[Congressional Record Volume 171, Number 24 (Wednesday, February 5, 2025)]
[Senate]
[Pages S675-S709]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
EXECUTIVE CALENDAR--Continued
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Minnesota.
Ms. KLOBUCHAR. Mr. President, along with my colleague from California
and so many others tonight, I rise in opposition to the President's
nomination of Russell Vought to lead the Office of Management and
Budget.
My colleagues and I are here--it is now shortly before midnight--to
go through the night to make this case because this nominee has already
demonstrated exactly how dangerous he would be if confirmed. We know
that from the last time he worked in the Office of Management and
Budget, and we know it because of his work in the last few years. And
despite not even being in the office yet, he has already, through his
work on Project 2025, driven a reckless budget decision that created
immediate chaos and uncertainty across the country.
The duty of the Office of Management and Budget Director is to assist
the President of the United States in faithfully executing the laws
passed by Congress. Notably, this does not include singlehandedly
turning off Federal funding.
It was just a few weeks ago that Donald Trump was inaugurated. And
that day, as chair of the yearlong Inaugural Committee, I made the
point that there are three branches of government. Otherwise, we would
have had the inauguration--as in some countries--in a Presidential
palace or in some gilded executive office building. In fact, that
inauguration was in the Capitol for a reason, and that is because in
our country we have three branches of government--three equal branches
of government. And article I of the Constitution makes it clear that
the Congress makes decisions about funding--the Congress.
And in this case, on a bipartisan basis, year after year after year--
and it is not easy, and it can be a mess to the end, but we come
together, Democrats and Republicans, and make a decision about funding.
And it is the job of the executive branch--in addition, of course, to
the President of the United States, signing off on this--but the
executive branch then implements it.
But in this case, things are backward and upside down when the Office
of Management and Budget comes in with a plan that had actually been
devised by this nominee to freeze the funds. Millions of Americans
awoke to find that vital Federal funding had been frozen--not by
Congress, not by a confirmed official in an administration, but by an
unelected adviser acting from the shadows. And, yes, it was chaos--big
surprise.
People lost access to essential services. Agencies scrambled to
interpret conflicting statements. It was in, and 24 hours later, it was
rescinded. And then the Press Secretary to the President of the United
States put out a post that--no, no, no--all the funds were still
frozen. Even the administration itself had to walk back its decision
after a Federal judge ruled it unconstitutional, this whole mess that
hurt regular people.
And I still wake up every day and say to myself: Has Donald Trump
brought down costs for housing or childcare? Has he created more
housing or childcare that a number of people who voted for him thought
they were going to get? Has he brought down the cost of prescription
drugs?
Instead, what do we see? We see this chaos. This wasn't an accident.
It wasn't even a decision made by an official with legal authority.
Let's be clear about exactly what happened. Russell Vought was not in
the administration. He is before the Senate right now. That is why we
are here tonight. He was not in the administration, but his
fingerprints were all over this scheme.
According to reports, he was a driving force behind the
administration's decision to freeze Federal funding. Stephen Miller,
someone very close to Donald Trump, even publicly credited Vought with
coming up with the idea. It was Vought's plan that led the
administration to take an action that hurt millions of Americans.
Now, I have heard from constituent after constituent, terrified
about: Is this Federal funding freeze, that clearly the administration
wanted to do and then a court stepped in--and it is only temporarily
paused. But I have heard from my constituents because, for some of
them, their funding is still in trouble. Others don't know what is
going to happen next.
So here are some Minnesotans, regular people, and what they had to
say following the decision to unilaterally, unconstitutionally cut off
support that families across the country rely on. One wrote to me
saying:
The late-night decisions, the freezing of Federal funds
already appropriated by Congress from an undisclosed group of
entities is outrageous, illegal, and gross mismanagement. It
is the throwing of the lives of your constituents into fear
and chaos.
She continued:
The administration is offering conflicting information and
no real answers as to what is going on. Even more money will
need to be spent. This is going to be challenged in court. It
is going to be a mess instead of just working it out. What
a waste.
That is right. There is a budget coming up. There are decisions to be
made about taxes. There is time to debate this and decide, even if I
don't agree with what the President wants to do. But there is a very
clear way that this should happen, and this is for the upcoming budget.
But instead, they want to make a big scene; they want to hurt a lot of
people. That is what happened.
Another constituent wrote in, concerned about her client, someone who
works in the area of mental health, and she talked about how her
clients rely on some of this funding. She said:
Executive branch interference with this funding not only
creates massive economic harms but also directly violates the
Constitution's delegation of spending powers to Congress.
[[Page S676]]
I will say, there is a silver lining here. Regular people are
actually looking at the Constitution. They are saying: How can this
happen? How can someone--an unelected billionaire--come in and try to
get data? How can you just stop funding in the middle of one day, with
one single memo from someone who is not even elected?
So they are like: Hmm, maybe I should go look at the Constitution.
What does it say in article I? What is my role in this as a citizen in
electing people?
Another Minnesotan wrote:
I am a parent of a pediatric cancer survivor, and our
family relied on the Katie Beckett Program to survive before
we moved to Minnesota. This program runs through State
Medicaid--
She explained--
and it affords all families whose children have life-
threatening diagnoses financial assistance as a secondary
coverage, regardless of income, while they make their way
through treatment and while recovering from the significant
impacts of these treatments.
She asks:
Without access to this, what will happen to these kids?
But then again, acting in this way does seem to be a pattern, and
people are figuring it out. And believe me, there are a number of
people in my State who voted for Donald Trump and voted for me. OK? And
why did they vote for Donald Trump? Well, they wanted change. They were
worried about their costs. They thought: OK, maybe he is going to do
what he says he is going to do. Maybe, he is actually going to do
something and work with people to try to bring costs down.
And now they are seeing this chaos, in my mind, which we will be
leading to, which we have already seen with the firing of the inspector
general--just corruption, these constitutional grabs at power--
unconstitutional.
One constituent who teaches a class on cancer research at the
University of Minnesota wrote about this research funding. Our State
has a lot of research, between Mayo and the University of Minnesota--
cutting-edge research. She says:
The students I am teaching are dependent on National
Institutes of Health support. The patients I am seeing are
helped by the National Institutes of Health-funded clinical
trials, our cancer center trial organization and the core
facilities at the U of M that help conduct these trials.
Cancer patients on clinical trials may die because of pausing
of Federal support for these trials.
Another cancer patient:
Please do everything you can to restore National Cancer
Institute funding immediately. I am in treatment for four
different cancers. It is the fifth time. Why would you stop
the funding? It is even impossible to contemplate.
They are referring, of course, to this memo that was sent out with
the blessing of the Trump administration, under their administration,
sat out there for 24 hours, and then gets repealed. But then the White
House says: No, no, no. We still want to freeze all the funding.
And then a Federal judge has to come in. But, of course, that is only
temporary.
A different Minnesotan worried about her niece, who is being treated
for triple-negative breast cancer in an NIH-funded trial:
To have the funding cut off could have deadly consequences
for my niece.
She wrote:
This is her second round with this very aggressive cancer,
and she is getting results from the clinical trial. She has
three small children at home and is fighting as hard as she
can, but without this trial, I am not sure what her
physicians would do.
Someone else from my State:
The havoc that the administration is causing with the ``on
again off again'' freezing of Federal aid and the freeze on
the work of essential public health agencies like the NIH and
the CDC will have devastating consequences for our economy
and citizens if allowed to stand.
She continued:
I know you will do your best to protect and stand up for
Congress's constitutional rights.
Again, my constituents--I do see this as a silver lining--are looking
at what is the role of Congress? What did our Founding Fathers want?
What is the role of the courts? Can the Executive just stand in there
and do anything he wants?
And, of course, the answer is no, which is why you have seen
litigation, which is why I have urged my constituents to write emails
to me with these stories because, actually, we will create a record of
exactly what is going on as these court cases continue in States all
over the country, because, right now, we have an administration, a
President, that took the oath to follow the Constitution, to support
and defend the Constitution, but doesn't seem to be reading it.
So she writes this:
I know you will do your best to protect and stand up for
Congress's constitutional rights. My family and I appreciate
the work you do as our Senator, and I like that you work
across the aisle.
She says:
During this critical time, however, we urge you to do
everything you can to be in Congress to thwart these illegal
acts. The extraconstitutional games need to stop, and the
rule of law must stand. The President is not a king and
cannot be treated as one.
Another constituent, like many others, is worried about what this
freeze will mean for seniors.
As you know, our adult day center relies on Federal funding
to provide essential services to seniors in our community--
specifically, title III caregiver respite. These funds
support a wide range of programs, including healthcare,
social activities, nutritional support, all of which are
crucial for the well-being of our participants. The sudden
pause in Federal funding has put these vital services at
risk, and we are worried about the impact on our seniors.
She continued:
Many of our participants depend on our center for daily
care and support, and any disruption in our services could
have severe consequences for their health and quality of
life. We are particularly concerned about the lack of clarity
regarding which programs will be affected and the timeline
for resolving this issue.
She concluded:
We urge you to advocate on our behalf and work with your
colleagues to ensure that Federal funding for programs
supporting seniors is restored as quickly as possible. Our
seniors deserve stability and continuity in their care.
More on seniors from another woman:
My next-door neighbor is 81 years old. She has to get
injections into both of her eyes every 13 weeks. Without the
injections, she will go blind. Good Day Foundation has helped
pay for the injections. As of yesterday, they are broke. My
neighbor had to pay $1,028 out of pocket yesterday. She is on
a fixed income. How can Good Day Foundation get their funding
back? My friend can't afford these shots.
Another constituent, a senior herself, wrote:
I am 73 years old, and I live in housing that is covered by
a voucher. I eat with SNAP funds. I am disabled and dependent
on my CADI waiver to keep myself going. I can't be homeless
at my age.
Another Minnesota senior:
I am currently enrolled in the Senior Community Service
Employment Program through National Able Network. National
Able is a nonprofit organization that helps job seekers learn
new skills and connect with area employers to fill their job
openings. Each year, they help hundreds of seniors like me
get a job, and I want to make sure this program continues. I
know age discrimination and not having the necessary skills
have been a problem for me in getting a job in the past.
He went on to say:
The funding freeze would stop the payments that this
program needs to operate, and that would negatively impact me
and the organization I am training with. The wages I earn
while in training help me pay for bills that I otherwise
wouldn't be able to afford.
And, you know, this is part of a pattern. When the President ran for
office this time, he talked about bringing healthcare costs down. He
told us how beautiful it would be. Yet what do we see when they come
into office? One of the first Executive orders--different than this
funding freeze--was stopping one of the key programs, a pilot for
generic drugs at $2 a pop, to try to encourage more generic drugs.
And when the nominee for HHS Secretary was before our Senate
committees, he would not commit to actually implementing the
prescription drug negotiation bill that I had spent years trying to get
passed. And we finally passed it. We finally ended the sweetheart deal
that Big Pharma had because of congressional action that locked them
into high prices and high profits at the expense of regular people,
where Americans were paying, in many cases, twice as much as people in
other countries.
It is part of the reasons why there were bus trips from Minnesota to
Canada to get less expensive drugs.
My colleagues here all know that bringing down the cost of
prescription
[[Page S677]]
drugs has always been a top priority, because in the United States of
America, no one should be forced to choose between filling their
prescriptions or filling their grocery cart.
Taking on these big drug companies was not easy, they had three
lobbyists--and still have three lobbyists--for every Member of Congress
and spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to stop us. AARP with
us in the fight; so many seniors with us in the fight. What they didn't
have was the power of 50 million American seniors who came together to
say: Enough is enough.
We passed our bill. There is a $35 cap on insulin per month, which
the companies now, because of competitive pressures, have had to offer
to nonseniors. There is a $2,000 cap for Medicare for people that are
paying for services, a $2,000 cap on prescription drugs, and then we
have the first 10 drugs that have been negotiated with the prices
taking effect in a bit over a year.
Those first 10 drugs are done, but this administration--as the torch
was handed over by the American people--this new administration is
going to have to implement it. What was the result of the drug
negotiations in the last administration? They picked the first 10
drugs, and they picked blockbusters. I would have done a lot more than
10, but that was the compromise that had been reached.
What are the first 10 drugs? They are drugs like Eliquis and Xarelto
and Jardiance and Januvia--blockbuster drugs. The negotiated prices for
those drugs, the Pharma companies agreed, even though they were suing
in court--and still are and losing every single case they have brought
to question the underpinnings of this bill. Republican-appointed
judges, Democratic-appointed judges said: No, Congress has the right to
make that change.
Those 10 drugs, the prices down 60, 70 percent--and this is my
favorite number--it is going to save 9 million seniors in one year in
out-of-pocket $1.5 billion--$1.5 billion, with a B. That is not even
counting what it saves for taxpayers.
But now this program, this change in the law is in the hands of this
new administration. This new administration is going to have to make
sure those 10 drugs, with the negotiated prices, that that happens. But
now the Biden administration, at the end of this year, as they were on
schedule for 15 drugs--that is what our law that was passed in this
Chamber says, 15 new drugs--they are going to have to now negotiate
that with the Pharma companies.
Well, that is going to go real well when they are already talking
about getting rid of some of the other drug programs that take on
pharma when their nominee for HHS won't even commit to doing it. And
those drugs are blockbusters too: diabetes, weight loss drugs like
Ozempic, Rybelsus, Wegovy, all those drugs, they are on the line for
negotiation. Mr. President, 2.3 million Medicare part D enrollees take
those drugs alone.
In his confirmation hearings, as I noted, the President's Health and
Human Service Secretary nominee Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., did not give a
clear answer on whether or not he would uphold drug price negotiations.
That is unacceptable.
Make no mistake, these actions aren't going to lower costs. They are
going to raise costs. And, instead, what do we see? The chaos and
confusion of all of these reasons.
So what else? Talked about healthcare; next on to education. Here is
what a Minnesotan wrote me after the memo came out that was later
rescinded, but then the White House said: No, no, no, we want to freeze
all these funds.
A Minnesotan wrote:
I am reaching out as a constituent and a proud advocate for
TRIO programs, which serve thousands of students across
Minnesota and Wisconsin by providing academic, financial, and
personal support.
I am concerned about the recent directive from the Office
of Management and Budget to temporarily pause all activities
related to Federal financial assistance.
He went on to say:
This action could significantly impact TRIO programs'
ability to serve low-income, first-generation students and
students with disability who rely on our services.
Please work with your colleagues in Congress to ensure that
these programs continue.
Another Minnesotan called the funding freeze ``extremely upsetting
for me as I am someone who works in this field and spends my time
working to help students, to help those less privileged than me.''
He said:
One of those programs includes TRIO. Each summer I teach
students, I help them, they are extremely bright, and they
don't have enough support.
``I write to you,'' he says, ``as a frustrated citizen and instructor
to air my grievances as I am no longer sure what to do or how to
proceed.''
Yeah, I don't really blame him, because one bureaucrat can just write
a memo with a plan that was laid out by Russell Vought, laid out by
that guy, laid out and consistent with what was in Project 2025, and
now we are actually debating him, putting him back in the Office of
Management and Budget again.
One, again, of the things that I am quite astounded by is how much
American citizens are looking at the Constitution.
Listen to this letter--all these in just the last few days:
I am writing to express my deep concern regarding the White
House's recent decision to unilaterally freeze
congressionally approved Federal funding.
So let's look at that sentence. Very clear this constituent
understands that it is Congress--Democrats and Republicans--that agreed
on the funding, that agreed on the funding amount, and that,
unilaterally, this administration thinks they can just come in, they
can just come in and take it away. That is not true. That is illegal.
``This action,'' the writer says, ``not only disrupts essential
services and institutions that rely on Federal grants and loans but
also represents a troubling overreach of Executive power that directly
violates our Constitution. This practice is an abuse of power that must
be met with swift congressional action.''
So that is why we asked our colleagues on the other side of the aisle
to listen to this constituent from the State of Minnesota, who is not a
constitutional law professor, but all you have to do is open up the
Constitution, and this constituent is wondering, why won't everyone
stand up and say: No, we are willing to work with you, Donald Trump, on
efficiency measures, on making government work better, but we are
willing to do it only if it is consistent with the Constitution.
She continues:
I urge you to take immediate steps to hold the
administration accountable. I appreciate your leadership and
look forward to your response on how you plan to address this
pressing issue. Please stand firm in upholding the
Constitution.
A different Minnesotan:
I am writing to you to express concern over the pause of
Federal loans, grants, and foreign aid and ask you to take
all possible action to block the confirmation of the
nominated OMB Director Russell Vought.
She continued:
Russell Vought stated in his confirmation hearing that he
would not guarantee that we would follow the laws.
Now, they are even watching the confirmation hearings. I think this
is good for democracy when people realize this is serious, that it is
not just a campaign commercial; it is not just something you say at a
rally; it is not just something you put on X. This is real.
She says:
Russell Vought stated in his confirmation hearing that he
would not guarantee he would follow the law in expending
funds Congress appropriated; and, in other words, he seems to
believe he and the President have authority to selectively
decide to make these pauses permanent, regardless of what
Congress has appropriated. This is a grave violation of the
constitutional authority granted to Congress and shows brazen
disrespect for the American people's elected representative.
I actually couldn't write it better, I like that, ``brazen
disrespect.'' And what I want to see is people understanding that this
is brazen disrespect. It is brazen disrespect of the people that work
in the U.S. Senate and in the House. But, OK, put that aside--it is
brazen disrespect of the people who sent us here.
As I said on the day of Donald Trump's inauguration, in that
beautiful Rotunda, when he brought that inauguration inside, that there
was some pretty powerful people in that room. I think people saw the
photos of the oligarchs and the like. But when it comes to the elected
officials in that room--whether they are Representatives, Senators, or
the President or the Vice President--their power actually
[[Page S678]]
didn't come from the people in that room. Their power comes from the
people outside of that room.
So when this constituent says that this was brazen disrespect in
freezing the funds or devising this plan that Russell Vought had, she
gets it, she gets it; this is brazen disrespect of our democracy, no
matter what party you are in.
She goes on to say:
Please begin educating constituents on the severity of this
issue.
I am trying to do it tonight. Hopefully, some people are watching on
C-SPAN.
Please also tell them how they can reach out to their
representatives in the White House to voice their
disapproval. Most people do not understand the power and
leverage that the Office of Management and Budget Director
has.
I think that is true. Most people don't understand it. That is why we
are here tonight.
They need to understand the direct impact these actions
will have on day-to-day life for them and their neighbors and
what their options are for making their voices heard.
So this chaos and corruption and this just assault on our
constitutional powers, we have been seeing this since day one. Chaos is
up, corruption is up, and, yes, egg prices are up. Because none of this
is going to help people with their bills.
One great example of this when you look at everything that has been
going and say how do I tie this together, we know it is distraction,
talking about things that aren't really going to help people, one of
the things that was also hard to understand, but is all connected when
you connect the dots was the firing--the illegal firings--of the
nonpartisan inspectors general.
This was, remember--it was just about 10 days ago--the middle-of-the-
night purge of government watchdogs, and it was a serious abuse of
power. These are the people that are watching over the taxpayer money.
These are the ones, no matter if the President is a Democrat or
Republican, they go in, they look at what is going on in the Agency,
they often discover things like fraud. They discover things like
paybacks. They discover things like bribes, because they are looking at
all the books, and they are not just people sitting inside the Agency.
Those were the people who were purged; those were the people who were
fired; those are the people who have been appointed during both
Democratic and Republican administrations.
What is it that Shakespeare said?
The first thing you do is kill all the lawyers.
Well, with this administration, the first thing they did was kill off
the inspectors general. Congress passed the Inspector General Act in
1978 to establish independent, nonpartisan inspectors general in each
Agency to investigate waste, fraud, and abuse, and prevent improper
political influence and favoritism.
Inspectors general also save taxpayer money. They investigate
corruption--as I just mentioned--and waste under administrations,
regardless of party.
And studies have shown that for every dollar invested in Federal
inspectors general, Americans saved approximately $13. That is what
they discover; they discover problems. To protect inspectors general
from political interference, Congress has passed safeguards into law,
including specific requirements that must be followed if they are going
to be removed from their positions by a President.
The law, which can be found--I am doing this for my very informed
constituents who have been writing the office. Now they can look at a
new law. We care about the laws; that is what we are supposed to do
here, we pass laws.
The law, which can be found at title V, section 403(b), states:
If an inspector general is removed from office or is
transferred to another position or location within an
establishment, the President shall communicate in writing the
substantive rationale, including detailed and case specific
reasons for any such removal or transfer to both Houses of
Congress, including the appropriate congressional committees,
not later than 30 days before the removal or transfer.
Congress wrote these requirements into law to provide inspectors
general protection from political interference, to let Congress know
what was going on.
The President's decision, in which he just completely ignored these
requirements and fired them in the middle of the night, is a violation
of law.
Firing these critical watchdogs, just like freezing the funding from
an unnamed bureaucrat with a plan that was put in place from Russell
Vought, just like as my colleagues have been talking about tonight,
firing Justice Department officials or asking for a list of people who
work at the FBI just because they were assigned to a certain case--this
is not consistent with democracy.
I am a former prosecutor. I always believed that my job was to do my
job without fear or favor. No matter who we were prosecuting, no matter
who was working with me, we followed the law. That is what has gone
amok here.
And that is why Americans are reading the Constitution. That is why
they are calling this Senate so much that they shut the phone lines
down the other day. That is why they are writing e-mails--and, by the
way, the benefit of that is we also have a record of the harm that is
being caused.
More than ever, the responsibility will fall on Congress and the
people that elect us to conduct oversight and to ensure that the people
in our government are working for the American people--not their
unelected billionaire friends.
More, Federal aid, now foreign aid. Why would people in my State care
about that? Well, we actually do a lot with the world around us. We
have a number of businesses that do business all around the world. We
have one of the highest rates of adoption from foreign countries. We
have a number of refugees that have come to our State--Somali,
Liberian, Hmong--that are a big part of the fabric of the State of
Minnesota. We have one of the lowest unemployment rates in the Nation.
We are a successful economy in our State, and a lot of that has to do
with the fact that we didn't close down our doors, that we brought in
people to work in the jobs, to work in the farms, to work in our
manufacturing companies.
So that is one of the reasons we care about the world around us, but
there is another. My constituents actually see that if you just shut
off foreign aid--as what is happening right now in our country--in the
world around you, you are going to have a less secure America. You are
going to create this huge opening for countries like Russia and China--
which have been expending money in developing nations--to come in and
fill the void.
One Minnesotan wrote: The freeze on U.S. foreign aid will prevent
many vulnerable people from accessing critical resources, including
clean water for infants, help for farmers, to feed their families,
medications for kids. People will needlessly suffer and die.
He continued: The freeze also risks irreparably damaging our
country's reputation and credibility and gives opening to malign
governments and terrorist groups. Further, it may increase irregular
migration both in the Western Hemisphere and beyond. In short, a halt
of programs will create instability, undermining the administration's
important foreign policy goals to make the U.S. safer, stronger, and
more prosperous.
And I should say a number of leading Republicans in my State have
come out very strongly against what is going on with USAID for two
reasons: One, they care about the world around them--maybe three--two,
they understand the impact it has on America; and, three, they figure
if he is going to start cherry-picking one Agency and just decide to
shut it down in violation of article I and all of these things I have
talked about of Congress's right to have the decision of funding, if he
can do that, what Agency is he going to pick next? He can just cherry-
pick anything.
Someone else said: I am deeply concerned that any cuts to U.S.
foreign assistance programs that save lives, promote global stability,
and keep Americans safe will be a bad thing.
She continued: U.S. foreign assistance is not only the right thing to
do, it is the smart thing to do. At less than 1 percent of the Federal
budget, it is a cheap and effective tool for improving global
stability, gaining U.S. allies, and reducing the need for more U.S. aid
in the future. Without this support, millions of people will face
devastating and, in some cases, deadly consequences.
[[Page S679]]
She is exactly right.
Yet yesterday, as our colleagues know, the administration announced
its intent to end USAID. The decision to abruptly end this when it
counters extremism, fights diseases, and creates more markets for U.S.
exports--my State, for instance, is the fourth biggest ag exporting
State in the Nation--that decision was reckless, and it was dangerous,
just like the decision to suddenly assess our allies--our allies--of
Canada and Mexico, 25 percent on tariffs--25 percent tariffs. It is
just not good for our economy.
When I think about the importance of USAID, I always think about a
story that former President Bill Clinton used to tell about how, at one
point, he went to an African nation, and he toured some new factories
that America had helped invest in, and they were making shirts, and he
got a shirt, and he put that shirt in front of the closet so that every
single time he opened the closet, he saw that shirt, and he thought,
They don't hate us. They actually like us. They like our country.
And when they grow, as we have seen around the world, they are going
to want to do business with America. They are going to want to buy
American goods. They are going to stand with us when we have foreign
enemies that attack us.
All that, just pluck all that out of there. That is exactly what the
Trump administration is doing right now. When we turn our backs on our
friends across the globe, they will look elsewhere for support when
they need it, including countries like China and Russia. It isn't only
about being there for countries in need. It is also about our national
security.
Then other constituents--of thousands and thousands and thousands of
emails and calls that we have gotten in just the last few days--are
concerned about what this is going to do for jobs.
One Minnesotan wrote: I had a meeting with a nonprofit canceled this
morning that is working on energy projects in southwest Minnesota. It
was funded by a Department of Energy grant. At least half a dozen
people will stop working on a project because of this. Due to the
freeze on approvals, I could be laid off with thousands of other people
I work with.
A different constituent who runs another nonprofit was shocked: This
grant was only a drop in the budget bucket, but this is just a tiny
example of the ripple effect that this pause in funding will have
throughout Minnesota where no doubt hundreds, if not thousands, rely on
some funding. This pause will not harm us as an organization, but I can
imagine how services will be impacted.
Other Minnesotans fear that the freeze could upend their entire
family's livelihood just to have this happen so suddenly.
As of today, they write: My wife and I will both lose our jobs. I
will be unable to make phone calls as a deaf person using the video
relay phone systems. We will lose our house and be unable to care for
our disabled son. It will also affect the hundreds of thousands of
disabled people my small U.S. Department of Education grant serves.
Another constituent, a reverend, wrote: We are a family that has a
disabled son. He is 15 years old, a freshman in high school, and is
active in the community.
She continued: We urge all leaders to protect programs essential to
individuals who are often excluded. We especially want people with
Down's Syndrome, autism, or other developmental disabilities and their
families to be recognized as valuable and important for their role in
the world.
So what this is, is chaos, and people are starting to think of, How
will this work in my own family? Just today, we had a hearing of the
Agriculture Committee. As you think about jobs and you think about the
effect on people, we had the witnesses of the head of the National Farm
Bureau and the head of the National Farmers Union there as our first
witnesses. Both of them had submitted pretty pointed letters that
completely set out the alarms on this administration's plan to put in
these tariffs.
And I am a fan of targeted tariffs. I think you can do it. I have
seen it with steel dumping from China. I have seen that once we did
that and fought back, we were able to keep the iron ore mines in
northern Minnesota, and I have supported other tariffs as well. But
that is not what this is. This is an across the board--across the
board--tariff.
The day after imposing these tariffs--again, more chaos just like we
saw with the funding freeze--the administration decided to delay them.
It created more uncertainty for Americans. But one thing is certain:
These tariffs aren't going to lower the price of groceries, like the
President promised in his campaign. They are going to raise the price
of groceries.
They are not going to lower the price of gas; they are going to raise
it. They are not going to lower the price of housing; in fact, the
Builders Association came out against them. They are going to raise it.
Tariffs are taxes, and the new tariffs would be a tax increase on
families of over $1,000 a year.
Beyond the higher costs, these tariffs would threaten our critical
trade partnerships with our neighbors, Canada and Mexico. The U.S.-
Canada relationship is particularly important for my State. President
Harry Truman once said Canada's relationship with the United States was
``compounded of one part proximity and nine parts good will and common
sense.''
I couldn't agree more. Our two countries share the world's largest,
longest land border, more than 5,500 miles; and almost 400,000 people
and about $3 billion in goods and services cross it every day.
Minnesota exports more goods to Canada--ranging from ag products to
machinery to medical devices--than we sell to our second and third
largest markets combined. Minnesota exports about $7 billion worth of
goods to Canada each year, and overall, Canada imported over $354
billion in American goods in 2023 alone.
That trade relationship with an ally--an ally that at one point on
their Embassy draped their Embassy with banners that said ``friend,
ally, partner''--that strengthens our economy and our national
security, it supports our manufacturers, farmers, and ranchers. It
creates jobs. But the administration's announcement unravels these
ties.
When you look at the groups that came out against the new tariffs
within 24 hours of the announcement, you can see why the President had
to scramble back and hit a pause. But again, damage done. Because if
you are a business in another country and you think, I don't know if I
am going to--there might be a tariff on that. If you are in Canada, you
are like: Maybe I should get my next shipment from somewhere else
because I don't know if I am going to be able to depend on the United
States as a trading partner.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce said the tariffs will only raise prices
for American families and upend supply chains. Then you have both the
National Association of Manufacturers and the International Association
of Machinists saying they will put American manufacturing jobs at risk.
The American Farm Bureau, as just noted, warns that these tariffs
threaten to deliver another blow to the finances of farm families. And
the National Association of Home Builders said they would increase the
cost of construction and consumers will end up paying in the form of
higher home prices.
So you have complaints from the workers' side; you have complaints
from the business side, and you have complaints from the farm side. I
would say you are in trouble.
And it is not only these groups, which do represent thousands and
thousands and thousands of businesses and workers; it is people right
in this building.
And it is not just the Democrats who are here speaking tonight about
what this chaos is doing to American families. Senator McConnell put it
pretty well when he talked today about this at the Agriculture hearing,
but he said, ``It will be paid for by American consumers.'' He is
absolutely right.
Slapping new taxes on American families while planning more massive
tax cuts for billionaires is not how you strengthen our economy. Lives
and livelihoods are at stake.
When I look at these constituent letters--and I literally have only
read a fraction of them--I see that people are waking up. They are
energized. They are starting to see that, you know, I don't feel like I
have much control over my life, and maybe that is why I voted
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for change in this election--but I actually wanted it to happen. And
the other thing they say is I actually wanted Democrats and Republicans
to work across the aisle, like we do so much in this Senate.
But what they didn't vote for, what they didn't vote for was chaos.
What they didn't vote for was corruption. What they didn't vote for was
an unelected billionaire deciding he is just going to come in and run
the government.
They actually said, OK, I want to tip the scales a little. I want to
see what can happen. Someone else in there.
And then they thought we were going to work it out. They thought we
were going to work on how to make government more efficient. They
thought we were going to work on how to get more housing with all these
things that are incredible around my State with incentives for private
entities to work to do things like expand childcare.
Or a bunch of businesses get together, we can do some things to
create more incentives to make that happen, to expand existing private
childcare or this idea of creating more smaller childcare facilities so
that they are all ones in a row, apartment after apartment, so that
they can bring in kids in the smaller businesses.
Or they thought maybe they are going to do something about
consolidation, or maybe they are going to do something so my kids, when
they look at the internet, they don't see pornography and they don't
get fentanyl dealers online.
But instead, what do they see? Well, I guess talk about Panama and
Greenland and talk about all kinds of things that really aren't
relevant to their lives. They want us to do things that are relevant to
their lives, and they do not want some unelected guy to come in and
make all these decisions for them.
These Minnesotans are only some, but not all, of the lives that this
administration is playing with. They deserve better. The people of this
country deserve competence, not chaos. We have already seen what
happens when Russell Vought's vision for the Office of Management and
Budget is put into action. It leads to disorder. It leads to
uncertainty. It leads to unconstitutional power grabs that hurt
Americans. And that was even before he had the job because, you see,
this was his plan from the very beginning.
I implore my colleagues on the other side of the aisle to vote no on
this nomination; to stand up as our constituents have asked us to stand
up, whether they are Democrats or Republicans--no to chaos, no to
corruption. Uphold the values of our Constitution.
When you look at these nominees, fulfill your duties of advice and
consent. Why rubberstamp every single one of these nominees? Why would
you do that? Instead, look at what they plan to do. Are they truly
qualified or do they actually have the interests of the Agency they are
supposed to run and the interests of the American people at heart? Then
make your decision.
We cannot put someone in charge of the Office of Management and
Budget--which, by the way, has now become a household word--an Agency
that many people had never heard of in my State, but they are now
writing letters in droves about the fact that they don't understand why
an unelected bureaucrat could issue that memo and why we would put
someone in place that devised this strategy, someone who has already
demonstrated that he will abuse his power.
Article I of our Constitution, which so many of my constituents are
now reading up on, makes it clear that decisions about Federal funding
belong to Congress, not the President, and certainly not the Director
of the Office of Management and Budget.
Russell Vought has shown blatant disrespect for the Constitution and
the American people. He is not the man for this job.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Cramer). The Senator from New Jersey.
Mr. KIM. Mr. President, I rise today because we have a crisis of
confidence in our government. It is a crisis that is being driven by
the Trump administration with one goal in mind: to let the well-off and
the well-connected play by their own set of rules while you, the
American people, continue to scrape by.
It is a crisis that puts us at a crossroads. Will we take the steps
necessary to address the corruption and restore trust or will we break
our institutions even further and usher in a golden age of corruption?
In order to answer those questions, we need to have a real
understanding of a few things. One, how deep is this crisis in
confidence? Two, in what way is the Trump administration putting their
thumb on the scale for the well-off and the well-connected? Three, how
is that impacting the rest of us and how will it impact America's
future? Four, and finally, how can we fight back?
Now, let's start with the crisis that we are in. When I talk about
this crisis in confidence, what we are talking about is the belief that
your government is working for you; that it is working for the American
people--all of its people--a belief that, no matter the challenge you
face or the ambitions that you have, that your government has your best
interests at heart. That is the fundamental credence of our democracy.
It is of, by, and for the people. And that belief is always important.
But when times are tough, it is even more critical than ever.
Let's be clear: These are tough times. I don't think there is a
single person in America that would disagree with that. We have
challenges before us. We have challenges with the high cost of living
and affordability problems. It is a top issue that I hear about in my
home State of New Jersey.
We have a lot of crises of confidence in this moment about whether or
not we can step up as a nation and be able to rise through the
challenges that we face. And the challenges we face are significant. We
have to acknowledge that.
Over the past couple of years, as we recover from a generationally
defining pandemic, I have heard from so many families who just don't
believe that they can get ahead. They don't believe or think that they
will do better than their parents and that their kids won't do better
than them.
I think about that in my own family situation--my parents coming
here, emigrating to this Nation 50 years ago. And I remember asking
them why they did it. And my parents said to me just one simple line.
They said: We did it because we felt that here in America, we could
guarantee that the family that we raise--that you and your sister--
would have a better life and more opportunities than we do. That was
it. It was that simple.
They weren't driven by greed. They weren't trying to take it all for
themselves, as if this was some zero-sum, survival of the fittest. It
was a sense of America and a sense of the opportunity that it can bring
for everyone, including two immigrants from South Korea who were born
during the Korean war into poverty and came to this Nation.
And now, as they get older, there are challenges that they face as
being seniors, the elderly--the healthcare and other challenges that
they face with their budget fixed. And now myself, as a father of a 7-
year-old and 9-year-old, I wonder: What kind of America are my kids
going to grow up in?
I know it is not just my family that worries about this. When the
costs of basic goods go up, it makes it harder to save for everybody.
And when families can't save, it makes it harder to achieve that crown
jewel of the American dream--owning a home, something that my family
has struggled with over the years, something that so many other
families are facing right now as we see the cost of owning a home
skyrocket. It puts that dream even more out of reach. And for those
that can't own, even the cost of rental prices are going through the
roof, demoralizing people.
I remember hearing from this young man, a recent college graduate,
and he just came to me just feeling so deflated. He said: I don't think
I am ever going to own a home. That is how he put it. I have to tell
you, just hearing that from him, just how pessimistic he was, just how
demoralized he was about his place in our society--but it wasn't just
about his place. It was about this moment for this country and the fact
that he doesn't see us moving in a trajectory where someone like
himself and people in his generation are going to be able to have that
opportunity and that chance that generations before had.
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So you throw in that rising cost of higher education that he is
struggling with, trying to pay off the bills, trying to keep up with
student debt, and you have that general sense that we are losing that
sense that we are part of something bigger than all of us.
It is easy to understand why people just don't think the system that
should be working for them is working for them. That is the place that
we are in right now--that in this moment we find ourselves living
through the moment of the greatest amount of inequality in our Nation's
history, even worse than the Robber Baron Age that we studied about in
history books; that somehow we see just such extraordinary wealth but
for just a few, whereas the vast majority of Americans are struggling
paycheck to paycheck and won't be able to step up if they face some
type of crisis, a car accident or something else that could just lead
them into catastrophe.
That lack of trust is very clear in the numbers that we see from the
American people. A Pew study from last summer showed that public trust
in the Federal Government is at approximately 22 percent. And in 2023,
only 16 percent said the government always or most of the time is
something that you can trust. According to Pew, that was among the
lowest tally in nearly 70 years.
That number was reflected in a survey conducted by the Partnership
for Public Service in the spring of 2024. Their research shows that
only 23 percent of Americans trust the Federal Government. That is down
from 35 percent the year before. We are just seeing it go down and
down. Only 15 percent think the government is transparent, down from 21
percent the year before.
This erosion that we are continuing to see in our country and in the
public trust has to be at top of line, because how can a government
function, how can a democracy function, with that much distrust?
Alarming in that group is trust among people age 18 to 34--that age
group of that young man I told you about who had such pessimism about
his future. And in that group, we saw trust decline by half of 30
percent to 15 percent.
Now, you might think this is just maybe a red State problem. But let
me tell you, it is a massive issue in my home State of New Jersey, as
well. In May of 2023, a poll by Fairleigh Dickinson University showed
that over 80 percent of New Jersey residents--that is over 80 percent--
believe that their State's politicians are corrupt. That shows you just
such a devastating number, the distrust that is out there and how
widespread it is.
We certainly have had our challenges of late in New Jersey. When you
see the corruption, when you hear about the news of indictments and
convictions--I remember one time I went to a neighbor of mine, asked
him what he thought about the state of corruption in New Jersey, and he
just said: That is New Jersey. He threw up his hands.
This sense of helplessness, this sense of apathy, the sense that that
is just how things are now; there is nothing we can do about it--there
are a variety of reasons why this is a case in New Jersey, but it all
comes back to the same thing, a singular question: Are the people in
your government working for you or are they working for themselves? Are
they trying to lift up their own personal wealth or to look out for
their friends or their associates or their families or for special
interests?
I always often felt like one of the most important questions you can
get a sense from the people is this question of: Do your elected
officials, do your government officials care about you? Because
sometimes it just feels like we are in this moment in this country
where we have this crisis of empathy right now; that we are losing
touch with that idea that we are part of something bigger than all of
us. We are having trouble. We are struggling to see the world through
someone else's eyes and walk in their shoes.
In this Nation of over 330 million people, how can we continue if we
continue to only think about ourselves and lose sight of that which is
around us?
Obviously, this is all the more important in times like these when we
need our government working to solve the problems that we face. As we
said, we face significant challenges.
So what happens when we have a government where the people aren't
working in the public interests, when those that are charged by the
people to take up the public common good are not following through?
What happens when we have a government where those people working to
protect the public interests are fired or pushed out or marginalized?
Luckily for us, history may not repeat, but it certainly rhymes. The
Founding Fathers established the Federal workforce to be one built on
merit. It was something that they took quite seriously--so seriously,
in fact, that during debate in the weeks after Washington's first
inauguration, James Madison stated:
Wanton removal of a meritorious officer is an impeachable
offense.
George Washington himself wrote that appointments into public service
would be the most difficult and delicate part of his work.
In the history of the Federal service, in a report published by the
Office of Personnel Management, the evolution of this debate from one
of merit first to one of political gain becomes very apparent. As
political parties grew, so did the pendulum swing over retaliation and
actions that further politicized public servant positions, but the dam
broke just a generation after the founding of the Republic.
The Tenure of Office Act of 1820--not exactly a household name--was
one of the first dominoes to fall. It led to what was eventually called
the spoils system. By limiting the terms of many officials to 4 years,
in corresponding to the President, it basically meant that public
servants would come in and out with the tides of the Presidency and not
be based on need or qualifications--just a pendulum swing of
partisanship--the qualification being that of loyalty rather than skill
or merit. The impact of the spoils system became very apparent, which
was of wholesale patronage and corruption and a rejection of the status
quo that looks very familiar to what we see today.
Senator Henry Clay, on the Senate floor, called it a ``detestable
system''--a ``detestable system.''
George William Curtis, one of the leaders in the fight to reform the
civil service, said that the spoils system ``presents a most
ridiculous, revolting, and disheartening spectacle.'' He said that,
through it, the United States seethes with intrigue and corruption.''
Over time, the pushback against the system and the damage it did to
the U.S. Government and its people built a reform movement that
eventually resulted in the passage and enactment of the Pendleton Act
in 1883. In many ways, the Pendleton Act brought our public service
back to its original roots--codifying it, protecting it--by calling for
an open selection of government employees and creating a Civil Service
Commission--our modern civil service--and it required that the
applicants pass a civil service exam. The bill was the first domino of
several to help to restore trust in government by ensuring that those
who serve will serve the people and not themselves--will serve the
people and not just some loyalty test.
In so many ways, the battle that led to the passage of the Pendleton
Act continues today and answers the first question I posed: How deep
does our crisis and confidence in our government go?
In short, it goes back to a friction we have seen for most of our
history. It is a friction between those who want to use power for their
gain--to enrich themselves and their party--at the expense of other
Americans. On the other side are those who seek only to swear an oath
to the Constitution and to deliver on the promise of making the next
American generation more prosperous and secure. To have that sense of
progress as a nation, which we know we cannot take for granted, we have
to work for it.
So, when you look at Donald Trump or look at Elon Musk, you are not
seeing something new. You are not seeing the disruptors they tell you
that they are. You are not seeing an innovator. You are seeing
something that is very old, just another power-hungry politician--an
elite figure--seeking to hoard power at the expense of real American
families--in this moment right now, as I said, that is a moment of the
greatest amount of inequality in our Nation's history--and doing that
by attacking
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the very people who work for the people, and they are not beholden to
the well-off and the well-connected.
Another person leading the charge to bring us back to the golden age
of corruption of the 1800s is a man named Russell Vought.
Now, Russell Vought was born to make corruption safe again. As a
staffer in the House and the Senate, he worked for Members of both
Chambers who attacked and demeaned civil servants in order to get them
out of the way and let big corporate interests through. He worked for
nearly a decade at the Heritage Foundation, taking dark corporate money
and translating it into a systematic takedown of the same protections
those corporations were lobbying against.
When the Trump administration came into office in 2017, Mr. Vought
was one of the first in the building at the Office of Management and
Budget, the OMB. Then, like now, Senators had serious concerns when he
was nominated then for Deputy Director and, eventually, for Director of
OMB.
Now this brings me to my second question: In what ways is the Trump
administration putting the thumb on the scale for the well-off and
well-connected?
Well, let's look at it. Let's look at Project 2025, Mr. Vought's
guidebook for attacking the core of the very principles our Founders
wrote into the Constitution.
Our Founding Fathers wanted to ensure checks and balances. They
wanted to make sure we didn't swap one monarch for another. Vought
believes that the President has a right to stop funds that Congress has
approved from getting to the places we approved them to go. That means
that, even if your elected officials approve of money to go toward
building a road or investing in a school in your community or trying to
get your kids childcare, Russell Vought believes that Donald Trump
should be able to just stop it from getting to them--just because.
Now, I say ``Donald Trump'' because Russell Vought is a champion of
something called the unitary executive theory. I know that may sound
like a half-baked physics idea, but Vought believes that all of the
power in the executive branch belongs to the President and to the
President alone.
Mr. Vought even said in an interview, just a few months ago, that
there are ``no independent Agencies''--warping the power of the
Presidency to supersede Congress and the independence of Agencies that
have massive authorities--given to them, by the way, by Congress, to
protect the American people. This is core in clearing the field for the
well-off and the well-connected by warping that and trying to change
the fundamental balance of our government across three branches.
Finally, by weakening the ability to fund the work that they do and
to operate independently, it is Mr. Vought's attacks on civil
servants--the very positions put into place more than 140 years ago to
stop rampant corruption and patronage--it is his attacks that threaten
to take us back in time.
In a speech last year, Mr. Vought said he wants civil servants to be
``traumatically affected.''
He said:
When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want
to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the
villains.
He went on to say:
We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can't
do all the rules against our energy industry because they
have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them--
our public servants--
in trauma.
Trauma. He used that word ``trauma.'' I want you to think about that
for a second. This is an American--an American--who is asking for our
vote here in the U.S. Senate to be confirmed as a senior government
official, as someone who will lead an incredibly important part of our
executive branch, and be a top adviser to the President; an American
who will take an oath to support and defend the Constitution; an
American who is actively saying he wants to traumatize his fellow
Americans--other Americans--who have also sworn that oath to our
Constitution.
Now, I may disagree with my colleagues on the other side of the
aisle, but I don't wish to traumatize them. I don't wish them harm. How
is it that we have found ourselves in this place where Americans call
and see other Americans as the enemy? I talk with Democrats and
Republicans across New Jersey. They may have disagreements, but they
don't want to traumatize each other.
This is not who we are as Americans, but it is what Mr. Vought wants
to inflict on the people who show up to work each and every day to
serve you, the American people. These are people who are trying to
serve you, not themselves, but they are being demonized; they are being
attacked, disrespected. And for those he can't traumatize out of a job,
he is going to try to change their status as employees of the Federal
Government so that he can push them out.
Maybe you have heard of something called Schedule F. If you haven't,
let me put it into simple terms: Russell Vought wants to, basically,
bring back the same policies that started the chain of events that led
to the spoils system. He wants to make it so that civil servants have
their protections removed, giving partisan leaders the ability to fire
them and put in their own political staff.
We are already hearing and seeing this. There are reports that those
at the White House and elsewhere are asking civil servants--asking
those in jobs or who are seeking jobs--who they voted for in the last
election, about campaign donations, and about party affiliation rather
than just their commitment to the Constitution.
My colleagues on the other side of the aisle would say that a
President should have the ability to appoint their own staff, and I
have agreement with that in broad strokes, but there is a reason we
have different kinds of government workers. It is because the
government is meant to do the work of the people, not be completely
bent to the will of a particular political party.
I speak from personal experience. I was proud to be a civil servant.
I believe I am actually one of only a handful of the Members of
Congress who currently serves who worked as a civil servant. I worked
under President Bush and President Obama. I served a nation, not a
party or a specific President, and that is the way it should be.
Frankly, the oath that I swore as a civil servant is the same as what I
recite here in this Chamber, and we could all be better off if we would
take the mindset and approach of our civil servants.
If we just let President Trump fire civil servants and replace them
with people like Mr. Vought or with people who Mr. Vought deems loyal
enough to the President to bring on board, the protections our Founders
envisioned to prevent the corrupting influence of power and the
corrupting power of that influence will completely override any ability
to make change for the rest of us, and we are seeing this in realtime
right now.
(Mr. CASSIDY assumed the Chair.)
This leads me to my third question: What is the impact of this
corruption and these attacks on our neighbors and our national
security?
The number of calls and emails and visits to my office I have gotten
over the past weeks has been overwhelming. First of all, I want to
thank everybody who has reached out to express their opinions and their
concerns. We would be better off if we had that kind of consistent
engagement from the American people, paying attention to the work that
is being done in government and having their voices heard. And I want
to thank my team for their service in being responsive to those
concerns.
Now, starting with a memo from OMB freezing Federal funding, there
has been panic across New Jersey and, frankly, the country about the
funds that we approve as Congress--funds that are your funds as
taxpayers. And they have been taken away from you by the Trump
administration.
I want to share a couple examples of the notes I have gotten from
people in my State who are being hurt by the systematic attempt to fire
civil servants and strip away programs that help working families to
clear the way for the Trump administration to let the well-off and the
well-connected take control, as they get ready to plan for their big
tax giveaway to the wealthiest Americans and the biggest corporations,
taking that away from the rest of the American people.
[[Page S683]]
I got a letter from Julia, a community leader who runs an
organization in central Jersey that helps kids and seniors and people
just trying to get by. She said:
The new Administration's ``pause on all activities related
to obligation or disbursement'' of funds for federal grants
to non-governmental organizations would have had an immediate
and negative effect on the low-income, working folks we all
serve across New Jersey.
She went on to say:
Children in Head Start and Early Head Start, quality child
care and after school services improve their physical and
cognitive development while their parents pursue employment
and training.
That these programs would struggle.
The WIC Nutrition Program provides essential access to
healthy foods for pregnant women and young children leading
to lifelong health benefits.
That this would be on the chopping block.
Pregnant women in our maternal health programs are less
likely to have preterm or low-birth weight deliveries, with
immediate and sustained health benefits and cost savings.
That that would be a detriment.
Medicare navigation services for seniors on fixed, low
incomes are helpful and enable them to live independently and
longer.
And that that is something they won't be able to count on.
For every child raised by a kinship caregiver, our state
saves thousands in foster care payments it would otherwise
incur with public dollars. It matters that these programs are
delivered by nonprofit organizations that provide a continuum
of services that support economic activity and make our whole
community more resilient.
This is one organization helping tens of thousands in our State. And
I want to share one quick figure that stuck out to me. Of the
approximately $13 million in grants they received, they estimate an
economic benefit to New Jersey of around $52 million saved.
So for my colleagues not convinced by our attempts to feed children
and provide healthcare to seniors, you might be interested to hear that
providing these services is the fiscally responsible thing to do as
well.
Let's look at the other impacts these draconian cuts could have on
New Jersey families. We should work to keep our communities safe. If
these cuts persist, grants to law enforcement and homeland security
activities will be cut off, putting us in danger.
We should work to be prepared for disasters like wildfires and
hurricanes. Public assistance and hazard mitigation grants from the
Disaster Relief Fund help communities quickly respond to, recover from,
and prepare for major disasters that might not go to the many
communities that are struggling after severe natural disasters.
As our neighbors in New Jersey continue to recover from storms from
even more than a decade ago--as Superstorm Sandy shattered so many
lives, continues to wreak havoc, and many of those families are still
not back in their homes--our government should never abandon them.
We should work to build the best infrastructure--roads and bridges
and public transit and more--take it into the next generation with
universal broadband and connectivity on so many fronts that are
necessary for all families. We should be able to work together to build
that infrastructure so that your families can get to work and your kids
can get to school and our businesses can thrive. But that funding is at
risk.
We should work to combat the fentanyl crisis and the mental health
crisis by investing in proven programs that save lives, programs that
could be on the chopping block if these cuts persist.
We should invest in lifesaving medical research so that this is the
last generation that will have to suffer through cancer, Alzheimer's
disease, diabetes. Cutting this funding means cutting clinical trials
at NIH Clinical Centers all across the country. The American people
deserve better than that.
We should work to provide the best education for our next generation.
As a father of a 7-year-old and a 9-year-old, I see every day the
impacts a good education has on them. I myself am a public school kid
from New Jersey, something that we are proud of in New Jersey, but
knowing that we still have so much more work to do to make that
available to everyone. This is a process we have to continue. You
cannot take it for granted.
Right now, Head Start programs that provide comprehensive early
childhood education for more than 800,000 kids are being frozen. With
teachers and staff not getting paid, programs may not be able to stay
open. Childcare programs could also be next to close without funding
being delivered. And our K-12 schools will lose critical funding from
title I, IDEA, Impact Aid, and other programs that can keep their doors
open and lights on in the middle of the school year.
From healthcare to small business support, to protecting our veterans
and providing support to those suffering through hunger, the examples
of the kinds of impacts and the people impacted by these cuts are
almost endless, and they are a reminder of who is on the losing side
when corruption and corporate greed win out.
And beyond the impacts on our communities, the impact on our national
security is real. And these stories of Mr. Musk and his band of 20-
somethings raiding government Agencies and making threats to workers
isn't some example of brave tech disrupters innovating their way to
efficiency and better results. In fact, what we are seeing from this
administration is quite the opposite: stories of dangerous
incompetence.
Late yesterday, the New York Times reported that the White House
ordered the CIA to send an unclassified email listing all the employees
hired over the past 2 years. Many of these new employees were hired to
help us deal with the rising challenges of China and Russia and of
other threats that we face out there. Now, they are effectively being
exposed, made vulnerable to our adversaries, because the Trump
administration simply wants to traumatize public servants.
We are doing the work of our adversaries for them. One example of
this is the attacks that we see against USAID. And as I have seen what
has unfolded this week at USAID, it actually reminded me of my first
moments in public service. A little over 20 years ago, I started my
very first day working for the U.S. Government. I remember walking up
to the doors of the Ronald Reagan building because I was starting my
first day at USAID.
I had just graduated college, and I was proud to have a chance to
serve this Nation and proud to serve at a place like USAID. And it was
the public servants there that showed me what community meant, showed
me that someone like me has every bit as much right to represent and to
work and serve our country--because it was something I wasn't sure
about when I first showed up to this town.
I remember stepping out at Union Station and seeing the beautiful
dome of the Capitol, and I was simultaneously inspired but also
terrified. I felt imposter syndrome: Who am I to be able to represent
and serve this country? I am a son of immigrants, from a family of
political nobodies, and I thought serving this country, working in
government wasn't for me.
I worked alongside public servants at USAID who helped with the
rehabilitation of ex-child soldiers in Uganda, others that worked on
combating malaria and helping save millions of lives. I was working at
USAID around the time of the Indian Ocean tsunami, if you remember that
catastrophe, a 9.1-magnitude earthquake killing an estimated 240,000
people in 14 nations across two continents.
And USAID stepped up, helping support those families living in dire
conditions, having faced a catastrophe unlike anything we had seen in
generations--but also building toward the future, creating early
warning systems across the world. It was USAID that helped deliver that
to countries all across this world to help better prepare for the next
disaster.
Later in my career, I worked at the White House National Security
Council. I was working on helping coordinate the counter-ISIS fight
about a decade ago. I remember one particular moment in August 2014
where we saw ISIS going and attacking a religious minority of a people
called the Yazidi people. And the Yazidis were forced out from their
communities. And they fled up on top of a mountain called Sinjar
Mountain, tried to take refuge there, while they were surrounded by
ISIS terrorists who were hell-bent on committing genocide and a mass
atrocity.
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And we in the U.S. Government were trying to figure out: What can we
do? What can we do to try to help save these people, tens of thousands
of people, trapped on a mountain, deep in enemy territory on the other
side of the world? Can we help them with humanitarian airdrops? Is
there a way we can build a humanitarian corridor off that mountain? Are
there ways in which we can try to protect them from being annihilated?
And you want to know who the first Americans were that went there
under dangerous circumstances, deep in enemy territory? It was a USAID
DART team, a disaster assistance response team, there alongside our
military, that helped the President of the United States make decisions
in the Situation Room about what to do next, about whether or not we
were going to decide to protect these people or not.
And the President, based off of the information provided by USAID,
made the decision to conduct humanitarian airdrops and be able to
provide overflight coverage and be able to provide support and security
to those people. And we were able to get them off that mountain, and it
was one of the finest moments I had ever seen in government. On those
days, I saw the best of us, and I saw a government that can inspire.
We see USAID working on disease eradication, on agriculture, global
health, humanitarian aid and economic growth, food security, clean
water; helping with the eradication of smallpox; saving countless lives
through simple oral rehydration therapies--things like that--that have
had immeasurable, countless benefits. It was a legacy that excited me
when I walked up on my first day at work as a recent college grad.
And then, just this past Monday, I walked through those same doors at
the Reagan building yet again, only to find it empty, apart from a
security guard who I went up to, and he told me that he had
instructions to bar and prevent any USAID employee from entering the
building that day, to bar public servants from going to the office to
do the work that they are entrusted by the American people to do.
It was just despicable, the demonization of public servants.
Now, let's remember why USAID exists. American global leadership has
always been hand in hand with our foreign assistance, from the Marshall
Plan forward, under both Democrats and Republicans.
Kennedy, in 1961, said:
The program requires a highly professional skilled service,
attracting substantial numbers of high caliber men and women
capable of sensitive dealing with other governments, and with
a deep understanding of the process of economic development.
He went on to say:
In the face of these weaknesses and inadequacies--
Of the previous system--
it is proper that we draw back and ask with candor a
fundamental question: Is a foreign aid program really
necessary?
The answer is that there is no escaping our obligations:
our moral obligations as a wise leader and good neighbor in
the interdependent community of free nations.
And he said:
To fail to meet those obligations now would be disastrous;
and in the long run, more expensive. For the widespread
poverty and chaos lead to a collapse of existing political
and social structures which would inevitably invite the
advance of totalitarianism into every weak and unstable area.
Thus our own security would be endangered and our own
prosperity imperiled.
So Kennedy went on and called for an effort to--he said, ``unified
administration and operation--a single agency in Washington and the
field, equipped with a flexible set of tools.'' And this was going to
be drawing upon ``the most competent and dedicated career servants now
in the field, and attracting the highest quality from every part of the
nation.''
He went on to say that he wanted to ensure that this was separate
from our military assistance, for instance, because, he said, ``our
program of aid to social and economic development must be seen on its
own merits, and judged in the light of its vital and distinctive
contribution to our basic security needs.''
He was clear in saying this was a bipartisan legacy, one that had
``moved forward under the leadership of two great Presidents--Harry
Truman and Dwight Eisenhower--and drawn its support from forward-
looking members of both political parties in the Congress and
throughout the nation.''
He said:
It's about American global leadership.
Now, there is a reason why the USAID headquarters is at the Reagan
Building. Reagan continued that emphasis on development and
humanitarian aid.
He said:
The ultimate importance to the United States of our
security and development programs cannot be exaggerated.
Here is another quote that is actually quite apt for this moment. He
said:
You know the excuses: We can't afford foreign aid anymore,
or we're wasting money pouring it into these poor countries,
or we can't buy friends--other countries just take the money
and dislike us for giving it. Well, all these excuses are
just that, excuses.
Reagan said:
[T]hey're dead wrong.
Now we have a Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, saying USAID takes
taxpayer funds and ``spends it as a global charity irrespective of
whether it is in the national interest or not the national interest.''
But do you know who else said that the work of USAID isn't charity,
like Kennedy, like Reagan? It was Marco Rubio just a few years ago.
``Foreign aid is not charity,'' he said. ``We must make sure it is well
spent but it is less than 1 percent of budget and critical to our
national security.''
Rubio went on to say:
We don't have to give foreign aid, we do so because it
furthers our national interest. That's why we give foreign
aid.
He said:
Anyone who tells you that we can slash foreign aid and that
will bring us balance [to our budget] is lying to you.
Foreign aid is less than 1 percent of our budget. It's just
not true.
Look, there can always be space to review our foreign assistance. I
worked in these organizations. I know there are places that we can try
to fine-tune, make more efficient, make more effective.
If there are programs that Congress and Members of Congress have
questions about, that is ripe for our oversight role. But to undermine
USAID as a whole is flat wrong.
We see this with Secretary Rubio's first trip this past weekend. He
went to Panama and complained about Panama accepting support from China
through the Belt and Road Initiative. Yet he then goes on to help Trump
and Musk gut USAID--a critical tool that we have to counter Chinese
influence. It very much exposes that this ``America First'' foreign
policy really means ``America Only.'' If we continue down this path, we
will find ourselves alone.
Over the years of our global power, our strategic advantage has
always been in building coalitions. In this dangerous global
environment, this ``America First'' approach leaves us distracted from
the real threats and challenges. This is about American global
leadership.
I think about my own family. My parents were born during the Korean
war. They grew up--the very first Americans they ever met were American
servicemembers and other Americans that were there to try to help Korea
rebuild.
It wasn't just America's resolve in the war; it was about what
happened afterwards in terms of helping provide assistance, Americans
taking action to feed kids like my parents.
As I said earlier, 50 years ago, my parents decided to come to
America. They knew nobody here--not a single person. They didn't know
anybody in the entire Western Hemisphere of planet Earth, but my
parents moved here to America because America meant something to them.
It is because they met the best of us--Americans abroad, willing to
work in dangerous places, in tough circumstances, wanting to try to
live out the values of our country.
We learn it is not just the GDP of our Nation that makes us a leader;
it is the projection of our values, and ultimately it is our people.
Now we are pulling back our foreign assistance. We are closing the
door to immigrants like my parents. This is unfortunately a moment of
American withdrawal. That is not what the American people want. They
wanted a government that was focused on them instead of billionaires
and the biggest corporations, but they understand the importance of
American leadership.
When I talk to leaders and officials in other countries--I remember
there was one situation where I talked to one,
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and he said something to me that really just stuck in my mind. He said:
I just want you to know, when I talk to other leaders around the world,
when we talk about America--this official I was talking to--we ask
ourselves a question: Is America a reliable partner?
He asked that question knowing full well what the answer is, and we
know what the answer is, which is we are not the reliable partner we
should be.
This isn't just about USAID. We know USAID--that these attacks are
only just the beginning. It is the canary in the coal mine. Next, it
will be the Department of Education or Justice or FBI or elsewhere,
schedule F, an effort to kill the civil service, return to the spoils
systems of 200 years ago, and it goes back to Russell Vought.
I want to emphasize that quote I said earlier because it is worth
emphasizing in this moment. He said:
We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When
they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go
to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.
We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can't
do all the rules against our energy industry because they
have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them
in trauma.
When you listen to those words, doesn't that sound like exactly what
happened over the last week? I get these phone calls and texts from
people at USAID, people that I worked with, texting me and telling me
``Things are very grave,'' talking about how disrespected they feel.
It saddens me greatly to think that Trump and Musk and Mr. Vought and
others are relishing in that anxiety, fear, and pain that they are
purposefully--purposefully--trying to create.
In an interview with Tucker Carlson, Vought said Trump ``has to move
executively as fast and as aggressively as possible with a radical
constitutional perspective to be able to dismantle that bureaucracy and
their power centers.''
Now, why do you think they need to move so fast? It is because when
you want to grab as much power as you can, you want to do it before the
American people understand and see what is happening. They feed off the
apathy and the helplessness. They want people to be disengaged. They
are intentionally using terms like ``shock and awe''--a term of war
that we had used, and now they are using that against the American
people.
I have been saying this line a lot lately where I say: I believe that
the opposite of democracy is apathy.
We have to stay engaged. There is a massive division in our country,
no doubt about that. It is not just between Democrats and Republicans;
it is between those who are engaged and those who aren't. And these
actions are built to paralyze you with anger, fueled by disinformation
and distraction to make you disengage, but don't let them.
So what comes next? All we have to do is look at Mr. Vought's past
statements to know exactly what is coming.
He said:
What we're trying to do is identify the pockets of
independence and seize them.
When he was talking about the Federal Reserve, he went on to say:
It's very hard to square the Fed's independence with the
Constitution.
That quote of his led me to ask him directly in a confirmation
hearing if he believed that the President has the right to set interest
rates in our country, and Mr. Vought refused to answer. He couldn't
answer something as simple as that. The answer should be very easy. It
should be, clearly no.
I talked to a number of leaders at the Fed recently, and they really
emphasize the longstanding bipartisan agreement that we do not want
someone approaching critical decisions about fiscal stability in
America based off of what is best for the next election for that
leader. We don't want to see that kind of politicization. The goal
always needs to be towards the stability of our economy and the
responsibility towards growth and prosperity.
Vought--he just believes in power and not just any kind of power. He
believes in an all-powerful President--something our Founding Fathers
specifically avoided. We don't want a monarch. We have coequal branches
of government. But is that what the American people have seen since
January 20? No. We have seen blatant power grabs, illegal actions,
disregard of laws passed by Congress, chaos.
But, remember, as you see this, chaos is their plan. It is Trump's
plan. It is Mr. Vought's plan. It is the reason why they are going
after public servants, and it is the same reason that happened 200
years ago, because public service is about serving the people, while
corruption, we see, is about serving themselves.
Public service was the answer to countering corruption in the 1800s,
and it is my belief that it is the answer to the current threat to our
democracy.
When you see these attacks on public servants, when you see what is
unfolding before our eyes, that is not the golden age that Trump tried
to talk about in his inaugural address. It is not the ``Make America
Great Again'' slogan that he has been using. It goes back to another
phrase that he used over the campaign where he talked about ``the enemy
from within''--those three words, ``the enemy from within.'' That is
what this is all about. Painting our public servants who swear an oath
to protect our Constitution as the enemy.
Earlier, I talked about my parents coming to the United States 50
years ago. Now my family--we think about the next 50 years. I am now a
parent of a 7-year-old and a 9-year-old, two little boys. I will be
honest with you, I worry about what kind of America my boys are going
to grow up in. What will it look like? What will this country look like
when they are my age? So that is why I am here. That is why I stand
here on the floor of the Senate. I am here because I refuse to believe
that my kids and their generation are doomed to grow up in a broken
America. I still believe in the America that inspired my parents 50
years ago to travel halfway around the world, and I know we are not the
only family out there that believes in this.
There is a hunger in this country for reform and change. People don't
want to see the status quo, but that doesn't mean they want to hand
over our country to corruption, hand it over to patronage, hand it over
for another generation of the worst inequality our Nation has ever
seen, where every day it gets worse.
As I mentioned before, we just took on and fought against machine
politics in New Jersey. I heard it straight from the people; they don't
want to see that kind of rise of broken machine politics across our
Nation. Corruption is the quickest way to take the strongest, most
powerful nation in the world and send it into decline.
In just a little over a year, we will have our 250th anniversary as a
nation. And as I close here, I want us to reflect on that--250 years. I
hope we can commit, as a nation, to have that more than just about
fireworks; that we use that as a moment to try to rededicate ourselves
to the mission of this country, to the purpose of this Nation, and why
it began.
After the January 6 riots, the way I framed it is I said I was going
to dedicate the rest of my life to try to solve one singular question,
which is: How do we heal this country? I believe the answer to that
question is ``service.'' That we need a new ``ask not what your country
can do for you'' moment, a reminder that we are part of something
bigger than all of us. Instead of attacking public servants, we should
be promoting and encouraging them.
And I hope on our 250th anniversary, we rededicate ourselves to this
project, build a national service program, invest in civics education.
We need to reject divisiveness that is infecting our Nation and restore
a sense of trust.
We start by rejecting this dangerous nomination to do just that.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Hawaii.
Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, I just want to say how much I have come to
admire, in a short period of time, the junior Senator from New Jersey.
That was a--that was a real speech, you know. We are, obviously,
spending 30 hours on the floor to oppose Russ Vought's nomination, and,
you know, a lot of people have to come here and speak for 60 minutes or
30 minutes or 90 minutes, and we will take anything, right? Some people
just read whatever they have got, and we appreciate all of it because
we have to take the floor, and we have to maintain presence on this
floor.
But that was a beautiful, well-crafted speech about American
democracy,
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about his life story, about his dedication to public service. So I am
very honored to work alongside him.
Mr. KIM. Thank you.
Mr. SCHATZ. Last week, without any advanced notice, OMB issued a memo
freezing all Federal funding in order to end wokeness, ``Marxist
equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering
policies.'' Like, I just want to--we can pause right here, right?
This is not the kind of thing that the OMB is supposed to say, right?
It is the Office of Management and Budget. They are not supposed to
have an opinion about wokeness or not wokeness or anything like that.
It is just a very odd way to view what is otherwise a kind of
technocratic position, and that is what is very important about this
particular OMB and this particular OMB Director. He does not view it as
merely administering the budgets and the spending bills within the
government. He views it as a power center through which all of his
ideology and all of Project 2025 is going to be implemented.
Like, to think of the Office of Management and Budget as a place to
fight wokeness and Marxist equity--I don't even know what any of that
means, but I think a lot of us know the previous OMB Director. She was
really well-regarded by both sides of the aisle. I think the Presiding
Officer actually knew her from Louisiana. And, you know, like, she was
left of center, but she would never say anything other than what is
sort of straight down the middle as it relates to the Office of
Management and Budget.
And that is--why would we take the floor for the OMB Director? Well,
because he is the author of 2025. He is essentially the architect
behind the Federal funds freeze. And in Project 2025, among all the
things that they talk about, they also, like, devote a huge passage to
how important OMB is and how powerful the next OMB Director should be.
Just so happens that the author of that section saying the OMB
Director should be, like, pretty close to all-powerful and,
essentially, representing the President in all things policy and
budget, so happens that the guy that wrote that passage is the guy that
is going to be in the job to do that. So, I mean, that seems kind of
neat. I think OMB should be all powerful; also, I think I should run
OMB. So that is what we are talking about.
But just understand what happened last week was not some attack on
wokeness--whatever the hell that actually means. It was an attack on
all of us. It really was an attack on all of us. All Federal funding
was suspended. Millions of Americans around the country were in the
dark, how they would access basic things--healthcare, education,
childcare, small business loans, VA loans, disaster relief, opioid
treatment. Everything from road repairs to cancer research was shut
down across the country.
And you have to ask, aside from the very obvious fact that
withholding funding from Congress that has already appropriated funding
is plainly illegal, you have to ask: What on earth does so-called
wokeness have to do with repairing a road? Or letting people refill
their prescriptions at a community center? Or helping survivors of a
flood or wildfire to try to rebuild their lives?
Is a child having a healthy meal wokeness? Is that DEI? Is that, I
don't know, gender ideology, or is that the Green New Deal? Like,
seriously, what the hell are we doing here?
A President is allowed to make policy. A President is expected to
make policy. But they can't take a law and repeal it by Executive
order, and especially as it relates to a spending law. Those laws are
not actually optional, right?
And there is a very simple way for a President to get his way in the
spending context. The Republicans control both Chambers of the
Congress, the House and the Senate and the Presidency. They had a big
victory--I didn't love it, but they had a big victory. So if they want
changes in spending policy, they can just do it the American way. And
so this is like a combination of laziness, impatience, a not-
inconsiderable splash of illegality.
But, I mean, this is amateur hour. You want to change something. You
want to fight wokeness--again, whatever the hell that actually means.
If we have gotten to the point where shutting down a construction
project is, like, attacking wokeness, then the actual word has ceased
to mean anything. And DEI is this other, like, epithet they throw at
things, but it is--the dragnet has caught all of Indian country, most
Native people everywhere. Do you know what they did? They literally
``control F'' searched for keywords and then pulled those things out.
They don't know anything about these programs. They pulled these things
out if it said ``gender'' in it, or if it said ``equity,'' or if it
said ``inclusive,'' or if it said ``climate,'' and they just, like,
pulled it out and said: We are not funding that.
First of all, what a goofy way to make policy. Seriously, what a
goofy, like, childish way to make policy.
Second of all, just to reiterate, you don't get to do that. If you
want to make a change in a law, you have to make a change in a law. You
can't just write a memo saying: I don't like the law; therefore, it no
longer exists because I won.
It is true that the President won a free and fair election,
absolutely a free and fair election. I didn't like the result, but I
was absolutely prepared to tolerate policy outcomes that I didn't like.
But this is not that. This is them, like, skipping a step. And by
skipping a step, I mean literally skipping the legislative branch.
And so there has been a lot of consternation on the Republican side;
I mean, a lot of consternation. Rightwing Republicans, moderate
Republicans--all of them are a little, like, I don't know about this.
But you can't stand up for the legislative branch in secret. You
can't uphold the Constitution privately. At some point, you have to
stand up for your prerogatives. And, listen, there is a lot of very
talented people here, actually. I don't agree with them. Some of them I
don't even like, but supertalented people, high-achieving human beings
who could be doing something else.
And my view is, like, if you are going to forfeit your constitutional
prerogatives, like, go be--I don't know, whatever. Do something else.
Do something more interesting. Do something more lucrative. Do
something more easy. But if you are going to be here and you are going
to go through all the pain of running for election, of getting beat up
by everybody left, right, and center, of people complaining about you,
of putting your family through challenges--I am serious. Why would you
do that and then forfeit, like, I would say two-thirds of the power
that you are in possession of. You ran, presumably, to achieve some
measure of influence so that you could actually change things. And now
there is just a collective shrug of the shoulders.
So the problem with Mr. Vought is twofold: One, we have a government
with three coequal branches, and Congress is the article I branch that
holds the power of the purse, and we decide what to fund and at what
levels. And in the face of an illegal action, the courts can step in
and strike it down, as several judges did with the original funding
freeze memo.
And this is one of the things, to the extent that there are at least
20 or 30 people still watching, Donald Trump and his team are running a
huge bluff. It is not that they are not causing damage. I know they are
causing damage. But understand that what they want to do is multiple
illegal things and then see if they can get a few of these things to
stick.
They have articulated that pretty clearly. Mr. Vought has said that.
JD Vance has said a version of that. And just say: We are going to defy
the Federal law and see whether we can come up with some judges who
will give us a different interpretation.
And so the reason that that is an important thing to say is not just
for me to be another Democrat saying: I can't believe he did this--but
to understand Donald Trump is not the only person in the world who is
not constrained by Federal law.
We saw last week the Federal funding freeze was found to be illegal
and it was suspended and there is an injunction against it.
Last week--or maybe it was 2 weeks ago--the birthright citizenship
nonsense was rejected by a Federal judge. Even what is happening with
the access to the Treasury payments is being constrained in the court
system. So I am
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not, like, Pollyanna about the status of the court system. I am very
frustrated, especially with the Supreme Court, and I do not expect, if
it is at all a close call, for it to break our way.
But these are not close calls. These are clear violations of Federal
statutory law, and so we don't want to give up in advance. The roots of
democracy are still strong. And, like, my old now-friend, one-time
adversary, the Former Speaker of the House in the State of Hawaii
Calvin Say, he used to say:
Be like the bamboo, bend but don't break.
So we all have to understand that Donald Trump is a disrupter, and it
is going to be rocky. But this idea that he is just going to rack up
wins and there is nothing anybody can do about it is a dangerous
premise because it can become self-fulfilling--people out on the
streets, people in the courts, people in the legislature. We are out of
power, but we are not powerless.
So everybody needs to understand that Russ Vought represents a very
specific view of Presidential power, which is essentially unitarian,
executive--whatever you want to call it. But it is a view that once you
win, you are basically a monarch and that all those niceties--rules--I
mean literally rules, right? You make a law, and usually the Agency has
to make rules to kind of explain specifically how to implement any law.
They view that as just an impediment to the inherent constitutional
power of one man.
This is also consistent with the way that the tech bros view
government. They view government as unnecessarily slow, too many checks
and balances.
Why doesn't the government run like a business? Let me tell you why.
Because if you ran government like a business, you would shut down
every rural hospital. If you ran government like a business, you would
actually not have a national transportation network; you wouldn't have
a library in Kai. If you ran government like a business, by the way,
most of the money would be spent in the cities. So we have a system of
government that we all have to be committed to defending.
I want to spend a little bit of time with some letters that I
received from constituents last week.
I just wasn't expecting it all to go sideways so quickly. After the
OMB memo came out that said Federal Agencies must temporarily pause all
activities related to the obligation or disbursement of all Federal
financial assistance--what a crazy--can you imagine being a person who
previously was at OMB--this person is not new to this--issuing a memo
saying: Pause all activities related to obligation or disbursement of
funds. I knew immediately--I was like, oh, my God.
There are these portals, and they are basically websites. If you are
the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands or the Hawaii Department of
Transportation, almost daily, you are doing draws. You have your little
code words. You have to send your little invoice, and then there is an
electronic transfer of money to a clinic or a construction project or
the Veterans' Administration or whatever it is. Those portals were shut
down, and everybody was in an actual panic. I am not exaggerating.
People voted for Trump for all sorts of reasons, but one of the
reasons that kept coming up over and over: They thought he would bring
down the price of eggs, the price of groceries, the price at the pump.
What they did not vote for was to lose their ability to get a home loan
or healthcare or childcare or a healthy meal or a good education for
their children.
I want to read a couple of letters from constituents:
I am reaching out with a heavy heart as a program planner
and student adviser who works directly with students across
several Maui County schools. I also want to include
representation of our sister programs, which collectively
provide vital support for low-income, first-generation Native
Hawaiian students.
This year has been one of the most difficult in recent
memory for our students and their families. The devastating
Lahaina wildfires left deep scars in our community, and many
of our students are still working to recover from the
emotional, physical, and financial toll that disaster caused.
For many of them, this catastrophe was a breaking point
where they saw their homes, their schools, and even their
sense of safety and stability go up in flames. Despite
overwhelming loss, these students are still resilient. They
are fighting to stay afloat, to keep their dreams alive, and
to continue their education, despite the trauma that they
have endured.
These support programs have been there for them every step
of the way, offering them emotional support, academic
assistance, and a safe space for students to process their
grief and focus on the future. Through our programs, they
have found a sense of community and hope.
Our academic advisers and mentors have been working
tirelessly to ensure, even in the wake of the fire, that
these students know that they are not alone, that there is a
path forward.
But now we face a crisis that can further jeopardize these
opportunities for these young people. OMB has imposed a
Federal freeze on funds set to take effect at 5 p.m. eastern
time. This freeze will halt the disbursement of federal
funds, including those essential for our programs.
Without access to these funds, we will be unable to
continue providing services that our students need to heal,
thrive, and succeed. The support that they so desperately
need--academic tutoring, mentorship, college prep, and a
strong network of peer support--will be in jeopardy.
For many of our students, this isn't just a program; it is
a lifeline. These students are not just looking for a way to
finish high school; they are looking for a chance to rebuild
their lives, to break the cycles of poverty and hardship, and
to find their footing in a world that has been turned upside
down. To take away the programs that have supported them
through the wildfires and their ongoing recovery would be
devastating.
Is this program woke? Is it DEI? Is it Marxist? What the hell are we
doing here? What the hell are we doing here? Why would we cause this
amount of pain? Some sense of like fiscal discipline? We are not saving
the money.
On top of everything else, thousands and thousands and thousands of
employees--not just at USAID but at the Small Business Administration
and at the CIA--were sent home. By the way, because of civil service
law, we can't lay them off. It is not a private sector situation. You
can't lay them off as a matter of law. So we sent them home to not
work. We are shutting people out of their emails to not deliver service
to the public. Awesome. Let's run the government like the worst
business ever where we are just going to pay people not to work.
I am an eighth grade student at Halau Ku Mana in Honolulu,
Hawaii. I am writing to ask for your support in protecting
federal funding for Native Hawaiian education. The proposed
freeze on federal financial assistance under executive memo
M-2513 puts programs like ours at risk. Without them,
students like me will lose access to the cultural education
that connects us to our identity.
At Halau Ku Mana, our learning is different from other
schools. We don't just sit in a classroom all day. We malama
aina, meaning care for the land. We learn from cultural
experts and study through real experiences. Programs
funded by federal grants allow us to go on educational
journeys, restore fishponds, grow food in kalo taro
patches, and learn traditional skills. These experiences
teach us about our past and prepare us for the future.
I guess it was too woke.
As your constituent, I am writing to express strong
opposition to the White House order to freeze federal funding
across all federal agencies. Millions of families will lose
access to services provided by SNAP, TANF, and HUD housing
assistance. Millions of students in Head Start, grade
schools, and colleges will lose access to classroom funding,
school resources, federal loans, and Pell grants. Millions of
local firefighters and public safety officials will lose
federal grants and resources needed to protect communities.
Millions of veterans would lose access to VA mortgages and
home loans and suicide prevention services.
Is that woke, Marxist ideology?
You see, what is happening is they want to dismantle the public
services that we all rely upon. Can you imagine a week ago--I guess it
was a little more than a week ago--air traffic controllers were told to
quit? And we have--I think it is a 30-percent vacancy rate. We are
short of air traffic controllers.
I understand. I have been in politics, I have been an appropriator
for a while. Sometimes people cry wolf: If you don't give us this
money, it is going to be dire. But the air traffic controller situation
is quite dire, and we saw the impact of being understaffed last week.
So the language about woke and Marxism and all that stuff is a smoke
screen. What they truly want to do is dismantle whatever the Federal
Government does--if it is firefighting, if it is the CIA, if it is the
National Weather Service, if it is VA home loans.
Their Project 2025 is to--they call it dismantle the administrative
state, but really what they want to do is provide less service to
people. The reason they want to do that is they have a yawning $1
trillion to $1.5 trillion gap that they have to fill because they want
to provide a $1 trillion to $2 trillion tax cut
[[Page S688]]
for the wealthiest corporations that have ever existed--literally have
ever existed. They have a bunch of hardcore fiscal conservatives on the
House side that just won't do it on a deficit finance basis, so they
have to find savings, and that is what this is.
They really are cutting the stuff that matters to regular people, and
then they are going to book that as savings, and then they are going to
shove it in the direction of billionaires and billionaire corporations.
I see my friend Senator Murphy is here. It is a little bit like old
times to see you on the floor at 2 a.m. It used to be easier when I was
on Hawaii time, but I have been here for a couple of weeks, so this is
actually late for me.
I just want to recognize that we have most Democratic Senators
speaking at some point through this 30-hour period, but Murph decided
to take the 2 a.m. to 5 a.m. shift.
I hope you haven't had too much Mountain Dew at this point.
I would be happy to yield to the Senator from Connecticut.
With the permission of the Chair, I ask unanimous consent to engage
in a colloquy without having to go through the Chair every time.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. MURPHY. Just for the record, Senator Schatz, it is Diet Mountain
Dew. Mountain Dew is disgusting. Diet Mountain Dew is acceptable.
Mr. SCHATZ. Can I say one thing about--I did not know that this whole
Senate is powered on Celsius. I never had Celsius before. I was walking
around offering people coffee, and everyone had a Celsius.
Mr. MURPHY. I think it is two or three times the amount of caffeine
that a Red Bull has. There is a reason why the conversion is
happening--not that I have an intimate understanding of which beverages
have which amounts of caffeine.
But I am motivated to get up at this point because I think you hit on
something really, really important. There are a number of different
lanes that the policy we are talking about and the agenda of Russ
Vought occupy, but I thought you just talked about a really important
one, which is the effort to take anything left in the common space and
shift it off to the private sector to become a commodity.
Much of what we are discussing today is an effort to raid services
that help poor people and kids and middle-class families and just bank
that money so that they can afford this giant tax cut that is going to
go primarily to the very, very wealthy and the corporations.
Because Mr. Vought and the other folks who wrote Project 2025 and the
other people that are populating the administration still believe in
this long-discredited theory of trickle-down economics--which is that
if you just give a ton of money to the very, very richest, then
eventually that money will trickle its way down to everybody else. That
is not how economics work. It was a fraud from the beginning. It is
just intellectual window dressing for the rich and the powerful to get
more rich and powerful.
But there is this other lane you were talking about, which is finding
the last remaining elements of public services that we decide to do
together not for profit and turn it into a source of profit. TSA is one
of those targets.
So Project 2025, written in part by Russ Vought, says TSA--this is
the Transportation Security Administration; this is the Agency
responsible for the security at our airports--should just be outsourced
to the private sector; that some private equity firm should be running
security at our airports.
To a lot of Americans, that idea is frightening--the idea that we
would just turn security at the airports over to an entity that is
doing it only for profit. It seems like we should have a public mission
at the heart of airport protection. But you were reading this letter
from, it sounded like, a student who may not see what is coming for our
school system. This is--I was going to talk about this later, but I
will bring it up now.
This is a pretty long article on a massive play being made by private
equity into education and, in particular, into elementary education. It
is kind of hard to think about this--but it may be coming--and that is
a private equity firm or a hedge fund or an investment firm owning your
child's elementary school.
Right now, private equity investors are lining up to put money in
funds because they believe they are going to have a chance to bid on
your child's elementary school or to bid on your child's middle school.
We are literally going to outsource the education of our kids to
investment firms.
If you read this article, it is absolutely chilling because the folks
who cover the private equity industry are kind of, you know, used to
being unapologetic about the fact that the only thing that matters is
money, right? So, if you read this article, there is not a single word
in here about quality or about making sure that, you know, there aren't
50 kids in a classroom. It is just about the private equity industry
realizing that ``Oh, my gosh, there is a ton of money that we can pull
out of our elementary schools and our middle schools. This is a
wonderful source of profit for us.''
They are not mission-oriented; they are profit-oriented.
So in addition to this agenda about stripping bare services in order
to create the illusion that you are saving money so that you can pass
along a tax cut to the very wealthy, this is also just a simple play to
take every element of public services that haven't been commoditized
and turn them into a commodity so that somebody can get rich.
I don't know. I just--I get sick at the idea of my kid's middle
school becoming a source of profit. I am a capitalist. I believe this
country is great because we allow people to get fabulously rich off of
entrepreneurship and great ideas--but man, I just think there should
be, like, a couple of things that we don't do for profit. I just think
there should be a few things that we do because it is just the right
thing to do, whether it is police protection or fire protection or
building a road or educating our kids or protecting our airports. Like,
not everything has to be for profit.
So I just wanted to pick up on this really important element of the
2025 plan and the Trump administration's agenda.
Mr. SCHATZ. I just want to drill down on why the profit motive is so
dangerous to public service.
If you are in the business of trying to figure out where to drop a
Starbucks or whatever, you have got to figure out where the people are,
right? You would not drop a Starbucks in a place where it is, you know,
a 300-person town. Fair enough. You don't have to drop a Starbucks
there, but you do need a health clinic somewhere around there, and you
do need a public library somewhere around there, and you are going to
want a fire station somewhere around there. And if everything becomes a
question of profitability and arithmetic and ROI, what is going to
happen is that rural communities are not going to get what they need
because, if you do that arithmetic as if you were a private sector
investor, I promise you that the only place anything makes any sense to
do it is in the cities, and that is what they are going to do. They are
going to eviscerate public service across rural America.
You know, I think the Senator from Connecticut knows this:
I care very much about NOAA, the National Weather Service. Part of
Project 2025 is this idea that we should privatize NOAA. Like, these
people launch satellites; provide us with data; and then people can
make, I mean, basic plans of what they are going to do that day. But
aviation depends on it; farming depends on it; shipping depends on it.
And the backbone of this is, like, a pretty expensive data collection
enterprise and satellite-launching and maintenance enterprise. Then, in
the back of that--right?--like, there is AccuWeather and these private
sector companies, and they will put a skin on it and give you an app
that tells you what the weather is, but they are all using the NOAA
data. They are using the National Weather Service data. What they want
is to be able to monetize this public service. It is always that--it is
socializing the losses and privatizing the gains.
I think that is what these folks want to do, but--they have always
kind of wanted to do this. They have always had this point of view, and
some of our Republican colleagues, like, have a
[[Page S689]]
point of view where, at the edges, we could have an argument about what
ought to be a private sector enterprise or what ought to be a public-
private partnership. Like, those are all kind of within the bounds of
normal political discussion. But that is not what this is. This is,
like, arson.
Mr. MURPHY. Yes.
And, to your point, when profit is the only motive, somebody loses
out as in your example about, you know, a health clinic in a rural
area. It is true also of education, right? I mean, it is pretty costly.
It is not monetizable to have a school in a very rural area where
teachers have to drive long distances; where there, you know, isn't a
high volume of kids. So, if you live in a world in which the private
sector gets to run our schools, then you are just going to have the
haves and have-nots. You might have in-person education in the cities
or in the suburbs, but those private equity firms will figure out
pretty fast that it just doesn't make a lot of sense to run a bricks-
and-mortar school in a rural area, and those kids will just be
constantly telelearning. Those kids will just be staring at their
screens all day long.
Mr. SCHATZ. If there is any internet.
Mr. MURPHY. If there is any internet.
So there are places, when it comes to government and government
services, for which there is a proper role for the private sector. We
have long had public-private partnerships. Inside the Department of
Defense, I think we have very well married together a fundamental
public mission, right? We don't privatize the Army--right?--with the
private sector mission. The technology for the Army gets developed a
little bit faster if the private sector has a role to play; but what we
have realized is that there are limits to the degree to which the
private sector wants to own unprofitable services.
One of the grants that got turned off before the court injunction was
issued was a grant to community health centers. Community health
centers, which are not-for-profit healthcare centers that are primarily
funded by the Federal Government, often exist in the places where there
is not a profit motivation to run healthcare, either in rural areas or
in very low-income areas of cities. They run on very, very thin
profit--excuse me--on very thin margins at all. They don't make profit.
They are on very thin margins. So when they miss one payment from the
Federal Government, they are talking about immediately laying off
workers.
Mr. SCHATZ. I used to run a social services agency. We had a couple
hundred employees, and we delivered mental health services, and we were
a Medicaid provider. It was back in the day when we weren't yet
receiving electronic payments, and I would go to--like, I would wait
for the mail every Wednesday and Thursday to see if we had to dip into
our line of credit to make payroll. We ran a successful agency, and we
were one of the bigger social services agencies on the island of Oahu--
the most populous island in Hawaii.
But that is what this is like. Even if you are a pretty solid social
services agency or health clinic, it is always hand to mouth. You don't
have some, like, cash reserves. So when they turned off that spigot, it
was instantaneous, right?
I think part of what is happening with 2025--and excuse me for, you
know, maybe diverting our conversation slightly--is that there is just
a lot of very ideological people in cubicles who haven't been outside
of Washington, DC, and are actually thinking in abstractions, and they
truly believe in their heart of hearts--it is the billionaires, first
of all, but it is also some other people who wrote the document who
believe--I mean, deeply--that no one is going to miss the Federal
Government if it doesn't deliver these services.
I think one of the things that has given me some comfort in the last
couple of weeks--and, you know, it has been a rough couple of weeks--is
that, boy, it was instantaneous, right? People were freaked out across
the country--red States, blue States, rural, urban, suburban, exurban.
Like, everyone was, like, what the hell, right? Like, I might have
voted for Donald Trump or I might not have, but, like, nobody wants
this. You are at the helm of the Federal Government, and then you just,
like, within the first 2 weeks, go, like: I am going to destroy this
place. Isn't that what you wanted?
No. People didn't vote for Donald Trump so he could destroy the
Federal Government. They like that he is a disruptor. They like that
he, you know, doesn't talk like the rest of us. They were pissed about
the cost of eggs and groceries and gasoline and all the rest of it. I
understand all of that, but I don't think this is what people signed up
for. Like, I would like this guy to shut down the Medicaid portal. I
would like for Head Start to have difficulty making payroll. I would
like for construction projects to be staged and then send everybody
home because there is no money to pay them. Like, this is not the kind
of disruption that people thought they were getting.
They thought it was going to be like, I am going to make those
Democrats uncomfortable or I need a businessman to, like, not--you
know, to ``think outside of the box.'' But this is not that. This is
arson, and people see it for what it is. It wasn't one of those things
where we are arguing about the impacts, and then 3 years from now
everybody figures out what the impacts were. It was instantaneous, and
it was pretty violent, right? I don't mean physically violent, but I do
mean, like, Whoa! What are you doing to us across society--right?--and
all under this, like, Marxist ideology, woke, DEI? Like, it is just
like you put a bunch of--like, ``Please say cliche stuff about
Democrats'' into ChatGPT and then, like, spit out an Executive order.
Mr. MURPHY. Listen, if not for lawyers who brought lawsuits, if not
for judges who issued injunctions, we would be in a different kind of
crisis today. So we are talking about public outrage at an executive
action--that was midwived, in part, by the nominee--that only existed
for about a day before it was enjoined, before it was stayed. But if
that Executive order had actually been fully implemented, there
literally would be, today, rural health clinics that would be shut
down. There would be hundreds of thousands of children who would not be
in preschool tomorrow morning. There would be a national catastrophe.
Whether or not these billionaires don't need many government services
unless their houses catch on fire and even though they don't understand
that people actually rely on government-funded services sometimes, this
would have been an absolute nightmare and disaster.
(Mr. SHEEHY assumed the Chair.)
So we need to remember that while we feel like we are in a
constitutional crisis right now, that crisis would be fundamentally
different if not for the court's stepping in at this moment.
Let me just raise another issue because I think you started by
talking about the assumption that the young men in these cubicles made
when they were writing Project 2025, when they were implementing these
orders. I mean, there is this wild assumption about people who do
public jobs. The contempt that this administration, these billionaires,
and the authors of Project 2025 have for public employees is just
extraordinary.
Who are public employees? OK, you can envision somebody sitting in a
cubicle at a desk in Washington, DC, pushing papers. That is a public
employee. But so are teachers, so are police officers, and so are
firefighters.
Here is what Russ Vought said about the Federal workforce, he said:
When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want
to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the
villains. We want to put them in trauma.
He is talking about researchers at NIH who are trying to cure cancer.
He is talking about people who are trying to just get special education
funds to our schools to make sure that our kids get a fair shot at
learning. He is talking about the people at NOAA who are just showing
up to work every day, trying to make sure we are prepared for natural
disasters.
The contempt they have for people that get up every day and don't go
to work for a bank or a hedge fund or private equity company but
instead go to work because they just want to make the world better or
their community better or their country better is absolutely
extraordinary. It is as if these folks have never actually spent any
time with a teacher or a firefighter or an NIH researcher.
Mr. SCHATZ. I think about my constituents in the IFPTE who work at
[[Page S690]]
the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard. I think about 20 years ago, I guess,
the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard was low-performing. It was not great.
There was the BRAC Commission to determine if we were going to get rid
of some of these bases and installations, and quite reasonably, people
were looking at Pearl Harbor as one of those to possibly get rid of
because it was so low-performing.
They have, in the great tradition, by the way, of--after Pearl Harbor
was bombed and they quickly built a fuel storage facility and rebuilt
ships in, like, months when it was expected that it would take a couple
of years, what they did was literally miraculous and caused us to win
the war. Without it, we wouldn't have won the war. Those guys dug in,
understood there was a need for improvement, and now it is the best
performing naval shipyard.
Are they woke? Are they DEI? What are we doing here?
I want every American to share our sense of outrage on behalf of the
nurses and the firefighters and the technical workers and the welders
and the boilermakers and the TSA agents and the Coast Guard men and
women. These are patriots. By the way, some are also in a cubicle
pushing paper. That paper probably matters. It might be your VA
benefits. It might be your Social Security benefits. It might be your
ACA subsidy.
Nobody likes a big bureaucracy. I am a Kaiser member. God bless
everybody who works there, but I have my frustrations getting through
to someone, navigating the system. So it is easy to hate anything that
is big, whether it is Verizon or Comcast or Kaiser or the Federal
Government. You don't have to love everything that happens in any big
organization, and you don't have to think it is perfect. It is not
perfect.
The Federal Government needs reform. I actually think there are some
really interesting opportunities to provide better service using AI. I
am all in if you want to make the government work better. But DOGE is
kind of dressing up what they are doing as some sort of effort at
efficiency and a better delivery of service. That is actually not what
they are doing.
You don't terrorize your employees. Anybody who has run an
organization larger than two people knows that if you are going to get
stuff out of someone, then you can be tough, but you can't actually
terrorize them.
Mr. MURPHY. ``We want to put them in trauma.'' What CEO says that
about their workers?
Mr. SCHATZ. They would get--I was about to swear. It is the Senate
floor. I will not. But they would get canned. They would get
immediately sacked.
Mr. MURPHY. Their board of directors would get rid of them.
Mr. SCHATZ. Like, this guy is nuts. Get rid of him.
Mr. MURPHY. Yes.
Mr. SCHATZ. Even in the private sector, just so we are clear--because
there are also differences between the public and the private sector in
terms of civil service protections and unions and all that. I am happy
with that because, by the way, the unions are some of the people who
are standing up not just for the rights of the workers but the services
they provide.
I think this is a little bit of a--look, I know not everybody is
paying super close attention to all aspects of this, but I think in the
abstract, people might have gone, like, yeah, maybe you should cut the
Federal workforce by X, and there is probably a lot waste, fraud, and
abuse. Conceptually thinking, yeah, who cares? Then suddenly you
realize, oh, no, that is a VA home loan. Oh, I actually don't want a
shortage of air traffic controllers. No, I don't want a private company
collecting my biometric data as I go through the airport.
So there is kind of a broad recognition, there is a waking up to the
idea that destroying the Federal Government is doing damage to the
United States of America. It is not doing damage to woke something. It
is not doing damage to the left. It is just that the Federal Government
has an important role in society whether you like it or not.
We can argue about the size and the scope of that Federal Government,
but that is not what we are arguing about anymore. They are out to
destroy it. They don't want to make it 4 percent smaller over a period
of time or 20 percent smaller; they want to commit arson.
I want to talk about USAID. I understand USAID is not an animating
issue for, like, most voters. Fair enough. You have got your own
problems, and imagining money going elsewhere is sometimes hard to
swallow. But I want to set that aside, whatever your view is of foreign
aid, which you and I both strongly support because instability
elsewhere is dangerous to the United States of America.
But setting all of that aside, they literally just shut everybody out
of their email and told them all to go home. We were standing there
trying to enter USAID to just conduct some oversight and ask what is
happening, and we were told by the security guard that no one was
there. No one was there. So this isn't, like, some efficiency effort;
they are sacking everyone.
Now I think it is 1,400--it might be more--Foreign Service officers
across the planet who got an email. They are everywhere. They are at
the Embassies in Europe, in Asia, in Africa, in Central America--
everywhere--and they just got an email saying: Come home. You have 30
days. If you want an exception for any health reason or any specific
circumstances, you can submit it to us, but otherwise, you are out.
These people have their kids in school. These people are there to
respond to disasters. These people are there to build relationships on
behalf of the United States of America.
Imagine the kind of person who takes the Foreign Service exam and
then says ``I want to work in Ghana'' or ``I want to work in Ecuador on
behalf of this country.'' Those are legit patriots, and they get
deployed wherever they get deployed or sent--I shouldn't say
``deployed''--they get sent wherever they get sent, and they try to dig
in. Their kids are going to the American school in whatever city it is.
It is challenging, but it is exciting, and it is important. Then they
just get an email saying: We are recalling you, and there is no choice.
That is not an efficient way to do anything; that is just arson.
Mr. MURPHY. And they dressed that up for, like, 2 days, suggesting
that they were reviewing USAID for efficiencies. For 1 day, they said
they were folding it into the State Department because it would be more
efficiently run inside the State Department. That was never the plan.
I mean, I would just sort of have to call out the fabrication. The
plan clearly from the start was to eliminate USAID, and they willfully
pretended for a handful of days that the agenda was efficiency when the
agenda was, in fact, the wholesale elimination of the Agency. The
stated on-the-record reason for the elimination of the Agency is
bananas--bananas. They are calling USAID a ``criminal organization.'' I
mean, it is extraordinary.
I was on a radio program the other day, and the interviewer wanted to
talk to me about the constitutional crisis and whether legally the
President can dismantle USAID. The answer is no, he cannot. But the
interviewer was like: You know, they say it is a criminal organization,
and let's just set that aside for a minute.
I was like: No, no, wait a second. Don't let them get away with the
idea that USAID has to be shuttered because it is a criminal
organization.
Apparently, the conclusion that they have come to--the allegation
that they are making is that because many of the USAID employees in
their free time may support Democratic candidates for office, that it
is a criminal enterprise, because you are apparently not allowed to
have any political views.
There are certainly many other Agencies and Departments and public
functions in which the majority of employees support Republicans.
Public services are staffed by people who have a variety of views.
But the rationale on its face for getting rid of the Agency is just
absolutely--
Mr. SCHATZ. Is that it has too many Democrats.
Mr. MURPHY.--is absolutely absurd, that there are too many Democrats.
So I guess we are going to shut down any Agencies that have 50
percent plus 1 Democratic affiliation, and we are going to hold on to
Agencies in which the employees are 50 percent plus 1 Republican.
It shouldn't matter. I don't care whether a Republican or a Democrat
is
[[Page S691]]
teaching my kid. I don't care whether a Republican or Democrat is
staffing the domestic violence shelter or putting out the fire at my
neighbor's home. And most Americans don't care.
But this war that has been waged--I mean, that is what ``woke''
means, right? ``Woke'' really just means that a service is being
provided by somebody who has views or a lifestyle that I don't agree
with.
We have never approached public service like that. We have decided as
a country that we are going to have these people called civil servants
who get up every day to serve the country no matter what their
background is, their ethnicity, their race, or their political views,
or their religion; that their reason for getting up in the morning and
going to work is to just serve everybody--to serve everybody.
We are now retreating to this world in which, no, the only legitimate
people to work for the Federal Government are people who share the
political views of the President.
The purge is happening in so many different ways.
Mr. SCHATZ. Well, I want to just sort of pause on that because,
Chris, you are right. This is a purge.
I was sort of yelling in the Press Gallery--maybe not the best idea,
but it was at a press conference--and I just basically pointed at all
these people whom I have a lot of respect for in the media, but I am
getting quite frustrated because this is actually not that hard to see
if this were happening somewhere else.
We are both on the Foreign Relations Committee. We do a lot of
travel. A lot of times, you sit down with some foreign leader--a
Minister or a Prime Minister or another legislator from another
country--and if you can see autocratic behavior like that, then it is
literally on your talking points to encourage them to not engage in
purges, to maintain a free media, the importance of an independent
judiciary, blah, blah, blah. But when it happens to our own country, we
just can't see it. If this were happening in Belarus, we would be like,
ah, creeping autocracy. If this were happening in a Middle Eastern
country, we would know what this was.
So I think you are really, you know, hitting the right point as it
relates to public service.
I think about the U.S. military, which has been always, always a
bastion for integration.
Mr. MURPHY. All sorts of integration.
Mr. SCHATZ. All sorts of integration. And now we are deciding that
some people are not eligible to serve, not because they can't meet the
requirements but because somebody finds it weird.
We are going back not 5 years but 20 or 30 in terms of--by the way,
this anti-DEI and anti-woke thing, I just want to drill down on it just
for a moment.
If what you don't like about DEI is the whole consultancy where
someone comes into your workplace with a PowerPoint or whatever and
makes you feel guilty for your personal ethnic background, I have been
in some of those meetings, and there is a lot of eye-rolling in there,
and they are very ineffective, and they do not increase diversity,
equity, or inclusion. I am sure there is good versions of it.
But there is a lot of people who got frustrated with DEI because when
they think of DEI, they think of a kind of goofy consultant guy telling
everybody how to divide everybody in the workplace and how to be
sensitive in the workplace, and a lot of people are thinking, I am
fine, I am nice to people, I don't harass anyone, I don't discriminate,
why are you hectoring me about this issue?
But what DEI has become is anything that is related to civil rights,
right? And so as these people, mostly kids, are getting access to the
Federal payment system, they are clearly just looking for words like
``gender,'' right?
So I think in the NSF, National Science Foundation, or CDC, I forgot,
research, they are no longer allowed to say gender and--
Mr. MURPHY. The kids say they can't use the word ``female.''
Mr. SCHATZ. Yeah. So the problem is though, you have to do research
on females in order to understand what is happening with females.
Mr. MURPHY. No, no, no. That is DEI.
Mr. SCHATZ. Yeah, yeah. This is the crazy thing.
By the way, different, I am an Ashkenazi Jew, right, I do actually
have--there is a thing called--I think it is called Tay-Sachs or
something that I have a proclivity to having it, so we have to have a
special check. And the reason we know that is we actually do the kind
of medical research to know how people of different ethnic extractions
and different sexes will respond to medicine and what they may need.
African Americans need certain things that Jewish Americans don't
need. And this isn't some woke DEI thing; it is like a biological fact.
But now because these guys are, I mean, childish, right? They are not
just saying: Hey, we should have a colorblind workplace; they are
saying: You can't say sex--the word ``sex''--in medical research.
Mr. MURPHY. You can't say female; you can't say gender.
I have the list here. It is absolutely patently absurd, right? Do you
remember, OK, so that is an element of DEI, but there is another
element of DEI.
So when that tragic plane crash happened, within hours, Donald Trump
was hustling to organize a press conference for one purpose and one
purpose only, to blame the crash on DEI.
Now, what did he mean in that context? It is crystal clear what he
meant. He meant that if you employ women or Black people or Latinos or
Asian Americans, the country is maybe in jeopardy, maybe, maybe the
country is not safe if White men aren't in charge.
And so sometimes, DEI means the consultancy that legitimately some
people think has gone a little bit overblown. And sometimes, it means
we just can't discuss the differences that we actually have with each
other, but sometimes, it just means real old-fashioned misogyny and
discrimination and prejudice, right? It stands for a lot of things,
most of which are pretty sick and creepy and outdated.
Mr. SCHATZ. And we have the Fair Housing Law, we have equal
employment law, like you are not allowed to discriminate in housing.
And so just to understand, they are not trying to just like cancel
these programs related to DEI; they are trying to cancel the civil
rights movement, like in statutory law, and defund anything that
mentions a woman or mentions gender or mentions civil rights, right?
And these are like long-settled questions.
And so everybody needs--we don't need to spend all night talking
about this, but we do need to--like to me, when I saw that thing where
it was maybe DEI was the cause of a plane crash, I thought, this is
when the DEI thing jumped the shark. And as I see these pages, you can
Google ``jumping the shark'' later on.
Mr. MURPHY. I don't think they know jumping the shark.
Mr. SCHATZ. Don't Google it. Google doesn't work anymore.
But anyway, this is the end of this as a useful way to understand
something. It is now just an epithet that you hurl when you are not
sure what else to say, right?
And so, look, back to Russell Vought for a moment, he is part of a
crew, right? And it is Homan, it is Brendan Carr of the FCC, who is now
trying to intimidate the media.
The Project 2025 crew is--I mean, they are really rolling. They are
populating the Cabinet of the President. And the President was clever
enough during the campaign to disassociate himself with Project 2025,
but that did not last long because about two-thirds of his senior
staffers are closely affiliated with 2025. This isn't some like
ancillary thing; they are like in it.
Let me read to you something from my local FOX affiliate:
Hawai'i's rural healthcare at stake as federal funding
freezes
The freezing of federal funds has thrown many nonprofit
organizations in Hawaii, especially those providing
healthcare services, into a state of uncertainty. Amongst
these organizations is the Maui AIDS Foundation, which serves
some of the most vulnerable populations on Maui. Linda
Puppolo, executive director of the [Maui AIDS Foundation], is
deeply concerned about the potential consequences of this
freeze.
Many clients fear being exposed in other healthcare
settings due to stigma, which makes [Maui AIDS Foundation's]
discreet, nonjudgmental environment crucial.
``We have quite a lot of clients who are terrified right
now because they feel like they will be exposed somewhere
else.''
The foundation's operating budget is about $2 million, but
a significant portion of that
[[Page S692]]
[comes from federal funding]. Some grants are directly
administered, while others flow through state agencies.
One of the most at-risk programs is the housing subsidy for
people living with HIV. And Puppolo fears the worst.
Without the housing grant, ``That's over $1 million of our housing
subsidies right there.''
People are going to be homeless.
In addition to the financial strain, Puppolo expressed
frustration with the lack of transparency . . .
``There's a gag order on federal employees, and we can't
get any straight answers.''
And by the way, this has been the case, I am sure, Chris, you have
seen this in Connecticut, Russell Vought has already done it; he is not
even confirmed. He is not even a government employee, but he is clearly
already at the helm, and he has clearly already achieved his objective,
which is to terrify and terrorize public employees.
And so one of the things I have been saying--and it is easy for me to
say, I understand that, but I will tell you that the Federal employees
I have talked to who got that e-mail saying, ``fork in the road,'' were
like, now I am not going anywhere, right?
And I know 20,000 people say they signed up for it, but I was
thinking about this, 20,000 people out of 2 million--first of all, I
don't know if that is true. And certainly, it is unclear to me whether
that would be honored, but that is actually 1 percent of the workforce.
Mr. MURPHY. It is pretty normal attrition.
Mr. SCHATZ. That seems like normal attrition in a 9-month period, so
I think what we just did, is of the people who were planning on
retiring anyway, we just gave them like a 6-month payout. So we get
nothing because they get paid through September--if this thing sticks,
very unclear. But if this thing sticks, they get paid through September
but just retire early, and we don't achieve any sort of turnover
savings. So I just think these people are trying to terrorize the
workforce.
Mr. MURPHY. And all the Federal employees who have been furloughed
from the USAID employees to all the folks who are doing DEI to the FBI
agents, they are still getting paid right now, right?
So for the last week, all those USAID employees were sent home, they
were doing nothing to protect America, and they were still getting
paychecks.
Mr. SCHATZ. Well, and just to be clear, they don't even have their e-
mail accounts working, so think about that.
First of all, it is a little weird to send people home and say, We
are still operational, and then they can't even get their dot-aid, dot-
gov e-mail to work, and they are not permitted to use their private e-
mail to conduct public business.
And so I know someone who said: I am reading spy novels, like, I am
just killing time. And we are paying them.
Mr. MURPHY. It is almost like the agenda isn't efficiency.
Mr. SCHATZ. Right.
Mr. MURPHY. It is like if you read about all the people who were
going to quit anyway, but quit and got a payout and the people who are
at home locked out of their e-mail but still getting paid, it is almost
like there is a different agenda.
And listen, you are right that the agenda is to terrorize public
employees, they have made it absolutely clear, to try to keep them
silenced and to try to make everybody decide that there is a different
line of work that would be better for them.
But you know what, I know the folks that work at Prudence Crandall
domestic violence shelter, and they didn't go into that line of work
because it is lucrative, right? They didn't go into that line of work
because it is an easy job. And when they get home every night at 5, it
is just really easy to unplug. That is like the hardest work in the
world to show up every day and work in a domestic violence shelter,
dealing with women, mostly, at the worst moment in their entire life,
having just fled a home in which they were regularly abused, often to
the brink of death, by their spouse or their boyfriend.
And so, yes, they are scared today because they got told a week ago
that their funds were being cut off. And that domestic violence shelter
in New Britain, CT, it can't run for more than a week or so without
Federal dollars.
Guess what? Our domestic violence shelters in America do not make any
profits. They do not make a profit.
News flash: Your taxpayer dollars actually do pay for domestic
violence shelters. We need to actually fund that publicly because that
is not something that you can make a big profit on.
The women who are fleeing violence don't show up at the door with a
check to pay for the shelter that they need for a couple days. Those
people are scared. They are feeling harassed. They don't know whether
the doors will remain open, but they are not going home. They are not
going home because they have decided to live their life in a way
devoted to a mission--to a mission.
And so this is a moment to just say thank you, frankly, to all of the
folks who work, either for not-for-profits that rely on government
funding, who are public employees doing the good work, who are staying
on the job.
I don't begrudge anybody who decides that, listen, I am better off if
I just go do something else amidst this harassment campaign, but I am
thankful, on behalf of abused women in Connecticut, that there are
people who are deciding to stay on the job, despite the fact that they
are getting threatened and harassed by the Trump administration and, in
particular, the nominee that we are discussing today.
Mr. SCHATZ. Well, I think I have been, on one level, trying not to
overreact, but I also think there is a little danger of underreacting.
And I have been talking about this a little bit with my brother, who is
a professor with an expertise in former Soviet Union countries,
Kazakhstan in particular. And so in this town--and you know this,
Chris--in this town, the worst thing is to be overreacting, like that
is just very not cool for the cocktail party and pundit circuit.
Everything is always going to be fine, and if you are alarmed, you
are shrill; that means you are not savvy. And the savvy thing is always
that this will land fine. And I feel like we are sleepwalking into a
very dangerous place.
And so as I think of my theory of change, just mine, I don't presume
to know exactly what we should do, all of us, I know in the legislative
context, we have got to do a couple of things: We have got to find
opportunities--we only have 47 of us, so we have to find opportunities
to find three or four Republicans.
And I have had some very constructive conversations with Republican
appropriators who are super uncomfortable with what is going on. Now,
they might not be quite ready to go public, but they are certainly
trying to figure out how they are going to exert their authorities and
reestablish that it is coequal branches here.
So part of our strategy has to include: Find Republican support where
we can. I think part of our strategy has to be, where we can't, to not
make it easy for our Republican colleagues as they try to march to the
beat of Donald Trump's drum.
I think we also have an obligation to just speak out and explain to
the public, especially when we are powerless to stop things, what
exactly is happening and why it is bad. But the rest of society has a
role here too. I think the media has an obligation to stop
underreacting, to stop treating super unconstitutional, illegal,
``thuggy'' acts as if it is just, like, the President proposed there be
an AI commission or something. The way these things are talked about,
it is like: President attempts to reform USAID.
It is, like, no, that is not what happened. They stormed in, and they
took over the servers. They stand over people and tell them what to do.
And if those people don't do exactly what the DOGE folks say--or, yeah,
say--they are relieved of their duty on the spot.
And then they sent everybody home, and then they got into the secure
conference facility, the SCIF. Like, this is not to be characterized as
something kind of mundane and, oh, this week there is a markup on the
social media bill. Like, this is different, and we have got to treat it
differently.
And there also is a role for the Federal employee--and, to your
point, where they can, because I don't presume to know anybody's
personal situation, and a lot of people have other personal stuff going
on, and I can't ask for them to be brave on my behalf.
But there are some people who are deeply committed and deeply
patriotic
[[Page S693]]
and care about the mission and care about public service, and all I
would ask you is: Stay if you can. Stay if you can. And if someone
tries to shove you around and if someone tries to tell you to do
something that feels like it might not be permissible, don't do it.
Talk to your union. Ask them whether this is authorized by law. Stick,
because they are counting on you, sort of, vanishing from the scene.
And then the other thing--and, Chris, you and I have talked about
this. You are the one that pointed it out to me. The difference between
this week and last week is that individual citizens are physically
showing up to protest what is happening all across the country.
I mean, we have been here in Washington, DC, and we have seen it at
the Treasury building and at the Senate--they call it the Senate
swamp--and elsewhere. It has been a minute since people have shown up
in person this organically, and I think that is a really important
aspect of any mass movement to preserve democracy.
It can't just be your legislators fighting in the legislative
context. We only get credibility if there are people behind us.
And now I think--look, I think we were in a bit of a slumber,
frankly, and I think the American public was in a bit of a slumber.
There was this sense that some people were excited about the election;
some people were sad about the election. But everybody was kind of not
animated in the same way that they were prior to the first Trump term.
And over the last week, people said: Oh, my goodness, this is real.
And by the way, even Republicans who were sort of imaging that this was
all going to be manageable and that you are just going to get your
conservative outcomes with some mean tweets. That is what people
thought they were going to get. I really believe that. Good people that
I know thought: This guy is going to be good for the economy. He is
going to be provocative on line, and that will be that.
Mr. MURPHY. And, listen, you had Trump's first term as evidence,
right? Obviously, President Trump says a lot of things that he has no
intent of doing. News flash: We aren't going to invade and occupy Gaza.
But he says a lot of things
Mr. SCHATZ. I am a no on that one.
Mr. MURPHY. I would say 98, 99 percent of Americans are a no on that.
In his first term, he said a lot of things that he never even tried
to do. He said a lot of reckless things that he never actually followed
up on.
And during the campaign, he said many things that sounded a little
crazy to folks. He said: I am going to be a dictator on day one. He
said the No. 1 enemy of the people are Democrats, and I am going to use
the military to take care of the enemy within, which he referenced as
his political opposition.
And I think many Americans said: Do you know what? I heard him say a
lot of stuff like that in his first term. He is not going to really do
it.
So you are right. After the election--we had an election; he won. And
people assumed that things were going to be different. There was going
to be a little bit more topsy-turvy. Maybe this country needed to be
shaken up a little bit. But they actually didn't believe he was going
to act like a dictator. They actually didn't believe he was going to
violate the Constitution so brazenly in the first month. They didn't
believe he was going to shut down funding for preschools and for
medical research.
Mr. SCHATZ. Or pardon everyone in the January 6 event. You know this,
and you have talked about this on the floor.
Mr. MURPHY. Right.
Mr. SCHATZ. They recommend that he pardon, essentially, the people
who improperly entered the building.
Now, I would have opposed that.
But then he just said: You know what? Pardon them all.
Mr. MURPHY. Because it was too hard, as he explained, to try to pick
out the really violent ones from the nonviolent ones.
Later tonight, I am going to read through some of the very easily
accessible stories of the really violent protestors. It wasn't that
hard to just pick out a handful of people who literally beat police
officers over the head with poles, that stuck Tasers into the necks of
police officers until they had a heart attack. Like, it wasn't hard to
identify those people and say: You know what? Those people should stay
in jail. Those people should complete their term.
The American public didn't think that he was really going to absolve
everyone who invaded the Capitol and beat the hell out of police
officers that day.
And so the reason that it has taken a minute for the people to rise
up--and, by the way, we have seen big crowds in DC, but, you know, that
doesn't really mean much if there is nobody out there in the American
public. Today, there were pretty big rallies in all 50 States. This
weekend, there are going to be many more.
It is because people, even many who voted for him--but many who
didn't and just wanted to sort of respect the choice of the
electorate--are now realizing that this is so much more dystopian than
the first term was and a crisis that is going to immediately impact
them in a real way. It is not somebody else's problem. It now seems to
be my problem when a billionaire has access to my Social Security,
Medicare, and tax refund data. That sounds like something that actually
potentially hurts me.
Mr. SCHATZ. Yes, I think you are exactly right that we are--look,
every day I try to sort out, of the 20 outrages, how many can I even
focus on? And to your point, the Gaza thing was deeply offensive,
right? Deeply offensive. But also probably not worth devoting a ton of
bandwidth to because, by some accounts from people I think who do know,
it is pretty clear to me he does not have a plan. He was just literally
talking.
And so sometimes we are going to have to not quite pull a punch, but
not ``hair on fire'' freak out because that is not--to your point, that
is not happening, right? That is not happening.
They would need an appropriation. They would probably need a war
authorization. And, by the way, occupying a country in the Middle East,
it doesn't usually work.
Mr. MURPHY. It often doesn't go well.
But here is the difference, though, getting back to the nominee,
right? Russ Vought is a serious person with the ability to execute on
plans.
Mr. SCHATZ. Yes.
Mr. MURPHY. And so his plan, which is to destroy elements of the
Federal Government and State governments and the nonprofit sector that
help regular people; his plan to try to intimidate and harass Federal
workers; his plan to try to make folks who work in government pass a
loyalty test to the administration; his plan to destroy access to
reproductive healthcare--I mean, all of that is being put into place as
we speak.
So, you know, what makes this moment so dangerous is that they kind
of learned their lessons. They wanted to do a lot of these things in
the first term, but it all kind of snuck up on them really fast. They
had 4 years to put into place a plan called Project 2025 so that they
could, starting on day one, destroy services for the middle class and
poor people, root out of government anybody that doesn't swear a
loyalty test, and endorse violence in a way that hopefully suppresses
political dissent.
That is not working right now, and I don't think it will work. But
Russ Vought is dangerous because he has got radical ideas, and he
actually has the means to implement them.
Mr. SCHATZ. He is a smart dude. He is a smart dude, and he is a
serious guy and actually knows the government. I mean part of the
problem with the DOGE folks is they don't really know what they are
even looking for. So they literally just, like, ``Control F.'' Oh, does
it say ``gender''? Maybe this is bad; maybe this is woke. That is
terrible and irresponsible, but it is also incompetent.
But Russ Vought is not incompetent. He has an actual project, not
just Project 2025. But he has been like this for a while. He has a view
of the government, which is that the bigger the government is, the less
freedom you have.
And Ben Sasse, our old friend and colleague who is now retired from
the Senate, he had that sincere view, right? And it was a kind of
radical view. But it was sincerely held that--I
[[Page S694]]
mean, I would go to him and go: What about rural health clinics? And,
like, he was consistent--nope--right?
What about Federal firefighters?
Counties can take care of that, right?
I don't want to characterize all of Ben's views, but--what about the
Federal Emergency Management Agency?
Nope, we have got to get rid of that.
And FEMA is a really good example of--there are just some things
that, if you are going to have a country, that your Federal Government
has to do, because I think of two examples: When the town of Lahaina
burned down, the County of Maui is kind of small. It is a couple
hundred thousand people. It is not a poor county. It has some tax base
and all the rest of it, but it is not capable to respond to a disaster
where a whole town burned down, was incinerated to the ground in like 3
hours--2,200 structures. So 2,200 structures, basically, between 6 and
midnight, all of them gone--110, 109 lives lost.
And so the Federal Government comes in when--you know, this is how a
disaster declaration works. The county or the State submits something
to the President of the United States and basically says: We can't
handle this. This disaster is bigger than our ability to handle it,
right?
And then the President signs the disaster declaration, and then that
releases FEMA to go and be on the scene.
And if there is no FEMA, there is no recovery. FEMA prevented--I got
into some fights with FEMA about the way they were doing it, but they
are good humans. They are trying their very best to alleviate
suffering.
And in the immediate wake of those wildfires, nobody went hungry,
nobody lacked a place to live. And it is going to be a long recovery,
but people's most basic needs were met.
And when I think about Western North Carolina, in particular, on some
level it is worse. It was bigger. It was more structures. It was
actually more property damage, and it was so vast. I mean, just the
portion that got flooded is like the size of small States. And these
little towns are not even as big as Maui County, right? These are 500
people, 700 people, 2,000 people, 75 people.
If the Federal Government doesn't come in and help folks like that
through FEMA, then you are just leaving people, I mean, really to fend
for themselves.
And over the last year, these disasters keep getting worse and worse.
I suppose we can pretend it is not climate change. Even if you want to
pretend it is not climate change, you have to concede that something is
out there that is causing us to have more frequent and more severe
disasters.
So let's set aside the question of climate and what we ought to do
about it. Everybody knows my view about it, and everybody knows yours.
But the fact is we had about $150 billion worth of damage last year.
And so I am not prepared to tell small States, small counties, little
towns that they are on their own. But that is what Project 2025 wants
to do.
Mr. MURPHY. So one of the things that is confusing for everybody,
including us, about this moment is that it is not clear whether there
is consistency or inconsistency.
So you may be right that they are going to try to just destroy FEMA
writ large and erase from existence the ability for our country to come
together in a patriotic way to try to help out our neighbors when a
natural disaster hits.
But it can't be coincidental that they launched the idea to destroy
FEMA in California, when a very blue State was responding to a terrible
disaster, right? That doesn't seem coincidental.
It doesn't, also, seem coincidental that the first big infrastructure
project that the President came out and said that he would be defunding
was also in California, while an equally big city-to-city, high-speed
infrastructure project in Florida is on no one's radar screen. And so
this may be a consistent nationwide assault on public services, but it
also may be--or in addition may be--simply a grift in order to provide
services and grants in States that are loyal to the President--meaning
they voted for him--and to deny services to States that are not loyal.
We have not, historically, cared at all whether a natural disaster
hit a State that sends Democrats or Republicans to the U.S. Senate. We
have sometimes had fights over how much money and when we are going to
authorize disaster assistance, but we have never fought over whether a
blue State or a red State should get it if the other party is in charge
of the U.S. Senate. All of a sudden, that seems very relevant. That
seems very relevant.
And part of the reason why the Constitution does not allow the
President to have power over spending decisions is because that leads
to a fundamental potential for corruption.
Mr. SCHATZ. Before you came on, Senator Kim talked about taking on
the New Jersey political machine. Political machines everywhere work
pretty much the same. If you behave well, you get your stuff. And pork
is distributed based on political alliances. I think you are right to
notice that the President of the United States wants to sort of create
a Tammany Hall vibe nationwide.
I will say, just to take your own advice, that on, say, withholding
disaster aid from California, that feels like just--like he is just
ranting, and he is not actually in a position to do that because the
Stafford Act provides that this is a disaster and that once we fund it,
they have to help, and they will help. They are not permitted not to
help. Now, he may stretch the boundaries of the law, but I do not think
he is in a position to withhold aid.
Now, do I think Mike Johnson is going to initiate a disaster
supplemental for California? No. But the terrible fact of the matter
is, there will be disasters going forward, and they hit blue States and
red States equally. You just never know.
Mr. MURPHY. But what Trump says, whether or not he ends up
implementing it, sets the agenda for his party. So what is the Speaker
talking about and what are many of our colleagues talking about with
respect to aid to California? Yes, they are very worried about setting
a precedent in which a State doesn't get aid if they are of the
opposite party of the party in charge, but they know that they have to
be loyal to the basic premise of the President. And so they are talking
about conditions; that California is going to have to change its laws
to, I would assume, more align itself with Republican priorities in
order for it to get money, which would be a perversion of Federal law
and precedent and very dangerous.
Mr. SCHATZ. It is not changing laws regarding disaster preparedness
or infrastructure; it is changing laws on voter ID.
Mr. MURPHY. Right.
Mr. SCHATZ. That is one of the things I have noticed about this
President is just the unapologetic ``I have leverage, and I am going to
use it'' aspect of it and nobody bats an eyelash. If you behaved like
that, you would get lit on fire, appropriately.
So I think one of the things that I have noticed over the last couple
of weeks is there's--look, Democrats need to understand, this guy is
unusually talented. And we used to say ``what a buffoon,'' whatever--
maybe--but he is a very talented politician in a very unconventional
way. But he is also not infallible. He is capable of making incompetent
decisions. He is capable of being beaten legislatively and in the court
of public opinion. Right now, he is in the saddle because he has all
these EOs, all these Executive orders. But, eventually, events
overtake. And a President, usually, is responding to events rather than
creating conditions on the ground.
So part of the thing that I want everybody to kind of understand as
they feel their frustration, as they kind of process and try to
metabolize the flurry of nonsense coming at the American people, is
just to understand it is not always going to be like this.
They don't have 1,200 days' worth of Executive orders ready to go.
And as these things are--some of them are like wishes and could have
been a tweet. Many of them are illegal and, in some cases, the
President does have pretty raw authority. Tariffs, he can do; and there
is not much the legislature can do about it.
My favorite EO was--I think it was a Presidential memo, not an EO.
But after the plane crash last week, they did a memo that this was Joe
Biden's fault.
Mr. MURPHY. That is right.
Mr. SCHATZ. I was like, now we are cooking. He was like, I want
another EO to just say it was Biden's fault. That is like when they
admitted that
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what they are doing is when all you have is a hammer, everything looks
like a nail. They understand that their agenda is so unpopular--their
agenda is so unpopular--that they can't even get it through the
Congress of their own party.
Mr. MURPHY. As happened in 2017.
Mr. SCHATZ. As happened in 2017. They couldn't even do the things
that they promised they were going to do, except for the tax cuts.
So I think they understand the fundamental weakness of their
position, which is we have a President who is likely to do very
unpopular things. And although he is not unpopular at the moment, he
is, relatively speaking, very unpopular for a newly inaugurated
President, historically unpopular for a newly inaugurated President.
And it is going to get worse because everybody knows the way he
conducts himself does not age well. So they are in a hurry.
But it is not always going to feel like this; it is not always going
to be like this. They will lose in court. They will lose in the court
of public opinion. I am not suggesting we are not about to experience
some bad public policy outcomes and that people will not suffer. A lot
of bad stuff is about to happen. But the roots of democracy are deep;
and like my friend Calvin Say says: ``Bend but don't break.'' I want
everybody to understand, ``bend but don't break.''
I am so proud of Chris for coming here and staying from 2 to 5. I may
go get a little more coffee and come and join you, or I may take a nap.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Connecticut.
Mr. MURPHY. Brian, thank you very much for your work in organizing
this effort and always great to be with you on the floor today. I will
not hold it against you if you go take an actual nap and get some rest.
You exerted a lot of effort to make sure we were all here united--
Democrats on the floor, raising the alarm.
I am going to try to go through the case as to why I do think this is
a red-alert moment; the reason I was so glad to jump in and join you
this evening and why I volunteered for the 2 to 5 shift tonight. I am
very grateful for Senator Welch. We had a gap from 5 to 6, and I hear I
may not have to go the full 4 hours.
But I certainly have 2 hours of material here because I think
something really, really dangerous is happening to this country right
now; something that is worthy of an overnight session on the floor of
the U.S. Senate; something that every American needs to be talking
about.
I first want to just go through all of the events and developments of
the last 2 weeks that matter because Senator Schatz was referring to a
phenomena that I think is important. Donald Trump and Stephen Miller
and Steve Bannon and other people who advise him are pretty
unapologetic about this strategy. They call it ``flooding the zone.''
The idea is they are going to make so much news, they are going to make
so many outrageous statements every day, that it becomes really hard
for Americans to understand what is real and what is not real, what is
important and what is not important.
I am not saying that the President's comments last night on Gaza
won't have deep impacts; they will. I can guarantee you that Hamas and
Hezbollah and other terrorist groups in the Middle East, right now, are
using the President's comments to recruit. The idea that the United
States is coming to Gaza to invade, occupy, cleanse, and level Gaza--
that is bulletin-board recruiting material for terrorist groups.
Our country is less safe today than it was yesterday because that is
easy recruitment material for the groups that we are fighting. It keeps
them alive at a moment when they were on the run. It separates us from
our allies, because despite what President Trump said last night that
everybody agrees with the plan, that was not true. Not true. Nobody
agrees with that plan.
Benyamin Netanyahu doesn't want America coming in invading and
occupying Gaza. No Middle Eastern leader wants that. The President said
it; it is not true. He says many things that are not true. It makes
Americans look like a laughingstock around the world because everybody
knows we are not invading Gaza. So when the President announces that he
has come up with a brilliant plan that everybody supports and every
world leader knows he is not telling the truth and he is never going to
do it, it undermines American credibility and reputation around the
world.
I am not suggesting that the President's absurd statements last night
about Gaza don't hurt America; they do. But he is not going to do it.
He won't get support from Congress to do it, and nobody in the American
public wants him to do it.
I can't get into the President's brain, but I suspect it was part of
this strategy, this articulated purposeful strategy to try to confuse
people about what is real and what is not real. I don't think it was
coincidental that the President was making this outrageous, outlandish
statement about Gaza last night on the first day that you really felt
like the American people had figured out the game. The people turning
out to protest were big--bigger than they had been since the election.
All of a sudden the President comes up with a new plan to invade and
occupy Gaza.
I think one of the exercises that I want to go through in my time
today is just to tell you the pieces of the agenda--an agenda set by
Russ Vought--that matter; that are the most dangerous; that are the
ones that you should pay attention to.
I wouldn't spend a lot of time worrying about the drama over the
Panama Canal or Greenland, just like I wouldn't worry too much about
the President's statements on Gaza.
But here is what I would worry about. I am clearly going to cover
ground that has been covered here today. But I just want to lay it out
because I have more time to do it than anybody else, so I will be a
little more thoughtful and comprehensive about it.
At the top of my list is the President's decision to seize control of
Federal spending. So this was his Executive order from a few days ago
that suspended all Federal spending. For that day, everything seemed to
be turned off. Even the Medicaid program was not open for
reimbursement. Head Start programs were not getting money. No State in
the country could access dollars for different projects that they run.
Not-for-profits weren't receiving funding.
Now, the order was for 90 days, but if you believe that, I have some
bridges to sell you. Even if it was for 90 days, that is patently
illegal. That is patently illegal. The Founding Fathers spent a lot of
time wrestling with a foundational question: How to preserve democracy
in America and prevent what, up until that point, had been an
inexorable retreat to despotism in countries that had tried to engage
in some kind of self-determination. The Founding Fathers thought
relentlessly about the kind of tools that would be available to a
President that could allow him to take control and rule as a king or as
a monarch.
Now, some of the things they spent a lot of time thinking about feel,
today, a little anachronistic. The Founding Fathers, for instance, were
really focused on not giving the President a standing army. Now, we
have moved beyond that belief that a standing army is a threat to our
liberty, but that was one of the things the Founding Fathers worried
greatly about. They didn't necessarily write that protection into the
Constitution, but they thought a lot about it.
The protection they did write into the Constitution was the
protection to reserve spending power for the branch of government most
directly connected to the people. That is Congress--the branch that
gets elected every 2 years, the branch that has different factions,
different geographies represented. They wanted the spending power to be
invested in the most democratic body so as to make sure that the
compromise on spending ended up benefiting the whole country--every
geography but also every political affiliation. So they said: Congress
has the power to spend. Congress has the power to decide how money is
spent.
So, for 240 years, courts and the Supreme Court have broadly
recognized that a President cannot decide by himself what money to
spend and what money not to spend. A President also cannot decide for
himself to apply new conditions to spending beyond what the
democratically elected Congress selected.
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The reason for that--the reason why that power is vested in
Congress--is primarily a check on despotism because if a President has
the ability to unilaterally decide how to spend money, then, of course,
the natural temptation will be to only spend money in a way that
benefits and preserves and advances your political power. Spend money
on people who support you, and deny money to people who don't support
you in order to pressure more people to support you.
I wasn't here for Senator Kim's speech, but it sounded like he laid
out the corollary that still exists, unfortunately, in some closed
political systems in this country wherein you have party machines that
give out favors and money and privilege based upon loyalty. OK. We
decided, in this country, the President is not going to get to do that
because it is inherently subject to fraud and abuse and corruption.
As we have talked about--as Senator Schatz and I talked about--this
President has been pretty unapologetic and Russ Vought has been pretty
unapologetic in their insistence that, yes, in fact, people who are
loyal to the President should be treated differently.
It isn't as if we don't understand what the President is trying to do
by capturing Federal spending power. He is criticizing projects in
Democratic States. He is saying: We may not fund disasters in
Democratic States. They are targeting Agencies that they believe are
populated by people with different political affiliations than the
President's. They are firing FBI agents who engaged in any kind of law
enforcement action against Republicans.
Maybe this conversation would be a little bit less frantic--the
moment would feel a little bit less urgent--if you thought the
President was seizing control of Federal spending for some halfway
legitimate reason, but, in fact, it looks as if President Trump is
trying to seize control of Federal spending for the exact reason that
worried the Founding Fathers so much that they were explicit in the
Constitution: No, the President cannot seize control of Federal
spending. It will lead to fraud, corruption, and ultimately the erosion
and perhaps destruction of our democracy.
The Founding Fathers worried every single day about writing a
document that prevented a slide to despotism. You can laugh that off as
hyperbole. You can say: Democrats are crying wolf. Of course, America
is always going to be a democracy.
Every democracy dies. It does. Every democracy has an expiration date
just like every civilization has an expiration date. There is an end,
and there is a series of events that leads to that end. Maybe this
isn't it, but, boy, when you package the list that I will give you
together, it looks suspiciously like the roadmaps that caused other
democracies to fall, and it looks suspiciously like the set of things
that our Founding Fathers were clear about protecting against.
The second thing that matters is the President's decision to shutter
certain Departments. It has started with USAID, and we spent some time
talking tonight about what has happened at USAID. It is absolutely
extraordinary. This is the nonpartisan Agency that fights for the
United States abroad.
Our military leaders--I suspect most of whom are Republicans; I don't
really care--are fond of saying: If you get rid of USAID, if you were
ever to stop paying for foreign aid, you would have to double the
number of bullets you buy us.
Our military leaders consistently, consistently make the case for
USAID because USAID is a partner with our military in preventing chaos
and instability that ultimately lead to war and threats to U.S. troops.
The Army and the Navy and the Air Force--they chase Chinese
influence. They try to protect us from Russia. But so does USAID.
China's power in the world is not just military power. Every nation's
power is multifaceted. China, frankly, gets more influence in the world
through its nonmilitary tools than it gets through its military tools.
China doesn't have the number of military partnerships that the United
States does. In fact, it has very few. Its partnerships are information
partnerships, technology partnerships, economic development
partnerships. Those are the kinds of tools that USAID has. So when
USAID just vanishes from the playing field, China wins; Russia wins;
nonstate terrorist groups win.
One of the things USAID was doing in Lebanon was running a bunch of
programming, trying to depress Hezbollah's influence and trying to help
stand up a government that was independent and free of terrorist
influence.
What was USAID doing in Mexico? It was trying to build up the
capability of law enforcement so the drug gangs that send fentanyl to
the United States didn't control areas of Mexico which allow them,
without interruption or harassment, to be able to send fatal drugs like
fentanyl to the United States.
So there are things our military can do to advance U.S. power, but
they can't do everything, so USAID was doing those other things. Now
that they are off the playing field, America is fundamentally weaker.
That is the merit-based case for why it is a disaster for the United
States and a gift to China and Russia and terrorist groups that USAID
has disappeared.
But there is a clear legal and constitutional case. USAID is an
Agency established by statute. We passed a law establishing USAID. We
pass a budget every year funding not just USAID but specific accounts
in USAID. A President of the United States cannot by fiat eliminate a
statutorily authorized Agency. That is what a monarch does. And you are
already hearing that the Elon Musk crowd that so happily got rid of
USAID is now talking about ``USAID'' as a verb. They are going to
``USAID'' the Department of Labor. They are going to ``USAID'' the
Department of Education. They can't eliminate those Departments from
the statutes, but they could just send everybody home. That would be
illegal, but they could just send everybody home.
What a disaster it would be if the people who make sure that our
factories are safe and that workers aren't abused by greedy
corporations all of a sudden don't show up to work. That is great for
the companies and the corporations, but that is terrible for workers.
Pay attention to this effort to shut down Agencies because these
Agencies, while certainly you can have a conversation about making them
more efficient, provide essential services.
The Department of Education provides essential services. Two-thirds
of our schools run on funds from the Department of Education. Disabled
kids are protected because of laws administered by the Department of
Education. The Department of Labor protects workers to make sure they
don't get run over and abused by companies. USAID protects America all
over the world. There is a cost to Americans' pocketbooks, to the
quality of life, to the defense of America when these Agencies get
shuttered, so you should pay attention to that.
The third thing that you should pay attention to is the corruption
that is happening inside the Department of the Treasury as we speak.
The Department of the Treasury pays the bills of this country, and
those bills range from contracts we have with companies and not-for-
profits to, you know, your tax refund or your Social Security check or
your Medicare benefit. That is really sensitive stuff, so we
historically have had totally nonpolitical people running that payment
system.
Congress decides how that money is spent and what the level of your
benefit is, but a bunch of civil servants--people who are not loyal to
Democrats or Republicans, who just want to make the payments--run that
system.
What really caused this public tempest in the last few days was the
disclosure that Elon Musk--a billionaire with all sorts of interests
when it comes to the Federal Government; he became a billionaire based
off of Federal policy and Federal contracts--has been given access to
the Treasury's payment system, not just him but a bunch of kids who
work for him. So a bunch of twenty-somethings fresh out of college,
with absolutely no expertise in payment systems, have gotten access to
these payment systems. They are apparently inside these payment systems
right now, fiddling around with them. They broke one payment system as
soon as they got access to it in the Medicaid system.
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Now, I will be honest with you, we don't know why they want access to
the payment systems. We don't know what they are doing inside the
payment systems. But there aren't a lot of benign possibilities. Are
they getting ready to turn off payments to individuals and entities
that they don't like? Are they just sort of looking under the hood so
that they can get your tax information or get the tax information about
Elon Musk's competitors? I mean, this is unheard of. This is a private
sector individual--an individual who actually cannot get a security
clearance because he is deemed to be a security risk--who is inside the
most sensitive part of the Department of the Treasury, with access to
every single American's personal data. That is a corruption. That is a
perversion of norms and rules, and it matters. That matters. You should
pay attention to it.
The fourth thing that matters is the darkness that is descending over
the Federal Government. A few hours--maybe it was a day, 2 days--after
President Trump was inaugurated, he fired I believe every single
inspector general.
What is an inspector general? An inspector general, again, is an
independent, nonpartisan individual who has got an office and staff
that work for them that sit inside each of our Agencies. Our Federal
Agencies are big. They are. They spend billions of dollars. They do
really good work, but there is always the chance for fraud and abuse.
So we historically--Congress historically has authorized a little bit
of money inside of every Department to have a watchdog. We call them
inspectors general because they are inspecting how taxpayer dollars are
being spent and make sure that the dollars are being spent in
accordance with the law.
The inspectors general normally have the power to intervene when
something has gone wrong, at the very least, the power to issue a
report to tell the public and Congress: Hey, guys, you know, the money
was supposed to be spent on trying to fight wildfires, and instead, it
is being spent on something else. Those inspectors general are gone.
Donald Trump didn't get rid of them because he thought they were
doing a bad job and he wanted to replace them with somebody else; he
just got rid of them illegally. You can't do that. You have to, at the
very least, give notice to Congress.
At the same time, they have begun issuing what we call gag orders to
Federal employees. The most notorious one happened at USAID. As the
purge started beginning at USAID when they started to, first, just
sending all the supervisors home, when they suspended all USAID
programming all around the world, a corresponding order went out to
employees saying: Do not talk to anybody about what is happening.
Now, I can understand being sensitive about rank-and-file employees
talking to the press. But they didn't just say the press. They said
don't talk to Members of Congress. Don't talk to elected Members of
Congress who are in charge of spending the taxpayers' money. Don't even
talk to them about the purge that is happening.
That all sounds a little suspicious, right? That is a little worrying
when, with intention, all the watchdogs are fired; with intention, an
order goes out to employees: Shut your mouth. Don't say anything.
That probably doesn't mean that good legal stuff is happening inside
these Departments. That probably doesn't mean that this administration
is really focused on rooting out fraud and corruption and tackling
inefficiency. When you get rid of the watchdogs, that normally means
that you are preparing to engage in some pretty bad stuff. Pay
attention to the fact that the watchdogs are no longer there.
The fifth thing that matters--and I wrote it on my list here as the
fifth thing, but it probably matters the most, and I will spend some
time later talking more about this--is the legitimization of political
violence in this country.
There is something special about force. The thing that matters most
to us in life is the physical safety of ourselves and our kids and our
family. I talk about this a lot because I do a lot of work on gun
violence. And I try to explain to people that this is the issue that
matters the most to people, the physical safety of their family.
I mean, you would give up anything in life to defend your family from
physical harm. You would give up your house. You would give up your
savings. You might even give up your life to protect the life of
somebody that you love.
Physical harm is really, really scary. And because physical harm is
so traumatic, the threat of physical harm is impactful. It makes people
do things and change behaviors if they think there is a chance that
they are going to be hurt. Every single person knows this because, at
some point in your life, you were threatened with physical harm.
And, yes, maybe once or twice, or maybe for some people more often
than once or twice, you stood up to that bully or you fought back. But
for most people, there are plenty of other times in which you just
changed your behavior. If the bully was on this street, you went the
other block. I stood up to bullies a handful of times in my life, but I
also changed my route home a bunch of times as well.
There can be no place for physical violence in politics, there just
can't, because it does change behavior. When somebody is subject to the
threat of physical violence, you are no longer making a decision based
on what is best for the country or for your constituents. You are
instead making a decision based on what keeps you physically safe and
what keeps your family physically safe.
Democracies do not exist when the party in power, when the individual
in power, gets to use the threat of physical violence as a tool to try
to influence behavior. That is, by definition, not a democracy.
I am pretty confident none of my colleagues really thought that
Donald Trump was going to pardon every single January 6 protester, but
he did. But he did.
I will just tell you, subsequent to that decision, the threats of
violence to my office--and I suspect the same is true for Democrats--
have risen. Republicans have been subject to threats of violence
before. They will continue to be. But this is different because Donald
Trump has not immunized violence writ large, neither has he immunized
political violence writ large. What Donald Trump did by pardoning all
the January 6 protesters is say: If you commit violence in my name
against people who are trying to stop me from advancing my power, it is
cool. It is cool.
What were the police officers doing? They were defending the Capitol
from an attack that was designed to keep Donald Trump in power. Those
people were storming the Capitol because they believed that the
election had been stolen from Donald Trump. They were coming here to
install him in power permanently.
The police officers who were defending the Capitol, they weren't
political. They weren't Democrats. They were engaged in an effort to
try to stop the seizure of power by Donald Trump's supporters. And when
every single one of those rioters got pardoned, the message was clear:
If you commit violence against people who are trying to stop Donald
Trump's political agenda, it is cool. Do it. There will be no
consequence.
So it is not shocking that threats of violence have increased to me
and my Democratic colleagues because, right now, we are trying to
frustrate or stymie President Trump's political agenda. And Donald
Trump has said: If you beat the hell out of people who are trying to
stop my political agenda, I will let you off the hook. The
legitimatization of political violence, the endorsement of political
violence, that matters.
The final thing that has happened over the course of the last 2
weeks--really, it has been happening since the election--that matters
is the effort by Donald Trump to try to co-opt and control the media.
Obviously, the Founding Fathers thought a lot about the independence
of the free press. They knew that one of the bulwarks against despotism
was a free and independent press. So even though they didn't get around
to it until a little bit later, in the Bill of Rights, they guaranteed
the freedom of the press.
As we have watched other democracies fall in the last 240 years all
around the world, as we have watched countries like Hungary slide away
from
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democracy, a key facet of that slide, that purposeful slide, engineered
by a would-be autocrat, is the seizure and control of information.
It is obvious why you would want to do that because, if you can
control information, then you can make sure that the dominant narrative
is your spin and you can suppress any criticism.
Already, one of the Nation's biggest information platforms, Twitter,
is effectively an organ of the White House. Donald Trump announced that
he wanted to take a 50-percent ownership stake--using taxpayer
dollars--in TikTok, maybe the most influential of platforms today.
He has apparently cut deals with the owners of other platforms. Most
notably, the CEO of Facebook, right after the election, came down to
Mar-a-Lago, and Trump openly bragged that Facebook had decided to do
what he wanted, which was to stop fact-checking all of the lies that
get put online by Trump's supporters.
Trump said: Yeah, he probably did that because I threatened him. He
was probably worried that I was going to do something to hurt him.
Maybe not coincidental is the fact that there is an FTC lawsuit
pending against Facebook. We will see what happens with that lawsuit.
But would it be surprising that that lawsuit disappears after the owner
of Facebook said: Yeah, Mr. President, I will do what you want. I will
take down my fact-checking to make sure that your misinformation--and
all misinformation, frankly, because the misinformation doesn't only
come from the right--misinformation gets to exist freely online
platform.
So pay attention to the hard work that Donald Trump is engaged in to
try to control, to the best he can, the information infrastructure in
this country.
I mean, it wasn't a coincidence that not every billionaire was
sitting up there on the dais with Trump during the inauguration. It was
primarily the billionaires who control information companies. Facebook
is an information company. Apple is an information company. Amazon is
an information company. They have other business lines as well, but
they are controlling huge amounts of information in this country. It is
not a coincidence that those are the companies that Donald Trump is
trying to gain the most influence over.
Those are the five things that I have identified as the things that
should matter: the seizing of control of Federal spending; the illegal
shutdowns of Departments--and, by the way, I mentioned USAID. But, as I
said, Labor and Education seems next on the chopping block--the
infiltration of Treasury's payment system by Elon Musk, a private
sector individual who can't get a security clearance; the firing of the
IGs and the gag orders, shedding darkness on our Agencies; the
legitimization of political violence, the endorsement of political
violence; and the attempts to put the President in a position to
control the flow of information in this country.
Why this matters tonight is that Russ Vought is going to occupy a
space at the nerve center of all of those policies.
That is what OMB is. The Office of Management and Budget is
essentially the government's nerve center. It is the place where all
the Departments of the Federal Government and all the accounts and all
the policies, they all connect.
In many ways, the Director of OMB is the most powerful person in
government, often one of the least well-known. The job tends to exist
behind the scenes. But OMB is the place where all the pipes connect,
where all the regulations and policies and Executive orders have to be
vetted, the place where all the Department heads have to get a sign-off
before moving forward with policies.
So none of this can happen or will happen--the seizure of Federal
spending, the shuttering of the Departments, the infiltration of the
Treasury payment system, the firing of the IGs, the legitimization of
political violence, or the influence of information platforms--without
the Director of OMB being in charge.
By the way, it isn't coincidence that that comprehensive document
that Trump swore he had nothing to do with--Project 2025--was authored
in part by Russ Vought. Russ Vought was one of the primary authors, one
of the primary organizers, of Project 2025, which was this document
that explained exactly how you would do many of these things to push
American democracy toward autocracy. It isn't a coincidence that one of
the authors--one of the primary authors of the Project 2025 document is
now the nominee to run the Agency that perhaps has more influence than
any other Agency in the Federal Government: the Office of Management
and Budget.
OK. So having talked about the things that matter versus the things
that don't matter, I want to talk about the why and I want to talk
about how all of the six developments that matter fit together because
this isn't a random set of priorities, events, or developments. All
those things that I mentioned serve two major purposes, and this is
what I want to spend the remaining time that I have on.
The first goal is to enact a massive, massive transfer of both money
and power from poor people and the middle class to the corporations and
the billionaires and the millionaires.
Senator Schatz and I talked about this long-discredited economic
theory called trickle-down economics in which, if you just cut taxes
for the very, very wealthy, the economic elites, the masters of the
economic universe, eventually all that money will spill down to
everybody else. That was a fraud as a theory. It was a fraud. It was
essentially made up in order for rich people to just pretend like there
was some intellectual underpinning to their greed.
When people get really, really wealthy, they tend to just want to get
more and more wealthy. For many people, being a billionaire is not good
enough; you have to have $2 billion and $3 billion. So they came up
with this idea that ``If you just continue to give us money, it will
eventually find its way down to everybody else.''
But everybody knows that that is not how it has worked because people
in this country in the middle of the economy are miserable--they are
miserable--because they are working harder and harder, and they are not
getting anything back in return.
Wages have gone up a little bit, especially over the last 4 years,
but they are not keeping pace with prices; they have not for decades.
Even though this country is becoming much more productive--every worker
is way more productive than they were 10, 20, 30 years ago, in part
because of technology--the gains from that productivity are not
accruing to workers; they are accruing to the owner class, to the
capital class.
So there is this separation happening in this country whereby
everybody in the middle is just kind of like treading water, and then
you have this set of superelites--people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos
and Mark Zuckerberg, the people who were on that inauguration
platform--that have more money than they know what to do with, and very
little of it is actually ending up trickling down. They are hoarding
much of the money that they are collecting.
So this theory has never ever worked, but greed is powerful. It is
powerful. So that crowd, that economic elite crowd--there aren't any
poor people walking around Mar-a-Lago. Everybody that Trump hangs out
with at Mar-a-Lago--those are really, really rich people--really,
really rich people. Trump is not playing golf with, you know, his
cleaner. The people that Trump is talking to are people who are
immensely wealthy, and they see a real opportunity. It is not just good
enough to have low taxes; they want them lower. They also want the
ability to squeeze as much as they can out of the Federal Treasury for
themselves.
So what Project 2025 is all about and what the Trump agenda is all
about is, first and foremost, about a massive transfer of wealth and
power from the middle of America to a very handful of elites. I want to
try to walk you through that for a second.
The first thing they are doing is trying to set up another round of
massive tax cuts for the billionaires and for the corporations. They
are going to try to get money other ways, but the most important thing
to them is for their taxes to be much lower; for the corporate taxes to
be low or nonexistent; for them to be able to pass along all
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their wealth, without any taxation, to their kids so that you have
these permanent billionaire families where nobody ever has to work, and
the money just gets handed down from generation to generation; for
regulations to be gutted so that they can abuse the environment or
workers in a way to pile up more money. They are going to do that in
this bill that will be considered later in the year through a process
called reconciliation.
Now, when Republicans did this bill in 2017, they made no attempt to
try to pay for it. It was almost all borrowed money, and it was one of
the reasons the piece of legislation was really unpopular. People hated
that tax cut because, fully enacted, that tax cut would have sent about
80 percent of the benefit to the very, very wealthy, but it also was
just all put on the American credit card.
There was again this argument that, A, if we cut taxes for the
wealthy, it will trickle down to everybody else and it will result in a
magical increase in tax revenue because of all the economic activity
caused by the tax cut, and that magical economic activity and the tax
revenue from it will pay for the fact that we are now collecting less
in taxes from the very, very wealthy.
That didn't happen. It just didn't happen. We lost a ton of revenue
because the rich and the corporations were paying much less. The
economic activity that they predicted did not happen, and the deficit
grew. The deficit grew. It was a massive explosion in our deficit. No
President up until Donald Trump had added more to our deficit than he
did during those 4 years.
So this time, knowing that that tax cut was really unpopular--for a
lot of reasons but not the least of which the fact that it wasn't paid
for; it was all borrowed--Republicans are trying to create the illusion
that they are serious about savings. So part of what is happening with
the cuts at USAID--the evisceration, the elimination of USAID--and the
next round of cuts at the Department of Education or the Department of
Labor is about gutting a series of programs or at least creating the
illusion of cuts that then create a pretext that ``Hey, we have saved a
lot of money. We have cut a lot of government services. We can afford
that massive tax cut for the rich and for the corporations.''
Now, as I talked about with Senator Schatz, a lot of those cuts are
illusory. All those USAID employees that have been sent home, they are
still getting paid. I mean, it is insane. We have thousands of Federal
employees right now who are home or are about to be recalled, many of
whom have lost access to their email, so they can't even work from
home, that are getting paid to do nothing. So some of these cuts are
illusory. They don't exist. It looks like you are saving money, but you
are not really saving money.
But eventually, if you do shutter the Department of Education and you
do shutter the Department of Labor and you keep USAID illegally closed,
then, yeah, some savings will appear. But where do they come from? They
come from a retreat of American power. They come from our decision to
stop contesting the rise of China. They come because we have decided to
hand Ukraine to the Russians. They come from our decision to stop
fighting terrorists.
If you close the Department of Education, you will get some savings,
but it will only be because we have abandoned children with
disabilities, we have stopped trying to fight bias and discrimination
in our schools, and we are no longer helping kids afford college.
If you destroy the Department of Labor, yeah, you will get some
savings that you can apply to the billionaire tax cut, but it is
because you have shut down OSHA, which makes sure that our factories
and our workplaces are safe; it is because you are no longer helping
workers collectively bargain so that they can get better wages and
better benefits.
USAID protects this country. The Department of Education and the
Department of Labor help regular people. It is easy for the billionaire
class to say: Let's shut down the Department of Education. All their
kids go to private schools. They don't need the Department of
Education. And even if their kids are discriminated against, they can
hire fancy teams of lawyers.
So some of the savings are illusory, some of them are fake, but many
of the savings, if you shut down USAID and the Department of Labor and
the Department of Education, they are real, but those savings are
gleaned by hurting real people.
Shutting down schools or withdrawing from a fight for civil rights
and protections for kids with disabilities or stopping trying to
protect workers from harm done to them by corporations or a retreat
from the world, a decision to just pack up and let China own the
world--there is a cost to all of that, and the cost is borne not by the
wealthy and the billionaires but by regular people.
(Mrs. MOODY assumed the Chair.)
Military leaders say routinely--I will say this again; I mentioned it
earlier--that if you eliminate USAID, if you stop soft power, right,
you have to buy us twice as many bullets, because they know that USAID
helps keep really dangerous places--places that matter to the United
States, like the Middle East--stable. And if you stop focusing on
stability in parts of the world that matter to the United States,
conflict breaks out, and the United States often gets dragged into that
conflict. When the United States gets dragged into that conflict, it is
not the billionaires' kids that are fighting. By and large--we all know
this--the people that sign up for our military are middle-class
families, are often poor families.
So the billionaires and the corporations won't have much to lose if
the evisceration of USAID leads to American troops being sent into
conflict around the world. It will be regular folks--the nonbillionaire
class--that will get impacted by that when their kids are sent
overseas, when their kids don't come home.
So this attack on Agencies, this illegal shuttering of Departments,
it is all in service of trying to make it seem as if there are savings
happening so that we can afford that tax cut for the very, very
wealthy.
But then there is this other thing that is happening. Again, we don't
know what it is yet, but, man, it looks really worried.
So why is Elon Musk inside the Department of the Treasury? Why has
Donald Trump given him access to this incredibly sensitive payment
system?
I am going to admit to you: We don't know yet. It just is
unprecedented. And you saw the long-time Treasury employee. I mean,
this is a nonpolitical guy. This is just a guy who shows up to work
every day trying to make sure that you get your Medicare benefits and
you get your refund check. He left. He left because he had never seen
anything like this. He had never seen a billionaire with a political
agenda come in and take control of this payment system.
And so what is the agenda there? I don't know. But could it be in the
same service as the elimination of USAID and the potential elimination
of other Departments? Could it be that they want to take control of the
payment system so that they can strip benefits--admittedly expensive
benefits--for the middle class so they can afford their tax cut? If you
have control of the payment system and you don't care about the law and
you don't care about the Constitution, you can decide to reduce
payments or shut down payments.
For a day, they stopped paying Medicaid claims. So it is not like
this is beyond them. For a day, they shut down the Medicaid system.
If Elon Musk has control of the Treasury payment system and there is
a need to save some big money so that you can claim that you passed
along the big tax cuts to the billionaires and the corporations and you
didn't increase the deficit, then maybe those Social Security benefits
get turned off for a day. Maybe those Medicare benefits get turned off
for a day.
I don't know what the hell he is doing inside that payment system.
And you can say: Well, you shouldn't believe the worst, or you
shouldn't hypothesize. You shouldn't guess. But we haven't been given a
good explanation for something that looks like a fundamental perversion
of precedent and the law.
Remember, Elon Musk can't get a security clearance. He can't. But
apparently, he can have access to all of our most sensitive information
and data. And maybe it is in service of trying to rearrange payments to
save money for that tax cut.
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I mean, it is stunning the number of programs that he has access to:
Social Security and Medicare benefits, salaries for all Federal
personnel, payments to government contractors and grant recipients, tax
refunds. The system holds a lot of sensitive information, including
Social Security numbers--all of our Social Security numbers, all of our
names, all of our addresses, much of our private banking information,
much of our private tax information.
News broke today that Musk now has access to even more. He didn't
just get access to the Treasury payment system, but now, he has access
to CMS's payment system. CMS runs Medicare and Medicaid. So now, Elon
Musk has access to all of the payment and contracting systems that run
Medicare and Medicaid--literally has control of hundreds of billions of
dollars in payments to healthcare providers. They got access to that
payment system.
Today, they also showed up at the Atlanta headquarters of the CDC.
They met with Labor Department leaders to begin the process of getting
access to those payment systems as well. Why is this happening? Why is
this happening?
Well, it could be that they are trying to save money so that they can
afford the billionaires' tax cut, but it also may be so that they can
direct payments to the companies and the individuals that have pledged
support to Donald Trump and they can deny payment to people who have
not pledged loyalty.
And, again, I understand that that sounds a little fanciful, but just
look at what is happening right now at the White House. The President
is saying he is going to shut down a high-speed rail system in
California, while saying nothing about a high-speed rail system in
Florida. He is proposing eliminating FEMA because there was a series of
devastating, deadly wildfires in California, but he wasn't--and
Republicans weren't talking about eliminating FEMA when there were
disasters in Republican States. It seems as if there is a pretty
unapologetic preference for political friends.
And if Elon Musk has control over the payment system, then why should
we assume that he wouldn't use that control to turn on money to people
he likes or maybe even entities that he is affiliated with and turn off
money to entities that he is not affiliated with or to his competitors.
That is why you don't allow a billionaire, that is why you don't allow
somebody with massive financial interests, to be in charge of the
Treasury's payment system. That is bananas. We don't do that because it
opens up the opportunity for fundamental corruption.
But if you understand one of the key reasons for all of these early
actions to be a transfer of power and wealth away from regular people
to the billionaire class, then it makes sense, because you can either
use your control of that payment system to bank money that you can use
to cut your own taxes or you can just use control of that payment
system to pay people that are affiliated with you or help your business
and deny money to your competitors.
This is where the firing of the IGs matters because, if we had
inspectors general in these Departments, then we would actually be able
to have a view as to whether the access to these information systems
are being used for corrupt purposes.
Here is the list of the inspectors general: the inspector general at
the State Department, the inspector general at the Department of
Energy, the inspector general at the Interior Department, the inspector
general at the Defense Department, the inspector general at the
Department of Veterans Affairs, the inspector general at the Department
of Transportation, the inspector general at the Environmental
Protection Agency, the inspector general at the Small Business
Administration, the inspector general over Social Security, the
inspector general at the Department of Labor, the inspector general at
the Department of Health and Human Services, the inspector general of
the Department of Agriculture, and the inspector general at the
Department of Housing and Urban and Development.
All of those watchdogs are gone, and they are being replaced with no
one--because the complaint wasn't that these inspectors general weren't
good enough watchdogs of the Federal taxpayer dollars. The complaint
was that they were watchdogs. The complaint was that somebody was
looking and watching. All of these inspectors general were fired and
replaced with no one for the purpose of darkness descending.
Elon Musk got access today to the entire Medicare and Medicaid
payment system. Why? We do not know, but it is certainly plausible to
believe that there are nefarious purposes afoot, that his access to
that system is part of a design to harm our democracy or enhance his
economic interests, but we will have a really hard time figuring it out
because the inspector general at the Department of Health and Human
Services, coincidentally, was fired days before Elon Musk was given
unprecedented access.
An unaccountable, unelected billionaire with tons of business
interests inside this government was given access to the most sensitive
payment systems in our government. It is not a coincidence. I was being
facetious. It was not a coincidence that all the inspectors general
were fired right before Elon Musk got access to these payment systems.
The intent is darkness. And if your intent is to steal from the
American people, if your intent is to use that access to be able to
divert money from legal purposes to illegal purposes, if your intent is
to transfer resources that are supposed to be due to the taxpayer
instead to the millionaire, billionaire, and corporate class, then you
can't have sunlight. You can't have pesky inspectors general because
the public would hate that if they knew it was happening.
There are thousands of people showing up to riots, but there would be
hundreds of thousands showing up to protests. But there would be
hundreds of thousands of people showing to protests if they knew,
through the reports of these inspectors general, that there was
thievery happening. We don't know what is happening because darkness
has descended upon these Agencies.
The other part of this plan related to the shutdown of these
Departments and the infiltration of these Departments by people like
Elon Musk is that another way for the billionaires to get richer,
beyond cutting services, influencing the economy by giving themselves
payments and denying payments to their competitors, is to just
privatize more and more of the Federal Government so that they get to
take it--to privatize more and more State and local services, so they
get to take it.
Project 2025, written by Russ Vought, amongst others, is very clear
about that intention. They sort of look at the remaining parts of the
Federal Government--in our government writ large, that are still done
just for the common good, not done for profit. And they say: To hell
with that. We want every public service to be a source of profit.
Now, I think that is a disaster. I think there is an important
public-private sector partnership in a lot of parts of our government.
I think it actually does work pretty well, for instance, the Department
of Defense, to have the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, to have our
military servicemembers be a public service, right? We don't have a
mercenary army, right? Our Army is run by the government, by generals,
by officers who work for the government.
But they are supplied with equipment that comes out of the private
sector because, in the private sector, you are maybe going to get some
more innovation than you would in the public sector. I think that is a
very legitimate public-private partnership.
Same with healthcare, I don't like how much of our healthcare system
has gone to the for-profit sector, but I understand that it is
important to have a profit motive, for instance, in drug discovery,
that private companies probably push a little bit harder to
commercialize a breakthrough therapy than might a government
laboratory.
So I think there are plenty of places in government where public-
private partnerships work. There are plenty of places in government
where maybe it should all be in the private sector, and we just flow
money from the public sector to the private sector.
But I don't think that works for law enforcement. I don't think that
that works for protection services. I don't think that works for our
public schools. I do not want a private equity
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firm to own my kids' public school. I don't want the motivation of the
administrators of my kids' elementary school to be sucking as much
profit out of the school as possible. I want my kids' school to be a
place where they only care about quality and performance.
And does that mean that there might be a little redundancy built in?
Does that mean there might be a little inefficiency built in? Yeah, but
I just want the mission to be doing good for my kids.
But that is not how Russ Vought sees it. That is not how the Trump
administration sees it. They see every existing remaining public
service, from the security at our airports to the administration of our
schools, as a lost opportunity for the rich to get even richer.
I referenced this article earlier, but I will do it again. This is
from the publication called ``Buyout Insider.'' It is a pretty long
article entitled ``Back to school''--cute little heading--``Back to
School: Investors are bullish again on education.''
``Private equity's appetite for the sector is strong'' is the
subheadline. While a lot of this article is, admittedly, about private
equity's interest in ed tech, the technology that surrounds schools and
is used by teachers, it also talks about private equity's interest in
just buying schools--buying and running schools.
It talks about some of the schools that are already being bought and
run by private equity. Remember Betsy DeVos, the first Secretary of
Education during Trump's first term? She ran for-profit schools,
schools where the goal every day was not to educate kids but to make
money for Betsy DeVos and her family.
So part of the agenda here is not just to pass along a tax cut to the
billionaires and the millionaires and the corporations, but also to
ship big parts of our public service infrastructure into the private
sector.
I am a capitalist. We are all capitalists here. I believe in the
genius of the private sector. I just do think there are some things
that we should just do for the common good. There are some things that
shouldn't be about how much money can I make. Billionaires and the
corporations, the private equity firms, they are doing fine. They don't
need our schools. They don't need our schools.
Frankly, there is plenty of evidence to show that when they get their
hands on fundamental public services, they do it worse. For instance,
if you look at nursing homes that are owned by private equity firms
versus nursing homes that are not-for-profit, the not-for-profit homes
are better quality homes--are better quality homes. Less people die in
nursing homes owned by not-for-profit organizations than die in nursing
homes that are owned by private equity. Why? Because private equity
exists not to keep patients alive--I am not saying the owners of these
companies aren't moral human beings. I am not saying they are
indifferent to life. But their bottom line is: How much money do we
make? How much money do we make?
There are certain sectors of public life--like the end of life, like
my kids' education, like whether I am safe at the airport--that I just
don't want profit to be the motivating factor. So it is important to
understand the why. The effort to shutter these Agencies is, in part,
an effort to send their services into the private sector.
The agenda at the Department of Education is not just to destroy the
bureaucracy at the Department, it is also to outsource the education of
our kids to the private sector. They want to destroy these Agencies so,
in part, they can move the services into the for-profit realm so that
the billionaires and the millionaires and the corporations can get even
richer. I think it is important to understand that element.
There is another piece of this story, specifically, the story about
USAID that is relevant to this effort to transfer power into the hands
of the elites. You have to ask: Why was USAID first? Why was there such
a fervor to shut down USAID?
I don't know the answer. But what I know is we traditionally don't
allow people like Elon Musk to be this involved in foreign policy
because they are conflicted. I understand that is probably the reason
why Elon Musk can't get a security clearance because he has these
massive business interests outside the United States--in particular, in
China.
So you have to ask yourself: Why is USAID being shuttered? Why does
Elon Musk care so much about USAID? And I hate that we are searching
for explanations, but the explanation that we have been given on the
record is a lie. It is not true.
What Elon Musk and others have said is that they had to shut down
USAID because it is a criminal organization. I mean, there is not a
single U.S. Senator--even the U.S. Senators who don't like the fact
that we spend money addressing famine overseas--who thinks USAID is a
criminal organization. That is ridiculous. It is not true. Nobody who
has spent a day looking at USAID thinks it is a criminal organization.
This is just normal public service, committed people who show up to
work every day trying to solve problems for America abroad. We just
have to accept that their on-the-record explanation that they are
shutting down USAID because it is a criminal organization is not true.
It is not true.
So we have to search for what the answer is. Who benefits most by
USAID shutting down? I would argue it is China. China's influence in
the world is primarily nonmilitary. China has a big growing military.
We have to worry about that.
But China doesn't have military partnerships with countries like the
United States does. China has economic development partnerships,
technology partnerships, mineral resource extraction partnerships, pork
ownership, and administration partnerships. China's influence in the
world right now is primarily nonmilitary. They don't do as much relief
aid as we do, but they do a lot of it as well. They do help countries
invest in public health infrastructure. They do show up and help with
disasters. That is how they get influence.
The defining contest in the world right now is between the United
States and China for who is going to control the piping of the
international economy. When I say ``piping,'' I mean the navigation of
the seas, the information infrastructure, the AI data sets, the flow of
critical minerals that are so key to making all the technologies, the
chips, et cetera, for the future.
China is trying to buy up that piping. And they do that by creating
relationships with governments overseas based upon their nonmilitary
relationship, the economic development partnerships, the investments
that they make. USAID competes with China when it comes to those
nonmilitary investments so that China won't command that competition
over who controls the economic piping of the world. So when USAID
disappears, China cheers.
They are cheering because now they have the run of the place. They
are able to gain more influence when the United States is withdrawn. I
say that because Elon Musk has a lot on the line with China.
Here is a recent article describing the extent of Elon Musk's
business relationships in China:
Mr. Musk has a lot on the line [in China]. His best-known
company, the electric vehicle maker Tesla, makes half its
cars in China. Tesla sells more cars in China than anywhere
except the United States, and his local competition is
getting stronger. Chinese regulators have not yet allowed
Tesla to offer its latest assisted-driving and self-driving
car technology, while allowing Chinese automakers to race
ahead with similar systems.
Many of Mr. Musk's other companies, including his ventures
in solar energy and large batteries, face formidable
competition from Chinese businesses. Some of his businesses
might benefit from a decoupling of Chinese and American
economies.
It goes on to explain all the different ways in which Elon Musk has
real interests in China and real reason to curry favor with the Chinese
Government. We can't know for certain whether there is a connection
between Elon Musk's ferocity in eliminating USAID, a daily thorn in the
side of China, and his business interests, but we certainly haven't
seen any more credible explanation.
And we got more evidence today of how Elon Musk's business interests
seem to be dictating American foreign policy. One of the places that
decisions get made about the rules of the world--rules that matter to
the United States and U.S. companies--is the G20, the 20 biggest
economies. We are there every
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year because we want a seat at the table when the rules of the global
economy are set because, if we are not there, the rules are going to
disadvantage America, disadvantage our interests, and disadvantage our
companies.
Well, the Secretary of State today announced that we would be
boycotting the G20 this year. Why? Because we just don't like the place
that it is being held. Guess where that place is? South Africa. And
guess what Elon Musk has been doing over the course of the last several
months and years--running a PR campaign against the government of South
Africa for a host of reasons, but one of them is that the South African
Government refused to sign a contract with Starlink. He is very mad
that the South African Government refuses to sign a contract with him
on Starlink because, whether he likes it or not, the South African
Government has certain rules about diversity and inclusion and equality
that he can't meet.
And so what did Secretary Rubio announce today? We will not be
attending the G20 in South Africa because we don't like their rules on
diversity, equity, and inclusion. The very rules that are preventing
Elon Musk from getting a contract in South Africa are now the reasons
why the United States is not showing up at the G20.
I am not a conspiracy theorist, but, man, this seems a little weird
that our foreign policy seems to be impacted by the billionaire's
interests, the billionaire that has such close connection to the policy
of this administration.
One of the other ways that American policy and American law can be
perverted to serve the billionaires and the corporations is if there is
an integration between the interests of the billionaires and American
foreign policy. It is just something we have to have our eyes wide open
to.
And the last thing I want to talk about is just what is coming with
this reconciliation bill because it could be that what is happening
inside Treasury or what is happening in USAID is largely an effort to
create savings--or the illusion of savings--to be able to afford this
big tax cut for billionaires and millionaires.
But there is also a plan that is put down on paper by a Congressman
in the House who is very influential in budget circles that lists out a
series of cuts that they intend to carry out or want to have on the
table in order to afford that big tax cut for billionaires and
millionaires.
On that list is $479 billion of cuts to Medicare, $2.3 trillion worth
of cuts for Medicaid. Medicare insures all seniors in this country.
Medicaid insures seniors and pays for many senior services, but also
pays for many services for the poorest families and kids in this
country. And 40 percent of births in this country are paid for in part
by Medicaid--$2.3 trillion. I understand nobody understands how much
money that is. But that is a lot of freaking money. That is a lot of
really hurt people if you cut $2.3 trillion out of the Medicaid system.
And $151 billion in cuts to the Affordable Care Act--that means kicking
people off of their insurance; $347 billion of cuts to things like
TANF, which is assistance for the very, very poor kids in this country,
food programs that keep kids and families alive who can't afford food.
I mean, this is a draconian list of cuts--Medicare, Medicaid,
Affordable Care Act, food programs, emergency assistance programs.
None of these programs that are laid out in the Arrington memo--this
is Representative Arrington. None of the programs laid out in
Representative Arrington's memo impact billionaires in a meaningful way
or millionaires in a meaningful way. There is not a cut here that
impacts a corporation in a meaningful way. Every single cut listed in
his memo--Medicare, Medicaid, food programs, TANF, the Affordable Care
Act--impacts middle-class people, poor people, regular people. It is
just like USAID benefits regular people, making sure that their sons
and daughters don't have to go off and fight a war. It is just like the
Department of Labor and the Department of Education protect regular
people.
Are you seeing the story here?
This agenda is about stealing money from the middle class and poor
people and rerouting it to the billionaires, the millionaires, and
corporations.
Every part of this story--the shuttering of these Agencies, the
removal of the IGs, the infiltration of the payment system, the
requisition of American foreign policy by the billionaires, the
reconciliation bill--is all in service of the same thing: taking power
and money from people in the middle and delivering it to the very, very
wealthy.
For what? What else does Elon Musk need? What more does somebody who
makes $500 million need? Why do they need another giant tax cut? Why do
they need to run our schools or the TSA--just to be able to pad their
pockets?
I mean, I don't begrudge anybody for making money in this country.
That is the genius of America, that you get to get rich if you have a
good idea and you work hard. But I don't support the wholesale, rapid
transfer of money and resources from folks in need in the middle class
to folks who are already rich and don't need any more help.
All we are talking about here is just a realtime shift--cutting
Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, shutting down Agencies that help
normal people, corrupting our foreign policy--in order to deliver more
money to people who are already billionaires? Nobody wants that.
So let me talk about the second goal here that I think is actually,
in some ways, much more urgent.
The second goal is to try to either suppress or shutter public
dissent because they know what they are doing is really unpopular--
cutting Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act in order to
finance tax cuts for the wealthy. That is not popular. That is very,
very unpopular. Repealing the Affordable Care Act was and still is
really unpopular.
So how do you get away with that? How do you stay in power and win
elections if you do things that are really unpopular?
Well, you rig the rules. You rig the rules. The before and after
moment is January 6, 2021. I am still flabbergasted by the fact that
the majority of Republicans between the House and the Senate endorsed
the idea that Donald Trump should still be President of the United
States after he lost the election. That was the majority's position for
Republicans in Congress--that Donald Trump had lost the election. No.
They said he really won the election. They claimed there was fraud.
Obviously, there was not fraud. Obviously, there is no evidence that he
won the election. He lost it by a landslide. He lost it by a landslide.
It wasn't like a million votes--it wasn't like 1,000 votes. He lost the
election by a landslide.
But the Republicans said: No, I don't care that he lost the election.
I want President Trump to stay in power.
In many ways, it is the most dangerous day in American politics since
the end of the Civil War because it was an admission by one major
political party that they care more about power and keeping power
permanently than they care about observing the will of the people. The
people elected Joe Biden. The majority of Republicans here said: I
don't care. I want Donald Trump to stay in power, and I am willing to
do whatever it takes, including endorsing and condoning violence, in
order to keep Donald Trump in power.
That effort to try to destroy public dissent--to try to eradicate
democracy as we know it so as to keep Republicans and the Trump family
in power permanently--has not disappeared, and I think it is important
to talk about that.
So, as I mentioned before, the most significant thing that has
happened in many ways in the last 2 weeks--something that was supported
by this incoming Director of OMB--is the endorsement of political
violence in the pardoning of the January 6 protesters. It is
unforgivable what happened. It is unforgivable because the people who
assaulted the Capitol that day engaged in unspeakable violence.
You know these stories: the rioters who came here with metal poles
and beat police officers over the head; the rioter who dragged a
Capitol Police officer by the neck into the crowd and held him down
while his fellow rioters stomped on the Capitol Police officer's body;
the rioter who posted the night before, ``The revolution is coming.
There will be blood''; the scaffolding that was erected outside the
Capitol in the chance of hanging Mike Pence; the rioter who went to the
scaffolding after
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beating up police officers--after beating up police officers--and
posted on social media, ``Too bad there are no Democrats here''; the
police officers who died afterward; the police officer who had a heart
attack after being tased repeatedly by one protester; the rioter who
walked around the Capitol with zip ties, apparently looking for any
Democrat to be able to seize, to kidnap, to torture.
I was here inside this Chamber. For my Republican colleagues who
remember that day as a day of wayward tourists, none of my Republican
colleagues stayed here to welcome the tourists when they were beating
down those doors. The Republicans ran just like the Democrats ran.
I covered this before; so I won't belabor it. But Russ Vought is
really dangerous, in part because he has been part of this effort to
endorse political violence. And I don't know that we ever repair our
Nation from that transition away from a universal belief that only
peaceful protest is acceptable in this country to the world today in
which, as long as you are engaged in political violence on behalf of
the President, you can get away with it.
I mentioned this before, as well, but the other component of this
attempt to seize power and hold power permanently for Republicans and
the Trump family is this attempt to try to control information.
It is wild to me that this major information platform Twitter is now
essentially being run out of the White House. It is amazing to me that
President Trump is proposing to spend taxpayer dollars to take a 50-
percent ownership stake in TikTok. It is amazing to me that people like
Mark Zuckerberg are making deals with the President in which apparently
the company will get some favorable treatment from the administration
in exchange for Facebook's stopping patrolling false content being
posted by everybody but including supporters of the President's.
The bullying of the media, the deals that seem to be being cut, you
know, are not unfamiliar to those of us who study the ways that
democracies die, and democracies vanish often because the information
systems get co-opted or controlled by the regime.
We are not all the way there yet today.
I admit, even though Twitter is run by an ally of the President's, I
still post on Twitter, and there are still people who see my criticisms
of the President and Elon Musk. But all it takes is one tweak of those
algorithms, and, all of a sudden, content that opposes the President is
depressed, and content that spreads his narrative is accelerated. And
it just isn't a coincidence that all the CEOs who were on stage at the
inauguration--or the majority of the CEOs who were on stage at the
inauguration--run information companies.
Again, I have covered this before, but another way in which they
oppress dissent is just by stopping information from ever getting out
to the public. So the effort to fire the inspectors general, the effort
to place gag orders on people who work at these Agencies--that is just
an effort to try to hide the bad behavior, to hide the potential fraud
so that folks who are organizing out there to oppose the President's
agenda never get access to the information.
Second to the endorsement of political violence in, I think, the
order of urgency for us to talk about is the seizure of government
funding.
I talked about the seizure of government funding in the context of
how it allows for corruption and how it allows for somebody like Elon
Musk to send money to people he likes and to deny money to people he
doesn't like; how it allows them to unilaterally violate the laws that
we have passed to hold back funding so that they can bank dollars to
afford a tax cut or a tax cut for a set of individuals or a
corporation.
It also suppresses political dissent and speech, and we saw this
happen in realtime. When those grants were all shut down, we had a hard
time during that day to get information from grant recipients because
they were afraid that, if they went public, the grant would never be
turned back on, and that fear has not completely dissipated. It is very
hard to get information from grant recipients even when their money has
been turned back on because, again, they fear, if they collaborate with
Democrats, they will be a target to have their dollars turned back off.
Again, this is exactly why the Founding Fathers said a unitary
executive--a single executive--cannot and should not be in charge of
who gets money and who doesn't because they can use that money to
reward friends and to punish enemies.
So we are still trying to understand the full scope of the
President's compliance or violation with the court orders, but it seems
clear to us that there is an agenda here to protest money when it goes
to places that don't align with the President's political priorities
and let money go through when it goes to places that are lined up with
the President's political priorities. I mentioned the most obvious
example of that being the President's threat to shut down a high-speed
rail grant to California but his disinterest in that grant when it is
going to another State that supports him, like Florida.
The last very, very worrying development is what is happening inside
our Justice Department right now. There is a rolling purge that is
happening right now. You are watching the FBI squeeze out anyone who
was affiliated with the prosecution of the January 6 rioters. You are
watching the firing of anybody who was associated with law enforcement
actions against the President.
So the message is clear: If you are in law enforcement and you go
after Republicans or you go after Donald Trump's political interests,
you are not going to have a job. That would be worrying in and of
itself.
But there is something else that is happening, and that is early
threats of law enforcement against opponents of the President. The new
acting U.S. attorney in Washington, DC, sent a really interesting
letter directly to Elon Musk. Again, Elon Musk is a private citizen. He
can't pass a security clearance. But Ed Martin, the acting U.S.
attorney for Washington, DC, sent a letter saying: It was good to work
with the DOGE team this weekend. We must keep all our American
Government employees safe. We must protect the American people's
property. I recognize that some of the staff at DOGE have been targeted
publicly.
That is true. DOGE is apparently a public Agency. If you are working
for DOGE, you have accountability to the American public. It is true
that we are having a public conversation about DOGE, about Elon Musk,
and about the people who work for him.
He said: At this time, I ask that you utilize me and my staff to
assist in protecting the DOGE's work and the DOGE's workers. Let me
assure you of this: We will pursue any legal action against anyone who
impedes your work and threatens your people.
Let me read that again. Let me assure you of this: We will pursue any
and all legal action against anyone who impedes your work and threatens
your people.
That is extraordinary. The political opposition in this country is
allowed to try to impede the work of the majority party. We are allowed
to publicly criticize the work of the majority ruling party. We are
allowed to protest outside of buildings. We are allowed to name
individual government officials and criticize them for the actions that
they have taken. But this letter from the U.S. attorney says: Be
assured, we will pursue legal action against anyone who impedes your
work or threatens your people.
Online, there are many critics of Elon Musk. The other night, one of
these MAGA trolls targeted a critic of Elon Musk, and he tagged Ed
Martin, the U.S. attorney, in his tweet.
He said: I found one right here, EagleEdMartin. Lots of stuff in his
Bluesky account as well. I would look into him if I were you. He was
threatening to hurt Elon Musk. Very unstable figure.
This is a pretty mainstream critic of Donald Trump and Elon Musk. He
is not threatening to hurt anybody, but he is a pretty regular critic
of Elon Musk.
That critic responds to this troll, and then guess who comes up
posting. The U.S. attorney for Washington, DC.
He responds to this MAGA troll: Thank you for the information. Noted.
That is extraordinary. That is law enforcement, with the power of
arrest and imprisonment, posting on a thread that includes a very loud,
visible critic
[[Page S704]]
of the President and Elon Musk, that he is watching him--he is watching
him--coming on the heels of a letter that says: Let me assure you, we
will pursue any and all legal action against anyone who impedes your
work or threatens your people.
Even if this critic doesn't end up getting arrested, because there is
no claim that there is anything he has done, as far as I have seen,
that would ever rise to the level of an arrestable offense--he is just
a critic of Elon Musk and Donald Trump--even if he never gets arrested,
the chilling effect of a U.S. attorney telling critics online that ``I
am watching you'' is authoritarian stuff, and it has impact because
this particular individual is not going to stop criticizing.
But plenty of other people, faced with a vague threat of Federal
investigation for their criticism of DOGE, will stop doing it, and I
wouldn't blame them for it. If I get threatened with imprisonment
because I criticize the President, I won't stop. This particular
activist will not stop. But it would be reasonable for many Americans,
if they were trolled by a U.S. attorney on their Twitter feed, being
told ``I am watching you''--it would be as logical for them to just
stop criticizing as it would be for the recipient of Federal grants to
stop criticizing the President because they worry that if they do,
their funding will be shut off, as it might be for any ordinary
American, knowing now that Elon Musk has the ability to control whether
they get a tax refund or not.
Democracies don't die in an instance. There isn't this minute when
dissent has been crushed so badly that we don't have fair contests in
this country. It is a slow-rolling death.
Why Russ Vought, to me, is so dangerous is that he helped write the
document that is the foundation of all of this attack on democracy that
is happening. Put it all together: information platforms; agreeing to
the terms laid down by the President because they fear retribution by
the President; political violence being endorsed and mainstreamed;
people being told that if you engage in violence to support the
President's power, you won't be held accountable; the message being
sent inside law enforcement that you will lose your job if you pursue
any law enforcement action against allies of the President; and the
message being sent to critics that you will be subject potentially to
arrest, at the very least to harassment, if you impede the work of the
administration.
Some people will not stand out. Faced with potential political
violence, faced with the cutoff of funds to their State or their agency
or their organization, faced with the potential action from an unhinged
prosecutor, some people will not be silent.
In Hungary today, there are still people who show up for protests but
never enough to topple the regime because lots of other people just
stay home because they don't want to get on the wrong side of the
government because the government decides where the money goes and
where it doesn't go and because they don't want to be subject to an
arrest warrant.
We are not there yet. We aren't. We aren't. But we have never had a
series of developments like we have had over the last 2 weeks that pose
such a significant threat to our democracy and to democratic norms.
The reason we are on the floor tonight, the reason you feel this
urgency from our side of the aisle and from the American public, is
that we used to think we were in this together, Republicans and
Democrats. Yes, we have always had a difference on this philosophy of
where wealth and power should accumulate. I think Republicans broadly
have believed in this idea of trickle-down. They have not believed as
much as we have in supporting the middle class with programs like
Medicare and Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act.
That is a legitimate political disagreement. If that is what is going
on, then the country will survive, but if there is a seizure of
spending power by the President, if the President gets to decide by
himself which Agencies exist and which don't, well, our democracy
doesn't recover from that because what goes around comes around. Today,
it is a Republican President seizing spending power. A Democratic
President will do it as well. And then all of a sudden, the people
aren't in charge; one person is in charge.
I thought we all were in that exercise together--the defense of the
Constitution, the defense of Congress's rightful prerogative to decide
how money is spent on behalf of our constituents. What Donald Trump is
doing is putting Congress out of business.
I think I heard Senator Schatz saying something like this as I walked
in: I don't know why you work so hard to get a job like this if you are
just going to outsource all of your power to one man.
It is not easy to become a U.S. Senator. Most people spend their
entire career fighting to get this job. You have to do kind of ugly,
distasteful things, like sitting in a room raising money for hours on
end, in order to become a U.S. Senator. You have to give up all your
weekends. You spend less time with your family. Why go through all of
that if you are comfortable with not being in charge of spending, with
endorsing the violation of the Constitution and the enshrinement of
spending power in the hands of one person? There is really nothing left
to do here. There is a lot less to do here if we don't decide how the
taxpayer dollars are spent.
But even more worrying to me is that it seems like we are getting out
of the bipartisan business of caring about democratic norms.
I am heartbroken--heartbroken--that a lot of people I like and
respect on the Republican side didn't stand up to the President when he
pardoned the guys who entered this building and beat police officers
over the head with poles. I am even more heartbroken that many of my
Republican colleagues endorsed it.
I don't understand why my Republican colleagues don't see the ways in
which this seizure of power could be used for corruption, could be used
so that the executive branch gets to shower favor on individuals and
entities that are loyal to the administration while punishing
individuals and entities that are not loyal to the administration.
I am heartbroken that my Republican colleagues don't have a problem
with what is happening at the DOJ and the FBI. If you are an FBI agent
and you investigated the people who attacked the Capitol, you shouldn't
lose your job. We should all be outraged over that, not just because
they were doing their job but also because they were investigating a
legitimately illegal action. Come on. We can't agree that the storming
of the Capitol and the destruction of the Capitol and the attacks on
police officers are out of bounds?
Political violence is a real thing. We have had colleagues on both
sides of the aisle who have been irreparably injured by would-be
assassins, from Steve Scalise to Gabby Giffords. I am just telling you,
the temperature rose in this country when all of those rioters were let
off the hook.
So this is really important, that we raise the alarm as to what is
happening in this country. You need to pay attention to the things that
matter. You need to understand the story. That story is about the
wholesale transfer of power and wealth from average people to the
billionaires and the millionaires. That story is about the destruction
of democratic norms in a way that may be irreversible if not abated in
the next few weeks or months.
Russ Vought is the architect of those plans to erode our democracy
and to transfer wealth to the very powerful. He does not deserve to be
the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, and I am very glad
and proud of my colleagues for being on the floor all night to raise
these concerns.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Barrasso). The Senator from Vermont.
Mr. WELCH. Mr. President, I thank the Presiding Officer. I want to
thank all the folks on the floor from the Parliamentarian's office, the
floor clerks for spending the night on this important effort. I want to
thank the Presiding Officer and your colleagues for occupying the
Chair, something I had the privilege of doing for the last 2 years. I
want to thank my colleagues, particularly Senator Murphy, who is
working the night shift along with Senator Schatz.
And I share the concerns that I have heard Senator Murphy express
about the peril of our democracy and the
[[Page S705]]
peril of the people that all of us represent. My view here is that
January 6 is not over. I was here that day, as I know the Presiding
Officer was and Senator Murphy was. And I remember taking a walk in the
morning from the Capitol, right here, down past the Ellipse where the
President later that day spoke, to the Washington Monument, and then
down to the Lincoln Memorial.
And I didn't have a sense of dread or anticipation of what ultimately
happened that day. There were lots of people here who were supporters
of President Trump. I was looking at them as just American citizens. I
was nervous a little bit about the signs that were so aggressive--
``Hang Mike Pence''--seeing a gallows that was put up outside the
Capitol, seeing the signs about killing Nancy Pelosi.
But I had an assumption that I think all of us had that it would be
peaceful and orderly, and I never ever anticipated that there would be
a direct attack by a mob on the Capitol. And I don't think any of us
did.
On the other hand, my walk had ended before then-President Trump, in
his last days of office--he had 14 more days--had his rally at the
Ellipse and encouraged people, invited them to come here and go wild.
He said that he won the election, feverish activity in a number of
States to try to assert that it was false electors. He filed--I don't
know--60 or 70 lawsuits, and they were all set aside, I think, except
one on a minor technicality. The courts defended the outcome of the
election. There was never any evidence that there was significant fraud
that in any way affected the outcome of the election. And that is not
me saying it. That was then-Attorney General Barr coming to the
conclusion that there was no evidence whatsoever that there was
widespread fraud or any kind of fraud that was substantial enough to
affect the outcome of the election.
So you had 67, maybe 70, courts that rejected all the arguments that
the Trump team made. You had his own Attorney General reject it. But
despite that, you had intense efforts on the part of President Trump to
convince people that he won when he lost. And it got so extreme that he
got on the phone with the secretary of state of Georgia and asked him
to find him 11,000-plus votes to reverse the outcome of the
election. He actually asked a secretary of state to completely violate
his oath of office and ``find me the votes.'' You just don't do that
when your job, more than anything else, as the President of the United
States is to respect the process of the citizens voting for who the
next President will be.
And that didn't stop after January 6. When he got feverish calls from
highly respected leaders here in the Capitol--``Mr. President, you have
got to do something''--that was after the invasion of the Senate when
Vice President Pence was actually in quite a bit of danger. And the
stories are told that when the President was told that at the White
House, he said, basically, ``Why do I care?''
And that attitude persisted. It just went on and on and on. And while
the President was in the White House watching TV, watching things
unfold--and there was incredible violence here. Many of us were in the
building--and I was. I can tell the story. I was in the House, and I
was in the Gallery. And the reason I was in the Gallery as opposed to
on the floor is, of course, that was COVID, so there was social
distancing, so we were doing our business both on the floor and in the
Gallery. The Gallery was probably the worst place to be in some ways
because you couldn't get in and out with any kind of ease.
And what I so vividly remember was a couple of things. One, we had
the Speaker in the Chair, and we had no idea what was going on outside.
It was on TV, apparently, but we didn't have--we weren't watching it.
We were watching the floor activities.
And, suddenly, the Speaker was interrupted when a Capitol Police
officer came out on the floor and interrupted and shouted that the
Capitol was under siege and we were to stay in place and that we were
to take out the gas masks, breathing apparatus, that were under the
chairs and get ready to put those on.
Now, one of the things we still have in the Senate and we had in the
House was a sense of decorum. And there might be, in a fierce debate,
some talking over one another on occasion, but the Chair was always the
person who was in charge. And suddenly we had a police officer
literally interrupting the proceedings of the House of Representatives.
And I just thought to myself: How is this happening? And, of course, he
told us that we were under attack. We didn't know what that meant.
I had taken that walk, a couple-of-hour walk, earlier in the morning,
and I saw a lot of very aggressive activity, but I thought it was
peaceful. By the way, the one thing I did see that didn't mean all that
much to me in the moment but meant a lot to me after all the events
unfolded was there were about three groups of people that were marching
in military formation, and they were singing anthems, which were pretty
vulgar, about what to do to Nancy Pelosi. But they were in a military
lockstep. It was all civilians, or so I thought. But it was a formation
that I later, in the videos, saw was used to overwhelm the Capitol
Police who were at the gates, the racks that were surrounding the
Capitol--all very, very premeditated and practiced. It was a military
kind of formation.
So going back to the Gallery, we were all mystified what to do. We
were apprehensive, obviously. And right after that officer spoke, I saw
a couple of other Capitol Police come to the leaders. Speaker Pelosi,
Majority Leader Hoyer--I was watching that side of the room--and I
think Leader McCarthy as well were just whisked out. They were just
taken out.
And then it was just silence because the mob that ultimately attacked
the House side had to get from this side of the Capitol, the Senate
side, over there. And we watched and waited.
And one of the things--and then we tried to go back in session, and
Congressman McGovern took the Chair and tried to proceed. And I think
part of it was that, even though the police officer had told us that
the Capitol was under attack, we wanted to get our job done. It was
January 6. We had to certify the election. It is a pretty easy job
because our job is not to have a debate about who won the election; it
is just to validate the vote of the citizens of the State we represent
so that their will will be officially recorded and the person that the
people of this country, in all our 50 States, elected will be
certified. Very, very simple.
And as Mr. McGovern was attempting to proceed, there was more and
more alarm, and I watched as our security staff began taking heavy
furniture and putting it up as a barricade against the doors. And the
doors I am talking about were the ones that--the iconic doors where,
when the President of the United States is escorted to the well of the
House to give an address to a Joint Session of Congress, with the great
ceremony and tradition that we have, is escorted over by the Sergeant
at Arms, who announces with great fanfare: Ladies and gentlemen, the
President of the United States.
Well, those doors were barricaded. And at this point we all began to
hear battering at the doors, those very doors--banging and banging and
battering. And then I saw something else I had never seen. I saw our
security staff with guns out. I had never seen that. And the banging on
the door and then, eventually, the shattering of glass on these doors
on the House side that are right over there, the comparable ones. And I
saw this pole coming through the door itself, where the person with the
pole had managed to shatter that glass.
And there were a number of us up there in the House. And all of us
had different levels of fear, and one of the fears that I think a lot
of us had is that this is possibly a mass shooting event. All of us
know that the tragedy of modern life in this country is that mass
shooting events are all too common.
But this is one of the most vivid memories I have. I was standing
there and having no idea what was going to happen, but seeing that the
police had their firearms out and hearing the glass shatter.
And as I was looking at this, and I was feeling actually personally
fearful, as we all were, I had another feeling. It was even more
dominant than my apprehension about our safety. It was disbelief.
Even as I was watching, even as I was experiencing this attack--the
breaking
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of glass, the banging on the doors, the security folks putting up
barricades, having guns out--I didn't believe that it was happening. I
didn't believe it.
And the reason I didn't believe it is that this is the United States
of America. We have been able to enjoy something, that apparently we
took for granted, for nearly 250 years, and that is the peaceful
transfer of power. That is the renunciation of violence as a means of
affecting the outcome of an election. That was shattered that day on
January 6.
So, of course, later we found out that there was a huge mob outside,
and they did an immense amount of damage. I know they came over here
and ransacked the Senate and some of the offices, including the
Parliamentarian's.
We had police officers who died. We had many of our Capitol Police
injured, and I want to just talk about one police officer who was in
the Capitol with me. It was a young man. He was probably about 35. I
had been talking to him a little bit. He had two kids. He commuted into
work. As many of the folks who work here, they can't live close by. It
is too expensive. And they work hard, but it is a tough grind. You have
got to commute maybe an hour in heavy traffic to come in and out,
especially folks with a young family.
And he was literally standing over me when I was on the floor, with
his gun out. And as you know, in the Gallery, it is like in the Senate
Chambers. There are all these doors around the Gallery, and they were
not all secure, although we did have some Capitol Police up there. And
the apprehension all of us had at that point was there was going to be
a mob coming through those doors and attacking us directly.
And this officer, a young man, had his weapon out, and he was
intently surveilling. And I could just see--or maybe I am imagining
what was going through his mind--the last thing in the world he wanted
to do, the last thing, was to have to use that weapon on a fellow
citizen who was in the Capitol, and, I am sure, for all kinds of
reasons.
I mean, just think of the responsibility one has if their job is to
protect Members of Congress and the staff, and in the doing of that
job, you actually have to make a decision to use your sidearm; and how
traumatic that would be for the officer if he, in fact, had to do it--
this person who has a family, who is working hard, whose partner is
expecting him home in a matter of hours. Maybe he is going to pick up
the milk or pick up his kid at school on the way home. All the
activities of everyday life--that is what is important to all of us.
But what I could see is that, as horrible as it would be for him to
have to take that action, if that was what was required--and, in my
case, I was the one he was really protecting--he did not want to do it,
but I could just see he was determined to do whatever was required to
protect us.
You know, that is the point where I really got disgusted with the
people who were attacking, because I was wondering how is it? You know,
I get it. You think your guy won, and you are over the top here. You
have actually shown up at the Capitol. And, you know, some were
violent. A lot were really violent. Others were less so, but they
obviously were part of the mob scene here.
But what disturbed me was the lack of capacity on the part of the
folks attacking the Capitol to experience or empathize or see the
impact that their actions were having on everyday Americans. Not us in
Congress. They don't like us. They don't think we represent them. I get
that.
But what I don't understand is how a grievance you may have against
Members of Congress on that day or the Vice President or on the actors
who were going to actually do the certification--how you would allow
yourself to be part of a group that did such harm, in this case, to
that officer who was standing over me--to put him in such jeopardy, to
cause him such anguish and trauma. You know, there is just no
justification.
We have an obligation to one another. As passionate as we may be
about the political concerns that we have, it doesn't justify just
treating with enormous disrespect, with physical violence, people who
just aren't involved in it? They are just collateral damage.
And then to think that while this was going on, President Trump was
watching TV, and he was getting frantic calls from people like Kevin
McCarthy, the leader, and others: Stop this. It is out of hand. You
have got to call them off.
He wouldn't do it. He wouldn't do it.
So that was a dark day, and it is not over. January 6 was the first
time in our history where there was a mob attack like that on the
Capitol by a group inspired by the President of the United States,
where the purpose was to stop the really clerical administrative
process of certifying--not electing, but certifying--the victor of the
election for President of the United States.
And what the President's team had done is cooked up a bunch of
theories, all of which were dismissed by the courts, to make a case
that the electors should be rejected and substitute electors provided
to get an outcome that the person who lost the election wanted in order
to claim that he won the election.
But there is the fact that the President of the United States, who is
the custodian, really, and the one most representative of the whole
people of the United States--and the need and importance of us having
additional commitment to the peaceful transfer of power--was rejecting
that and encouraging people to act against that tradition.
And he did an effective job in persuading a lot of people who
supported him. And, in fact, many of the folks who came on January 6
later testified that they thought the President wanted them here and
that they believed the President when he said the election was stolen.
There is an immense amount of power in that office and in the person of
Donald Trump. So a lot of people who came here thought they were doing
patriotic work.
And then, of course, the Senate and the House reconvened, and we did
certify the election. But the dispute continued, and many in the House
and many in the Senate voted against certification, in my view, without
any justification whatsoever. But there was enormous turmoil among
people of our country because a lot of folks did believe--inspired by
President Trump's assertions--that the election was ``rigged.''
And then, of course, after the certification and even the swearing in
of President Biden, the continuing assertion by President Trump was
that the election was stolen. He never stopped that narrative.
And I am not enough of a historian to know if what happened on
January 20 with respect to the inauguration was unique, but President
Trump did not show up. He did not sit on the dais. And the tradition
that we have had, of course, in this country as part of the peaceful
transfer of power is that the outgoing President does sit on the dais
and acknowledges the arrival of the new President elected by the
people.
And it is a wonderful ceremony because it reminds us that the power
that a President has is derived from the will of the people, and it is
temporary. It is while that person is in office that they hold the
power of that office until they don't.
So I have been to a few inaugurations, and the only one I have been
to where the outgoing President wasn't there was that one. You know,
another thing so incredible, the first inauguration I went to was in
2008, and it was George Bush, a transfer of power to Barack Obama. And
the ceremony that I remember most vividly was not what happened on the
dais in the taking of the oath by President Obama. It was after.
You know, the President takes his oath. Following that, he comes into
the building, the Capitol, and there is a dinner with legislative
leaders and others, the guests of the President. And there is a lot of
fanfare, a lot of people around. But after all that happens, on the
East steps, the President and First Lady and the Vice President and the
Second Lady, at that time, walked down the steps just themselves. And
on each step is a uniformed military person from each one of the
service branches.
And there are not people out there. There is some press far away so
they can record this. But my wife Margaret and I were out there
watching, and I got a pretty good view because I was a Member of
Congress then. And they have a ceremony where the branches of the
military, each of them, wears a
[[Page S707]]
uniform that goes back to when that branch of the service was
originated. And they have a solemn parade past the President--the newly
elected President, who has been President for an hour or for 2 hours--
and it is a beautiful thing to see a military march when they do it in
formation.
And each branch comes by, and as they get right across from the
President, who may be 100 feet away, they all turn and salute.
And I just thought: This is a miracle that we have a country where at
11:59 a.m., all of those people who just marched by, their allegiance
was to the then President, President Bush. And at 12:01, their
allegiance is to the newly elected President, at that time President
Obama.
And what is so moving to me is the power of this democracy that we
have, where these magnificent, wonderful people, who serve in the
military and make this choice to serve, respect the constitutional
order that ultimately the power belongs to the people. The person they
elected is the Commander in Chief, and their allegiance is not just to
that person, that newly elected President. It is to the constitutional
right that the people are in charge, not the military. You know, we
take it for granted here because it has been there since George
Washington.
That is not the way it works in so many parts of the world. If there
is turmoil that is political in many parts of the world, the military
steps in, and they take over. But this incredibly durable strength of
our democracy where it is civilian control in the military is a
testament.
And I witnessed that then, and I witnessed it again in the
inauguration of President Trump, although that parade because of the
weather had to be downstairs in the Capitol Visitors Center.
But what made that happen? What made that happen is not just that the
military has that respect for the Constitution that they certainly do,
but because all of our leaders--all of our elected Presidents--
understood that there was a tradition we had here that was absolutely
vital to maintain and preserve, and that is the peaceful transfer of
power, and that is to accept the outcome of an election.
And we have had close elections. That one wasn't a particularly close
election. Just think of Bush v. Gore. It all came down to a few votes,
hanging chads in Florida, and ultimately, a Supreme Court decision. A
lot of us disagree with that decision, but Vice President Gore then
accepted the outcome of the election, including the role that the Court
played in that.
And there is enormous heartache for the losing side. But what all of
us have experienced is the pain of defeat--maybe not all of us, but
most of us. And if you haven't experienced it yet, it is waiting for
you. Sometimes, it can be an ambition that is thwarted. Sometimes, it
can be your health that is compromised. But if we are fortunate, then
we understand if you get set back, you lose, you pick yourself up, dust
yourself off, and you get back in, and you fight again.
In my political life, I lost two elections. It is a big deal when you
put yourself out there--whether it is running for office or trying to
get a job--and you get set back. But it is universal. It is always
there. But in politics, it is not so much about you losing an election.
What is really critical is that we don't lose our democracy.
Each of us has an obligation when we win or when we lose to move on.
And if we lost, we get a chance to fight another day. That is what we
all knew. You lose an election--the Democrats lose, Republicans lose--
you come back, run again. Your party runs again, and you have a shot to
get the support of the American people.
January 6 shattered that, and the lingering effects of January 6 are
still here. As we know, President Trump never acknowledged that he lost
that election and Joe Biden won. And a big part of his comeback was a
continuation of the ``Big Steal.'' And it is really a danger to our
democracy that now, emboldened by his win--and he won, OK--he won the
popular vote this time; he won the electoral vote.
His boast that it was a landslide is totally false. It is about a
point and a half margin of victory. We are a divided country. A
Lincolnesque kind of President, but acknowledged the obvious, that it
was a close call for the American people, but he won. But his job is to
represent everybody, whether they voted for him or not.
I think all of us in the Senate, we won, we are here, we are really
happy we got the approval of the people we represent. But I think all
of us know, whether people voted for us or not--I have an obligation to
everybody in Vermont, as you do to everybody in Wyoming, they have a
right to be heard.
What we are getting, I think, is a version of leadership at this
point that rejects that. Where we are now, and it is very regrettable,
we have an administration that is talking about going after people that
they perceive as political adversaries, and that will have real
effects.
We had hearings about it in the Judiciary and in the Finance
Committee. In the Judiciary Committee, we heard from Pam Bondi, the
nominee, now Attorney General, and Kash Patel, whom we have not voted
on yet, for FBI Director.
In the case of Pam Bondi, I was very impressed with her. She is quite
an accomplished person--attorney general in the county that she grew up
in Florida, then she had the gumption to run a statewide race in the
third biggest State of our country, and she won that to be attorney
general. By all accounts, she did a really good job.
But one of the questions that she was asked, Mr. Patel was asked, and
others have been asked is the simple question: Who won the election in
2020? President Trump cannot tolerate anyone acknowledging that Biden
won. So the standard answer now that they go through in their
preparation for the hearings is that President Biden was the President
or he was certified. But they can't say--because it would infuriate
President Trump--that he lost or the other guy won.
Now, why is that so worrisome to me? Because it is a continuation of
the denial of the decision the American people made. And it is an
indication of a demand of fealty that the President is imposing on
people who are going to be in very important positions.
Law enforcement, where an Attorney General and FBI Director have
enormous power to prosecute and where aggression is a good quality, you
want to be ambitious and work hard for the American people, bring law
breakers to justice.
But restraint is also extraordinarily important in those positions
because the power you have by bringing in prosecution is the power to
ruin the life of a person. So there has to be great caution and
reservation and restraint in folks who have that awesome power.
And my take on the insistence by the President that an individual is
going to serve him, not acknowledge who won the 2020 election, is an
indication that first and foremost, the President is demanding fealty
to him, as opposed to fealty to the Constitution.
We are in the first whirlwind weeks of a new Presidency, and I am
alarmed. I am alarmed at what appears to be a disregard for the law on
the part of President Trump.
No. 1, the order the President sent out impounding money that was
appropriated by Congress is a direct challenge to the institutional
responsibility authority of the U.S. Senate and the U.S. Congress.
Under our Constitution, article I, the Congress has the power of the
purse, the Congress decides how to raise money, the Congress decides
how to spend money.
We have a President in the past who tried to end run that and take
away the power that the Congress has. And that, of course, is President
Nixon. And the Court found what he did illegal, and Congress passed the
Impoundment Act to prohibit the President from doing that, although
allowing a President to come before Congress to seek a revision in the
appropriations we made. That is the way to do it. This Impoundment Act
cut across all levels of government and completely rejected the
authority of Congress.
Now, some people may not care about that; let the President decide.
So why is it really important? Just as the peaceful transfer of power
has been the hallmark of our democracy and served us well, the system
of checks and balances of three branches of government--coequal--where
ambition is challenged by ambition, in the words of one of our great
legal philosophers--
[[Page S708]]
and what that meant is you have an ambitious executive, that is fine;
but you have an ambitious Congress where it knows its role is to
protect the interests of the people that we represent and assert our
authority and stand up for the rights of the people we represent if
there is an overreach of executive authority.
So we have the three branches. And there is a tug of war oftentimes.
But the last thing in the world any of us can do, in my view, as U.S.
Senators, is to abdicate our responsibility under the Constitution to
be a separate branch of government. For me, that would be a violation
of my oath.
And where you have a direct challenge by the executive, as you do
with the Impoundment Act--the memo the President sent out basically
picking and choosing which appropriations he is OK with and which he
isn't, that is a direct challenge to the authority of the Congress.
As I say, this is not about us individually needing authority. It is
about good governance. It is about the constitutional principles of
how, as a large and diverse country, we navigate the political
questions that have to be addressed in every generation--questions
about war and peace, that we do everything that is within our power to
protect that separation of powers and stand up for the institutional
responsibilities of the U.S. Senate.
The other aspect of this that is very disturbing to me is reminiscent
of my experience when I was in the Gallery with a police officer, the
young man who wanted to go home to his family and who is now in
enormous jeopardy, if not physically, the trauma of what he had to
experience and what may have been required of him to do.
There is a kind of callousness to that on the part of the attackers
where he is just erased. His feelings don't matter. Whether he gets
home with the milk he promised to bring, whether he gets there to pick
up his child at soccer doesn't matter to them.
What reminds me of that is the impact of this impoundment and what it
did to everyday people. Of course, I am talking the impoundment, but
also, I am talking about the letter that went out telling people who
are working in countries like Malawi. They are working with us with
USAID. They are working in Rwanda. They are working in Ethiopia. They
are providing food to people who are starving, providing vaccines to
people who may be sick. They are teaching young girls.
I was in Malawi with Senator Murray and this beautiful young girl--
really, she is probably 12 years old--went to school at USAID. She came
up to Senator Murray and just threw her arms around her and thanked her
that there was this school. She could go to school. But this letter
went out in an email. You wake up and open up your inbox, and it says:
You no longer work. You are done.
How cruel is that? It is cruel to this person, a USAID worker, whose
life is to serve. That is why they are in USAID. They get gratification
from serving, and you take that away from them.
But then think about that young girl who threw her arms around
Senator Murray and is thrilled. Here she is in Malawi. It is one of the
poorest countries in the world, and she is thrilled that she is
reading. She is thinking: Maybe I could be a doctor. She is thinking
that she could have a big life and be independent, and the teacher who
has been showing up for the past several months doesn't appear, and
there is no explanation to her.
That has happened in country after country after country and AID
project after AID project after AID project. There is a cruelty here
that is just bad for us. I mean, that is not how we treat one another
no matter how much we disagree on politics. So that actually makes me
sad about what is happening.
You know, there are really large issues here that affect us. I was
listening to Senator Murphy, and I thought he made some really terrific
points, you know, about our democracy, about what dynamic is happening
here with this new administration, about the wealth transfer that is
happening.
You know, I will give President Trump this: He did tap into a lot of
heartache and a lot of anxiety and a lot of concern that people around
the country had. They didn't like the way things were going, and they
felt, I think, economically, that they weren't getting ahead despite
working really hard. I think that is something that he tapped into, and
I think, to some extent, we Democrats did not do the job on the
securing of the southern border inasmuch as we did with many of the
initiatives, economic initiatives, of the last administration.
There is a reality that confronts all of us, Republicans and
Democrats, that if you are a young family and you are trying to buy a
house, that is out of reach. Healthcare that we used to be able to
count on is getting incredibly expensive. The cost of childcare for
young families is like going to college. I mean, these things are
really tough on people, and we have got to address them, but those
challenges that I just mentioned are in all of America. It is not like
that is just red America or blue America. You could talk to a family in
Vermont. You could talk to a family, probably, in Wyoming or in Idaho
or in Ohio. The challenges they face are very similar.
What that suggests to me is that the problems that we face and that
the people we represent face are real. In a campaign, we can argue
about who has the better prescription to address them. You won that
campaign the last time. You did. By the way, I can say, ``Donald Trump
won the election.'' I don't like to say it, but I can say it, and I
should say it because he did. But now is the time where the focus we
have together should be to try to solve those problems and make life
better for everyday people in the Presiding Officer's State and in
mine.
But do you know? If you listen to the inaugural speech of President
Trump, I didn't hear any words about housing. I didn't hear any words
about childcare. I didn't hear any words about clean air. I didn't hear
any words about strengthening rural hospitals. All of those things that
we share in common and that are real challenges weren't talked about.
The big emphasis was on these tax cuts. You know, those tax cuts will
help some everyday people--some of them--but an immense amount of the
allocation of those tax cuts is going to go to folks who are doing
really well and to our corporations that are doing really well. Those
tax cuts are going to come and be paid for by cutting into some of the
services the government provides through the private sector, oftentimes
to the citizens in every one of our States, and Senator Murphy went
through a lot of those.
The House has now taken the lead on his tax bill. They are trying to
come up with ways to cut the spending in order to pay for the tax cuts.
Medicare is in jeopardy. Medicaid is in jeopardy. Childcare, to the
extent we help, is in jeopardy. So there is a real wealth transfer that
has been built into this major agenda item.
The other aspect of this that is disturbing to me is just the impact
it has on people in Vermont. There is a lot of turmoil for our
businesses and for our service providers. Let me just talk about some
of the effects of these across-the-board cuts that the President is
talking about and how it would affect Vermont.
It would freeze funding for Head Start. As the Presiding Officer
knows, that affects, like, 1,200 kids in Vermont. It really makes a
difference to their getting off to a decent start. It is the poor kids
who oftentimes don't get the nutrition that they need, and a lot of
these kids with the benefit of Head Start go on to become very
successful people.
A freeze in funding for community health centers: You know, when the
administration sent out that directive just, really, freezing funding--
one of the community health centers that we have is the Wells River
health center, a community health center. I was talking to the
director. They provide healthcare for people in what we call the
Northeast Kingdom--it is a very low-income part of our State with very,
very hard-working and proud people--and they have an operating cash
margin of, like, 0 to 5 days.
So, when the funding was cut off and, of course, the website too--
where you can get payments and find out what is going on--it was closed
down just unilaterally, which is something Mr. Vought thinks is a good
idea. When that happened, the director was in an incredible bind. He
had workers who were showing up. He had moms who were bringing their
kids in for a dental appointment they had been trying to
[[Page S709]]
get for 7 months. He had support staff who had been working there for
years. But with this directive, they couldn't pay the bills. OK? I am
not even quite sure what their status is right now, but with that
directive imposed on the director of the program--this horrible
decision--they were in no capacity to have any confidence whatsoever
that he could meet payroll.
Why would you do that? You know, if you have a plan where you are
saying, ``Hey, we are spending too much money. We have got to figure
out how to tighten our belts,'' then you take some time to have a plan,
and there is some consultation with the Agency and the people who are
affected. That is a responsible way to proceed but not to have just a
bolt out of the blue, when you open up your inbox and you are told you
are shutting down. There are the ripple effects that that has on a
community. Then, of course, people who work there have to make their
plans because they can't wait indefinitely to get the decision as to
whether they will or won't have a job, whether it be a community health
center will stay open or it will close. There is a lot of destruction
that goes into an action that the administration took with that.
You know, we had a couple of roundtables because people were really,
really stressed and calling all of our offices. We are a small State
like the Presiding Officer is, and, you know, one of the privileges
that I think he and I both have is that of being a Senator in a small
State, we really get to know an awful lot of the people we represent. I
know I have talked to the Presiding Officer about this: The great joy
we get is in that interaction with the folks we represent, and that is
whether we agree with them or not, whether they voted for us or not. It
also makes it a little more painful because it is very real; it is not
abstract.
So I will just tell a few stories about some of the Vermonters who
got affected.
Sarah Robinson is with the Vermont Network Against Sexual and
Domestic Violence. She said:
Federal funding in Vermont supports emergency shelter and
hotline services for victims of domestic and sexual violence.
If they get a call in the middle of the night that a woman is getting
battered, they respond. They have a network of volunteers who goes out.
They will bring that woman to safety, and they will have a safe house
for her. That is a pretty amazing service--and, suddenly, that is cut
off.
Andy Barter is from the Little Rivers Health Care Center. That is the
one I was talking about earlier up in Wells River.
He said:
This has been a week like none other that threatened the
continuation of our health center in operations and has
dearly affected the feeling of safety for our staff and
patients.
You know, you get these local institutions, and they are so important
to everyday people. You count on being able to bring your daughter or
your son to the doctor, and it is somebody you know.
I mean, again, I have such respect for the Presiding Officer and
admiration in his career as a physician and in the healing he does. I
know, you know, the joy he gets in that service; but, suddenly, we have
got doctors who end up having that same ethic that you have in Vermont,
and, suddenly, the people who depended on them can't go there.
Vermont State Representative Kate Logan, who works at Elevate, said,
``Our agencies are currently serving 78 [young people]--youth,'' and if
they don't get the resources, they are not going to be able to continue
their services. This is about housing and homelessness. Of course, that
problem in Vermont, like in all of our States, has increased very, very
significantly.
Sonali Samarasinghe, U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants,
said:
We have 79 families in temporary housing. This is very
challenging for us. We don't have the funds, and it's a
public safety issue because there's homelessness, and we
don't have the funds to go on paying their rents.
So this is not new funds they are seeking. These are the funds that
have been authorized and have been committed and--boom--out of nowhere,
they are told they are out of business.
Karen Price, the Vermont Family Network. She said:
The Executive order and the memo have thrown all of our
funding that we have relied on into disarray . . . We
suspended all of our planned activities. We talked about
furloughing our employees . . . Cashflow for a nonprofit like
the [Family Network] is tight. We cannot sustain a prolonged
nonreceipt of funding. Every day since Tuesday has been
filled with anxiety and uncertainty.
Steve Schmida from Resonance: They do a lot of work with USAID.
He told me: ``Seventy percent of our work is with the [USAID] and the
State Department. Before the Secretary of State's and Secretary Marco
Rubio's foreign assistance stop work order . . . 62 of those have now
been laid off.
This is in the inbox: You are not working anymore.
It is no different than if we went home tonight--each one of us--had
a nice meal with our families, went to bed, looking forward to resting
and getting up and facing today, getting up and--boom--in the inbox, we
are told: Don't show up for work.
The two features that I have seen so far in this administration, it
really is a continuation of the January 6 ethic, is a willingness to
disregard the law--the shattering of norms--and a casual infliction of
cruelty for no reason on everyday Americans who just want to keep doing
the job that they have and do the work that needs to be done.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. McCormick). The Senator from Michigan.