After a marathon markup where lawmakers clocked nearly 26 hours of debate, the House Foreign Affairs Committee endorsed a series of bills that would overhaul and reauthorize the structure of the State Department in its first top-to-bottom reauthorization in more than two decades.
Chair Brian Mast, R-Fla., took a piecemeal approach to the reauthorization, spreading the work across nine bills. That gave members a chance to vote against any they found politically difficult, but in the end they all advanced.
Lawmakers worked their way through at least 225 amendments, the overwhelming majority from Democrats who opposed GOP efforts to codify the Trump administration’s unilateral shuttering of the U.S. Agency for International Development and Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s sweeping reorganization of the State Department. In the summer, Rubio spearheaded an effort to consolidate and eliminate numerous Foggy Bottom offices, including ones focused on refugees, human rights and regional multilateral diplomacy.
A GOP committee aide characterized the overnight markup as a productive session that met with Mast’s goals of advancing a comprehensive package.
“One of the key takeaways I had was absolutely everybody hanging through the night, it just shows that everybody actually on the committee is full-bore committed to putting their stamp on the State Department and that is exactly what the chairman set out to do at the beginning of this,” said the Republican aide who was not authorized to speak publicly.
Democrats panned the markup as a performative exercise rather than a substantive legislative effort, despite the length of the markup and the quantity of proposals.
“I think what the majority has produced is a rushed product that codifies many of this administration’s reckless efforts to hollow out the department and dismantle USAID,” said the panel’s top Democrat, Gregory W. Meeks of New York.
Still, three department reauthorization measures were approved unanimously, boosting their chances of becoming law should they make it to the Senate. Those bills covered reauthorizing and modernizing the State Department’s public diplomacy operations, its political affairs structure, and its management structure.
In the Senate, leaders of the Foreign Relations Committee are focused on attaching a much slimmer bipartisan package of State Department provisions to the annual defense authorization bill, a strategy that has been employed for a number of years with success.
A catch-all foreign policy bill of disparate measures spread across sections dealing with economic affairs, foreign assistance, international security and public diplomacy was approved by the House committee Thursday evening in a 27-24 vote.
Lawmakers spent all night Wednesday debating the bill, which is close to 250 pages, finally wrapping up debate at 10:30 a.m. the next day. Some 200 amendments to the bill were considered.
“Measures that could have been considered on their own merits as stand-alones just got bundled together on this mega-bill that mixed in a lot of hyper-partisan things but then had some Democratic measures,” said a Democratic committee aide who wasn’t authorized to speak publicly.
The aide was pessimistic about the legislation’s chances of passing the House due its sheer scope. Its provisions include language relating to Georgian sovereignty, support for Nicaraguan human rights, updates to the 2019 Global Fragility Act and an extension of the U.S. military weapons stockpile in Israel.
“You’re mixing apples and oranges together and wanting everyone to swallow it,” the Democratic staffer said. “That’s just dumping everything that you didn’t want to deal with into a big bill that was destined to fail.”
At times, Republicans seemed surprised and dismayed that Democrats were intent on offering so many amendments, but overall the tenor of the markup remained polite with a few exceptions. Lawmakers squabbled over the health care implications for Americans of the GOP’s signature domestic policy and tax cuts bill as well as the use of gender pronouns on professional identity documents in the department.
“It was still pretty good spirited, I think it was very cordial. I think everybody would have to say that objectively,” the Republican committee staffer said. “The Democrats can say they weren’t involved, but they came to play ball and the chairman facilitated that, all night. So it was a really good process.”
One provision that drew significant concern from Democrats and outside civil liberties groups was language in the broad foreign policy bill that would have given Rubio wide-reaching authority to seize the passports of U.S. citizens whom he deemed to have provided material support to terrorism through their speech and actions.
However, a manager’s amendment offered by Mast to strike the provision was adopted, 28-23. Before it was stripped from the bill, Texas Democrat Joaquin Castro called the provision a dangerous attack on fundamental First Amendment rights.
“Freedom of speech and freedom of conscience are among the most fundamental civil liberties our constitution protects,” Castro said.
While Republicans beat back most Democratic proposals during the markup, some less contentious ones were adopted by voice vote, including a large en bloc package of amendments that included language aimed at supporting Ukraine’s F-16 fighter program, reaffirming U.S. policy to facilitate routine transit through the United States by Taiwanese officials, and requiring a new National Diplomatic and Development Strategy.
The committee also approved, 28-23, legislation that would reauthorize the U.S. Development Finance Corporation in a manner that aligns with a White House proposal that would allow for U.S. taxpayer-financed loans to go to infrastructure projects in wealthier countries.
And the panel backed legislation, 28-23, that would establish new foreign assistance roles at the State Department following the elimination of USAID.
Democrats at the markup objected to nearly all elements of the Republican push to codify Rubio’s massive reorganization of the State Department and the Trump administration’s dismantlement of USAID.
“To codify the dismantling of USAID now with this legislation would be an insult” to the thousands of laid-off USAID staff, contractors and foreign service nationals who worked for the agency around the world, Meeks said.
When Mast won the committee gavel in late 2024, he pledged to conduct the first comprehensive stand-alone State Department reauthorization since 2002. Pursuing that goal has been the focus of Mast’s work this year, to the consternation of Democrats such as Meeks, who previously chaired the committee and saw to the 2021 enactment of a slimmed-down State Department reauthorization.
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