A group of protesters attempted to derail a USAID hearing at the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Thursday, demanding that President Donald Trump’s administration restore aid funding.<\/p>\n
Committee Chairman Brian Mast, R-Fla.,<\/a> poked fun at the protesters for being behind the times after they interrupted opening statements from witnesses before the committee.<\/p>\n “PEPFAR saves lives. Restore AIDS funding now,” the protesters chanted as they were forced out of the chamber.<\/p>\n “I guess these guys don’t watch the news. They didn’t realize that PREPFAR was one of the many programs that did prove to be life-saving so the funding was restored,”<\/a> Mast said. “Somebody better give them a link to, I don’t know, maybe Fox News or something like that.”<\/p>\n RUBIO PAUSES FOREIGN AID FROM STATE DEPARTMENT AND USAID TO ENSURE IT PUTS \u2018AMERICA FIRST\u2019<\/u><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n PEPFAR is a global AIDS relief program that has been credited with saving over 20 million lives since it was created under President George W. Bush.<\/p>\n The program received a waiver from Trump’s administration to continue its work despite the wider funding freeze impacting USAID and state department aid programs.<\/p>\n Secretary of State Marco Rubio has also created a wider exemption for “life-saving medicine, medical services, food, shelter, and subsistence assistance, as well as supplies and reasonable administrative costs as necessary to deliver such assistance,” Congressional Republicans noted in a memo.<\/a><\/p>\n Republicans have blasted the wider wasteful spending at USAID and the state department, however.<\/p>\n NONCITIZEN VOTER CRACKDOWN LED BY HOUSE GOP AHEAD OF 2026 MIDTERMS<\/u><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n The memo also highlighted funding programs including “$39,652 to host seminars at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on gender identity<\/u><\/a> and racial equality through the State Department” and “$425,622 to help Indonesian coffee companies become more climate and gender friendly through USAID.”<\/p>\n Other priorities listed included “$14 million in cash vouchers for migrants at the southern border through the State Department,” “$446,700 to promote the expansion of atheism in Nepal through the State Department” and “$32,000 for an LGBTQ-centered comic book in Peru.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A group of protesters attempted to derail a USAID hearing at the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Thursday, demanding that President Donald Trump’s administration restore aid funding. Committee Chairman Brian Mast, R-Fla., poked fun at the protesters for being behind the times after they interrupted opening statements from witnesses before the committee. “PEPFAR saves lives. … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33209","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33209","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33209"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33209\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33209"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}