Republicans do this now, Democrats are going to do it when they're in charge.
03:42This will become the norm.
03:44Sit down, do a bipartisan deal, wink, wink, and then a couple months later,
03:49just cancel the agreement through a partisan rescissions process.
03:52And of course, this is now the third time in seven short months that the new Republican majority
04:00has made substantial, meaningful changes to Senate rules and norms.
04:07Senate Republicans created a brand new rule that massively expands their ability
04:12to invalidate actions of the previous Democratic administration.
04:18Just a couple weeks ago, Republicans walked away from decades of precedent
04:24on how Senate bills are scored.
04:27And they used new magic math to create a score that hid the actual cost of their budget bill.
04:34And now this double-cross.
04:37But, Mr. President, this isn't just about breaking the Senate.
04:41That's actually probably the least serious consequence of what is happening here.
04:48The most serious consequence is what is happening to American power around the world.
04:58As Donald Trump and Republicans, in part through this rescissions bill,
05:03destroy every single non-military tool that we use around the world to protect our interests.
05:12When I was like eight or nine years old, I collected G.I. Joe figures.
05:18And one Christmas, I remember being so excited because Santa Claus brought me the huge G.I. Joe aircraft carrier.
05:27It was awesome.
05:30I was obsessed with the military, like a lot of boys that age.
05:34The planes, the tanks, the ships.
05:37That's what I thought American power was.
05:39The U.S. military.
05:41Period. Stop.
05:43And, of course, that's an eight-year-old view of the world.
05:48The world, as it turns out, is a lot more complicated.
05:50You need a lot more than just planes and tanks and ships to protect your interests.
05:58You need a powerful military.
06:01But adults, in particular adults who have any experience in national security,
06:09know that the octopus of global power has a lot of arms.
06:13Military might, but also information might, economic might, diplomatic might, energy might, humanitarian might.
06:23This revisions bill cancels billions of dollars in investments in non-military foreign policy tools.
06:32And it is part of a broader effort by the Trump administration to destroy almost every tool that protects American interests other than our military.
06:43Over the last 10 years, the defense budget has grown from about $502 billion to $825 billion.
06:54That's an extraordinary 10-year increase of about $323 billion.
06:58Over that same period of time, the State Department budget has grown from $54 billion to $56 billion.
07:08A $2 billion increase.
07:10Now, if you layer in emergency funds, that increase is more like $30 billion.
07:15But you are still talking about an increase for the military over the past 10 years that is 10 times the size of the increase for non-military tools.
07:26And this military myopia, it makes me remember my 8-year-old self.
07:32Because it is so childish.
07:34It's so immature.
07:36It is so divorced from reality.
07:38Donald Trump's national security strategy, fund the military and destroy every other way that we confront Russia, China, Iran, non-state actors.
07:49It could have been constructed by an 8-year-old.
07:52It's that unsophisticated.
07:55And it really amounts to surrender.
07:57Because as we stop projecting non-military power around the world, China and Russia, but especially China, they just celebrate and step into the void.
08:10Secretary Rubio announced on March 10th that 83% of USAID programs would be terminated.
08:16Meanwhile, China just announced an 8.4% increase in its own diplomatic budget for 2025, committing $500 million additional dollars to the World Health Organization over the next five years.
08:35An organization that the United States no longer belongs to.
08:40As a result of our cuts standing next to China's investments in diplomatic power, China will surpass the United States this year for the first time as the largest bilateral assistance partner for 40 countries.
08:58China is now the power at the World Health Organization.
09:03They call the shots about the standards of global health and pandemic relief.
09:09China is now the preferred economic development partner for many nations.
09:16China is now the dominant force in standards-setting boards for global commerce.
09:23This is a choice the Trump administration is making.
09:28To make China, and to a certain extent Russia, in certain forms, the dominant power.
09:34When it comes to economic statecraft, information statecraft, energy statecraft.
09:42Let me give you a specific example.
09:45Today, information is power.
09:47If you control information flows, man, you control politics, you control economics, you control culture.
09:55China spends about $7 billion a year to promote their communist narrative.
10:00To undermine U.S. leadership around the world and foster a China-friendly media environment globally.
10:06Russia, it's really hard to know how much Russia spends because they're not publicly reporting much of it.
10:12But they certainly spend at least $1.5 billion, but probably double that.
10:18And in many countries, Russia and China just control the information space.
10:22Russian-backed candidates win elections in countries on their periphery simply because of Russian information programs.
10:29Asian countries box the United States and U.S. companies out of economic competition because of Chinese information programs.
10:37And so, faced with China and Russia spending somewhere in the neighborhood of $10 billion,
10:44when the United States today is spending only a fraction of that amount of money,
10:50it would stand to reason that this would be a moment where we should come together, Republicans and Democrats,
10:54and dramatically increase our information warfare investments.
10:58But, of course, we're doing exactly the opposite.
11:01Trump is in the middle of a purposeful, relentless campaign to destroy,
11:05to destroy America's global information power.
11:10The Trump administration just shut down the Global Engagement Center.
11:13That is the capacity at the State Department to try to counter Russian and Chinese propaganda around the world.
11:22Gone.
11:23Just gone.
11:24Global Engagement Center.
11:25Bipartisan commitment set up years ago by myself and Rob Portman,
11:30supported by Marco Rubio when he was a senator, now just doesn't exist any longer.
11:35The administration is dismantling the U.S. Agency for Global Media.
11:39That's the umbrella arm that oversees our information programs around the world.
11:43They laid off 92% of its staff.
11:46Voice of America, the Middle East Broadcasting Networks, Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia,
11:51they are on track to disappear.
11:53The arm of the VOA that combats Iranian anti-American information, gone.
12:0054 different radio frequencies operated by Radio Free Asia to counter Chinese anti-American propaganda, gone.
12:07At the same time, China is opening up 80 new radio frequencies in multiple languages,
12:16including in those regions where America is disappearing.
12:19We are handing the world to China and Russia by deciding to view American power only through a military lens.
12:31And this rescissions bill makes it worse by enacting billions of dollars of cuts to diplomacy,
12:39to economic development programs, likely to information programs,
12:42because we actually can't see the impact of all of these cuts.
12:46China is throwing a blowout party as we disappear our non-military power from the world.
13:00Trump terminated tens of millions of dollars in projects to upgrade Africa's power grid.
13:07What did China do?
13:10They announced $50 billion of new financing for Africa.
13:17Africa, a place where the critical minerals exist to power AI and future defense systems.
13:25Africa, the part of the world whose economy is going to explode with opportunity.
13:28Now opportunity that will go to Chinese companies, not American companies.
13:32As we withdraw our relationships with that continent, as China steps into the breach.
13:38This revisions bill, standing next to Trump's destruction of all of our non-military foreign policy tools,
13:44it's surrender to our enemies.
13:46This bill is a double cross.
13:48It is.
13:49It's a double cross.
13:50It's going to harm our ability to ever be able to do a bipartisan budget process in the future.
13:58But even worse, this bill is surrender to our adversaries,
14:00who are chomping at the bit to fill the void that we are creating by adopting the national security strategy of an eight-year-old boy.
