The Subcommittee on Oversight, part of the Committee on the Judiciary, held a hearing on the misuse of federal tax dollars in the United States House of Representatives on Wednesday, 16 July. During the questioning of Mike Gonzalez, Senior Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, the country of Hungary was brought up.
Congressman Brandon Gill of Texas asked: ‘Why do you think the Biden administration was so interested in using our tax dollars to funnel monetary support for domestic political opposition in an allied nation in order to harm a democratically elected government?’
With this question, the Congressman was referring to Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary and his right-wing populist Fidesz party, in power in the country since 2010, as indicated by the caption on his X post where he shared a clip of the recent congressional hearing.
In response to the question by Congressman Gill, Gonzalez said: ‘For the same reason it [was] in Guatemala and Macedonia with equally pro-US leaders. It just didn’t like conservative governments that were trying to do things like fighting for life, fighting for demographic growth. All these countries disagreed with their foreign policy, all these leaders were also very pro-Israel, pro-Taiwan, in the case of Guatemala.
So, I think it was just that the Biden administration disagreed with the politics of these countries, even though it went against US interests to disagree with these governments.’
This interesting exchange in the US Congress has drawn quite a lot of attention on the social media site X. It has received 8,000 likes, 2,000 reposts, and around 300 comments in the few hours since it was posted by Congressman Gill.
In his second term, President Donald Trump, in an effort spearheaded by Elon Musk’s DOGE, aggressively went after USAID, a federal agency dedicated to providing foreign aid to other countries, deeming almost all of their spending wasteful. Now, after a lengthy battle in the US court system, USAID has officially ceased its operations. Additionally, Republicans in the Senate are now advancing a rescission bill that would do away with $8.3 billion in previously approved foreign aid, along with $1.1 billion of federal funding to the public broadcasting stations NPR and PBS.
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