Reports that U.S. Agency for International Development employees caught up in a new round of federal firings were given just 15 minutes to clear out their offices led to a blistering attack from Sen. Peter Welch (D-VT) on the Trump administration.
“I'm really shocked by it,” Welch said Thursday in an interview on CNN’s “The Situation Room.” He added: “But nothing shocks me anymore with the Trump administration.”
The latest development to hit the humanitarian aid agency — which has been crippled by sweeping funding cuts, mass layoffs and a freeze of foreign aid grants — came Thursday when employees shuffled out of the now-closed agency headquarters after being given 15 minutes to pack up their belongings, according to media reports.
“It's savage and cruel,” Welch said Thursday before fiercely defending the agency. “And you use the wrong word, you said slash, the agenda here – and they're well underway to accomplishing it – is to destroy the U.S. Agency for International Development.”
He first lauded the agency as a “very, very effective” form “of our soft power” that has been on display since the Kennedy administration.
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“Number two, the way the president is doing this is totally unconstitutional,” he added. “He's interfering with specific congressional appropriations, incidentally, appropriations that Secretary of State Marco Rubio advocated for and voted for.”
The Vermont lawmaker then circled back to the root of the agency, which he said has now been reduced to a display of “cruelty to receive recipients.”
“We've got 170 countries who are involved, there is food in warehouses that's available for starving children, it won't be delivered,” he said. “There's medicine that provides vaccines to prevent outbreaks of calamitous diseases, won't be injected.”
Welch concluded the way the fired employees were treated Thursday “is an extraordinary action done in a way of maximum cruelty to our workers, but also to the starving kids, the sick folks around the around the world.”
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