Senator Chris Coons said Friday that if President Donald Trump “wants to find the leading cause of government waste, he can just look in the mirror,” citing a new report from Senate Foreign Relations Committee Democrats that he said leaves taxpayers with “a bill of up to $19 billion to tear down America’s foreign policy apparatus while he and his rich friends line their pockets with cash.”
Coons, a Delaware Democrat, attributed the finding to “the Foreign Relations committee.” The report was produced by the committee’s Democratic minority staff, not by the full Republican-led committee. His post shared a summary of Washington Post coverage stating that the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle U.S. government agencies and fire federal workers “could cost taxpayers more than $19 billion, Senate Democrats argue in a new report.”
The underlying document is “Whose Interests? The Costs and Conflicts of Trump’s Foreign Policy,” released Oct. 29 by Ranking Member Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire and Democratic members of the committee. Shaheen’s office said the report was commissioned by her and produced by minority staff after a months-long examination of costs, funding diversions and conflicts of interest tied to the administration’s foreign policy.
“President Trump promised to root out waste, fraud and abuse. Instead, his Administration has become a leading source of government waste while his family profits from business dealings with foreign governments,” Shaheen said in the release, an argument Coons echoed a day later.
On USAID closeout costs, the release says the administration “has admitted that it may need as much as $19.2 billion to complete the process of terminating foreign assistance awards” previously handled by the U.S. Agency for International Development, which Democrats say was dismantled without congressional authorization. The release states that figure “does not include additional costs such as litigation costs or interest payments,” argues that shuttering the agency “could be nearly ten times what it cost to operate it,” and says that in 2025 alone the administration paid $8.9 million in interest penalties for delayed payments to vendors.
Shaheen also said taxpayers are “being left with a bill of as much as $22 billion while the President’s family and associates pursue lucrative business deals abroad.” That is a wider total than the $19.2 billion closeout estimate that Coons and the Post summary cited.
Other figures named in the release include an estimated $22 million in mpox vaccines, $39 million in food commodities and nearly $10 million in family planning commodities that officials tried to destroy before public reporting halted destruction; more than $250 million for months of paid leave and other termination costs; and more than $70 million in USAID and U.S. Agency for Global Media assets, including transmitters, vehicles and generators, “hastily disposed of and in some cases abandoned.”
The release also says the administration sought to redirect $1.25 billion in humanitarian and peacekeeping assistance toward a Board of Peace that designates Trump chairman for life; to shift or withhold nearly $400 million Congress designated for Ukraine and Europe; and to transfer close to $1 billion in refugee assistance funding to the Department of Homeland Security for deportation initiatives. On conflicts of interest, it states that in 2025 the president and his family made approximately $260 million from the sale of a stake in World Liberty Financial and at least $117 million in total foreign revenue, including from overseas real estate licensing and development agreements.
On oversight, the release says the president “has fired and threatened dozens of inspectors general,” that administration officials “stonewalled congressional oversight requests and refused to cooperate with GAO investigations and audits,” and that rules were changed to raise the independent-audit threshold for foreign-assistance contract terminations “from $2.5 million to $50 million.”
Coons’s “look in the mirror” line and his description of a committee finding are his own framing of a report written by the panel’s Democratic staff. The $19.2 billion figure is the administration’s own estimate of what closing out USAID awards may cost, as cited by Democrats, while Shaheen’s “as much as $22 billion” and the commodity, payroll and asset totals are the report’s broader tallies as published by her office on Oct. 29.