WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator Chris Coons (D-Del.) delivered a floor speech today condemning proposed Republican-led efforts to axe humanitarian and disaster relief funding, and eliminate publicly broadcast emergency alerts for rural communities in the latest budget rescission package. The cuts, totaling approximately $9 billion, or roughly 0.1% of the federal budget, target critical aid programs including the World Food Program, UNICEF, Catholic Relief Services, Save the Children, and disaster response efforts around the globe. During his speech, Senator Coons said the cuts not only undermine America’s values, but they also betray the moral teachings at the heart of our faith traditions.
“Jesus wept,” Senator Coons began, referencing the Gospel of John. Senator Coons warned that the proposed $9 billion in rescissions, which include drastic reductions to food assistance, refugee aid, and disaster response, would cause similar needless suffering to our most vulnerable. “For God's justice is swift and sure, and I tremble when I think about the answer this chamber will give today to the question, who is my neighbor? Ladies and gentlemen of the Senate, we should turn aside. We should not, with this act and this vote today, make Jesus weep.”
Despite the focus of President Trump and his Republican allies in Congress on cutting foreign aid this year, the United States spends less than 1% of its annual budget on foreign assistance. The money feeds starving children, combats epidemics overseas before they reach American shores, helps us strengthen partnerships and alliances, and is critical in helping us outcompete China.
“I was on a bipartisan trip to the Philippines just a few months ago with Senator Ricketts, and I was struck to learn that the Philippines of all the nations on Earth is the most prone to natural disasters,” Senator Coons continued. “They value our partnership, our alliance. We've been security partners for decades. There's many Filipino-Americans. There's a close and deep relationship. But in meeting with their national leaders, their elected leaders, their senators and their ministers of their cabinet, they said, you know, it makes an incredible difference here in the Philippines: every time there's a typhoon, there’s an earthquake, there’s a volcano, it's the Americans who come. It's the Americans who deliver the aid, who help us help ourselves with training and equipment and support.”
Shortly afterward, Senator Coons offered an amendment on the Senate floor to strip out $496 million of the cuts that target international disaster relief.
A video and transcript of Senator Coons’ remarks are available below.
Senator Coons: Jesus wept. Jesus wept. Most of us who grew up in bible-believing households know this is the shortest verse in all of Scripture, and in some ways the most powerful – one that haunts me. Jesus wept in John, the 11th chapter, 35th verse, because he had come too late, seemingly, to save the life of Lazarus. He wept because someone he knew and loved had died, and it had caused such harm and loss to his family. Today we are doing something on this floor of this Senate – my Republican colleagues are doing something on the floor of this Senate – that I believe would make Jesus weep.
In Luke, there's a moment in the 10th chapter where a lawyer – and it's always a lawyer – comes to test Jesus, and trying to justify himself, presses Jesus with questions: “What must I do to gain eternal life?” And Jesus says, “what does the Scripture teach?” He says, “You should love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind. And the second commandment is like unto it, you should love your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus says, “you have read well. Do this and you will gain eternal life.” But the lawyer, hoping to be justified says – “but, but, but wait. Who is my neighbor?” And what follows is the well-known parable of the good Samaritan where the righteous, the priestly, the respected, the powerful walk on the other side of the road when they encounter someone who's been set upon by robbers. Not my problem, not my neighbor. But in the parable of the good Samaritan, it's this person – a Samaritan from a disfavored ethnicity, someone outside the circle of concern to the ancient Israelites – who does the right thing.
This parable would have been shocking at the time that it was preached by Jesus. The idea that the “good neighbor” was the outcast – the unexpected – would be something that frankly would have been a surprise. So although today being a ‘good Samaritan’ is a common term, it's important to know the history. We are taught as children that we are to see all as our neighbors, not just those who live next door, not just those who look like us or speak like us or pray like us, but the widest possible definition of neighbor is what we are called through righteousness to see in the world.
And what a difference it has made. Because our nation has for decades embraced the cause of being present, of caring, of making lifesaving differences to young mothers and children, to widows and orphans, to the imprisoned, to the hungry, to the refugee, to those fleeing oppression, to those seeking relief from authoritarian governments, for those seeking a better way. We are all God's children, and from childhood we are taught that the Golden Rule, which appears in virtually every religion – do unto others as you would have them unto to you – is the very foundation of the goodness of America, that we care for each other as neighbors, and we care for the world as neighbors. Yes, we are the most charitable, giving, philanthropic, engaged nation on Earth. And yet all that we do in foreign aid is less than 1% of our total federal budget.
Months ago, when Elon Musk and DOGE began roaming about the federal agencies of our government, their first target was that that delivers disaster relief, that helps feed the hungry, that helps welcome the refugee, that helps stabilize countries going through turmoil. They laid off thousands. They shut down programs. They canceled billions [of dollars]. And yet, here today we are at it again. Republicans are proposing even deeper cuts.
I want to talk about one area of the many that will be cut, I fear, later today: disaster assistance. Our nation has been riveted as we've watched the tragedy that unfolded in the Texas Hill Country, where a raging river killed dozens and dozens of innocent children. And you know, around the world, when disaster strikes, it is the Americans who show up first. It is Americans who show up with relief, with assistance, with skill and talent and ability.
It's been this way for decades and it should be this way still. I was on a bipartisan trip to the Philippines just a few months ago with Senator Ricketts, and I was struck to learn that the Philippines, of all the nations on Earth, is the most prone to natural disasters. They value our partnership, our alliance. We've been security partners for decades. There's many Filipino-Americans. There's a close and deep relationship. But in meeting with their national leaders, their elected leaders, their senators and their ministers of their cabinet, they said, you know, it makes an incredible difference here in the Philippines: every time there's a typhoon, there’s an earthquake, there’s a volcano, it's the Americans who come. It's the Americans who deliver the aid, who help us help ourselves with training and equipment and support. And you know, in the excess of DOGE’s deep cuts, they fired and laid off most of our experts who are capable of delivering world-class disaster relief.
We saw the consequences with an earthquake in Myanmar just three months ago, where the few remaining folks who did this work were laid off as they were deployed. And instead, the response was led by the Chinese. We are driving nations into the open arms of our adversaries. We have long been known as a nation that sought to be respected, admired, believed in, embraced, not for the example of our power, but by the power of our example. That when there were dread pandemics killing millions, America showed up.
One of the positives of this day is that my Republican colleagues have recoiled from fully shutting down PEPFAR, and that is a positive. One of the best things we've ever done as a nation is to save 27 million lives across the world that otherwise would have been lost to HIV and AIDS. But I'll tell you, when Ebola raged across Africa in 2014, I was the one member of Congress who went to Liberia at the request of the president – a Nobel Peace Prize winner, a brave and proud leader of a nation struggling facing massive losses of life. Projections at the early stages of the Ebola pandemic were that a fifth to a quarter of their population would die in a matter of weeks. And who came to help? The Americans. Catholic Relief Services, Save the Children, CARE, the U.S. military, our public health service.
I'll never forget meeting a young Liberian named Alvin. He dropped out of college to become a physician's assistant to help when the outbreak began and he in caring for patients himself contracted Ebola – a near certain death sentence. Yet, Alvin was evacuated by Americans to the Ebola treatment center set up and funded and equipped by Americans. And his life was saved by Americans. Whether it was the president of the nation, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, or Alvin, the folks I met on that trip to Liberia thanked and praised the American people for our decency, our kindness, our seeing them as our neighbor in their moment of deepest struggle, risk, and loss. And yet today – yet today – my colleagues would rather trim one-tenth of 1% of the budget, $9 billion, to cut deeper into food aid and disaster assistance and fighting pandemics, all to justify a tax cut.
I can think of few more despicable acts on this floor in my 15 years. I can speak to process. We have a bipartisan appropriations process where we can and should debate and consider these further cuts, and put them on the floor, and vote them up. But this is an odd thing. It’s a rescission. It is a cutting back further of money we've already appropriated. Just a few minutes later today, I will be trying to get votes to end $465 million of further cuts in disaster assistance that'll be on the floor today. Taking money from the World Food Program and UNICEF, from Red Cross and Save the Children, from Catholic Relief Services and World Vision. Folks may think at home that this money that goes out to the world is money better spent here, but for the pennies on the federal dollar that we spend responding to disasters around the world, organizations we all know and the majority of us believe in and support, like the Red Cross, World Vision, or Catholic Relief Services are able to appear in time and deliver lifesaving aid.
Think about what we are doing. Think about the example we are setting. Think about what we are teaching our children. Open your hearts and eyes and realize what we are about to do. This is a nation of which I am so proud, and yet at times it does things of which I am so ashamed. I cannot imagine the faces in the refugee camps, in the villages, in the clinics, in the schools, in the towns, in the cities around the world, who for years have been used to the idea that when there's a pandemic, the Americans come; that when there's an earthquake, the Americans come; that when there is starvation, the Americans come. Today we will vote, “no, we won't.” We are more interested in ourselves and in a bigger tax cut than we are in saving starving children, people laid low by the devastation of an earthquake, families separated by a typhoon. The best part of this nation – what truly makes us great – is our selfless giving to others. We will be judged by how we act today. For God's justice is swift and sure, and I tremble when I think about the answer this chamber will give today to the question, who is my neighbor?
Ladies and gentlemen of the Senate, we should turn aside. We should not, with this act and this vote today, make Jesus weep.