The Trump administration’s vision for the future of Venezuela is coming into view: lean on what remains of the Maduro regime to end drug trafficking and open up the country’s oil industry to American companies — and eventually hold an election.
Each step of that plan is raising enormous questions, with Democrats arguing the administration has not provided clarity on its goals or strategy, while Republicans have largely expressed confidence in the administration — despite open questions about its endgame for the Latin American country.
“We need answers as to how long this is going to last. We need answers to how many troops, how much money, are there guardrails?” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said after the briefing, noting that the Trump administration is, for now, leaning on Venezuelan officials in place after Maduro’s ouster who do not align with U.S. interests.
Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.), a staunch Trump ally who sits on the Armed Services Committee, said it will take “some time” for elections to play out, noting that the “infrastructure has not been in place for 25 years, but that’s ultimately our goal.”
“There is a full plan, full effort, and if any Democrat comes to this mic and tells you anything different, obviously, I am not going to get into details, but they are absolutely lying about it.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio outlined the administration’s 3-phase plan on Wednesday during a classified briefing with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for all senators on Capitol Hill.
In phase one, Rubio said the administration is near inking a deal to take between 30 million and 50 million barrels of Venezuelan oil and sell it on the open market. The U.S. would control how the money is distributed “in a way that benefits the Venezuelan people,” according to Rubio.
The second phase would entail making sure that “American, Western and other companies have access to the Venezuelan market in a way that is fair,” Rubio told reporters after the classified session.
The third phase “will be one of transition” to a new government, he added.
For the time being, the Trump administration believes it can work with interim President Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s vice president, disappointing regime opponents who want America to back Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, whose party won last year’s election.
Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) fumed that the administration is not being transparent about its efforts in Venezuela and that the limited information is dispatched in a classified setting to lawmakers, where it is unlikely to be heard by the public.
“I don’t believe Secretary Rubio or Secretary Hegseth are being square with the American people,” the New Mexico senator told reporters after the briefing. “They want to hide in a box so they don’t have to take questions to the American people.”
However, Senate Republicans defended the president’s Venezuela agenda, while conceding that progress may take a while to surface. Trump ruled out elections taking place in Venezuela within the next 30 days during an interview with NBC News on Monday, saying, “we have to fix the country first.”
Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) said senators on both sides of the aisle wanted to hear more from the closed-door sessions.
“If there’s any frustration, well, there’s lots of them. But if any frustration that even Republicans have is that we didn’t have enough time to get into those further-down-the-road issues,” Cramer told reporters after the briefing. “We’re focusing a little more on the near and midterm, probably than the long term.”
Sen. Tim Sheehy (R-Mont.), a former Navy SEAL who also sits on the Armed Services Committee, said it’s “complicated” to run a country but suggested Trump’s plan to open the country could work with time.
“We have leverage in that we’ve put a stranglehold on the oil reserves, which is their lifeline,” Sheehy, a Trump ally, told reporters. “It was going to be transition period. We’re four days in. Just going to take time,”
The president indicated during the NBC interview that U.S. oil companies, which were pushed out of Venezuela’s oil sector during former President Hugo Chavez’s time in office two decades ago, would be reimbursed for investments to rebuild Venezuela’s energy infrastructure, either with direct government money or through oil revenues.
After Chavez nationalized the oil industry, companies like Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips reported losing billions and have gotten only a sliver of the funds back despite some wins in arbitration.
Rubio and Hegseth also briefed House lawmakers on Wednesday on the U.S. operation to capture Maduro and what lies ahead for the Trump administration in Venezuela.
Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), who has been critical of Trump’s handling of foreign policy, praised the mission to snag Maduro, known as Operation Absolute Resolve, which took months to plan and was rehearsed multiple times by military officials and the intelligence community.
Still, the ultimate success of the Jan. 3 operation will hinge on what happens next, he said.
“Are you going to leave an illegitimate vice president running the country? For how long are we going to get to rightfully elected people put in power? And I think that’s still to be determined,” Bacon told reporters.
Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.), who sits on the House Armed Services Committee, said he would support two steps regarding Venezuela — “get the hell out” and “put in place the people who won the election,” referring to the opposition led by Machado.
The State Department is making preparations to allow for a “reopening” of a U.S. Embassy in Caracas if Trump gives them the green light, a senior State Department official told The Hill on Tuesday.
Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) applauded the work of the military and the intelligence community in their effort to arrest Maduro but argued the administration has seemingly not thought out what comes next, which she called the most crucial portion of the effort.
“It’s incomprehensible to me that all that planning could go into this effort, and the most important part, which is ensuring that we don’t have a client state, that it’s not about oil and it is about a vibrant, prosperous nation being restored to democracy and freedom, the absence of a plan or even answers that provide some detail is shocking to me,” she told reporters.