    [Congressional Record Volume 171, Number 38 (Wednesday, February 26, 2025)]
    [House]
    [Page H863]
    From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

                                  {time}  1715
                            FIRED BY PRESIDENT TRUMP

      (Mr. FOSTER asked and was given permission to address the House for 1
    minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
      Mr. FOSTER. Mr. Speaker, I rise as a Ph.D. physicist in Congress, who
    spent most of his career in the national laboratories of the Department
    of Energy, to share the story of a research engineer at a national lab
    who was recently fired without cause by President Trump and Elon Musk.
      This engineer's job was:

           Co-leading a project developing software for critical
         mineral and rare earth element extraction, while also playing
         a lead technical role in computer modeling of desalination
         and water treatment processes and supporting U.S. industrial
         partners to use these tools to deploy and modernize their
         systems.

      Mr. Speaker, our country cannot afford to lose the talent of civic-
    minded scientists like this.
      Moreover, if Donald Trump thinks that he is going to strike a deal
    with Ukraine on rare earth minerals, then he is going to need real
    experts in our government on critical mineral extraction. We don't get
    that by firing them.

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