You Must Feel Like Such An Idiot Josh Hawley Rages Against Fraud In Spending Of Taxpayer Dollars

A call to order this third hearing of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Disaster Management, which I am delighted to work on with my colleague Ranking Member Kim. I want to thank you, say thank you to all of our witnesses for being here as well as everybody who is in the room and joining us online. The title of today's hearing is Examining Fraud and Foreign Influence in State and Federal Programs. And today's hearing is going to examine two pillars that are truly fundamental to our republic and to the confidence of the American people in our republic, and that is the integrity of our public funds and the integrity of our political system. Let me just start with the second one. As early as the Constitutional Convention, Alexander Hamilton warned that foreign powers would try to exploit America's freedoms to sow divisions inside our country. Threats from foreign influence, he said, should never be dismissed as idle or as hypothetical. And today we are confronting a raft of allegations and reports that foreign influence and foreign money is making its way into the American political system and is financing activities that is not only destructive, detrimental and divisive, but also potentially illegal. At the same time, more and more Americans are rightly concerned about the use of their tax dollars and where their tax money is being spent around the country. You know, I've often thought, watching and reading reports here in recent months, that if you are a hardworking American taxpayer, if you're somebody who wakes up every morning, goes to your job, plays by the rules, pays your taxes, you must feel like such an idiot. I mean, you must feel so taken advantage of. Because here we have reports, credible reports, and we're going to hear more about it today with some substantiation of billions of dollars of taxpayer money, your money, your tax funds being taken and spent on illicit activities, on foreign overseas activities, on other illegal and criminal activities. It's absolutely outrageous. And it's time that we got accountability for how Americans' hard-earned tax dollars are being spent and how the integrity of our political system is being protected. We're going to hear testimony that tens of billions of dollars intended to serve the public have been lost to fraud. In the state of Minnesota alone, organized criminal syndicates stole COVID-era disaster money to the tune of billions of dollars. And since then, they have defrauded money from every single federally funded program in the state of Minnesota. Let me say that again. Every single federally funded program in the state of Minnesota. Programs intended for children, for the elderly, for the poor, for the sick, for the most vulnerable Americans. We're going to hear testimony that $9 billion has been defrauded in Minnesota from Medicaid alone, $9 billion, vanishing into luxury cars, overseas vacations, billions going to fund foreign adversaries, billions shipped out of the country. In the last two years alone, get this now, nearly $700 million in cold, hard cash was stuffed into suitcases and flown out of Minneapolis, $700 million. That is 14,000 pounds of $100 bills in suitcases flown out of our country overseas. We're going to hear testimony that American taxpayers nationwide are losing north of a trillion dollars a year in government programs. That's the Pentagon's entire budget, a trillion dollars a year. This isn't isolated crooks gaming the system. I wish it were. It's transnational criminal syndicates siphoning money out of America. 70% of that loot flows overseas, funding cartels, terrorists, adversaries like North Korea, China, Iran, Russia. Money meant for American grandparents, working families, the elderly, the sick, is instead funding organized crime, arming our enemies, and subsidizing the trafficking of children. And the threats don't end there. In recent weeks, we have seen anti-ICE protests escalate into outright lawlessness. What we're going to hear testimony about today is these were not spontaneous protests in many cases. It's manufactured chaos. And who is behind it? Dark money networks and foreign actors, some of whom have ties to the Chinese Communist Party. We're going to hear testimony that these activities are funded and coordinated by a dense network of nonprofits and foreign-linked actors who use layer upon layer of pass-through entities to hide the money trail. A classic dark money, money laundering, to take foreign money and foreign influence and to dump it into our political system. It's sort of like Riot Incorporated, pre-planned tactics designed not to protest, but to destabilize, to erode faith in our institutions, and to force political change through manufactured crises. Listen, at the end of the day, this hearing is about a simple question. Is our government equipped to safeguard taxpayer dollars, protect the rule of law, and defend our institutions from exploitation? Because right now, it sure doesn't look like it. And it's time we got some answers for the American people.