Rep. Ilhan Omar says GOP “doesn’t have the numbers” to dismantle USAID through Congress

Washington — Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat, said Sunday that she doesn’t think Republicans have the support in Congress to approve the Trump administration’s gutting of federal agencies and programs, saying “that’s why they’re not bringing it through Congress.”

“Every single process that they are going through in implementing Trump’s agenda is, at the moment, illegal, and they know they don’t have the support for it in Congress,” Omar said on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan.” 

Recent actions that the Trump administration has argued are being put in place to make the government more efficient have prompted confusion through corners of the federal government and beyond, including actions with serious implications for the main U.S. agency handling foreign assistance. On Friday, a judge prevented the Trump administration from placing 2,200 employees of the U.S. Agency for International Development, known as USAID, on administrative leave, after a pause on all new U.S. foreign assistance programs funded by the State Department and USAID the week prior.

Omar, who was born in Somalia and has said she benefited from USAID programs while living in a refugee camp as a child, argued Sunday that USAID has support “not just with Democrats, but with Republicans.” And she noted that even with GOP control of both the House and Senate, “the votes are not there” for other recent developments, like granting Elon Musk’s team access to Treasury Department data or the possibility of dismantling the Department of Education.

With the dynamic, Omar characterized the current moment as a “constitutional crisis.”

“We are seeing an executive branch that has decided that they are no longer going to abide by the Constitution in honoring Congress’s role in the creation of the agencies, in their role in deciding where money is allocated,” Omar said.

Omar said that “the only recourse we have” is through the judiciary branch, noting that the bulk of the Trump administration’s controversial and sweeping moves to overhaul the federal bureaucracy so far have been temporarily halted by judges, including some who were Republican-appointed. She said the moves by judges “should give faith to the American people.”

“Our courts are working as they should,” Omar said. “The checks and balances are working. What is not working is the way that the executive is behaving and the congressional leadership that is failing the American people.”

On the issue of foreign aid more broadly, Omar acknowledged that it hasn’t always been popular among Americans, which she attributed to a messaging disconnect on where the aid is going and for what use. 

“A lot of people hear the millions, billions, and they don’t fully have a concept of what that actually means, the lives it touches, and how important it is — both the soft power that we have as a country, how it keeps us competitive around the world, how it buys us goodwill,” Omar said. 

Meanwhile, Rep. Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican who also appeared on “Face the Nation” on Sunday, argued that USAID “needs to be reviewed to get back to the core mission,” while stressing that “we need to have a strong presence in destabilized nations to keep out our adversaries.”

Trump ally Sen. Bill Hagerty was asked on “Face the Nation” about Congress’ views on dismantling and consolidating USAID. The Tennessee Republican argued that there’s a “tremendous appetite” to do so, saying “USAID has been out of control.”

“What we want to see is alignment of our programs with America’s national security interest,” he said. 

Hagerty also defended the Trump administration’s proposed buyouts for federal workers, a deadline for which a judge temporarily halted on Thursday, saying it’s “not unusual to take a hard look at these programs” and adding that he expects each agency to go through a “top to bottom review.”

“There’s been a lot of consternation and pearl clutching about the activities of Elon Musk and his team, but their charge, led by President Trump, is to go in and find efficiencies, find opportunities, and, frankly, deliver more of taxpayer dollars to the actual programs that are intended, less to overhead in administration,” Hagerty added.