[Congressional Record Volume 163, Number 46 (Thursday, March 16, 2017)]
[House]
[Pages H2139-H2143]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
BILLIONAIRE'S BUDGET
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Budd). Under the Speaker's announced
policy of January 3, 2017, the gentlewoman from Washington (Ms.
Jayapal) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority
leader.
General Leave
Ms. JAYAPAL. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members
have 5 legislative days to revise and extend their remarks and include
extraneous material on the subject of my Special Order.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Is there objection to the request of the
gentlewoman from Washington?
There was no objection.
Ms. JAYAPAL. Mr. Speaker, this evening I rise to speak on behalf of
the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and I believe some of my
colleagues will be joining me, to talk about the budget that has just
been released by this President.
I would like to say, Mr. Speaker, that while it is being called a
skinny budget, we call it the billionaire's budget. It is the same
misguided, rambling, unfocused, bloated giveaway to rich and corporate
interests that has been offered for years.
My belief is that a budget is a statement of our values. This budget
ensures that the rich get richer at the cost of working people, the
environment, and the future of our country.
Funding has been axed for nearly 20 agencies, from the Corporation
for Public Broadcasting to the National Endowment for the Arts and the
National Endowment for the Humanities. In addition to elimination of
these important agencies, the billionaire's budget guts funding for
several other important agencies.
You can see here by this chart from The Washington Post exactly what
is happening: the Environmental Protection Agency chopped by 31
percent; the State Department cut by 29 percent; Agriculture cut by 21
percent, the Labor Department by 21 percent.
[[Page H2140]]
And the cuts go on through every single agency of critical importance
to the American people: Department of Health and Human Services,
Commerce, Education, Housing and Urban Development at a time when we
have a tremendous housing crisis in this country.
Transportation, from a President who said that he was going to invest
in our infrastructure, yet here you see that the Transportation budget
has a 13 percent cut.
Mr. Speaker, the reality is that the cost of security for the Trump
Tower is $183 million a year. The budget for the National Endowment for
the Arts is $148 million a year.
There are some other cuts that we could do if we were that concerned,
but let's talk about housing. Housing access and affordability is
squarely on the chopping block in this billionaire's budget.
With a $4.3 billion cut, HUD will lose its Community Development
Block Grant program. Now, some people don't know exactly what the
Community Development Block Grant program does; and, in fact, it
sounded like Director Mulvaney didn't know that either when he was
asked about a critical program that is funded through this Community
Development Block Grant program, and that is funding for Meals on
Wheels.
There are communities across this country that fund their Meals on
Wheels program, which is funding for meals for the elderly who cannot
get to somewhere where they can get a meal, and so we take them a meal.
That is Meals on Wheels, an incredibly bipartisan, beloved program.
Unfortunately, that would go away because the CDBG program would be
cut; and, therefore, the Meals on Wheels program would be cut.
These programs are an integral part of building up our communities,
both through affordable housing as well as through some of these
critical programs that go as wraparound services to affordable housing.
The city of Seattle, which I represent, is currently in a state of
emergency due to its housing crisis. Right now, there are around 3,000
people experiencing homelessness in the city and nearly 10,000 in the
surrounding areas--veterans, families, LGBTQ youth.
This is unacceptable. Access to stable housing is absolutely critical
to making sure that members of our community are safe and able to
access the services they need to get back on track and live full lives.
Let's talk about Health and Human Services. The Department of Health
and Human Services is facing an 18 percent cut to its funding, which
could have devastating--and I am talking about life and death--
consequences here, absolutely devastating impacts.
It would decrease the funding for the National Institutes of Health,
for cancer and medical research, critical programs that help us to
figure out how we save lives in this country and actually are part of
the innovation that the United States offers. Gutting this funding
would put us at a grave disadvantage, and it would put people's lives
at risk.
Transportation, another critical area that this President promised
that he was going to invest in. He was going to make sure we were
bringing forward jobs, that we were investing in our infrastructure,
our crumbling roads and bridges, making sure that we are investing in
critical transit and transportation projects. But in this budget, the
Transportation budget is facing a 13 percent cut. That is nearly half a
billion dollars from the TIGER grant program, which has allowed our
country to carry out critical infrastructure improvement projects not
just in one kind of a city, not just in urban areas, but urban and
rural areas alike.
The billionaire's budget would also cut funding to all new fully
funded grant agreements, including some really important projects in
cities across the country.
In Seattle, our critical streetcar project would be cut; and light
rail expansion, which we have been working on for years, the State has
invested in a bipartisan way--when I was in the State senate, we
actually passed a $15 billion transportation infrastructure package
because we knew that we had to deal with the transportation
infrastructure needs of business, of our communities across the State
and the influx of people into our State.
{time} 1845
We agreed in a bipartisan way that this was something we needed to
do. Part of that agreement included being able to fund the next phase
of light-rail across our region.
Our Sound Transit CEO, Peter Rogoff, calls this budget a ``body
blow.'' I couldn't agree with him more. We are looking at potentially a
$7.7 billion cut to Sound Transit.
These are major transportation projects for our cities. They would
create jobs, which is what this President said that he wanted to do, is
create jobs. But by gutting these funds and gutting investment in
transportation infrastructure, we will be stopping the very projects
that are going to create those jobs and help our cities and rural areas
make the necessary upgrades that they need to thrive.
Mr. Speaker, one of the worst areas that is hit in this budget is the
environment. This billionaire's budget is an all-out assault on our
environment and efforts to fund research and curb climate change.
President Trump has found ways to wreak havoc on our efforts to
protect our planet by, in this budget, cutting climate research and
protection funds to multiple departments. This isn't just the
Environmental Protection Agency, but we are talking also about NASA
space exploration and many other areas that ensure that we preserve
this planet for the next generation.
I have got a 20-year-old, Mr. Speaker, and when I was running for
Congress, he said to me: Mom, you have got to work on climate change.
It is one of the most important issues facing my generation. You are
the stewards of our lands. If you don't take care of this planet, then
we won't have anything left and my children won't have anything left.
This is my 20-year-old son telling me this. Mr. Speaker, I promised
him I would do everything I can for his generation and future
generations to protect our planet.
Unfortunately, one of the biggest cuts in this budget is to the
Environmental Protection Agency. This is a 32 percent cut to the
Environmental Protection Agency. This decimates all of our work on
climate change, all of the research that we need to do so we know how
to protect our climate, all of the work on environmental justice
programs, which is really essential when you think about who is taking
the burden of climate change. It is our low-income communities,
communities of color, and other vulnerable and marginalized
communities.
I have always believed that we should rename the EPA. Environmental
Protection Agency makes it sound like it is something off in the
distance, like it is about something out there. But, in fact, what the
Environmental Protection Agency does is monitor our water so that we
have clean water to drink and use. It monitors our air so that we have
clean air to breathe and we don't have asthma and other respiratory
diseases that come with air that is so polluted that we can't even
survive in it. It ensures that we are protecting human health.
We could rename the EPA the Agency for Clean Water, Clean Air, and
Human Health, and I think that that would cover a lot of what the EPA
does.
The EPA's cut is going to result in 3,200 lost jobs. That is 20
percent of the department. Research programs would be discontinued both
domestically and around the world, and programs like the Clean Power
Plan and numerous restoration projects, including a critical
restoration project in the Puget Sound, the Puget Sound Restoration,
would lose 93 percent of its funding. This is true of the Great Lakes
region. There are places in Republican and Democratic districts across
this country that are going to suffer and see environmental protection
being rapidly undone.
President Trump has made it painfully clear that he and his
administration are enemies not only of the environment, but of the
science that tells us that yes, we must address climate change because
it is real and it is manmade. Yet, we are fighting efforts to
consistently undermine the research and the science that shows us
exactly
[[Page H2141]]
where we are as a country and what we must do in order to protect our
environment.
Let me talk about education for a second. With the appointment of
Betsy DeVos to the Department of Education, President Trump has
signaled that his administration has every intention of doing whatever
they can to privatize our education system. The billionaire's budget
takes the first steps in that process.
It increases charter school funding by $168 million and it adds $250
million to create a new, private school choice program. It cuts $3.7
billion in grants that go toward after-school programs, aid programs,
and important teacher training.
This budget would decimate Head Start. Head Start is a program that
has been shown to be successful. When you invest early in kids'
education and you make sure that you give them that early support, it
definitely has an impact in diminishing and breaking that school-to-
prison pipeline.
These are investments that save us money in the long run. Not only
are they the most humane thing to do and the right thing to do, but
they are actually cost-effective programs that stop us from having to
spend millions of dollars down the line when people can't get a great
public education.
We should be investing in our public education program and making
sure that we are helping kids to go all the way from early learning to
higher education. That is the foundation of a great country, when we
are educating and investing in our students to have that kind of a
great education.
Mr. Speaker, I see that my colleague from the Progressive Caucus is
here. I yield to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Raskin), the
wonderful Representative from that State, because I know he has got
somewhere to go right after this. I invite him to come up here, and I
thank him for his leadership on all issues constitutional and
otherwise.
Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, we are so proud of the leadership
Congresswoman Jayapal is showing in both Washington State and
Washington, D.C., in resisting these terrible cuts to the domestic
budget of the people of the United States, in showing leadership, also
especially in defending American values when it comes to immigration
and affording a refuge to people fleeing political and religious
repression all over the world.
She is a true leader and we are very proud of her. I am grateful that
she is sharing a couple of minutes with me tonight to talk about the
astonishing news of the day, which is the most dramatic and draconian
budget cuts offered perhaps in our lifetime to the domestic budget of
the United States.
It is going to take us many days--many weeks, indeed--to fully
analyze what exactly will be axed with these budget proposals, but I
wanted to start with a little exchange that took place today with Mick
Mulvaney, who is leading the budget effort for the President.
He had a press conference and he was asked about the implications of
these billions of dollars of cuts to Meals on Wheels. He was asked
about one specific program, and he had no problem basically casting
Meals on Wheels to the curbside, saying: ``It's just not showing any
results.'' Which is why the Trump administration apparently feels good
about slashing the domestic budget, including the community development
block grants which help support Meals on Wheels across the country.
Well, let's just take this one tiny little example, then. Meals on
Wheels actually serves 2.4 million Americans between the ages of 60 and
100. These are people who, for reasons of illness or physical infirmity
or simply poverty, cannot go grocery shopping for themselves or prepare
meals for themselves.
Why don't we take a moment to praise the people at Meals on Wheels
who actually do something constructive and patriotic for their country.
They bring food to older people who might otherwise go without.
You might say: Well, that is just kind of mushy-headed and soft-
hearted. We are in the age of the budget ax. We need to destroy these
domestic programs that are a terrible burden on the taxpayers.
Check out a 2013 review of studies on the issue of home-delivered
meal programs like Meals on Wheels. The study says that these programs
``significantly improve diet quality, increase nutrient intake, and
reduce food insecurity and nutritional risk among participants. Other
beneficial outcomes include increased socialization opportunities,
improvement in dietary adherence, and higher quality of life.''
Well, maybe you don't care about any of those things. Maybe you just
consider about the bottom line.
Consider this finding. These programs are aligned with the Federal
cost-containment policy to rebalance long-term care away from nursing
homes to home and community-based services by helping older adults
maintain independence and remain in their homes and communities as
their health and functioning decline.
You see, for Mr. Mulvaney and President Trump and the Cabinet of
billionaires and CEOs and ethically challenged Russian-influenced
corporate titans, they don't care about how the program is actually
working right here in American communities.
They don't care about facts. We know they have contempt for facts,
which is why they give us their alternative facts. They don't care
about studies and books because we know the President is their leader
and he doesn't read books.
They definitely don't care about the elderly people who can't make it
to the grocery store or who can't afford nutritious meals on their own.
These are the same people, after all, that they propose to throw to the
curb on Medicaid, with their proposal released last week in the cloak
of darkness to repeal the Affordable Care Act and gut Medicaid and
replace it with a monstrosity of a program which even their own Members
can't support. Under their plan, 14 million would lose their healthcare
insurance. Millions of elderly people would lose their insurance.
Now, with this mean-spirited little proposal to take a relative crumb
away from the community development block grant and from Meals on
Wheels, they would deprive a lot of people even of a wholesome dinner
delivered to their home.
Why do they want to slash all of these programs across the board: the
EPA, the State Department, the Agriculture Department, the Labor
Department, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Commerce
Department, the Education Department, HUD, Transportation, Interior,
and so on? Why?
Well, the President has announced he wants to take $54 billion out of
that slice of the pie for nondefense discretionary spending, which
accounts for only 16 percent of the overall budget, and put that $54
billion directly into the Pentagon.
Just to repeat, they want to take $54 billion out of the domestic
budget, nondefense discretionary spending, and put it into the Pentagon
for a military buildup.
But for what?
The world's second largest military power is Russia. We outspend them
10 to 1. We are a giant and they are a dwarf.
Vladimir Putin, in any event, is Donald Trump's best friend, his BFF,
his bosom buddy. The Trump-Putin relationship may be the President's
most successful long-term relationship, at least politically speaking.
All that money that goes to the Pentagon, why? What is it for? Is it
possible that Mr. Bannon and Mr. Trump are thinking about a war drive?
The President has tweeted about World War III in a very cavalier and
flippant way.
It is disturbing. Nobody really knows. But one thing we do know is
that all of that money that goes over to the Pentagon, if history is
any record, will be available for the beltway bandits, the inside
players with political influence and the mega corporations to go and
make a buck off of the American taxpayer.
We will strip it from the EPA, and we will strip it from the
Department of State, and we will strip it from education and we will
put it in the Pentagon, and that is where we know a lot of people are
going to get rich.
{time} 1900
They are going from Meals on Wheels to deals on wheels. That is the
name of the game. No more Meals on Wheels. It is all about deals on
wheels. You have got to know the President, you have got to know the
inside players in the
[[Page H2142]]
billionaire Cabinet, and then you can make some money.
Who are they going to sacrifice for this operation announced this
week?
Well, it would take us all night to go through all of the domestic
programs and projects that the American people depend on that are going
to be sliced and diced because of this budget proposal, at least if it
goes through.
But let's start with the National Institutes of Health, the NIH. The
administration proposes to cut nearly $6 billion from the NIH--$5.8
billion they want to get rid of.
Now, what is the NIH, which happens to be in my congressional
district in Rockville--and I am so proud of that--where we have got
doctors and nurses and researchers and scientists who are working every
day as part of the institutional world leader in biomedical research?
This is an entity that supports hundreds of thousands of jobs. These
cuts would devastate the NIH and their ability to research lifesaving
cures and treatments for diseases.
What kinds of diseases are being treated there?
I am not going to be able to go through all of them because there are
hundreds of them that are being researched, where treatments are being
developed, where patients are being seen, where progress is being made.
Acute respiratory distress syndrome, Agent Orange and dioxin, aging,
alcoholism, Alzheimer's disease, ALS, anorexia, anthrax, antimicrobial
resistance, anxiety disorders, aphasia, arthritis, assistive
technology, asthma, attention deficit disorder, autism, autoimmune
disease. That is just the A's.
Let's keep going a little bit. Batten disease, biodefense,
bioengineering, biotechnology, bipolar disorder, brain cancer, brain
disorders, breast cancer, cancer, cannabinoid research, cardiovascular,
cerebral palsy, cervical cancer, child abuse and neglect research,
Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, childhood leukemia, chronic fatigue
syndrome, chronic liver disease and cirrhosis, chronic obstructive
pulmonary disease, climate change, climate-related exposures and
conditions, colorectal cancer, and on and on. That is just the A's, the
B's, and the C's.
They want to cut $6 billion from the NIH, which is working to cure,
address, study, and manage the diseases and the sicknesses that our
people are dealing with; and just cavalierly they say they want to
slash it so they can pour all of this money over to the military side
for a reason unknown.
When they came down with their executive orders, which have now been
struck down by multiple Federal District Courts as unconstitutional, as
a violation of the Establishment Clause, as a violation likely of due
process and equal protection and so on, what they cited was 9/11
multiple times. They cited 9/11. The odd thing, though, was that the
three source countries for the 9/11 hijackers--Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and
the United Arab Emirates--were left off their executive orders, even
right up until today.
Why?
Some people say it is because Donald Trump has extensive business
dealings with corporations and governments in those three countries.
Nobody really knows. But they developed those orders, which the GOP
proudly once called the Muslim ban, in response allegedly to 9/11. Even
if you could blame an entire people for the acts of individual
terrorists, they didn't do it. They turned to some other countries
because that didn't interfere with the President's business interests.
So we have got this huge military buildup and we have got the
siphoning away of tens of billions of dollars of the American people's
hard-earned money away from medical research and diseases and
environmental protection all into the Pentagon. For what reason, nobody
knows, and they haven't told us.
What a dangerous moment this is in the life of the American Republic.
What a perilous time this is for a nation built on the principle that
that great Republican President Abraham Lincoln called government of
the people, by the people, and for the people.
Their budget proposal is a job killer. It is going to kill hundreds
of thousands of jobs. It devastates and ruins the search for cures, the
progress we are making in diseases like cystic fibrosis and diabetes.
Diseases that afflict hundreds of thousands, millions of our people,
they are just going to pull the plug on that. They are ransacking our
children's education. They are hollowing out the rural communities.
They are making urban life far more dangerous. They are weakening our
leadership overseas. And, of course, because they don't believe in
climate change, they are undermining our ability to respond to the
great peril that faces us as a people.
Just like the proposal to trash the Affordable Care Act cannot go
through this body because there must be a majority of responsible
Members of this body who will not accept that terrible proposal that
will throw 24 million of our people off their insurance, this body also
cannot accept this terrible budget. It must have arrived here DOA.
If a foreign government, a rival to America, an enemy of America, had
come up with this budget, we would regard it as an act of aggression
against the American people. You could view it as a declaration of war
against the prosperity, the health, and the welfare of our own people.
But, alas, it didn't come from abroad. At least it was addressed that
it came from the White House. It appears to have come from the
administration, yet it threatens our way of life.
I would urge all of my colleagues to very carefully study this budget
proposal over the next week or two and make clear that these are not
the priorities of the American people, make clear that these are not
the values of the American people, and this is not the future of the
American people. We must continue to make progress. That means we must
reject the Trump budget.
Ms. JAYAPAL. Mr. Speaker, I thank Representative Raskin for his
consistent brilliance and leadership. I so appreciate it. It has been a
tremendous honor to serve with him here.
I want to talk about another area that we haven't covered yet, which
is the State and development programs budget. This is essentially our
efforts around diplomacy and development around the world. This would
be incredibly hard hit. The prime target is the United Nations. Climate
change initiatives at the United Nations would lose all of their
funding. The government would cut back its regular contribution to the
U.N. and pay no more than 25 percent of the cost of U.N. peacekeeping
operations. The budget would hit all of the multilateral development
banks, like the World Bank, which would be trimmed by $650 million over
3 years, and cultural programs like the East-West Center in Honolulu.
Today a number of Republican colleagues talked about how misguided
this cut was, and it made me very hopeful, to be honest.
Representatives Hal Rogers and Ted Yoho both agree that this cut is
absolutely misguided.
Several retired three- and four-star generals wrote a letter to
Congress expressing their deep concern over these serious budget cuts
that are being made to the State Department because they know that
diplomacy goes hand in hand with any kind of defense that has to be put
out there. You have got to have the two together. Here is what they
said: ``The State Department, USAID, Millennium Challenge Corporation,
Peace Corps and other development agencies are critical to preventing
conflict and reducing the need to put our men and women in uniform in
harm's way.''
In 2013, General Mattis himself said that if more funding for
development wasn't provided, he would have to buy more bullets.
Development programs are inextricably linked with our national
security, and this President should not be cutting these funds if he
wants to bolster national security. If he wants to bolster national
security, then we should be investing more of our dollars into
diplomacy and development as two of the other legs of a three-legged
stool. Unfortunately, he is going in the opposite direction.
Our aid and development efforts have to be well-rounded and holistic.
I know this because I have worked in international development before
all over the world. I have worked along the borders of Laos and
Cambodia, in Thailand. I have worked across south Asia. I have worked
in Latin America. I know and I understand that our relationships and
our ability to build
[[Page H2143]]
strong multilateral coalitions and to invest in the stability of
countries as war is happening there is absolutely essential to
preserving peace.
The generals wrote: ``We know from our service in uniform that many
of the crises our nation faces do not have military solutions alone--
from confronting violent extremist groups like ISIS in the Middle East
and north Africa to preventing pandemics like Ebola. . . .''
This 29 percent cut is absolutely unacceptable and will not keep us
safe.
The billionaire's budget doesn't just cut funding for these programs,
though. It also increases spending, and not for the benefit of our
communities. This administration is calling for $3 billion to detain
more immigrants, deport more people, and build a bigger border wall.
The staggering increase to detain an unprecedented 45,700 men and women
is unacceptable.
Mr. Speaker, 167 men and women have died in detention since October
2003. The organization that I used to work at put out a human rights
abuses report about the detention center controlled by the GEO
corporation, private detention center way back in 2005 or 2006. We
looked at all of the human rights abuses that were happening not only
in that detention center, but we did research on what was happening
around the country.
Among the 35 death reviews in this recent report that came out that
have been released through Freedom of Information Act requests,
substandard medical care contributed to at least 15 deaths. And even
when government investigations concluded that a facility violated
government detention standards, the government fails to hold these
private facilities accountable and make sure that changes are made to
address deficiencies that lead to the loss of human life.
Instead of spending $3 billion on immigration enforcement and
detention, here is what we could do with that money: We could create
45,000 new middle class jobs. We could build 184 new elementary
schools. We could hire about 55,000 new kindergarten and elementary
schoolteachers. We could provide close to 337,000 Head Start slots for
young kids. We could pay for nearly 311,000 people to attend a 4-year
college per year. We could help States protect and save up to 12,000
at-risk wildlife and plant species in the United States every year for
the next 2.3 years. By the way, we could also provide nearly 2.1
million households with solar energy. We could weatherize over 460,000
homes nationwide, saving the average household about $283 a year. And
we could provide 10 million lifesaving HIV/AIDS treatments.
Mr. Speaker, this budget is about profit over safety, privatization
over public good. It is about war over peace and diplomacy. And it is
about incarceration over rehabilitation. It is fundamentally about
billionaires and lobbyists over the American people.
Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
____________________