U.S. Foreign Aid and Development

Secretary of State Marco Rubio used the U.S. response to October’s Category 5 Hurricane Melissa in Jamaica to argue that shuttering the U.S. Agency for International Development and folding its functions into the State Department has improved foreign assistance. Rubio said a regional disaster assistance response team and U.S.-based urban search-and-rescue teams were deployed, roughly $1 million in aid and prepositioned supplies from 12 regional warehouses were used, and 5,000 family food packs were delivered via the U.N. World Food Program, claiming this proves critics who warned the USAID closure would cause catastrophe were wrong.