CHAIRMAN DIAZ-BALART: Thank you very much. Secretary Rubio, your full written statement will be placed in the record, so feel free to summarize your testimony. As I said before, it's a privilege and honor to have you here. You are now recognized, sir.
SECRETARY RUBIO: Thank you, and thank you for having me here today. And I'm not going to go off the written testimony. How about I just tell you what's happening and what we're trying to do.
(Protest utterances.)
CHAIRMAN DIAZ-BALART: The committee will be in order. The chairman reminds our guests that disruptive demonstrations from audience are a violation of the House and will not be tolerated.
SECRETARY RUBIO: So let me just talk to you about the goal here. Our foreign policy has to once again return to the national interests. That's what it needs to be built on. We need to define what the national interest is. What is good for America? That doesn't mean we don't care about the world. That doesn't mean we don't care about great causes on this planet. But it means that when it comes to the conduct of foreign policy, whether it's the policies we stake out or the dollars we're spending, it has to be aligned with defined national interests. What is in it for America?
Now, you could argue that alliances are in it for America. You can argue - and we can - that in some cases humanitarian assistance or development assistance and all these sorts of things are in our national interest. And we're going to continue to make that argument. We're not - we are going to continue to be the world's most generous provider of humanitarian assistance, of food assistance, of development assistance, way more than any other country. We already are, and we're going to continue to be.
But we're going to do it differently. We're going to do it differently and we have to do it differently, because we are engaged in a very different world than the one that existed 30 years ago or 40 years ago or, in some places, 50 years when some of these programs were set up. So there are two things that I want to focus on today in the three minutes that I have or less here with you. Obviously we'll get into your questions.
The first is the reorganization of the State Department. It is not designed to either cripple the department or in any way - it's not even a cost savings endeavor. It is more about being able to deliver results in a better way. What we want to empower is our regional bureaus and our embassies. Here's how I want this - this is how we want this to work.
We want to be able to go - let me back up. The most important thing I read every single day - every morning I get a book with 10 or 15 cables from our embassies around the world. The best ideas, the best innovations that I get from our building - and this is not disrespectful to the people working here in Washington - is from the embassies and from the cables. They are identifying problems and opportunities well in advance of some memo that works its way to me. We want to get back to a situation or we want to get to a situation where we are empowering ideas and action at the embassy level and through our regional bureaus. Those are literally the front lines of American diplomacy. And so we have structured a State Department that can deliver on that.
The second thing - and included is to understand the full toolbox available to us to advance the national interests. And in the past, unfortunately, humanitarian assistance and development assistance in AID and what the State Department does have in some cases been unrelated, in other cases have found themselves to be in conflict. So what I want and what we want is for our regional bureaus to have available to them aid, diplomacy, economic development, all of these different tools in the toolbox of statecraft and tailored to the specific country and/or region based on our national interests. That's what we seek to deliver on.
And that's why we wanted - and by the way, I'm not the first Secretary of State - multiple secretaries of state, starting with Condoleeza Rice, I believe Secretary Albright herself, and others privately, have wanted to bring AID and all of it underneath the fold of the State Department so that aid is provided through the context of our broader foreign policy.
And I want to be frank with you about this as well. There are a lot of great causes in the world. But we are at a - we don't have unlimited resources. We never have and we never will. And even though we spend more than anybody else, these resources have to be tailored as part of a broader strategy, and frankly, they have to have some return on the United States as well. There are countries in this world where we've invested a lot of money - I mean, a lot of money - in humanitarian assistance, even in development assistance.
And so you go and you hear about these countries. We feed people. We take care of their medical systems. We even help them build their security services. But all the minerals contracts are with China. All of the other benefits are with China. There's got to be some situation here where we say: hold on a second. There has to be some relationship between the amount of help we give and what's - and what the United States is getting out of it. That includes their votes in international organizations.
There are countries we have poured billions of dollars into over the year who consistently vote against our interests in international relations. You know who doesn't do that? You know who doesn't tolerate that? China doesn't tolerate that. They don't tolerate that. All of their help is leveraged. By the way, all of their help is primarily loans. So they lend you money that you pay them back so you can hire Chinese companies to do work in their country with Chinese workers. That's what they call aid and that's what they still call aid.
So the purpose here is to structure a State Department and ultimately - that can deliver on the foreign - on the national interest of the United States, driven at our regional bureaus. We are not withdrawing from the world. We are not withdrawing from foreign aid, but we're going to engage in the world and we're going to conduct foreign aid and foreign assistance in a way that furthers the national interest. Not only do I look forward to working with you, I have to work with you, because you are the appropriators and you are the ones that write the budgets and you are - the appropriations bills. And by the way, we're welcome to taking input through this process. We need that input because our intention here is to leave something behind that is good, not something that is counterproductive or in some ways does something unintended that's negative.
Thank you.
