[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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