Rubio on foreign aid: "This is not charity, but a tool of national interests"

US foreign aid should promote the country's national interests, not be a form of charity. This was stated  by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio at a joint press conference with Costa Rican President Rodrigo Chavez Robles, UNN reports.

I want to repeat what I have already said: I have long supported foreign aid. I continue to support foreign aid. But foreign aid is not charity. It exists to advance the national interests of the United States. Every dollar that we spend as long as I'm Secretary of State-and as long as President Trump is in the White House-will be a dollar that advances our national interest,

The Secretary of State also explained that the decision to freeze aid for 90 days allows the administration to review programs and their effectiveness. According to him, before the freeze, USAID refused to provide information on the use of funds, including who receives the money and how many contractors it goes through.

Before we did the freeze, we couldn't find out anything about some of these programs, and USAID, in particular, refused to tell us anything. We won't tell you where the money goes, what it's for, who has it, what contractor it was - in some cases, it goes through four different contractors before it reaches the intended recipient. These are not my numbers. These are USAID's numbers,

He also noted that in some cases, with USAID, 10, 12, 13 percent, perhaps less money actually reached the recipient, and the rest went to overhead and bureaucracy.

This is not my money. It is taxpayers' money. So we are not going to refuse foreign aid. We will have foreign aid that makes sense. We will have foreign aid that works. We will have foreign aid that promotes national interests. We will have foreign aid that benefits our reliable partners and our allies,

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