SCOOP: Previewing Marco Rubio's Foreign Relations Committee testimony

Secretary of State Marco Rubio is returning to familiar ground this week: the Senate Foreign Relations and Appropriations Committees.

The Washington Reporter spoke with foreign policy experts who predicted what Democrats on the committee may try and lob at Rubio, their former colleague — and found that the likely allegations from the Democrats are baseless.

Sen. Jim Risch (R., Idaho), the Chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, is working with Capitol Police to arrest liberal protesters who illegally disrupt congressional hearings, the Reporter previously exclusively reported.

“Gonna be a lot of folks arrested,” one senior Hill staffer predicted to the Reporter about the upcoming hearing.

“I’m expecting sparks to fly,” a veteran GOP foreign policy expert told the Reporter. “Democrats will be gunning for Rubio to compare and contrast his recent actions with previous, more aggressive and supportive foreign policy statements and votes, particularly those calling for greater spending.”

“Republicans will no doubt try to deflect that line of criticism,” the expert continued.

At the top of those concerns is likely to be that the Trump administration “illegally canceled” the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

Rubio’s defenders are quick to highlight the gross mismanagement of taxpayer funds by the Biden administration’s USAID, which was helmed by Samantha Power. Rubio currently serves as the Acting Administrator of USAID.

“The direction in which Biden and his team under Samantha Power took USAID would be unrecognizable even to the officials of the Kennedy administration who established USAID in 1961,” Bonnie Glick, the USAID Deputy Administrator under the first Trump Administration, told the Reporter.

“The agency, whose mission was to alleviate poverty and to help countries on their journeys to self-reliance, became an arm of the progressive, radical left to administer programs that are anathema to the interests of most Americans. The United States is the most generous country in the history of the world, but Biden’s USAID took advantage of Americans’ charitable nature and the result is a rethinking of how to use the soft diplomacy tool of international aid to promote our national security interests while helping countries become self-reliant.”

Rubio himself has said that “USAID strayed from its original mission long ago.”

“As a result, the gains were too few and the costs were too high,” Rubio said.

The Biden administration’s USAID doled out millions of dollars to DEI programs around the world, and experts noted that many had minimal oversight.

Another criticism Democrats have lobbed at Rubio is that he is“eliminating” important State Department offices around the world. Rubio, however, is streamlining much of the agency’s functions around the world.

“With a bloated budget and unclear mandate, the expansive domain of the former Under Secretary for Civilian Security, Human Rights, and Democracy (known internally as the ‘J Family’), provided a fertile environment for activists to redefine ‘human rights’ and ‘democracy’ and to pursue their projects at the taxpayer expense, even when they were in direct conflict with the goals of the Secretary, the president, and the American people,” Rubio has said of his work.

One Democrat on the committee, Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D., Md.) has recently made championing illegal immigrants his personal cause célèbre — and most experts expect him to make a scene following his trip to El Salvador to visit Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an illegal immigrant whom the Trump administration has accused of being a human trafficker.

However, Rubio’s defenders noted that his leadership in working with regional allies to deport gang members and illegal immigrants is one of his signature wins, and that the recent agreement signed by the United States and El Salvador represents a standard that future bilateral agreements that the United States signs should look towards.

Finally, Democrats are expected to criticize Rubio for his revocation of thousands of students visas. This, most would argue is Rubio’s highest-profile — and most popular — policy.

For months, Rubio and his team have argued that support for Palestine, which has never been a country in world history, according to a historical review conducted by the Reporter, has nothing to do with visa revocation.

Rather, Rubio has been revoking the visas of visitors in America who are supporting terrorists.

“Since January 20, we have had the most robust America First policy of any presidential administration,” a senior State Department official told the Reporter.

“President Trump’s historic leadership has advanced peace, made our country more secure, and secured trillions of dollars in investments that will directly help the American people,” the spokesperson said. This week Congressional Democrats will predictably attempt to lob baseless attacks on this Administration’s foreign policy, but the facts speak for themselves: America is once again leading on the world stage.”

Rubio spent years serving on the committee as a senator for Florida before he was unanimously confirmed as Secretary of State.