SECRETARY RUBIO: Well, thank you, and I'm not going to give the written remarks. I'm just going to sort of walk you through this a little bit. That's the way these things are supposed to work, I hope.
And let me first start out by saying what is the goal here, because I think it's important. Even though we're going to talk about spending and all of that, you're going to do your own appropriations process. We recognize that. But I wanted to explain to you the organization. You have a chart behind you, the new organizational chart, and this is really the launchpad because that's what we're funding. That's what the appropriations bill will be funding. If you had the old one, you would struggle to see what the big difference - I mean, they're different, but you would - there are still a lot of boxes up there. And I want you to understand the primary thing we did, that I wanted to do and that I alluded to during my confirmation hearing.
I want the entire toolbox of American foreign policy to reside within the Department of State and in particular within our regional bureaus that cover the different regions of the world and ultimately down to our embassy. Senator Graham mentioned a moment ago about Syria. It is going to be one of the first test cases of whether this works or not, and what I mean by that is we have an embassy. It's obviously in exile. It's outside. It's in Türkiye. We are going to rely on them to tell us, okay, we're on the ground, we've gone in, we've met with the transitional authorities. Here are the things they need. These are the three, four, five things they need right now, and we need to be nimble enough to provide that, but it needs to be driven from the bottom up, not the top down.
I want you all to understand what I inherited when I go into the State Department. I get a memo asking for a decision. Sometimes these memos have 30 to 35 boxes in them that have to be checked off. Each box has to be checked off by somebody on a desk before it even gets to me. That just doesn't work. It certainly doesn't work in the 21st century, when events happen very quickly. And so we need to be nimble enough to make a decision, but we also have to make sure that these decisions are being made as close to the front lines as possible. What is the front lines of diplomacy? It is our embassies. It is the men and women who are deployed abroad on the ground who are hearing every single day. And so that's our number one goal.
The number two goal is to have, as I said, all the tools of foreign policy in the same toolbox. Foreign aid is a tool of our foreign policy. It is not the only tool of our foreign policy. It has to be taken in conjunction with all of these other things that we do, and they have to be intertwined.
Now, perhaps your experience was different, but I went to multiple countries around the world where I would go to the embassy and the embassy was upset at USAID because the embassy was pursuing one route - maybe closer to a leader who was less than ideal but we had a geopolitical interest why we would want to get closer, why we wanted to get closer to these people - and then USAID was funding a program that made the government angry, and so it cut off our ability - now, maybe we still do that, but there has to be a balance here. There can't be if they're two separate entities arguing with each other, in some cases not even communicating.
In other cases - this was my recent trip to the Caribbean, where they told me America's always been very generous at giving us things you think we need as opposed to the aid we think we need. And the aid they think they need in some of these countries is they need to build up police departments. They need to build up law enforcement so they can interdict drugs and secure the streets. And if they get that right, then they can send kids to school, then they can attract foreign investment to their country. But they have to get that part right.
The third dynamic that I say - and I leave humanitarian aside, because obviously natural disasters happen and these things will recur. But the best foreign aid is foreign aid that ends. You know why it ends?
(Protest utterances.)
The best foreign aid is foreign aid that ends because it's achieved its purpose. So take country X, and they say we want help with our law enforcement. The best foreign aid is foreign aid where at some point that country doesn't need it anymore, because now they're self-sufficient. South Africa is - I'm sorry, South Korea is a great example. South Korea was once poorer than North Korea. South Korea was once an aid-dependent nation. Today it is an aid donor and the ninth or tenth-largest economy in the world. That has to be the goal of our foreign aid. It has to be that it ultimately ends because it creates self-sufficiency.
There are other tools of foreign aid, by the way, whether it's the investment funds we have or Millennium Challenge grant. Those are outside my direct control or purview. They're not - they're under the committee's purview, and there will be efforts at reform there as well and potentially even expansion in one of them, although that won't be my decision solely.
So as we move forward in some of this and as you'll see some of the features of the budget we've presented before you, one of the ideas we have is having a global health programs account. The other is having a consolidated humanitarian assistance account. And the combination of these two things will allow us to deliver aid as part of the package driven from the ground up. I said this at the previous hearing: One of the most important things I feel, one of the most useful things to me in my time at the department, has been the cables, the cables that I get from ambassadors. We have gotten so many ideas from those cables. Will those ideas have ultimately made their way to me? Maybe, I don't know, but maybe months from now or weeks from now.
I want more of that in the department, and I want to empower embassies to be able to make decisions about which programs we should be funding, where the money should be going. I want, when an ambassador goes into a meeting, for she or he to be able to say to them here is a portfolio of things we can offer; which ones would make the most sense to you? So we're trying to accommodate that through these - the creation of these two funds. It's important to understand we're not walking away from foreign aid. We will still be the world's largest foreign aid donor by a lot. It won't even be close. But we want to target it more effectively.
Another feature is this America First Opportunity Fund, which, frankly, will allow us to be more nimble in providing funds for specific programs that arise outside the normal cycle of funding. And Syria, once again, is a great example. We don't have any money in the fiscal year's budget for Syria, because, frankly, none of us thought we would be talking about helping the Syrian Government six months ago or eight months ago, but now we have an opportunity to do it. And rather than have to go through reprogramming and all kinds of shuffling, to have the flexibility at some level to be able to respond quickly to something like that, that might be multifaceted in the approach, is an important thing to consider, as well as aligning it to other priorities we have as an administration.
So I do look forward to working with you, because, frankly, I have to - you pass the appropriations bills - but also because I think it can be very constructive.
