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WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Brian Mast delivered opening remarks at a full committee hearing titled, “The Need for an Authorized State Department.”

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-Remarks- 

As I said, I called this hearing really to establish a simple fact: the State Department has many broken parts, and it’s been in many ways a broken part of our government for many years. It’s been too big. It’s had no clear mission or definition for public diplomacy, has very little command and control over the dollars that it sends across the globe. It’s spent your tax dollars in ways that would have been better if the State Department just lit the money on fire in many cases.

Right now, more than 80% of the State Department is not authorized by Congress. That includes the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, with a budget of $57 million and 247 employees; the Bureau of International Organizations, with a budget of $90 million and 370 employees; and the Bureau of Administration, with a budget of $394 million and a staff of 700.

Now, despite 80% of it not being authorized, the State Department’s bureaus, offices, and programs continued to grow each and every year. Last year, the State Department employed more than 80,000 people across the globe. Between the year 2000 and the year 2024, the State Department’s budget grew from roughly $9.5 billion to more than $55 billion over the course of that time.

Where did that money go? Does our foreign policy feel like it’s five times more effective as we’ve spent five times more dollars? Instead, we’ve had a State Department with plenty of duplicative programs, but again, not a clear mission and a clear outline on how to go out there and affect the missions positively on behalf of the American people and all of our interests.

The largest operation of the State Department in any of our lifetimes was the withdrawal from Afghanistan, which was an abysmal failure. The State Department failed to plan everything from how many people would be requesting visas to how many people would be needed to process those visas and a thousand other things.

The State Department is too big, and it’s also unaccountable because we’ve not conducted a comprehensive standalone reauthorization since 2002. It’s also prioritizing the wrong things, in my opinion. That is why we saw American dollars going out the door to foreign companies, foreign countries, foreign NGOs, and foreign adversaries like the Taliban with less oversight than it takes the average American citizen to get a driver’s license at the DMV.

Don’t take my word for it. Listen to what the State Department’s funded with your tax dollars. Many of you heard me give lists of hundreds and hundreds of items. I’ll list just a couple: $14 million in cash vouchers for migrants at our southern border; $24,000 for a national spelling bee in Bosnia; $1.5 million to mobilize elderly, lesbian, transgender, non-binary, and intersex people to be involved in the Costa Rica political process; $20,000 for a drag show in Ecuador; $32,000 for an LGBTQ comic book in Peru.

I would challenge anybody in here to refute that American tax dollars were not spent in this way. I don’t see anybody refuting that.

I have hundreds of more examples of these, if not thousands. We have proof that these things happened. We have the documents. We have the photos. We have the receipts. These things are too stupid for us to try and make up, really.

But this is not about scoring political points with each of those; otherwise, I’d give the full list. These programs were funded with American tax dollars because somewhere, some person down the line at the State Department thought that programs like that were actually public diplomacy. The spending was not life-saving. It didn’t make American citizens visiting those countries safer or American businesses operating there more prosperous or a better partner. It didn’t bring any of the countries in which the money was spent closer to America. In fact, many of these countries actively opposed what the State Department was actually doing.

Yet State Department officials thought this was public diplomacy and exactly what America should be doing. Again, I personally disagree with that definition of public diplomacy, but we should have this debate and we should figure out what American tax dollars should and should not be used for abroad. That’s what the debate about a State Department reauthorization is all about. That’s what this hearing and a reauthorization process will accomplish.

We need to restore command and control over the State Department so that you don’t have USAID betraying its core mission by funding an $850,000 transgender job fair in Bangladesh or $15 million in condoms to the Taliban. That did nothing to bolster America’s national security.

Even worse, the lack of accountability allows USAID to create a bloated industry where D.C. contractors profited off sky-high overhead costs while people most in need received very little compared to what those contractors received. Even USAID admitted that just 12% of its grants went directly to local organizations.

This lack of accountability at USAID is exactly why the agency needed to be brought back under the control of the State Department. And this is an idea that was embraced by Bill Clinton—President Bill Clinton—and President Joe Biden, and it’s a move that we should make permanent in our reauthorization bill.

The State Department has been broken. That has been true. But it’s also our responsibility as the Foreign Affairs Committee to fix those issues permanently. Until now, the State Department has never shrunk. It’s never downsized its budget or eliminated an office or an envoy.

President Trump, Secretary Rubio, and Doge are already making changes, and they’re looking at us to be a partner in that process. We look forward to seeing Secretary Rubio to speak to us about that later in the month, next month. The only way that we do this as authorizers in the U.S. House of Representatives is by conducting that first full comprehensive State Department reauthorization again since 2002.

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