[Congressional Record Volume 164, Number 2 (Thursday, January 4, 2018)]
[Senate]
[Pages S33-S35]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                         Funding the Government

  Mr. SANDERS. Madam President, despite Donald Trump's assertion last 
May that ``our country needs a good shutdown,'' the truth is, shutting 
down the government is a serious and dangerous action that we must do 
everything possible to prevent.
  Shutting down the government would impact tens of millions of our 
fellow Americans who would be unable to access government services. It 
would severely impact Federal employees who would not get the paychecks 
they expected. It would also have a very significant impact on our 
Armed Forces. In other words, we must do everything we can to prevent a 
government shutdown, which is exactly what will happen if a budget 
agreement is not reached by January 19, when the short-term continuing 
resolution expires.
  I am very disappointed, therefore, that the Republican Party, which 
controls the White House, the U.S. House, and the U.S. Senate, is 
pushing us closer and closer to a very dangerous government shutdown. 
The Republican leadership in Congress and the White House must not 
allow this shutdown to take place. They have to compromise. They cannot 
get it all.
  As everyone knows, in 2011, Congress passed the Budget Control Act. 
The centerpiece of that bipartisan legislation was that there would be 
parity in defense and nondefense spending. That agreement continued in 
the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012, the Bipartisan Budget Act of 
2013, and the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2015. All of these bills 
provided equal amounts of funding for defense and nondefense purposes. 
Any future effort to increase the Budget Control Act caps must continue 
to

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adhere to this principle of parity. In other words, we have had a 
bipartisan agreement now for 6 years that has continued on four 
separate budgets. But now, threatening us with a government shutdown, 
the Republicans want to break that agreement.
  I was very disturbed to hear Senate Majority Leader McConnell on the 
floor yesterday say:

       Since fiscal year 2013, defense cuts have outpaced domestic 
     spending cuts by $85 billion. To fix this, we need to set 
     aside the arbitrary notion that defense spending be matched 
     equally by new nondefense spending. There is no reason why 
     funding for our national security and our servicemembers 
     should be limited by an arbitrary political formula that 
     bears no relationship to actual need.

  That was Senator McConnell on the floor yesterday.
  Unfortunately, what Senator McConnell said was inaccurate and 
misleading. His statement conveniently ignored the fact that mandatory 
spending on domestic programs like Medicare have been severely cut over 
this time period. He also ignored the fact that during this period, the 
Defense Department has also received tens and tens of billions of 
dollars in funding through the Overseas Contingency Operations funding, 
which is not capped at all.
  If you include the Overseas Contingency Operations funding, the 
reality is that overall defense spending has gone up, not down, over 
this time period, while nondefense discretionary spending has been 
severely cut.
  Further, Senator McConnell ignores a very, very important reality; 
that is, nondefense discretionary spending as a percentage of GDP is 
now at a 40-year low. This longstanding agreement regarding parity for 
defense and nondefense spending is not some kind of inside-the-beltway, 
esoteric issue. It is an issue that will impact tens of millions of 
working families in this country who, today, are struggling to keep 
their heads above water.
  Over the last 40 years, while the middle class of our country has 
been shrinking, the people on top--the top 1 percent--have been doing 
phenomenally well. The actions of the Republican Congress in the last 
year have only made a bad situation, an unfair situation, even worse. 
In the United States today, some 28 million Americans have no health 
insurance. Yet, over the last year, the Republicans have attempted to 
throw an additional 32 million people off of the healthcare they have, 
including proposed cuts for Medicaid by up to $1 trillion over a 10-
year period.
  Tragically, the United States has the highest rate of childhood 
poverty of nearly any major country in the industrialized world. 
Instead of doing all that we can to end childhood poverty in this 
country, the Republicans have proposed to once again make a horrific 
situation even worse by cutting nutrition programs for children, 
cutting the WIC Program for low-income pregnant women, cutting the Head 
Start Program, after-school programs, and funding for public education.
  There are millions of senior citizens in this country who can barely 
make it, and I sometimes wonder how in God's Name they do make it on 
$12,000, $13,000, $14,000 a year in Social Security. How do you keep 
your house warm, how do you buy the food you need, how do you buy the 
prescription drugs you need to stay alive on $13,000 or $14,000 a year? 
There are millions of senior citizens in this country in that position. 
Yet, despite that reality, over the last year we have had to fight off 
one Republican effort after another to cut Social Security COLAs, to 
raise the retirement age, or to even privatize this life-or-death 
program.
  Further, the Republicans have proposed massive cuts to LIHEAP, the 
Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which is keeping people warm 
in Vermont today when the weather goes below zero. All over this 
country, millions of people, often senior citizens, depend on this 
program. Yet President Trump, in his budget, proposes to wipe it out 
completely. Republican leaders are also proposing cuts to the Meals on 
Wheels program, senior housing programs, and Medicare.
  Today, in a highly competitive global economy, when we need to have 
the best educated workforce in the world, when the new jobs that are 
being created require a higher education, hundreds of thousands of 
bright young students desperately want to get a college education, but 
they are unable to do so because their families lack the income. But 
Republicans, incredibly, want to make that situation even worse by 
proposing massive cuts in the budget they recently passed to Pell 
grants--the major source of funding to help low-income young people get 
a college education--and other financial assistance programs for 
college. In my view, we should be making public colleges and 
universities tuition-free. Republicans today are proposing to make it 
harder for our young people to get the higher education they need.

  During this budget process, when the Republicans want to expand 
military spending by some $100 billion--$100 billion--over the next 2 
years, by far the largest increase in military spending in American 
history, we will not turn our backs on working families, the elderly, 
the children, the sick, and the poor. The U.S. Government must do more 
than greatly expand military spending and give tax breaks to 
billionaires. Our job is to protect the working families of this 
country, and that is what the new budget must do. That means we must 
have parity between defense and nondefense spending. That is why this 
budget--the proposed budget--that we are working on now must address 
the many crises facing the working families of the United States. That 
is what the American people want, and that is what we must deliver. 
Among many other things that must be included in the new budget that we 
are working on is full funding for community health centers, which 
provides primary healthcare, dental care, mental health counseling, and 
low-cost prescription drugs to some 27 million Americans in every State 
in our country. It has been more than 3 months since funding for 
community health centers has lapsed. Our Nation's 1,400 community 
health centers in roughly 10,000 communities throughout this country 
are deeply worried right now as to when they will get the funding they 
need.
  I just spoke to the leadership of community health centers in Vermont 
the other day. They have had a longstanding problem--as have community 
health centers all across this country--in retention and attracting new 
doctors and nurses into their programs. What we are seeing now is a 
situation where many people who might want to work at a community 
health center are saying: Why would I want to go there when the 
Republicans are delaying funding for this vitally important program?
  If we do not act soon, 70 percent of the funding for community health 
centers will be cut and 2,800 health centers will close their doors. 
Community health centers must be funded at the levels contained in the 
bipartisan legislation introduced earlier this year. I congratulate 
Senator Blunt and Senator Stabenow for their bipartisan work on this 
issue, and there are a number of other Republicans who are cosponsoring 
that legislation. We could pass it tomorrow if it were on the floor of 
the Senate. Let us do that.
  The offsets to the prevention program of the Affordable Care Act that 
were included in the December 21 agreement are unacceptable, and they 
must not be repeated. The Blunt-Stabenow bill has nine Republican 
cosponsors. This bill represents a modest 5-percent increase in funding 
at a cost of just $2 billion over 5 years--the very least we can do to 
address the major crisis of primary healthcare in America, especially 
in rural America.
  As you know, Federal funding for the Children's Health Insurance 
Program expired on September 30, 2017. If the CHIP program is not 
reauthorized, 9 million children in working families will lose their 
health insurance. Can you imagine that we have a Congress prepared and 
acting to give tax breaks to the richest people in this country, but 
somehow or another they have not gotten around to reauthorize and re-
fund the Children's Health Insurance Program? That must be done 
immediately and, once again, without regressive offsets which take 
money from other health insurance programs.

  We must keep our promises on pensions. If Congress does not act soon, 
the earned pension benefits of more than 1.5 million workers and 
retirees in multi-employer pension plans could be cut by up to 60 
percent. We must not rescind the promise we made to 1.5 million 
workers.

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  We must expand Social Security services for seniors. Since 2010, 
Congress has cut Social Security's operating budget by 16 percent, and 
Republicans want to cut it another 4 percent this year. These budget 
cuts have resulted in the loss of more than 10,000 employees, the 
closing of 64 field offices, and reduced hours in many others. In 
Vermont, one field office has seen its staffing cut by 30 percent. 
According to a recent Washington Post article, 10,000 people died in 
the past year while they waited for decisions on Social Security 
disability benefits. We need to increase the funding for these vital 
services by at least $1.4 billion just to bring staffing back up to 
where it was in 2010.
  We need to keep our promises to our veterans, the men and women who 
put their lives on the line to defend our country. Right now, we have 
tens of thousands of vacancies in the VA. Those vacancies must be 
filled. Veterans must be able to get high-quality, timely healthcare.
  We must fight the opioid and heroin epidemic that is sweeping this 
country. All over America, we are seeing tens of thousands of people, 
often young people, overdosing on opioids and heroin. States and 
communities all over this country need the resources for prevention and 
treatment. That is an issue that cannot be delayed. It has to be dealt 
with now.
  Everybody knows that in the last several months, we have seen 
disastrous hurricanes impact Texas and Florida and Puerto Rico and the 
Virgin Islands. In Puerto Rico today, there continue to be many people 
who still do not have electricity. We must pass disaster relief right 
now that is adequate and that treats Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands 
just as we will treat Texas and Florida. We cannot continue to delay 
given the enormous suffering that is existing in Puerto Rico and in the 
Virgin Islands.
  Very briefly, let me touch on another issue of enormous consequence 
which simply cannot be ignored. On September 5, 2017, President Trump 
announced that he would be rescinding President Obama's Executive order 
on DACA. That decision means that some 800,000 young people who have 
known the United States of America as their only home--this is where 
they grew up; this is where they went to school--are on the verge of 
losing their legal status in terms of education, in terms of 
employment, and in terms of serving in the military if that program is 
not reestablished. Without the legal protections afforded by the DACA 
Program, these young people live in a constant fear of being deported. 
Since the President's announcement in September, more than 11,000 
people have lost the protections under DACA, with there being 
approximately 22,000 set to lose their legal protections by the March 
5, 2018, deadline.
  Any spending agreement must address the fear and uncertainty that has 
been unnecessarily caused by the administration's reckless actions, and 
a clean Dream Act must be signed into law as part of the budget 
negotiations. Protecting the Dreamers and moving these young people 
toward citizenship is not some kind of wild and radical idea; it is 
precisely what the American people want. A recent Quinnipiac poll 
showed that 77 percent of the American people support providing legal 
protections to the Dreamers. This is an issue that must be dealt with, 
and it must be dealt with now.
  When history looks back on this period, I do not want it to see a 
U.S. Congress that worked overtime to protect billionaires and large 
corporations and a Congress that turned its back on working families 
and the children and the sick and the poor. I do not want history to 
look back on this period and say that Members of Congress thought it 
appropriate to spend $100 billion more on the military but were not 
concerned about veterans who did not get the healthcare they needed or 
some 800,000 young people who are now frightened that they will lose 
their legal status.
  As the U.S. Senate, we must get our priorities right, and we need a 
budget that deals not only with military spending but with the needs of 
the middle class and working families of this country.
  I yield the floor.

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