[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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