Ranking Member Lee Statement at the Subcommittee Markup of the 2025 State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs Funding Bill

Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-CA-12), Ranking Member of the State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs Subcommittee, delivered the following remarks at the Subcommittee's markup of the fiscal year 2025 State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs funding bill:

- As Prepared for Delivery -

Thank you, Chairman Diaz Balart, Chairman Cole, and Ranking Member DeLauro.

This is my seventeenth year on the Appropriations Committee, and today is my last State, Foreign Operations subcommittee mark-up.

As members of this subcommittee, we all know this work to be a kind of "passion project." We all serve on this subcommittee because we care deeply about how the United States engages with the rest of the world.

I have spent my time on the committee working to lift people up, addressing inequities and injustice and increasing human dignity, and tackling problems that our country faces by working in partnership with others.

I am incredibly proud of the lives saved through PEPFAR and the Global Fund; the children we've helped through the Children in Adversity Program or vaccinate; and how we have refocused attention on our close neighbors in the Caribbean. SFOPS gives us, and the majority and minority staff that support us, a tremendous opportunity to make a difference in the lives of millions of people.

I specifically want to recognize the staff that I have worked with over the years, especially Clelia Alvarado, Craig Higgins, Erin Kolodjeski, Dean Koulouris, Jean Kwon, Laurie Mignone, Marin Stein, Jonathan Stivers, Stephanie Reed, Lillian Wasvary, Jason Wheelock, and my personal office staff, Gregory Adams, Julie Nickson, and Joyce Kazadi.

While members of this subcommittee have policy disagreements, our commitment to this mission should bring us together. But the work of diplomats and development experts cannot be supported with a 12 percent cut as we are contemplating in this fiscal year 2025 House mark. What we are faced with today is a deeply political bill that seeks to satisfy the most extreme among us without consideration of the real-life consequences for our national security and the well-being of our allies.

Outside of general under-investment in our work globally to pursue American interests and values, this bill repeats many of the bad ideas of last year's House bill and then doubles down with some new ones. I hope over the coming weeks we will be able to discuss many of these deficiencies, but this morning, I want to focus on three things: the devastating impact of changing climate patterns; the need to empower women not just as economic actors but as having autonomy over their bodies; and the disastrous consequences of the United States walking away from the rest of the world.

First, this bill takes a dishonest approach to the threat posed by climate change. People are confronting the impacts of human-caused climate change right now—life threatening temperatures, crop failures, floods and severe weather. Many of us are experiencing this in our own districts and hometowns. The past 12 months have been the hottest ever measured and this year's hurricane season is predicted to be especially active because of record ocean temperatures.

Yet, this bill ignores this reality. It includes no funding for clean energy. No funding to help communities adapt to drought, rising coastlines, or extreme heat. No funding to stop deforestation or recurring coastal flooding. And even worse, the bill cuts off cooperation with other countries to address this existential threat. Climate change is taking people's homes and livelihoods over and over and over. And this bill is silent.

The second issue is the continued war that this bill wages on women's reproductive freedom. 218 million women still do not have access to the tools needed to decide when and how to have a baby and hundreds of thousands die in childbirth, but the House mark will make it harder for women to access care. It also cuts off funding to UNFPA, the one partner that provides services to mothers and their babies in the hardest places to reach. We know these are failed policies with negative impacts for child mortality and health and economic empowerment, but yet Republicans want to repeat the same destructive playbook.

But perhaps the most damaging aspect of this House mark is the abdication and retreat of U.S. leadership around the world. The bill projects a worldview that sees issues and countries as black and white, good and evil. If we don't like everything about an organization or can't control all their actions, this bill prohibits funding it. It is our way or the highway and this is fundamentally anti-democratic.

This is not how the world works and it is this approach that is causing the United States to become increasingly isolated. Instead of listening to partners and addressing concerns together, this mark forces the U.S. to go it alone and reject any country with a different perspective. It rejects burden-sharing and dialogue. Perhaps telling, the largest increase in this bill is Foreign Military Financing and it zeroes out the United Nations while outright prohibiting a half a dozen UN bodies. The message of this bill is more weapons, less cooperation.

Today's House mark would have severe consequences for United States leadership, our ability to work with others on shared challenges, and our long-term national security. The world is full of threats that don't respect borders, from climate change, to pandemics, to assertive dictators. We can't stick our head in the sand and hope it will all go away.

It has been a tremendous honor to lead this subcommittee, but I will depart this Committee deeply concerned that our politics are leading us in the wrong direction and leaving the United States alone on the global stage. Democrats will not support a bill if it means turning our backs to the world's most vulnerable women or the looming threat of climate change.

I take some solace knowing that final appropriations bills need bicameral and bipartisan support which is not reflected in this current draft. I look forward to improving this bill as it would be disastrous to go forward as currently written and gives our adversaries an even larger opening to fill the void in global leadership this bill creates.

I yield back.

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