[Congressional Record Volume 171, Number 45 (Tuesday, March 11, 2025)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1649-S1650]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                           Government Funding

  Mrs. MURRAY. Mr. President, if House Republicans don't think they 
need us when writing a bill, why should they expect us to support that 
bill, especially when it comes to taking funding away from our families 
who depend on it and hurting our communities and giving away Congress's 
power over key funding decisions?
  Instead of working with Democrats to invest in working people all 
across our country and make sure our constituents have their voices 
heard in

[[Page S1650]]

government funding, Speaker Johnson abandoned talks and rolled out a 
bill that includes major cuts. It cuts nondefense discretionary funding 
by $15 billion in total in 2025 and hands a blank check to Trump and 
Elon Musk to pick winners and losers and steal from our constituents.
  Make no mistake, the entire bill the House is voting on today is 
House Republicans' own doing, and it is a dumpster fire, so I am here 
to sound the alarm about that fire before it spreads. But, first, I 
need everyone to understand: The choice is absolutely not dumpster fire 
or shutdown. I should know. I introduced another option yesterday. It 
is a short-term CR that would give us the time to finish doing our job 
and negotiate bipartisan, full-year bills. There is no reason we cannot 
do that, and there is every reason that every single one of us should 
prefer actual bills that we write to help people over the bill that 
just empowers two billionaires who are running our government into the 
ground and our economy into a recession.
  I really want to make sure all of my colleagues understand how bad 
this bill is. So if anyone thinks this bill from House Republicans is 
going to avoid chaos or avoid pain for our country, listen up because 
it is only going to add to the chaos.
  This is not a ``clean CR,'' as some Republicans claim. It cuts 
programs our communities rely on, and that includes a major 44-percent 
cut to Army Corps projects that help mitigate against floods and 
hurricanes and much else.
  It cuts medical research into diseases and conditions affecting 
servicemembers and their families by more than $1 billion. That is over 
40 percent.
  It leaves a massive $280 million shortfall in NIH's budget, and that 
is a big cut to research that saves lives.
  It leaves a shortfall for housing programs. We are talking about 
32,000 fewer vouchers. And that is just scratching the surface.
  It also completely lacks the basic guardrails we include in all of 
our funding bills, on a bipartisan basis, each and every year, to make 
sure that our States and our communities are taken care of and not just 
subject to the whims of the Trump administration or any administration 
to pick winners and losers.
  House Republicans are not trying to responsibly fund the government; 
they are trying to turn it into a slush fund for Trump and Musk to 
wield as they see fit so that they can shift their focus entirely to 
tax cuts for billionaires.
  Right now, we--Congress--have the power of the purse. We have that 
power to fight for our States, to fight for our families, to bring 
Federal dollars back home and build bridges and feed families and care 
for veterans and fight fentanyl--whatever our communities tell us they 
need.
  We should not cede that power with this bill. That is really worth 
sitting with for a minute.
  We all chose to be here, to be here in Congress. We chose to take on 
this role so we can advocate for causes and communities that we care 
about and work in a bipartisan manner to reach compromise, to make sure 
that our causes and our communities get the support they need.
  House Republicans' full-year CR would instead pass the buck to Elon 
Musk and unelected political appointees to decide who gets funded and 
who doesn't. Is that not why each and every one of us was actually 
elected, to fight for our States and to fight for our communities as 
the people who know them best?
  I certainly know that is true for me. I have worked for years with 
colleagues on both sides of the aisle to make sure that people back 
home who trusted us when we said we would fight for them always know 
Congress has their back.
  So really think about that before you vote to make your voice mean 
less for the rest of this fiscal year because it is terrifying to think 
of what unelected political appointees would do.
  We have already gotten an alarming preview of how Trump will threaten 
to cut off States and cities that might disagree with him, and Elon 
will totally work the government to benefit his companies and hurt his 
competitors.
  I have to say, our bipartisan appropriations process is not always 
easy, but it is a heck of a lot better than handing over our decision 
making to this or to any administration. Voting against this bill is 
about standing for communities and families who actually rely on the 
funding and for our ability--every one of us--to be a voice for our 
constituents in Congress because what is going to happen when, perhaps, 
medical research funding gets sucked away from cancer and Alzheimer's 
all because a scientist worked somewhere previously and said that 
vaccines are safe and all of a sudden the funding is gone?
  What happens when you can't get a bridge replaced because the 
political appointees at DOT don't like the policies your mayors 
advocated for?
  What happens when they reduce staffing at national parks in your 
backyard because your Governor won't deny climate change?
  The bipartisan directives we provide--we, Congress, provides--each 
year with our funding bills help guard against that kind of thing for 
any administration. And all of that is missing from this disastrous 
slush fund CR.
  Through bipartisan compromise, we make sure our communities have a 
voice at the table, and our taxpayer dollars have a return on their 
taxes. We should reject this bill. We should pass a short-term CR to 
avoid a shutdown, and then we should do our job and work on full-year 
spending bills like we were sent here to do.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from OTE
  Ms. MURKOWSKI. Mr. President, I am scheduled to be part of a colloquy 
here in just a couple minutes, but I wanted to make a comment about 
what the Senator from Washington has shared.
  I am going to use a term that maybe some people are not familiar 
with. We are in a ``Morton's fork''--a Morton's fork. We have heard 
about a fork in the road. Some people know what a Hobson's choice is. 
But a Morton's fork is a choice between two equally unpleasant 
alternatives. And if this isn't where we are right now, ladies and 
gentlemen, I don't know what is.
  As Senator Murray has outlined, a long-term CR--a long-term CR--when 
we have already done our appropriations work and we are not able to get 
to that work and instead we basically give the administration the 
ability to direct within the funding levels but direct as they will see 
fit through the end of September is something that I think many of us--
certainly this appropriator--do not really feel comfortable with.
  I spent a lot of time within my Appropriations subcommittee, working 
very hard with the Department of the Interior, to make sure that we 
knew, whether it was funding for wildland firefighters or what we were 
doing within the VA or within any of the other Agencies--that we did 
what people asked and expected us to do. We did those bills, and I 
think we did a pretty good job.
  Mine moved out of full committee unanimously, and then they didn't 
advance. So here we are sitting at a place where we have to take either 
the choice of a long-term CR and basically give up the work that we 
have done as a Congress or we move to a government shutdown, an equally 
untenable and equally unpleasant alternative and one that, quite 
honestly, we should not be in this position. We should not be in this 
place where we have two bad choices for our government and for the 
people of this country.
  We can do better. I wish--I agree, Senator Murray--I wish that what 
we were able to advance was a short-term CR that would allow us to move 
to finish up our appropriations bills, do our work, and then start 
moving on to fiscal year 2026. I don't know whether it is possible 
between now and the end of day on March 14, but I, for one, am at a 
place where I am just beside myself that we are in a place where we 
feel that we have no good alternatives. We are in a Morton's fork.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Hampshire.