MyPR International: Department Press Briefing – July 2, 2025

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QUESTION: I want to ask you about the passing of USAID, the demise of USAID, being absorbed into the State Department in a very different fashion. According to The Lancet, a highly respected British medical journal, USAID was responsible for saving 90 million lives over the course of two decades.

MS BRUCE: American aid was responsible for that, Andrea; I’ll correct you right there. USAID was an element of the United States Government disbursing taxpayer funds around the world for humanitarian aid for a variety of different projects. It was the United States Government – and is, when it comes to the aid – not a department, but the nature of what this government —

QUESTION: It’s under the —

MS BRUCE: — under various administrations, had approved. Let’s keep that in mind.

QUESTION: Can I – can I continue?

MS BRUCE: Yes, please do, but I wanted – that’s a very – it’s something worth correcting.

QUESTION: And former President Bush, who was responsible for PEPFAR, with bipartisan majorities in Congress for years, suggested that the saving of 25 million lives from antiretroviral drugs is – on HIV/AIDS as well as tuberculosis – is something that the USAID staff – because he sent this to the USAID staff in a video, and he said that you should be proud of it, and God bless you all for what you did. So I just wanted to ask you about how it is going to be reconstituted, because the – the Secretary’s writing on Substack describes it as wasteful and not fulfilling U.S. goals in broad categories, and it is very – it’s contrary to what Republicans and Democrats –

MS BRUCE: Well –

QUESTION: — have said in Congress for years.

MS BRUCE: Yes, not – it is – inevitably it grew into something that was beyond what it was meant to do. There’s clearly some very good options and aid that was delivered, and that aid was maintained, but what we found was something that was unacceptable. We’ve been discussing this transparently from the beginning of the Trump Administration and Secretary Rubio’s State Department, that this – and I’ll – I guess I’ll have to repeat that there is the past, things that happened in the past, certainly aid that went out that was beneficial that has been maintained, and other aid that was not in line with America’s priorities or what, certainly, the Trump Administration and the Rubio State Department felt was appropriate. So they’ve taken action in that regard.

It is also what I’ve said repeatedly – is even though the mechanism has changed because it grew – it grew unable to function in a manner where even auditing was something – that was easy to do. There was a refusal to allow an auditing at the beginning of this administration. There was a sense that it was some independent organization, not something associated with the United States Government. All of that is absurd. It led to, yes, a dramatic action to look at and to review and to audit the entity. We’ve done that. A great deal of aid has remained. A great deal has been suspended or cut entirely. It fit well within the nature of needing to reform the government as a whole via the President’s executive order to do so, and to save money.

I’ll repeat again: Samantha Power, the last USAID director under the last administration at the end of 2024, complained in public statements that when she started only 7 percent of aid money that was assigned to various projects and groups made it to its intended destination, and that’s because of bureaucracy and layers of contractors. And she was proud that she got it up to 10 percent. All of us would agree that that’s unacceptable and that even if you do cut the amount of money that’s going out, it doesn’t mean that the services get cut. It doesn’t mean that the benefits get cut. It could in fact mean more services, more benefits, with less bureaucracy, with services getting directly to the people who need it.

QUESTION: Can you just —

MS BRUCE: I’ll – you stated a number of things that I think are unfortunate, and the American people deserve to hear an answer. Because we’ve also described – you asked how will this look now. With this reorganization, it fits within a framework of making sure that people assigned to those regions – and we have those; that’s called bureaus here – people who are assigned to look at the nature of what’s happening in a certain region of the world, they’re the experts in that regard. That foreign assistance for that region will now sit with the bureau assigned to that region as opposed to some massive bureaucracy, not even housed in our building, dealing with countries and regions separately without dealing with the experts here who understand what those regions might need. It will be more efficient. It will be more effective. We are not ending foreign aid. We are making it more nimble. We are operating at the speed of relevancy to making sure that the millions and billions of dollars that we spend on aid get to where it is meant to go.

There is nothing to be proud of when 90 percent, according to Samantha Power, is not even making it to the people to whom it was promised. These are promises. Donald Trump makes promises, and he keeps them – promises made, promises kept. We will be doing that also now with foreign aid. With the new structure of how this will be working, we are – of course, it is in our DNA – we exist in large part because of the nature of what America stands for as a beacon of hope for the future, for the world. We’ve died on that principle, we live on that principle, and we are giving foreign aid on that principle. But it will be functional, it will be auditable, we will know where it’s going, and we will see results.

…

QUESTION: Thanks, Tammy. I just want to come back to USAID, given that the official closure of it happened this week.

MS BRUCE: Sure.

QUESTION: Will State – will the administration be releasing a breakdown of how much it has cost to shut down USAID for the taxpayer to be able to see that? For example, how much does it cost to bring some 2,000 USAID officers back from the field to the U.S., including their family members? How much does it cost to pay – to do payment settlements for contracts and grants? How much does it cost to sever local staff?

MS BRUCE: I love that there’s no questions about how much things cost.

QUESTION: No, but I mean –

MS BRUCE: We are not used to those kinds of questions. I would – while I am not – I don’t direct the nature of the choices that are made about what’s conveyed, but I think that what obviously has underlied all of this, and what we know when it comes to the saving of money, is that we are saving Americans a lot of money. And I know it’s going to be in the interest, as I will argue, to share with the American people, and we tend to share how much money we are saving them.

Now, in the midst of us doing our work, there’s also expenditures. There always is. So it costs money to run this building, as we are also saving money in other ways with things that were wasteful programs. So we will – certainly the American people will see the results of – the fruitfulness of this work.

QUESTION: Will that part be public or not?

MS BRUCE: Well, I think certainly, as they’ve been public in the past – certainly the Trump Administration is public about money that’s already been saved through a variety of work, including DOGE’s work – I don’t know how that will look, and I’m not going to get ahead of that. But I would think that yes, obviously, going to be proud of the nature of the money that is saved and in order to make sure the American people know what that effort has gotten to us.

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