What did it take to get $95B bill through a divided US Congress?

Liz Schrayer remembers members of the U.S. Congress bragging that they didn’t own a passport. She said it was in the mid-90s when she created the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition — a network of over 500 businesses, nonprofits, and others focused on strengthening U.S. development and diplomacy. At that point, once the Cold War ended, much of America had begun to turn inward. “A lot of our fellow citizens said: ‘We won! We don’t need these tools of the State Department and Peace Corps and USAID,’” Schrayer said. “This is going to sound familiar — but there were attempts to cut all the tools of development and diplomacy.” Two decades later, Schrayer spoke to Devex President and Editor-in-Chief Raj Kumar, about how today feels both similar and different to that period — especially after the passage of a $95 billion national security supplemental bill, and the bitter, partisan fight it took to get there. “The narrative was, clearly, why am I giving over there when I have needs here?” Schrayer said. It was like the 90s, she added — but “on steroids.” There were 488 days between one Ukraine supplemental passing to the next, Schrayer said — “a long time in a war that we support.” But after months of partisan divides, the bill passed by 79 to 18 in the Senate. That included passing $9 billion in humanitarian aid, which the U.S. Agency for International Development and the State Department are now using to respond to crises across the world. So — how did the bill pass? Schrayer pointed to three main aspects of USGLC’s advocacy work that she felt were the most important: the message, the messenger, and local platforms. The first of those pieces was drilling down into what was at stake if the supplemental, which was centered on providing military and economic support to Ukraine, were to fail. Instead of just focusing on Russian President Vladimir Putin, USGLC’s lobbying wrapped in other adversaries of the U.S., including China, Iran, and North Korea. “We really had to talk about this new moment,” Schrayer said. The second was the messengers, from mayors to military leaders to businesspeople and, of course, members of Congress. In particular, she highlighted the conservatives such as Mark Green, the former administrator of USAID, who spoke up despite a rising tide against Ukraine support within their own party. “They really gave some focus to why this was important to our interests,” Schrayer said. “A lot of conservatives were giving cover and reason to these policymakers.” “The biggest challenge I see is that those who were against the Ukraine aid were getting help from our adversaries.” --— Liz Schrayer, president and CEO, U.S. Global Leadership Coalition Even more importantly, she added, was bringing things down to the “kitchen table.” There was a reason our gas prices went up in the summer of 2022, Schrayer explained. “Remember where the bread basket and the fertilizer basket of the world is. It is right in Ukraine and Russia,” she said. “And that is a very powerful argument.” Schrayer and her team hit the road. From Arkansas to South Dakota, she saw members of Congress sitting with their constituents to talk about the bill, and its importance for national security. Despite that, Schrayer said, they were far from alone: Russia was doing its own advocacy work too. “You asked me: what are we really up against now?” Schrayer said. “The biggest challenge I see is that those who were against the Ukraine aid were getting help from our adversaries.” “We didn’t have Twitter [in the 90s] to amplify certain voices, and we didn’t have our adversaries and competitors out there stirring the chaos and disruption in the world who are playing to win,” she added. “We can talk about the national security supplemental as an example of how there were wins against us in a very serious way.” Schrayer spoke about a conversation she had with Senator Brian Schatz, a Democrat from Hawaii, where he told Schrayer that Russian bots were spreading disinformation in the wake of the Maui fires — a series of disasters that hit the Hawaii island last August — and telling Facebook users that policymakers were sending aid to Ukraine instead of the island state. “We all know the stories about how China and Russia are playing to win around election interference, but it’s more and more happening with foreign policy interference,” she added.