[Congressional Record Volume 171, Number 118 (Wednesday, July 9, 2025)]
[Senate]
[Pages S4292-S4295]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
TRUMP ADMINISTRATION
Mr. SCHIFF. Mr. President, over the last 250 years, this country has
grown from a handful of rebellious Colonies to an economic, scientific,
military, cultural, technological, and agricultural behemoth. And,
crucially, through it all, we have remained a democracy devoted to the
hard work our Founders envisioned of making our Nation a more perfect
Union. Progress has not always been straightforward, but it has been
consistent over time and nothing short of extraordinary, which is why
it is all the more heartbreaking to see so much damage, so much self-
inflicted harm imposed on our country by this administration, over the
last 170 days.
Indeed, if you were to design a Presidency and policies to diminish
our scientific and technological prowess from within, it would look a
lot like this administration.
If you were determined to kill our clean energy future and retreat
from any hope of addressing climate change, it would look a lot like
this.
If you wanted to undermine our standing around the world, befriend
dictatorships, and betray our fellow democracies, it would look a lot
like this.
If you wanted to deliberately tear at the social fabric and cohesion
of our country, set State against State and people against people to
the point of conflict in the streets, it would look a lot like this
administration.
The President and his Cabinet have been tearing down so much of what
makes this country special--and so quickly--that it has been hard to
see the big picture, hard to separate the biggest harms from merely the
most sensational or the most proximate. One hundred days was not enough
time to evaluate the harms this administration had already inflicted on
our country and its people, but 170 days just might be sufficient.
So, today, I want to go through the top 10 ways this administration
has been wrecking the country. From the thoughtless and irresponsible
to the illegal and unconstitutional, to the deliberately cruel and
malicious, I want to tell you what the actions of this Presidency have
really meant for the country and for our future. So here they are, the
top 10 ways the administration is wrecking the country:
No. 10, Donald Trump is waging an all-out war on America's research
universities.
America's universities have been the envy of the world, for much of
the last century, in powering scientific achievement and economic
growth, dramatic breakthroughs in medicine, significant achievements in
the arts, technological innovation, and all of the attendant economic
benefits have been driven by a decades-old partnership between
universities and the Federal Government.
As a part of this grand bargain, the Federal Government invests in
research conducted at top universities, and the country enjoys the
benefits. From brilliant scientists and academia, the military gets new
technologies and capabilities, including innovations in fusion energy,
laser technology, electronic jamming capabilities, and so much more.
Our healthcare is improved and our lifespans are increased by
university-led research into new medicines, medical implants, and
devices. Food science helps us grow healthier crops and produce more
food with less water and less pesticides.
You would be hard-pressed to find a field of scientific endeavor in
which university research has failed to deliver. Now all of that is on
the chopping block. The administration has canceled tens of billions of
dollars in university research funding. It is stopping some of the best
and brightest students from coming to the United States to study by
banning international students from attending. Already, some of the
world's most promising students are choosing to go elsewhere--to China
or the UK or Sweden or Canada.
The reason we want the very best students is so that we can remain
the global leader in every field of endeavor. That is what makes us
great. But this--this is a one-way brain drain in the wrong direction.
The administration is also raising taxes on research universities and
threatening the removal of accreditation from universities which fail
to bow to the President's ideological and political whims. It is using
real concerns about anti-Semitism on campus as a pretext or the
policies of athletic departments that it disfavors to justify attacks
on universities that will do nothing but set the country and our
economy back. Their real agenda is to change the agenda at schools, to
eliminate academic independence, and to indoctrinate students into an
ideology that is more to their liking, turning administration
bureaucrats into a kind of thought police.
Coming in at No. 9 of the top 10 ways the administration is wrecking
the country is taking away food from hungry kids in America.
Donald Trump promised to make America healthy again, but he is not.
Instead, he has settled for making America hungry again.
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The budget just realized through their big, ugly bill makes a multi-
hundred-billion-dollar cut to the SNAP program--that is Supplemental
Nutrition and Food Assistance--basically food for hungry kids and
families. This isn't a cut that can be explained away with a vague,
multipurpose phrase or platitude like ``waste, fraud, or abuse'' or by
engaging in funny math. Feeding hungry families is not wasteful.
Providing fresh food at schools for kids who can't otherwise afford to
eat is not a fraud. Helping seniors living on the edge of poverty
afford a meal is not an abuse. But taking this food away to fund tax
cuts for wealthy people and corporations--that is a fraud, that is a
waste, and that is an abuse.
These cuts will mean more kids who are unable to get a school lunch;
more seniors literally sitting and starving in their homes; an America
that is more hungry than before; an America that, although it is the
richest Nation on Earth and the most productive agricultural Nation on
Earth, has chosen to adopt ``more hunger'' as its policy.
Moving on to No. 8. Coming in at No. 8 of the top 10 ways the
administration is wrecking the country, Donald Trump is destroying our
alliances with democratic nations around the world and aligning our
country with dictators.
Across administrations and decades, America has been a symbol of
stability for the globe, a trusted partner, a champion of freedom, a
democracy. We have stood up to evil empires and championed the cause of
liberty. And although we have made more than our share of mistakes in
trying to rebuild other nations in our image, we have strived to
achieve a foreign policy consistent with our values.
Now, in just the first few months, so much of that legacy has been
betrayed. So many of our alliances have been degraded. So much of our
standing in the world has been made small. So many of our friends have
become estranged. Our treaty partners are unsure of whether they can
count on us in a pinch.
Donald Trump likes to talk about peace through strength. He likes to
think that bullying our friends or extorting a price for our security
guarantees is what makes us strong, but he is wrong.
He trashes our relationships with our friends. He belittles the
Canadians and the British, who fought and died alongside American
soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. He denigrates Ukrainians and their
brave President, who fight nobly in the defense of their democracy and
their sovereignty. He insists on Ukraine paying tribute in the form of
mineral rights to secure his support. He flatters and fawns over the
Kremlin dictator--at least he did until even Trump could see that he
was being made to play the fool by a mass murderer who did not want
peace, only further mayhem. And who can say how long Trump's new
resolve against Putin will last before it is overtaken by caprice or
self-interest.
The only true constant of Trump's foreign policy has been that the
United States will be there for you if and only if it is pleasing to
the President, if you flatter him, if you bow and scrape before him, or
if there is something in it for him personally, like a $400 million
aircraft or a multibillion-dollar crypto deal for his family. He has
made it plain that American foreign policy is part protection racket
and part just racket.
All of this means that America is less safe and secure, with fewer
friends we can rely upon out of any sense of shared sacrifice or
values.
The mutual defense clause of article 5 of NATO has been invoked only
once, and that was on our behalf after we were viciously attacked by
terrorists on September 11. Our friends and allies rushed to our
defense--and not just out of a sense of treaty obligation but because
of a shared sense of purpose and our common humanity.
The problem with turning every relationship into a transitional or
transactional one is that everyone will want something in return and no
one will be there when you really need them.
Moving on, No. 7 of the top 10 ways the administration is wrecking
what is best about this country is their pointless, economically
suicidal, and self-destructive attack on the development of renewable
energy.
Renewable energy can lead the world away from a climate catastrophe.
It can be an economic slingshot, catapulting us into an abundant energy
future that is American-made. It can truly make us energy independent
instead of simply more dependent on the fossil fuel industry.
But Trump has attacked clean energy with a vengeance, repealing
incentives passed during the Biden administration. And why? Because
they were passed during the Biden administration and because Donald
Trump made a promise to oil companies in exchange for campaign cash--
lots of it, more than a billion of it.
The ``Big Ugly Bill'' phases out tax credits meant to spur
development of solar and wind power and replaces them with tax credits
for coal. If you are wondering whether you heard that right, you did--
tax credits for coal mining in the year 2025. At a time when we have
harnessed the capacity of the Sun and the wind to power entire
communities, we are disinvesting in a renewable energy future in order
to fund an industry from the 1800s. It is the policy equivalent of
investing in black lung, and it will choke our energy supply over time
and kneecap our economic potential.
China knows this. In May, China installed 93 gigawatts of solar
capacity. That is enough to power almost 70 million homes. And they did
it in a single month. China is installing almost 100 solar panels every
second. And that is not because the China Communist Party is populated
by a bunch of crazy environmentalists; it is because they know this is
the industry of the future. They want to dominate the global market in
clean energy, and thanks to Donald Trump, they will.
So how will Trump's energy policies impact you at home? It means your
energy bills are going to go up--way up--by hundreds of dollars a
month. Renewable sources of energy are the vast majority of new energy
coming online in America. Take that away, and we are reliant on the
same old capacity, your same old utility, less competition, and higher
prices, costing you more to heat your home in the winter or cool it
down during the hot, hot summer. It means more families will make the
impossible choice between paying their utility bills and putting food
on the table.
Now, earlier, I talked about this administration's cuts to research
universities, which brings me to No. 6: the broader attack on health
and science.
The administration is slashing the National Institutes of Health, the
Nation's premier medical research Agency. They have cut NIH by almost
half--almost half.
Now, I am no scientist, but I took enough science classes in college
to know my way around a lab, and I am certainly no economist, but I can
do basic math, and I can tell you with certainty, as anyone can who
looks at this, that cutting NIH in half, massively gutting research
grants and positions, will lead to the cancelation of clinical trials
and new treatments and to Americans needlessly suffering from any
number of illnesses and diseases. It will mean scaling back research
efforts on everything from cancer, to Alzheimer's, to HIV-AIDS,
destroying years or decades of research in any number of fields that
might have been weeks or months away from a breakthrough.
That hurts everyone. There isn't a Senator in this body who hasn't
been visited by families with sick children or sick parents or
constituents who are ill themselves, constituents who have pleaded with
us that we increase funding for NIH, who have put a human face on the
hope that they or their loved ones might be saved--saved--if only we
invest in NIH. And now we turn our backs on them. And for what? For
what?
At No. 5 of the top 10 ways the administration is wrecking the
country, we have the massive DOGE cuts to the Federal workforce and
Federal Agencies everywhere.
Elon Musk and his lot of unqualified, unvetted, unrestrained tech
bros have taken a chain saw to any number of Federal grants, Federal
contracts, Federal Departments, and Federal jobs without the slightest
understanding of the human consequences.
Musk may have held himself harmless during these massive cuts--he
managed to use his position in the administration to expand his
billions in government contracts at Starlink--but everyone else was
made to suffer. Now
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he is gone, but the wrecking crew continues its work.
DOGE accidentally cut nuclear safety staff and then had to rush and
try to rehire them. They cut specialists in bird flu, and then they had
to try to rush and rehire them.
(Mr. HUSTED assumed the Chair.)
Remember those coal tax credits I mentioned earlier? Well, they are
cutting mine safety efforts, making dangerous work even more so.
They DOGE'd USAID and diminished our soft power around the world.
They are dismantling the Department of Education and selling off our
children's education piece by piece.
And they would cut NASA in half. There is no more high-profile
example of America's scientific and technological prowess than our
space program, and, sadly, there is no better example of its deliberate
forfeiture.
In my lifetime alone, our space program was the first to plant a flag
on the Moon. We launched the first solar probe. We took the first
photos and landed the first rover on Mars. We are sending more humans
into orbit than ever and on track to land the first human on Mars.
We did those things not because they were easy. No. We did those
things, as President Kennedy once said, ``because they are hard'';
because space exploration can teach us things about our life on Earth
that propel innovation here at home, innovation that allows us to
travel faster, live longer, and live better; and because exploring
space can provide the most profound thoughts of our place in the
universe and whether, amidst all of that, we are alone.
This Agency that has brought such hope and excitement and pride--
pride--will be brought low. It may be one small step for DOGE, but it
represents one giant leap backward for mankind.
The Trump administration has also paused the hiring of critical
seasonal firefighting staff, laid off probationary employees just as we
begin another devastating fire season. They cut staff and programs at
NOAA and the National Weather Service, hurting early earthquake
warnings--early warnings of all disasters--warnings that are pivotal
when tragedy strikes, like it did in Texas this week, in North Carolina
months ago, or in Los Angeles in January.
They cut staff who run the phones at Social Security while closing
regional offices, making it harder for seniors to get the benefits they
paid into their entire life--because that was the goal. That was the
goal.
And for all the pain that DOGE has inflicted and continues to
inflict, the only thing that bastard Agency has really served to
accomplish is making government less effective, less efficient, and
less trustworthy because, more than anything else, the DOGE
bloodletting has killed the trust of countless Americans--trust that
the Federal jobs and programs they relied upon would continue; trust
that they might be paid less than private sector workers to do the work
they love, to unravel new mysteries in space, in the oceans, in our
bodies, and in ourselves but that they could rely upon the government
as an employer; that they could be insulated from political and
partisan considerations; that they would not become some ideological
arm of the President or his party or its collateral damage.
Now that trust is gone, and the loss of that talent and that trust
just might be the most expensive loss of all.
Now, No 4. At No. 4 of the top 10 ways in which the administration is
wrecking our country and our economy: tariffs--the on-again, off-again,
on-again, off-again, on-again, off-again, on-again tariffs; the ill-
considered, ill-executed, unpredictable, unproductive, costly,
indiscriminate, and self-destructive tariffs.
For a President who ran on lowering costs, his most significant
economic action has been a colossal backfire. Prices for your Fourth of
July barbecue last week were the highest they have ever been. Like the
cost of burgers or beer, phones are now more expensive, cars are more
expensive. Prices at Walmart, Target, Costco: up, up, up. And on
Amazon, they were going to add a specific line item for the cost of the
Trump tariffs beside each affected product, until the Trump
administration begged its owner, Jeff Bezos, not to be so transparent
with their own customers because it made the President look bad. This
didn't stop Amazon from adding the Trump tax to the price of the goods
you buy on Amazon. It just stopped Amazon from showing you just how
much more you are paying.
And while you get poorer because of these tariffs, America is not
getting any stronger. While your pocketbook is getting hit, so, too, is
our standing around the globe. After all, these chaotic tariffs give
our trading partners all too accurate an impression that we are
unpredictable; that we are unstable; that America, with all its power,
is unreliable. So those trading partners are flocking elsewhere. They
go to China or to India or elsewhere.
The fact is, we have so alienated even our closest friends and allies
that some countries, like Canada, have gone beyond reciprocal tariffs
to a downright boycott of American goods, devastating American farmers,
small businesses, and consumers alike.
The ``Art of the Deal'' indeed.
Which takes us to No. 3 and this administration's attack on our
healthcare. When the Senate passed Trump's ``Big Ugly Bill'' last week,
50 of our colleagues put their stamp on a budget that will devastate
Medicaid; that will mean hospitals and clinics close; that millions of
Americans will lose access to lifesaving care; that will mean people
get their care denied; that will mean the long, hard fight against
opioids will be set back by cuts to substance abuse treatment.
After promising that Medicaid would not be touched, that our
healthcare would not be harmed, they cut it by $1 trillion--trillion
with a ``t''--to fund tax cuts for wealthy people, by the trillions.
And when your hospital closes because it loses millions in Medicaid
dollars, it won't matter whether you were personally on Medicaid. Your
hospital will be gone. You and everyone else will have to drive farther
to find an emergency room, to have a baby, to get dialysis, or to be
treated for a stroke. The quality of your care will decline. Your
access to care will diminish, especially reproductive care but every
kind of care. Most of us will pay more--a lot more--for the care we
receive, but some will go without care altogether.
In the richest nation on Earth, we will move farther away from
universal quality care to a period of even greater scarcity, even
shorter lifespans, even lesser quality of life. And again, for what?
More tax cuts for wealthy people who don't need them and who already
have all the care that they need?
Now we have reached No. 2. No. 2 of the top 10 most destructive acts
of the administration: Trump's undermining of the rule of law. The
assault on the rule of law began almost immediately with the pardon of
1,550 people who committed one of the most serious offenses in the
Nation's history: attacking the U.S. Capitol to stop the peaceful
transfer of power.
In granting pardons to hundreds of offenders who used violence that
day against police officers, Donald Trump sent a powerful message to
his followers that they may use violence on his behalf and he would
have their back; that he would insulate them from the law and from
accountability, and more than that, that he would promote them,
advocate for them, appoint them to high positions in a new Justice
Department, a Department oriented not toward justice, not devoted to a
rule of law but devoted only to him. In Trump's Justice Department, we
are no longer a nation of laws but a nation of men to be rewarded or
punished according to the President's whims.
A mayor of New York, charged with corruption, has his case dismissed
not because of any prosecutorial misconduct or lack of evidence but
because he is useful to the President on an unrelated policy matter.
In Trump's Justice Department, the absence of evidence or lawful
predication is no bar to initiating a criminal investigation when a
political pretext will do. He is using the Department as both sword and
shield: a sword to pursue his enemies and a shield to protect his
friends and to protect no one--no one--more than himself; a President
given immunity by Supreme Court Justices he appointed--acting like a
convicted felon because he is a convicted felon--now engaging in the
most blatant graft and corruption, accepting gifts and gratuities,
airplanes and commissions, in the hundreds of millions,
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in the billions, and without any fear of investigation, let alone
prosecution.
The inspectors general are gone. The watchdogs are gone. Only the
dogs are left to feed on the carrion that was the rule of law.
When courts try to restrain the Trump administration's illegality,
his Departments ignore their orders. We saw it with the Alien Enemies
Act. We see it with the unlawful impoundment of FEMA funds, with the
lawless withholding of State funding, with attacks on foreign
assistance appropriated by Congress, with racial profiling and illegal
renditions to foreign prisons without due process or, frankly, any kind
of process.
Which brings us to No. 1--the No. 1 way in which Donald Trump and his
administration are wrecking this country--and that is by destroying the
very idea of America.
Our Nation was formed as an improbable experiment, an experiment
based on the unproven idea that people possessed sufficient virtue to
be self-governing, that we did not need to be ruled by a tyrant. From
that humble and daring beginning, the idea grew that a country so
constituted, so organized could not only rule itself but could attract
the best and the brightest, the most industrious of souls from all over
the Earth and make them Americans; that there would be no caste system
in America; that, here, anyone with the drive, the talent, and the
intellect could prosper; that there were no limits to what we could
achieve.
That idea that became America was our most powerful appeal, our
calling card at home and around the world. It has driven people to our
shores. It has inspired people in dark prison cells in Iran, in labor
camps in China, in gulags in Russia, and in impoverished places
everywhere to dream of America--what it stands for and what it might
mean to them if only they were so lucky, so very lucky, to one day move
to this great place called America.
And Donald Trump's destruction of that idea, the idea of America as
the last best hope of mankind, is the worst offense of this
administration.
During Ronald Reagan's final speech as President, he spoke of a man
who wrote to him of the uniqueness of America:
You can go to live in France--
The man wrote--
but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in
Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a
Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the
Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.
Other countries--
Reagan said--
may seek to compete with us; but in one vital area, as a
beacon of freedom and opportunity that draws the people of
the world, no country on Earth comes close.
This--
He said--
is one of the most important sources of America's greatness.
We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our
people--our strength--from every country and every corner of
the world. And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich
our nation. While other countries cling to the stale past,
here in America we breathe life into dreams. We create the
future, and the world follows us into tomorrow. Thanks to
each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity,
we're a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy
and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always
leading the world to the next frontier. This quality is
vital to our future as a nation. If we ever closed the
door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would
soon be lost.
That was Ronald Reagan. But now we have Donald Trump, a President
who, more than any other in our history, ``clings to a stale past.''
I can forgive the President for his reckless tariff policies, for his
sycophantic hires, or his foolish tax giveaways to the rich, but I will
never forgive him for the damage he has done and for the damage he
continues to do to the very idea of America, for how the rest of the
world now views this country, and more critically, more
catastrophically, how we have come to view ourselves. Tackling
immigrants to the ground, people who are landscapers or farmworkers or
restaurant workers or garment workers, let alone beating them while
they lay there, as agents did to the father of three U.S. marines, it
is not how Americans treat the hard-working people who come here in
search of a better life.
Using the military against our own citizens, sowing chaos and
division in our own cities is not consistent with the idea of America.
This is not an America confident of its future and of its place in the
world, able to inspire people around the world, able to see the best in
ourselves.
On a day that Benjamin Franklin watched our Nation being formed, on a
day he witnessed George Washington preside over the Constitutional
Convention, seated in a chair with an image of the Sun embossed on its
top, Franklin pulled some of his colleagues aside and remarked to them
about how artists often have a difficult time distinguishing between a
rising and setting Sun in their art.
I have often--
Franklin said--
and often in the course of this session . . . looked at that
[emblem] behind the President, without being able to tell
whether it was rising or setting. But now at length, I have
the happiness to know, that it is a rising and not a setting
sun.
Today, I know that a great many Americans fear that our Sun is
setting, but I do not believe that. I have more faith in America than
that. We have overcome far greater challenges in our history than our
present difficulties. And those who would bet against this country
would be wise not to. Those who have are far more likely to be proven
the losers than the winners of that bet.
The Sun is not setting on our Republic, but eclipse-like, it is
obscured and the actions of this administration have cast a kind of
shadowy darkness over the land.
Though our Sun is not setting, neither is it rising, nor would it
rise of its own accord. In this respect, Franklin's celestial metaphor
falls short. We have no control over the Sun. Our orbit has been
predetermined by forces well beyond our time and understanding. We are
powerless to change its trajectory, but we are not powerless to change
our own.
We are not powerless to save our country, to remember who we are, to
once again capture the imagination, the hopes, and aspirations of a
weary mankind. Our Sun, America's Sun will rise again and shine
brightly unto ourselves and to all nations. But it will take all of us
working together and well into the future to make it so.
Until then, we must press on, doing all we can to mitigate the harms
of the current administration until we can end them, until we can bind
up our Nation's wounds--as Lincoln said--and begin again the sacred
work of restoring the very best of America.
I yield the floor.
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