Secretary Of State Marco Rubio Shares Message To USAID Employees Currently Working Abroad

Thank you Mr. Secretary, Mr. President, Michael Crowley with the New York Times. Mr. Secretary, there's some confusion today about American diplomacy with Panama now, as you must be aware. I'm wondering if you could clarify for us. As you surely know, after the State Department announced last night that Panama had supposedly agreed to waive fees for U.S. government vessels transiting the canal, the Panama Canal Authority quickly denied this, and today President Molino, who seems rather upset, called the State Department's statement on this lies and falsehoods. Can you tell us your understanding of how we reach this point of confusion and where you understand the situation to be right now? Is there an agreement? What's the point of confusion here? And on USAID, if I may quickly, we are hearing from employees abroad who are confused, anxious, and in some cases actually panicked about the order to return within 30 days, which is not that much time to uproot and relocate from a foreign country. Do you plan on offering these employees any more guidance on this process? And in particular, are you able to say whether people can serve out their administrative leave in their mission country, or are they required to return home even if they're not using government resources? And Mr. President, please, you said that the leadership of the U.S. is fundamental and there is no substitute in finding some sort of a solution for Haiti. The President of Haiti's Transitional Council seems very concerned about this. He said a couple of weeks ago he believes that President Trump does not care about Haiti and that the Trump administration's policies will be a catastrophe for his country. Can you just give us a sense of your confidence level that the Trump administration will follow through and exercise the sort of leadership role you described? Thank you. What was your, let me answer the first two because I think they were for me. What was the first one again, I apologize? And the state of the diplomacy, what led to the confusion and where things stand now? And the second one was USAID. Okay. Yes, please. I'm not confused about Panama. We had conversations. I felt there were strong first steps. We have expectations we made clear in those conversations. I respect very much that Panama has a process. They're a democratically elected government. They have rules. They have laws. They're going to follow their process. But our expectations remain the same. And particularly on that, I would just say that the United States has a treaty obligation to protect the Panama Canal if it comes under attack. That treaty obligation would have to be enforced by the armed forces of the United States, particularly the U.S. Navy. I find it absurd that we would have to pay fees to transit a zone that we are obligated to protect in a time of conflict. Those are our expectations. They were clear. They were clearly understood in those conversations. But I respect very much the fact that Panama has a process of laws and procedures that they need to follow as it relates to the Panamanian Canal authorities. We'll allow them to work through those processes. We intend to make it amicable the way our visits were. As far as the USAID, a couple points. The goal of our endeavor has always been to identify programs that work and continue them and to identify programs that are not aligned with our national interests and identify those and address them. So we have sent out guidance to those deployed abroad that they should, they will be on leave of absence, not fired, leave of absence as of Friday. And then we made very clear in the message, it's there and it's written in the message that was posted, that if there are exceptional circumstances regarding family or displacement or maybe the spouse is employed in the embassy so they're co-located and their children are in school, there's room and space for that. We also made clear in the guidance that there would be specially designated programs that would not be a part of that order. And we are working through the process of identifying them now, what those specially designated programs are, and we will continue to work through the process of finding them. The third point I would make is that people were given 30 days that we would help bring them home if they so desired during that 30 day period. And at the same time, the expectation, as I said, that if they have a special condition or something's going on, we didn't list them all, but we're willing to listen to those. We're not trying to be disruptive to people's personal lives. We're not, this is, we're not trying to, we're not being punitive here, but this is the only way we've been able to get cooperation from USAID. I had preferred not to do it this way. When we tried to do it from the top down by getting cooperation from the central office of USAID, what we found instead are people trying to use the system to sneak through payments and push through payments despite the stop order. We found people that were uncooperative in terms of giving us information and access, all very consistent with some of the things we experienced while we were in Congress. And so we've had to do this other route instead. But we are going to get, we are going to do foreign aid. The United States will be providing foreign aid, but it is going to be foreign aid that makes sense and is aligned with our national interest. And I know the last question wasn't for me, but I want to address that as well. Number one, the United Nations is sitting on $100 million in their fund. The United States has provided 15 of the $100 million for that fund. Okay, that only 13 million of that is currently frozen. That means they still have $85 million plus the 1 point something million they spent that we already have in there available for the mission. That's clear. And that's not an impediment to the mission continuing. Beyond the UN fund, I've issued a waiver providing for the use of, I think it's close to $40 million of additional support. And those contracts are out there and they're working now. They're providing logistical support both to the mission and to the Haitian National Police. Those are facts. So I could just say that's a pretty strong commitment and it's certainly a lot stronger commitment than some of the other rich countries around the world who aren't doing nearly as much. By the way, it's a credit to Kenya, who's come halfway around the world and are willing to stand up and do something about it. When countries in our own hemisphere, they're not willing to do anything about it. And I don't want to go through and list all of them and start some diplomatic fight two and a half weeks into my term here, but I'm just telling you there's some rich countries out there and they're not doing nearly enough about it and they could be doing more. So I encourage them to do more. I'm sorry.