Republicans on the House Foreign Affairs Committee wanted to scrutinize all USAID line items for waste during a hearing Thursday, but Democrats were "trying to gloss over everything," Rep. Ryan Mackenzie, a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told Newsmax on Friday.
The Pennsylvania Republican, speaking on Newsmax's "Wake Up America" a day after his committee was examining spending by USAID, said that Democrats' conduct during the hearing was "shameful."
"Ultimately, it is $40 billion of taxpayer money that goes through USAID, and we want to scrutinize this," said Mackenzie. "We found these wasteful programs. They want to nitpick all the details. But at the end of the day, they're just trying to gloss over everything, saying 'nothing to see here. Keep this gravy train moving.'''
But Republicans are "doing the job that we were elected to do, which is to be good stewards of taxpayer dollars and end all this wasteful, crazy spending that the Democrats have been pushing in the Biden administration," he added.
Democrats in the committee were also on the defensive over some of the more controversial spending USAID has been doing, said Mackenzie.
"You heard a couple of different responses from them yesterday," he said. "One was it's just a tiny percentage of the overall budget. Again, it's $40 billion of taxpayer money. The second thing you would hear was constant nitpicking. They would say, 'well, that wasn't $1 billion for a woke program in this country. It was actually in this country over here.' Like, somehow if the facts of a certain country or location changed that."
Democrats on the committee also defended the spending by admitting that "maybe it got off track with this woke agenda," but also saying that USAID "still does a lot of good," said Mackenzie.
"You say, 'OK, well, let's focus on the wasteful spending,'" he said. "But again they constantly are trying to deflect. They point the finger at everybody else and everybody who is not related to this to try to change the topic. But again, we've caught them red-handed. And I think it's a great thing that Congress is having hearings like this."
But rather than eliminating USAID, Mackenzie said that he believes it should be reformed and put under the control of the Secretary of State, as the agency still has a role in advancing American interests overseas.
"But at the same time, what we have been seeing for years is not that none of what has been going on in these wasteful spending programs helps advance American interests," said Mackenzie.
In some cases, "because of this woke ideology that is being pushed by the Democrats and the progressive left," USAID's programs undermine the interests of the United States, said Mackenzie.
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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