Congressional Testimony

In March, the Administration requested $22.5 billion in additional COVID-19 response funding, including $5 billion to support the immediate needs of the global COVID-19 response. This global funding would enable a significant expansion of our Global VAX surge efforts to another 20 to 25 countries and other global COVID-19 vaccination priorities, including the rollout of boosters and pediatric doses. With more than 30 countries qualifying as severely undervaccinated, it remains critical to expand the initiative beyond the 11 surge countries we currently support. This request will also enable us to shrink the severe gaps in global access to testing, oxygen capacity, and antiviral treatments—enabling lifesaving services for more than 100 million people—as well as enhanced monitoring of potential or emerging variants.

Failure to continue our supplemental global funding would abdicate U.S. leadership even as the People’s Republic of China continues its transactional approach to pandemic response and global health; it would weaken health systems that are crucial to fighting this and future pandemics; and it would amount to a surrender to the inevitability of dangerous new variants. Failing to provide supplemental global funding would also jeopardize our long-term baseline pandemic preparedness, global health, and health security investments. In sum: it would be a geopolitical, ethical, health security, and economic mistake of historic proportions.

Thank you. It’s an honor to testify alongside these guardians of democracy. As we’ve just heard, autocrats don’t just destroy democracy and the rule of law in their own countries. They use lawfare and other subversive tactics to wield influence over other countries, stifling open discourse, corroding the integrity of economies, and interfering in politics and policymaking. But they cannot do it alone.

Localization is about recognizing that development agencies like USAID do not direct or drive change – we support or catalyze local change processes. To do this, we want to shift more leadership, ownership, decision making, evaluation and implementation to the local people and institutions who possess the capability, connectedness, and credibility to propel change in their own countries and communities. USAID's Local Works program is an excellent example of what this approach looks like in practice. Local Works provides flexible funding that enables USAID Missions to have more time and greater freedom to pursue locally led programming. In Bangladesh, the influx of nearly one million refugees resulting from the Rohingya humanitarian crisis into already impoverished communities in the district of Cox’s Bazar has led to a complex emergency that has depleted natural resources inside and outside of refugee camps.

USAID is proud to be a partner with Colombia on the path away from decades of conflict towards peace and prosperity. Our task now is to make that peace irreversible in the face of continuing challenges.