[Congressional Record Volume 171, Number 19 (Wednesday, January 29, 2025)]
[Senate]
[Pages S462-S465]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
Trump Executive Orders
Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. President, I think that Americans following what
is happening over the last 48 hours recognize that we are seeing a
great deal of chaos and turmoil around the country, and it is having a
harmful impact across communities, across my State of Maryland, across
the country.
On Monday night, the Trump administration issued an order to all
Federal Agencies to freeze the disbursement of Federal funds until
there was a review period, with the threat that much of those funds
would be withheld. And what that did was trigger a lot of
understandable panic across the country.
In my office, we heard from firefighters in many different parts of
our State. These are firefighters who receive grants to help purchase
equipment that they need to run into burning buildings to help save
people in emergency circumstances and to hire more staff.
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We have heard from people who work in Head Start programs to try to
make sure that kids get an early help and lift up in life. We heard
from folks in law enforcement, including people who were involved in
preventing human trafficking and sex trafficking of minors. We heard
from small businesses worried about their grants. We heard from people
in all different walks of life and different communities who were very
worried that the important Federal initiatives that they rely on to
help provide support for people in their communities were being turned
off.
And I want to make something crystal clear: This was avoidable. This
did not happen by accident.
I did see comments by the President's deputy policy director, Steve
Miller, saying: This was a very clear directive, and there has been a
lot of fake news about it.
I would just urge people to take a look at that directive. It is
extremely broad, and it is very ambiguous. And it was very foreseeable
that Federal Agencies would essentially put an immediate halt to funds
going to everybody from firefighters to those who are fighting sex
trafficking.
So how did this happen? It happened because this is an
administration--this Trump administration--that believes that it has
the power to cherry-pick the law, to decide what parts of the laws that
have been duly enacted by this Congress they like and want to implement
and which ones they want to reject.
That is an unconstitutional power grab--pure and simple--because
under article I, the Congress has the power of the purse, and when we
pass a law, including an appropriations bill, to provide funding for
important national and local priorities, and that is signed into law,
that becomes the law of the land.
And Presidents can't treat that like it is an ``a la carte'' menu.
They can't say: Well, I am going to implement this priority because I
like that one, and I am going to reject this provision of the law
because I don't like it. That is not how it works.
The Framers created checks and balances in our system to prevent
Presidents from acting like Kings and ignoring laws that they don't
like and only implementing the ones that they do.
This all came to a head many, many decades ago, when President Nixon
exercised what was called the line item veto.
So Congress passes legislation, the product of back and forth and
negotiation and compromise, signed by the President of the United
States. That makes it law. That is the law of the land.
So what President Nixon said was: Well, I am going to sign this, but
there are certain provisions here that I don't like. I don't want to be
spending any money on Head Start, for example, or I don't want to spend
money on law enforcement and police, for example. And so I am going to
veto those provisions, but I am going to accept the rest of the law,
even though Congress passed all of it in totality.
And the Supreme Court said: You can't do that. Presidents are not
Kings. They don't have the power to selectively implement parts of the
law they like and reject the others.
And then Congress passed what is known as the Impoundment Control
Act. This is legislation that says Presidents cannot impound. In other
words, they can't withdraw or put aside funds that have been duly
enacted by Congress, just because they don't like the purposes for
which Congress passed those provisions.
But this President and this administration believe that the
Impoundment Control Act doesn't apply to them. And we don't have to
guess at this question. All we have to do is look at the testimony of
somebody called Russ Vought.
So who is Russ Vought? Russ Vought is President Trump's nominee to
head the Office of Management and Budget.
What is the Office of Management and Budget? It is an office within
the White House that directs the budget control over all the other
Federal Agencies. They are like the central command center for all of
the other Agencies, whether it is Health and Human Services or EPA.
Whatever Federal Agency it is, they all feed their budget requests up
to the Office of Management and Budget in the Executive Office of the
President. And Russ Vought was nominated to head that position.
In fact, tomorrow, in the Senate Budget Committee, we will have a
vote on Russ Vought. We had his hearing a little while ago. At that
hearing, I asked him point-blank, as did Senator Murray, whether he and
the Trump administration would comply with the Impoundment Control Act.
You have to look at the videotape. He refused to confirm that he would
apply the law. He wouldn't say yes. In fact, what he said was that
President Trump has issues with the Impoundment Control Act; he doesn't
think it is constitutional. So he refused to commit to applying the law
here. He said that they may want to change that.
The obvious answer is: OK, President Trump, if you want to change the
Impoundment Control Act, let's seek an amendment to it. It will go
through the congressional process, and you can try to amend the law.
But for now, the law is as it is written, and you can't ignore it. Yet
Russ Vought said: We refuse to commit to comply to this thing.
We have actually seen this movie before in the first Trump
administration because Russ Vought was in charge of OMB for part of
that first Trump term. People may recall that we had quite a discussion
when President Trump, in his first term, wanted to withhold military
assistance from Ukraine, even though Congress--the House and the
Senate--had passed that into law and it had been signed into law. But
President Trump just decided he didn't want to implement that policy,
so they withheld funds.
I wrote to the GAO--that is Congress's watchdog--and I asked them a
very simple question. I asked them whether this withholding of military
assistance to Ukraine constituted an illegal withholding. In other
words, could President Trump hold onto and not disburse those funds
that had been enacted by Congress to help the people of Ukraine? GAO
looked into it, and they sent me back a letter, crystal clear, that the
Trump administration had violated the Impoundment Control Act and Russ
Vought, as the head of OMB at the time, violated the Impoundment
Control Act.
Now we are here today. Russ Vought is up again, nominated to be in
charge of OMB. At the hearing the other day, as I said, he refused to
commit to complying with the Impoundment Control Act. That is what we
are seeing here in this freeze on the funds and the claim that they can
look at these and decide: Congress may have passed this, it may have
been signed into law, but we are not going to disburse them because we
disagree with the purposes.
You can't do that.
Now, the President is going to submit the President's budget to
Congress, and we will have an opportunity to look at his proposals, and
we will act on it. But the President can't take a law that has already
been put into effect and decide: I am only going to help the people I
want and not the other people that I don't want to help.
The real concern just--what--10 days into this administration is this
is part and parcel of a much larger effort and strategy. I can tell you
for certain this is not about making the Federal Government more
efficient. If my colleagues on the other side of the aisle want to sit
down and seriously find ways to make the Federal Government more
efficient, I am all in.
But that is not what this DOGE committee headed by Elon Musk is all
about, at least none of the early indications suggest that is what it
is about. And the reason we know that is because one of the main
initiatives being taken on by this new administration is something
called Schedule F.
Schedule F, that is sort of an innocuous-sounding thing. What could
that mean? Schedule F is a concerted effort to throw out the merit-
based civil service structure that we have in this country, the merit-
based system where people are hired based on their qualifications and
their experience and their knowledge, and replace it with a political
cronyism-based system.
I want to pause here for a moment just to make sure everybody
understands the way things work now. Obviously, when you have a new
President elected, the President can bring in lots of new people. We
are debating right now advice and consent on some Cabinet officials.
The President also can
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hire the top echelon of people in Agencies across the Federal
Government. In fact, there are about 4,000 political appointees today,
people that the President puts into these positions. That is fine.
But what Schedule F would do and what President Trump and his nominee
to be head of OMB want to do is to take about 50,000 to 60,000
additional Federal positions and convert them from merit-based systems
to political cronyism systems.
So instead of being hired on the merits instead of being hired based
on your qualifications and your experience and what you know, they want
you to be hired based on who you know--a political test. And you can
see, if you place about 50,000 to 60,000 political cronies across the
Federal Government in these positions, you can get them to overlook the
law, like the Impoundment Control Act; you can get them to overlook the
Constitution. And I dare say, the American people don't want political
hacks to be the people who are doing food safety inspections or are
responsible for the air traffic control system or, really, any other
part of our government where we rely on experience and qualifications,
not a political test.
So this is a really important moment because the Trump administration
is claiming this power, not only to violate the Impoundment Control Act
and withhold funds from whatever they don't like and reward those who
do, but they want to create a whole structure within the Federal
Government to replace these merit-based civil servants with political
cronies.
And what is another thing you would do if you were President to try
to make sure you knocked down all the provisions we have for
accountability? Hey, you would fire all the inspectors general. What
are inspectors general? They are people in various Federal Departments
whose job it is to root out fraud, waste, and abuse. Their job is to
make sure that people in these Agencies don't ignore the law, don't
waste taxpayer money. Yet President Trump fired the inspectors general
in these Agencies. In other words, he fired the people who are supposed
to provide accountability to protect the public against waste, fraud,
and abuse.
So don't tell me you are for more government efficiency when you are
firing the people whose job it is to keep a look out for fraud, waste,
and abuse. What is really happening is you are firing the people who
would be responsible for calling out any wrongdoing by these 60,000
additional political cronies that the President wants to put in place
in these Departments to do his bidding.
I would hope colleagues on both sides of the aisle would see that
this is really fraught with danger because when you open the door to
this kind of political cronyism, you also open the door to corruption.
And when you get rid of the inspectors general, that means more people
think that they can get away with that kind of corruption.
Schedule F is not the only ongoing effort, apparently, the President
has to get rid of merit-based Federal employees. They just sent out
this note within the last couple of days offering ``early retirement to
Federal employees.'' I think the idea is if you agree to retire in the
next couple of weeks that you can continue to get your paycheck through
September or something without working.
I have no idea if that is even legal.
What we do know is the memo that was sent out to these Federal
employees was remarkably similar to something that Elon Musk sent out
to employees in his company at one point. In fact, the title of the
memo, ``Fork in the Road,'' was exactly what was on Elon Musk's memo.
And, in fact, apparently, Elon Musk is bringing in some computer
systems and other things to the executive office buildings over there
at the White House.
I would caution Federal employees that we don't even know if this is
legal, and don't count on you getting the benefit of whatever bargain
the President is, apparently, promising you because what this really is
is an effort just to clear out more people from the merit-based system
to create vacancies to bring in political cronies. That is what this is
all about.
You implement a hiring freeze, which is what they have done. Then you
get current Federal employees to retire early through something that
could end up being a scam. I don't know. And then you implement
Schedule F and bring in 50,000 to 60,000 people.
This is a really important consequential moment for all of us who
care about a merit-based civil service.
And by the way, we have had a merit-based system since the late
1800s. We adopted this merit-based system after President James
Garfield was assassinated by a disappointed job seeker--someone who had
worked on his campaign and didn't get a job. At that point, the
American people said: This spoil system where people are getting jobs
just based on who they know, not what they know, this isn't delivering
quality services for the American people. So they passed the Pendleton
Act. What is happening now is a direct attack on that merit-based civil
service.
What is the ultimate goal here? The ultimate goal is for President
Trump to put in place these political loyalists who will do his
bidding.
Bidding for who? In the last campaign, I think, many people who
supported Candidate Trump believed that he was there to look out for
working people, to look out for the forgotten Americans. That was sort
of what he said on the campaign. But on Inauguration Day, just down the
hall here a little bit, I think we got a better idea of exactly who it
was and who it is that President Trump is looking out for, because he
gave a speech talking about the ``new golden age'' for America. And the
people who had the best seats in the House, better than his Cabinet
nominees, were the billionaire tech titans--Elon Musk and others. They
were right there, right behind the President.
We also know that one of the President's major goals is to put in
place another big tax cut. Tax cut for who? A tax cut for the very
wealthiest people in the country who will get a disproportionate share
of any proposed tax cuts. We can expect to see that in round 2 because
we saw that in Trump administration round 1. And big tax breaks for
corporations who promised they would use the proceeds, by the way, to
expand plant and equipment, to raise wages of their employees--that is
not what happened. They used the extra money for stock buybacks that
benefited very wealthy stockholders disproportionately. And the CEOs
got bonuses. We didn't see wages for other employees.
So it is not just that the tax plan will benefit the very wealthy; it
is that it will do that at the expense of working Americans.
Just take a peek at some of the proposals that are being put forward
in the House Budget Committee by Republican leaders on that committee.
They are going after very important programs that benefit the American
people, whether in healthcare or nutrition. We will have to see when it
finally comes out of there, but we know that most of the cuts they are
proposing are going to be harmful to working Americans, to the people
Candidate Trump claimed he wanted to help.
So this is a moment when everybody needs to focus very clearly on
what their expectations were because it is shaping up to be a great
betrayal. It is shaping up to be a situation where this new
administration wants to get rid of merit-based civil servants, bring in
a lot of political cronies, and then implement these huge tax cuts for
very wealthy Americans and the biggest corporations at the expense of
everybody else in America. I don't think that is what the people
bargained for in this last election.
So I come to the floor today because we are seeing the Trump
administration put in place some of these pieces that would be
necessary in achieving these big tax breaks and benefits to the very
wealthy. Whenever a President decides that he gets to cherry-pick the
law and just provide resources to his political benefactors and ignore
the rest of the law, that is a big danger signal. When the nominee to
be the head of OMB refuses to commit to following the law, that is a
big danger signal.
So I would just ask all of our colleagues to do our jobs as Members
of Congress in the article I branch and make sure that we don't see
this flagrant attack on the Constitution be successful.
I yield the floor.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
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The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. WARNER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for
the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Justice). Without objection, it is so
ordered.