Coronavirus Preparedness and Response Supplemental Appropriations Act, 2020

Floor Speech

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Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, I call up my amendment, No. 1506, and I ask that it be reported by number.

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Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, my amendment would pay for the emergency funds for the coronavirus.

I think that we should not let fear or urgency cause us to lose our minds and cause us to act in an irresponsible fashion. I, for one, have looked at foreign aid over the years as welfare that we send to other countries that really is not particularly in our best interests anyway. If you follow foreign aid through the years, what you will find is that it goes from middle-class folks in rich countries to rich people in poor countries. Frankly, people enrich themselves at our expense. They steal our money. The Mubarak family in Egypt is now worth billions of dollars, which it skimmed off the top. The history of this throughout the Third World is legion and is well known.

My amendment would basically take the $8 billion from the welfare we give to foreign countries in order to pay for this. I see no reason we shouldn't do this. I am not opposed to the emergency funding, but I think that the emergency funding should be gotten from elsewhere in the budget and that this is the responsible way to act.

Every day, people across the country are confronted with unexpected expenses. We budget and we plan, but things happen. When they do, we adjust and plan accordingly. Sometimes we confront an expense that is not only unexpected but is urgent, and that is where we find ourselves today. We want to respond and make sure we are providing resources to our medical professionals and researchers. That is important, and I fully support that, which is why we should use this moment to ask ourselves whether it is really necessary to keep spending on wasteful things.

If we don't consider this now, when will we ever consider this?

We want an all-hands-on-deck response, so we should be cutting out waste and moving those resources to something that is of more immediate concern. So, if the coronavirus is of immediate concern--and I think it is--let's address that situation now, but let's do so by taking money from less urgent things and money that we are wasting overseas--money that is often stolen by Third-World dictators. That is exactly what I am proposing today.

We have the money. We don't need to borrow more money. We just have to start setting our own priorities. For example, we shouldn't spend another dollar in developing a foreign economy this year. That spending should be stopped, and the money should be spent here to buy supplies, to help expedite research, and to support our communities. The funds I am proposing to keep at home have been used abroad for all kinds of unnecessary and wasteful things. I will give you a few examples.

We send U.S. taxpayer dollars to fund kids from Pakistan to go to space camp in America. We spend money on combating student truancy in the Philippines. We have been funding the Peruvian Green New Deal. We actually send money to help deported illegal immigrants start up businesses in El Salvador. What business is it of the U.S. taxpayer to be funding small businesses in El Salvador for people who broke the law by trying to break into our country? It is insane. At this point in time, I think this money would be better spent on research on the coronavirus and on a response to this epidemic should it become worse in our country.

The list doesn't stop there. I don't know why we can't agree to spend this money on the coronavirus instead of spending it abroad. We spend over $50 billion a year in Afghanistan--building their roads, building their schools, trying to create a nation where there really is no nation. We need to spend that money here at home. Besides, it is the law.

We have a law called pay-go, or pay as you go, which is supposed to require Congress to pay for new spending. It has been around for a couple of decades. Yet we have broken the law thousands of times. What do they do? They see something they want. You know, they are kids in a candy store. They want to spend. They want to give you, give you, give you free money, so they just ignore the law. So what happens every year is that they exceed the pay-as-you-go, and they don't do the thing they are supposed to do, which is to offset this with a spending cut. Then they just write a small, little note in there, reading they have agreed to ignore the pay-go rules again. That is what will happen in this case.

The other way they ignore the rules on pay-go is they declare things to be emergencies, so everything is an emergency. They say: Well, what would we do if we didn't have this--if it weren't an emergency?

We already spend billions of dollars and have spent billions of dollars over the years to prepare for epidemics. We fund the CDC, and we fund the NIH. There is a lot of money out there.

Once again, I am not against giving additional money, but we should just make a decision. We should be mature people and say we are not just going to print up the money or borrow it from China but are going to take it, maybe, from something less necessary.

When we don't want to pay for new spending, we just simply waive these rules on pay-go. We declare the spending to be emergency, and we get around the requirement. That is how we got a $23 trillion debt. We actually borrow $2 million every minute.

People say: Well, we have to do something. People are running around, acting crazy--we have to do something. Well, who is going to do something about the $23 trillion debt?

Do we not have 5 minutes to take a vote? In 15 minutes, we will be taking this vote, and people could simply vote and say that we are not going to borrow more money and that we will take the money from somewhere else in the budget that is less pressing.

Mark my words--there is no fiscal responsibility up here among either party. It will be a small minority of us who will say that this funding should be offset by taking it from somewhere else in the budget.

In times of emergency, Congress scrambles to put together new spending, but we should be working just as hard to pay for the cost that comes with emergencies.

Which is a higher priority--spending millions of dollars to stabilize the supply chain of medical supplies and treatments here at home or spending millions on international arts festivals? Which is a higher priority--spending millions to train frontline medical professionals here at home on how to limit exposure to the coronavirus or spending millions of dollars, if not billions of dollars, paving roads in Afghanistan? My amendment gives us a chance to set priorities.

We can support our communities and give our medical system the resources its needs, and we can do it without adding to the debt. That is the responsible way. My amendment would do exactly that, and I encourage the other Senators to consider fiscal responsibility.

I thank the Presiding Officer.

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