afghanistan. there is a huge difference between 6,015,000. what happened to these other americans. the situation with the special immigrant visa is even more disturbing. not counting the sivs that arrived before kabul s fall, you evacuated 705 of roughly 20,000 principle siv applicants. what happened to these people? this committee reached out to the department in april, may and june to help expedite siv processing. we asked that additional what additional authorities or resources you needed for months we received contradictory responses or no response at all. i ll take a minute to defend the state department. one of the problem was providing the records needed to validate the afghans who bravely helped our forces. the fact that d.o.d. didn t keep accurate records is irresponsible and a slap in the face to those who fought
saying they are trying to get more than just what berasso said was excused from the secretary of state yesterday. we re also learning that the committee wanted to hear from the defense secretary today. but that they were rebuffed and he will not attend this hearing today andin steted they were trg to determine what has happening on ground and the state department and instead they ll zwruf just hear from the secretary of state. that frustrating some going into the meeting. and one of the things that the democrats are very careful of. even though they have tough questions, they want to make it clear this wasn t just the biden administration handling afghanistan. this is 20 years of a conflict in this country and as one aide put it to me, they re not going to let the republicans put this entire conflict at the feet of the biden administration. erica and jim. lauren fox, thank you. we re seeing secretary blinken
intended to restart foreign assistance is deeply, deeply concerning. i suspect there are other members of committee that are going to speak to to that. that is going to be a heavy lift for you. on the the security front, the united states spent over $80 billion on afghan security forces. many of the funds bypass the state department and this committee. we see a consequences of security cooperation on its own. the taliban is now one of the best armed terrorist organizations on the planet. we have sent repeated requests for plans to address the captured equipment and we have yet to receive any response. and as secretary a think you should demand that all d.o.d. programs require state department concurrence. in closing i would like to speak directly to our diplomats, our men and women in uniform, our gold star families, our humanitarian workers and our veterans. on behalf of the american
member frustration came on top of years of stonewalling by the trump administration and its refusal engage the senate on the taliban negotiations. this is one of the examples why i ve been trying to pursue on case act to understand what are the written agreements that come between an administration and others. maybe if we have seen all of the elements of it, we would have been in a better position. second, i m very disappointed that secretary austin declined our request to testify today. a full accounting of the u.s. response to this crisis is not complete without the pentagon. especially when it comes to understanding the complete collapse of the u.s. trained and funded afghan military. his decision not to appear before the committee will affect my personal judgment on department of defense nominees. i expect the secretary will avail himself to the committee in the near future and if he does not, i may consider use of committee subpoena power to
nine months going back to march of 2020. the program was basically in a stall. within two weeks of taking office, we restarted the siv process in kabul. on february 4th, one of the first executive orders issued by president biden directed us to immediately review the siv program to identify causes of undue delay and find ways to process siv applications more quickly. this spring i directed significant addition at resources to the program. expanding the people in washington processing applications from 10 to 50, doubling the number of adjudicators in kabul in our embassy there. even as many embassy personnel began to return under ordered departure, we sent more officers to kabul to process siv applications. as a result of these and other steps, including working with congress, especially this committee, senator shaheen and