[Congressional Record Volume 172, Number 9 (Tuesday, January 13, 2026)]
[Senate]
[Pages S152-S157]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
PROVIDING FOR CONGRESSIONAL DISAPPROVAL UNDER CHAPTER 8 OF TITLE 5,
UNITED STATES CODE, OF THE RULE SUBMITTED BY THE CENTERS FOR MEDICARE &
MEDICAID SERVICES RELATING TO ``PATIENT PROTECTION AND AFFORDABLE CARE
ACT; MARKETPLACE INTEGRITY AND AFFORDABILITY''--Motion to Proceed--
Continued
Vote on Motion
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The question occurs on the motion to proceed.
Mrs. BLACKBURN. I ask for the yeas and nays.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there a sufficient second?
There appears to be a sufficient second.
The clerk will call the roll.
The senior assistant legislative clerk called the roll.
Mr. BARRASSO. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the
Senator from Kansas (Mr. Moran).
The result was announced--yeas 47, nays 52, as follows:
[Rollcall Vote No. 8 Leg.]
YEAS--47
Alsobrooks
Baldwin
Bennet
Blumenthal
Blunt Rochester
Booker
Cantwell
Coons
Cortez Masto
Duckworth
Durbin
Fetterman
Gallego
Gillibrand
Hassan
Heinrich
Hickenlooper
Hirono
Kaine
Kelly
Kim
King
Klobuchar
Lujan
Markey
Merkley
Murphy
Murray
Ossoff
Padilla
Peters
Reed
Rosen
Sanders
Schatz
Schiff
Schumer
Shaheen
Slotkin
Smith
Van Hollen
Warner
Warnock
Warren
Welch
Whitehouse
Wyden
NAYS--52
Banks
Barrasso
Blackburn
Boozman
Britt
Budd
Capito
Cassidy
Collins
Cornyn
Cotton
Cramer
Crapo
Cruz
Curtis
Daines
Ernst
Fischer
Graham
Grassley
Hagerty
Hawley
Hoeven
Husted
Hyde-Smith
Johnson
Justice
Kennedy
Lankford
Lee
Lummis
Marshall
McConnell
McCormick
Moody
Moreno
Mullin
Murkowski
Paul
Ricketts
Risch
Rounds
Schmitt
Scott (FL)
Scott (SC)
Sheehy
Sullivan
Thune
Tillis
Tuberville
Wicker
Young
NOT VOTING--1
Moran
The motion was rejected.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Banks). The Senator from Delaware.
Honoring Corporal Grade One Matthew ``Ty'' Snook
Mr. COONS. Mr. President, I rise today to pay my respects and to
honor the memory of an incredible Delawarean and a genuine hero.
``I am anxious,'' he wrote, ``to begin a life of service and
commitment to making Delaware a safer place''--a safer place ``to live,
[to] work, [to] visit, and raise a family.''
Delaware State Police Corporal Ty Snook wrote those words before he
left the police academy, and it laid out his hope, his vision for
service.
I am anxious to begin a life of service and commitment to
making Delaware a safer place to live, work, and raise a
family.
Delaware State Police Corporal Grade One Ty Snook wrote those words
as a cadet late in his time in the police academy, and it laid out his
vision for the life he lived committed to protecting and serving the
people of my home State.
Two days before Christmas, Corporal Snook volunteered to work an
extra shift at the DMV. He was working to make some extra money for his
wife and young daughter, and he was volunteering to protect people so
that they could make it home to their families in the rush before
Christmas. He never made it home to his. A gunman walked into the DMV
and, from a blind angle, shot and killed Corporal Snook--his last act,
pushing a DMV employee behind him, shielding their life with his own.
What makes a hero? Someone whose instinct is protection. Someone
whose service is about loving others, even when faced with mortal pain
and fear. Corporal Snook's family and friends knew a hero, but his last
actions were not all that he was. He was a father to Letty, a husband
to Lauren, a big brother to his brother Josh, a big brother to his
sister Kassi, a son to Matthew and Karen, a friend to so many.
He was a person with a big heart and a big personality who was always
the center of attention and fun but who dedicated his time to
celebrating the successes of others and mentoring others. A standout
athlete, he was a Delaware wrestling champion. At Saint Mark's, he
improved and improved and improved in his wrestling and then went to
the University of Maryland on a wrestling scholarship, a D1 school, a
great program.
He knew how to make everyone feel at ease and to laugh, how to help
others by showing them the way. He stood out for his mentorship of
others, celebrating his teammates' victories and successes and
improvement as much as his own.
His sister Kassi said: Ty always did the right thing.
And his brother Josh said: All I ever wanted was to be more like him.
His brother Josh also serves in the Delaware State Police.
Corporal Snook is from a remarkable family, a family driven by
service and
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love and courage, and they are today suffering through pain no one
should know or endure. But they are so like every other law enforcement
family in our Nation, for when a member of law enforcement puts on
their badge and their gun and goes out to serve, the heart of those who
love them goes with them. Their children, their spouse, their parents,
they wait anxiously to hear that they have returned home safe at the
end of the shift.
Corporal Snook also saw and built strength in his second families:
brothers and sisters in the Delaware State Police. He was an FTO. He
was a field training officer for 20 State troopers, a remarkable
number. Because he was such a good mentor, he was committed to the next
generation of our State's troopers.
In our State of neighbors, a loss of one is a loss to all. But at his
funeral service, his memorial at the University of Delaware, there must
have been a thousand people present--law enforcement officers from
every State in our country, hundreds and hundreds from all of our major
agencies, in our State, in our region, and hundreds of us honored just
to be in the room from our community.
In what was a powerful and moving service, nothing struck home as
much as the powerful words of Lauren, his widow. Lauren said:
God does not waste suffering.
And she had one ask of all of us who heard her words:
Tell the people you love that you love them. Say the words.
Make the call. Leave the voicemail. Because you never know
when it will be your last chance to say that.
Lauren's words were incredible and powerful. Anyone seeking to hear
the strength and the heart and the conviction of the law enforcement
community--and in particular spouses--should go and watch Lauren's
words. They were incredible.
Lauren, your words found a home in my heart and in the hearts of all
who heard them, and I wanted to just bring Ty's memory--Corporal
Snook's memory--to this floor of this Senate and to reference your
incredible service and sacrifice and remarks today so that your love,
your determination to support and remember and celebrate your hero
could travel further, could touch the lives of more who need and
deserve to hear about you, about Ty, about your family.
Senator Blunt Rochester and I have introduced a resolution in the
Senate honoring Corporal Snook's life and bravery so that we can do our
small part to ensure his legacy remains and travels further.
To Corporal Snook: I want to come back to those words you wrote so
many years ago as a cadet, and I hope you know that you succeeded, that
you fulfilled your mission and your dream, that you made Delaware
safer, that you served with honor, that our State was blessed to have
you for the time we did. Better to live your life as a hero, better to
live your life honorably, better to live your life loving and being
loved by others than to live a long and peaceful life that amounts to
little.
I want to leave you with some words from the Gospel according to
John, the 14th Chapter, 27th verse:
Peace. Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do
not give to you as the world gives you. Do not let your
hearts be troubled and do not let them be afraid.
I am so grateful for the service and sacrifice of Corporal Ty Snook
of the Delaware State Police--a peacemaker, a hero, someone who
deserves to be a legend in our national law enforcement community.
May the God of love welcome you into His arms.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Louisiana.
Appropriations
Mr. KENNEDY. Mr. President, I want to speak first for a moment about
the Energy and Water Development bill that the Senate will shortly be
considering.
As the Presiding Officer knows, our budget is so large that we divide
our appropriations bill into 12 separate bills--many bills, if you
will--and Members in some cases are assigned and in some cases choose
to serve on these subcommittees to draft a portion of the
appropriations bill. I have the privilege of serving as the chair of
the Energy and Water Development portion of the larger appropriations
bill. My ranking member--in other words, the ranking Democrat--is my
friend Senator Patty Murray from Washington State.
We have conferenced that bill. What does that mean? Well, that means
that all the Democratic members and all the Republican members of the
Energy and Water Development Subcommittee have worked out our
differences. It doesn't mean we are all happy, but we have worked them
all out. We also worked out our differences with the House--the
Republicans and the Democrats in the House who sit on what we call
Energy and Water. I am not saying everybody is happy, but they have
accepted the bill. We have reached an agreement, and, in fact, the
House has already passed it. We are going to be considering that bill,
the Energy and Water bill, here in a couple of days. I just wanted to
quickly--I will speak more later, perhaps--I just wanted to quickly
highlight what we are going to be voting on here in the next couple
days.
The bill is $58 billion. That is less than the current budget. I am
very proud of that. I said at the very beginning of this process that I
was not going to approve a budget that did anything but spend less. We
have done that. Nominally, it is a $27 million reduction. Non-
nominally, which means if you factor in inflation, it is a 2.8-percent
reduction over the current Energy and Water bill. So in the new fiscal
year, fiscal year 2026, we will be spending 2.8 percent less than we
are spending on the Energy and Water bill right now. I am very proud of
that.
We increased defense spending. As the Presiding Officer knows, the
Energy and Water bill is divided into a defense portion and a
nondefense portion. We increased spending dramatically for defense. In
fact, we are spending $912 million extra on defense in the Energy and
Water bill over the current budget--a 2.7-percent increase even though
overall the bill is 2.8 percent less.
Well, obviously, we had to cut something. We did. We are cutting
nondefense spending, the nondefense portion of the bill, by 3.8
percent. We took a meat ax to the Green New Deal provisions in the
current Energy and Water budget. Now, not everybody is happy about it.
I get it. But we have already spent a lot--a lot--of money on the Green
New Deal--too much, in my judgment--so we reduced it in the new Energy
and Water bill.
Moving back just for a second on defense spending, what are we
spending that extra money on in defense? Well, I am not going to read
everything to you, but suffice it to say we plussed up or increased
nuclear weapons development, nuclear weapons sustainment. We are
strengthening our nuclear weapons stockpile testing. We are
strengthening its certification. We are continuing to provide money for
a new nuclear warhead, for a sea-launched cruise missile. We are going
to spend more money on plutonium pits and special explosive nuclear
materials.
The final two points I will make about our bill: We have
substantially increased spending for the Corps of Engineers--
substantially. In the new Energy and Water bill, we are spending $1.7
billion more on Corps of Engineers projects. That is a 19-percent
increase. And we are also doubling our spending on the Strategic
Petroleum Reserve.
So to sum up, the Energy and Water bill vis-a-vis the current budget
cuts spending by 2.8 percent. We increased defense spending by 2.7
percent. We paid for that increase and accommodated the decrease in
overall spending by cutting nondefense, mostly green energy, 3.8
percent. We have increased spending for the Corps of Engineers
dramatically--$1.7 billion. That is a 19-percent increase. And we have
doubled the amount of money for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
I will be happy, when the time comes when we take up the bill, to
answer questions.
Housing
Mr. President, let me talk about another subject: housing. You can't
talk about housing if you don't start with supply and demand and the
cost of housing. What determines prices in America? In a free
enterprise system, what determines the price of housing? A lot of
things, but basically it is supply and demand. In a free enterprise
system, supply and demand determines price.
Now, no free enterprise system is perfect. Ours is about as perfect
as you
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can get. In some economies that say they are free enterprise, they are
really not. For example, the government will come in and put its thumb
on the scale and affect supply and demand. The government might come
in--China does this all the time--and say: We are going to favor or
subsidize, either with direct money or special loans, solar panels.
China does that. They wanted to dominate the world in solar panels.
They do. The Communist Party in China went in and gave especially good
treatment to the manufacturers of solar panels. I don't much like that.
It is China's business. I don't like it when that sort of thing happens
in America because it interferes with free enterprise. It is an
illegitimate manipulating of price and supply and demand.
How else can prices be affected besides supply and demand? Well, you
can have antitrust violations. If all the makers of microwave ovens get
together in a back room over cigars and a sip of whiskey and say they
are going to fix prices at a certain price, they can run the price of
microwave ovens up. That is a crime too. It is illegal under the
Sherman Antitrust Act. You can go to the pokey for that.
So it is supply and demand. Well, what causes prices--specifically,
the cost of housing--to go up? Well, it is when demand for housing is
greater than the supply of housing. Duh. It is not complicated.
Remember when we had 9 percent inflation under President Biden--not
just in housing but in everything else? I will tell you how that
happened. President Biden used the pandemic as an excuse, but we were
past the pandemic. He and my Democratic friends appropriated billions
and billions and billions of dollars, in many cases directly to the
American people, and people got that money and said ``Thank you very
much,'' and they went out and spent it. They spent it on goods, and
they spent it on services. The problem was the people who produced the
services and made the goods were not prepared. Many of them had had
supply lines during the pandemic that were affected.
So you had this huge amount of demand with the American people having
a huge amount of money, and they wanted to buy, but the supply wasn't
there. So what happened? Prices went up. At one point, prices went up
to--inflation reached 9 percent.
Now, the good news is that it has come down. So we are better, but we
are not well. Inflation--I think new numbers came out today. They are
at about 2.7 percent. That means prices are still going up. Many of
them have come down. Prices are still going up; they are just not going
up as quickly as they were going up under President Biden, thanks to
the new economic policies adopted by the Trump administration and the
Republican Congress.
One of the things, though, that hasn't come down in price is housing.
I don't need to tell the American people. It is just breathtaking. The
average first-time home buyer in America today--let's just think about
this. To buy a home, you have to save up a downpayment, and you have
got to have enough income so they will loan you the money, so you can
comfortably pay the mortgage. The average person today, first-time home
buyer, doesn't reach those parameters until they are 40 years old--40
years old.
Owning a home is the American dream, and housing has gone up
everywhere. It has gone up in my State. It has gone up in the
Northeast, the Southwest. It has certainly gone up in California. Hell,
a refrigerator box behind an Outback costs $500,000 in California.
Nobody can afford homes anymore; they just can't. Why is that? Well,
you can hear a lot of experts talk about it. Some of them will say:
Well, it is interest rates; interest rates went up. They did go up. And
some will say it is this, and some will say it is that. But I will tell
you the main reason housing has gone up so much and hasn't come down:
because the demand for a house is greater than the supply. We don't
have enough houses; we just don't.
You are probably thinking to yourself, boy, then why doesn't somebody
build some? Well, the private sector is trying, but in many States--not
all, but in many States and many cities, they are being stopped by
local government.
And you say: Whoa. Why? Why would a councilwoman or a councilman in a
city of 100,000 people in Colorado not want to see more houses built?
I will tell you why: because that city councilperson--man or woman--
controls the zoning laws and controls, for rules and regulations,
housing starts.
A lot of the people--I am not just picking on Colorado; this is true
in every State--a lot of the people don't want more houses built. Why?
Because they already own a house, and it is worth a lot of money, and
it is a big part of their nest egg. They know that if, in their area,
more houses start being built, then the price of their home is going to
go down and they are going to lose money.
Now, again, I am not picking on Colorado. That is true in Colorado.
It is true in every State in our wonderful Union. It is called NIMBY--
not in my backyard. It is especially true in California, the most
liberal State God ever put breath in. That is why we are not building
more residential housing. That is why housing starts are not going up.
Now, what is Congress's usual reaction to that? Well, we start
passing bills telling the folks in local government how to do their
job. You won't find housing starts in the U.S. Constitution. You won't
find the subject of housing in the U.S. Constitution. It is a State but
it is really more of a local issue.
Zoning laws are local. Some States may have a statewide zoning law,
but most zoning laws, which determine housing starts--who can build
houses and who can't and what size they have to be and how big the lot
is and what the streets look like--that is up to the local governments,
OK?
Usually, what happens is Congress lectures our friends in local
government and says: You have got to do this. You have got to do that.
We are going to mandate this. We are going to mandate that.
The truth is, we are not housing experts. We are not there in the
community. That is why God created members of city councils and mayors.
They are closest to the people. They should be in charge of housing.
They should be in charge of zoning. They should be in charge of
deciding what size the streets and the lots are.
But it is undeniable--and some are trying, but it is undeniable that
a lot of them are saying, under political pressure from their
constituents: We don't want new houses because it might affect the
price of the existing houses, and the people whose houses go down in
price won't vote for me.
That is the way a lot of local folks think--not all of them but a lot
of them.
So what can we do about that? Short of us getting in the middle of
the business of our cities and telling them what zoning laws should
look like, here is what we can do. We could use a carrot and a stick.
Every year, we send between $2 and $3 billion to cities across
America. Every city gets a little bit of it. Some get a lot of it. But
every year, just like clockwork, we appropriate--it is really more like
$3 to $4 billion. We send that money through the Department of Housing
and Urban Development, and based on the population in a city, they
determine who gets what portion.
The local governments love what we call community development block
grant money, CDBG funds. You say ``CDBG'' to a person in local
government, and they will start salivating. They love this money like
the Devil loves sin. Why is that? Because it is free money, and they
have a lot of discretion--``they'' meaning our friends in local
government--they have a lot of discretion in how they spend it. They
can rehab public housing. They can build streets. They can use it for
code enforcement without the Federal Government staring them down.
So I came up with this idea, convinced Senator Elizabeth Warren to
join me, and we drafted and indeed passed--I will talk about that in a
second--a bill called the Build Now Act. It is really very simple. It
says that we are not going to tell local governments how to increase
housing starts; we are just going to tell them that if they do increase
housing starts, we are going to reward them with more CDBG money. If
they don't increase housing starts, we are going to take some of their
money away. Carrot; stick.
Here is how it would work. Every year, we look at all of our cities--
I
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think the cut off is 50,000 people or more--and we look at the housing
starts percentage-wise in each of our cities across America. After we
look at all of them--it will be a bunch of them, but we have got
computers--we look for the median point, not the average. We don't add
them up and divide; we look for the median point. The median point is
the city right smack dab square in the middle. Half of the cities have
increased housing starts more, and half of the cities below the median
have increased housing starts less.
So that is our starting point--the median. Let's call it 4 percent.
If our bill were in effect and next year the median--you can call it
average if you want--the median is 4 percent, if you are a local
government and you meet 4 percent, you get all of your CDBG money. Good
for you. You get a gold star. Maybe, if the median is 4 percent, you
did even better. Not only did you reach the median level--4 percent
increase on housing starts--you got 6 percent. Guess what. You are
going to get extra CDBG money. You get extra money. That is the carrot.
Now, if you are thinking to yourself: ``There is a catch here
somewhere,'' OK; there is no free lunch. Anytime someone tells you
something is free, uh-uh. Anything that is free, somebody had to pay
for.
Here is the catch: We are going to take that extra money to reward
the cities that increased housing starts above the median--we are going
to take it from the cities that don't, up to 10 percent.
Now, what does that mean? That means we are not going to tell our
friends in local government whether to increase housing starts or
decrease, and we are sure not going to tell them how to do it. They
don't have to do a damn thing if they don't want to. But if they do
increase housing starts, they are going to get extra money from the
Federal Government, and if they don't, they are going to get less.
It will work. Others agree with me. Senator Warren and I passed the
Build Now Act unanimously out of the Banking Committee. Every Democrat
and every Republican voted for it.
Then it came to the Senate floor. Every Member of the Senate--every
Democrat, every Republican--said: We like it. We will take a dozen of
these.
They liked it so much--my colleagues liked it so much that they made
it a part of the NDAA, the National Defense Authorization Act, which,
as you know, is a bill we have to pass every year. And housing is not
directly relevant to the NDAA. But under the rules, my colleagues liked
Elizabeth's and my bill so much they said: Let's put it on the NDAA.
And we did; flew out of here.
Then it went over to the House, and we started negotiating the NDAA
because the House passed its version of the NDAA, and we had passed our
version of the NDAA, and they weren't the same. So the people in charge
of the NDAA from the Senate sat down with the people in charge of the
NDAA in the House and started negotiating the final product.
I will use my words carefully here. There were a couple of folks on
the House side who for whatever reason decided to take our Build Now
Act out, and they did, despite the fact that every Member of the Senate
was for it and a lot of House Members.
I am not going to kid you, I was upset. I called that person and
those handful of people every--well, I called them an epithet that ends
with the word ``hole.'' I did. I swallowed it. I took it. I just said:
That is the legislative process. I took it full in the face, went home,
had a beer, petted my dog, tried to get over it, and lived to fight
another day. It was stupid, but they did it. But we live to fight
another day.
Now, when moms and dads lie down to sleep at night and can't in
America today, I can tell you one of the things they are worried about
is the cost of living, and part of the cost of living is the cost of
housing.
This bill will work, and it would have worked, and it would be law
right now. But that was then. You have to look to the future.
Mr. President, if you are listening, please endorse this bill.
To my friends in the House, please bring this bill up and vote for
it. It will work. We have been jawboning and talking about ``Oh, you
know, the cost of living is''--some say it is fake. Some say it is not.
Some say we are doing better than we are. Well, things are better, but
they are still not well. This bill will lower the cost of housing in
America, and it will do it under the basic principles of free
enterprise. You can write this down and take it home to Momma: All
things being equal, if you increase supply and demand stays the same,
the price is going to go down.
It will work. So I hope my friends in the House will take these
comments in the spirit in which they were meant and that they will pass
Senator Warren's and my Build Now Act.
I hope that the President is listening and that he will endorse it
because--I am going to repeat it again--this is America. Owning a home
is the American dream. A satisfactory home is not a refrigerator box
behind Outback. The American people deserve better.
Mr. President, what would you like me to do next? I think I will ask
for a quorum.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Ms. MURKOWSKI. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order
for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
The Senator from Alaska.
Appropriations
Ms. MURKOWSKI. Mr. President, I come to the floor this afternoon to
speak in strong support of the appropriations package that will soon be
pending on the Senate floor. We overwhelmingly voted to invoke cloture
on the motion to proceed last night, and so we are in a good place with
these appropriations bills. As we were talking yesterday on the floor,
we are appropriating again. This will be the second package of bills.
As colleagues have noted in their statements before me, this package
includes three bills for the rest of fiscal year 2026.
This is for Commerce, Justice, and Science; for Energy and Water
Development; and for Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies. And
as chairman of the Interior and Environment Subcommittee, I am really
pleased to be able to share with colleagues the good work that our
subcommittee has produced. I am proud of the bill that we have in this
package.
Ours is not an easy one to write. Within the Interior bill, we not
only have management of our public lands, but we have oversight of the
EPA, we have the arts, and we have the Indian health and Tribal
programs. It is a challenge. It is complex. There are a lot of matters
that reside under the Department of the Interior and the EPA. And,
oftentimes, we don't always see eye to eye on the issues that are
within this jurisdiction, and that certainly would extend to funding.
There are some years that the Interior bill has proven absolutely
elusive, where we simply could not overcome our differences, and we
couldn't complete our work. But, fortunately, that is not the case this
year.
I worked closely with our full committee leadership, Chairman Collins
and Ranking Member Murray, and I want to thank them for their
leadership. They have kept us all to task, and their leadership--and I
particularly commend my colleague from Maine, Senator Collins, for her
just constant effort to keep us to task and really working so well with
members of the committee.
I also want to recognize and thank my ranking member, Senator
Merkley. He has been a partner to work with on this committee. Again,
we don't always see eye to eye on the issues, and one wouldn't expect
us to. But we are able to work through those areas.
And I also want to acknowledge and thank the other colleagues on the
committee, as well as our counterparts in the House. I think we built a
good bipartisan bill, and I think that the support that we have seen by
way of the votes is proof positive of that.
We had a 26-to-2 vote in committee last summer, and then, after weeks
of bicameral negotiation, our colleagues in the House passed this
minibus last week by a resounding vote of 397 to 28--so pretty strong;
actually pretty powerful. And then, to have received the endorsement
from the President with his statement of position endorsing this three-
package bill was also very much appreciated.
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And, as I say, I absolutely appreciate the work that went into the
CJS and the Energy and Water bills. I certainly support them.
But, this afternoon, I want to direct my comments to the Interior
bill, as we begin the debate.
Overall, we prioritized fiscal responsibility, cutting a total of
$1.9 billion. This is about 4.7 percent of our bill. That is
substantive. And while we met that goal to cut our spending, we also
met the needs and met Members' requests across its many accounts.
We also reformatted. As we updated our priorities for this fiscal
year, reflecting a new administration and the majorities here in
Congress, I think that we restored balance in some of the key areas of
our bill. And the result is we have a measure that will strengthen our
energy security, our mineral security, and our national security.
It will continue to facilitate clean and safe drinking water. This is
a priority that so many of our colleagues have emphasized.
It will protect our public lands, and it will ensure that we are as
ready as we can be for the upcoming fire season.
For example, we provide funding so that Agencies like the Bureau of
Land Management, BLM, have greater capacity to issue permits for energy
projects. We have included robust funding from mapping and minerals-
related work at the USGS.
We have also provided funds to bolster development and staffing out
in our U.S. Territories. They are a long way away, most in the Pacific.
They are very crucial, very key, but, oftentimes, they are overlooked
or are possibly ignored. And so making sure that we have got the
critical staffing that we need out there and the folks to make sure
that we are poised in our quest to counter China.
But I mentioned the cuts that we had made to this bill. Even as we
cut back, we were able to do some important work when it comes to the
priorities, like fully funding wildland fire management.
We prioritized the removal of hazardous fuels. We took care of the
firefighters who risk their lives to protect their communities,
property, and the environment. As we have seen, year over year, that
threat of fire from one end of the country to another is very real. So
the effort here is a very important one.
We continued to address the threats that are posed by natural
hazards, like volcanoes--we just saw another eruption in Hawaii--
earthquakes, landslides, and tsunamis. My State has been particularly
hard hit in recent years with deadly landslides.
But there are other natural hazards that threaten lives and
landscapes, and we worked to address them in this bill.
When it comes to the Payments in Lieu of Taxes Program, or PILT, we
fully funded it. This accounts for the Federal lands that reduce the
tax base of counties and boroughs across the country.
We also included substantial resources for our Agencies to manage and
maintain our national parks. We hear from so many who love and embrace
our national parks. We all love them. Sometimes, we love them so much
that we forget that their care and their upkeep is also important. So
we made sure we addressed the resources for our national parks, our
wildlife refuges, and, really, all of our Federal lands.
One area of the bill that perhaps gets a little more parochial--but,
obviously, an issue of very real concern--is a focus on invasive
species.
We don't happen to have Asian carp in Alaska. We want to keep it that
way. I know that, in many parts of the South, Asian carp is a threat,
an invasive species that needs to be dealt with.
Up on the west coast, in Washington State and, now, unfortunately, in
Alaska, we are seeing growing threats from this European green crab. We
want to be able to knock those out.
There is the spruce budworm that threatens landscapes everywhere,
from Florida to Maine, to Washington, to Alaska.
Whether it is green crab, Asian carp, or budworms, the reality is we
are impacted in different ways. So being able to direct resources to
push back on these invasive species is important.
We also upheld our commitment to Native peoples. We have provided
robust funding for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, for the Indian Health
Service, and for similar Agencies.
I think we did really good work within the bill to advance some of
the public safety and justice initiatives. We strengthened Tribal
colleges and universities. We addressed the scourge of missing and
murdered indigenous women and children. A focus on ensuring the safety
of our Native peoples was a priority--but, really, not just the justice
and safety, but so many of the other aspects of the well-being of
Native people around the country.
As it relates to the EPA, I think, again, we have a good story to
tell here. We did scale back the overall budget, but we kept the
priorities in the right place. We fully funded the Clean Water and the
Safe Drinking Water State Revolving Funds. That is a priority across
the country.
We provided robust funding for EPA's efforts in science and
technology, in environmental programs and management, with Superfund
issues, and, especially, for State and Tribal assistance grant
programs.
Overall, we addressed the priorities of dozens of Members of the
Senate, whether it was programmatic requests for more parochial
matters, like stream gages on the Ohio River, to the distribution of
revenues from development off the gulf coast.
We did instruct Agencies not to undertake certain activities that
would waste taxpayer dollars and impose burdens, like the regulation of
lead tackle and greenhouse gas reporting requirements for farmers and
livestock producers.
We also provided funds for America250. I mentioned that the Interior
Subcommittee has oversight of the arts, whether it is the national
humanities or an element of the arts. In our account, we also provided
funds for America250. We recognize the importance of the 250th
anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the
founding of our Nation. We want this to be an anniversary that really
brings us together, that celebrates the best of our Nation and reminds
us that we are just so blessed to be Americans.
I have spoken about so many of the broad national impacts of this
bill, but for folks back home that may be listening: OK, what about
Alaska? No surprise, Alaska is always first and foremost for me, and we
paid attention to Alaska within this bill. In addition to the many
things I have mentioned, from wildfire to natural hazards, to PILT, we
were able to provide for the restoration of vital fish habitat. We were
able to scrounge up some funding for my colleague from Alaska's Save
Our Seas Act. This is very important legislation for us.
We also added funds for the cleanup of contaminated lands, for
airshed grants that will improve air quality in places like Fairbanks,
for healthcare facilities and staffing in Native communities, and to
begin to address the impending crisis of leaking above-ground fuel
storage tanks. This is a matter for so many of our communities that
rely for their power generation from just fuel that is brought upriver
by barge. You have to have a place to store it. These storage tanks
have been there for decades and need to be attended to.
We also recognize that there is a staggering backlog in BIA's probate
courts. This needs to be addressed, and we were able to make some
incremental gains in that area as well.
So there are many good provisions in the bill that add up to what I
think is a good bill. It is certainly not everything that I wanted.
They never are. I wish--I wish--we could have reached bicameral
agreement to include some of the naming conventions that we were
batting back and forth. We were not able to, in this bill, call Denali
by its rightful name. This is North America's largest peak. ``Denali,''
in the Koyukon-Athabascan language, means ``the great one,'' and that
is absolutely, positively, 100-percent fitting for this magnificent
mountain. We are going to live to fight another day on that because
nobody is going to take that mountain from us. I am certainly not
standing down here.
For today, I would urge the Senate to recognize the important
bipartisan work that we have done with balance, with common sense, and
with fiscal restraint as really our guiding principles here. I don't
take for granted anything in this Interior bill. But we would not
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be at this place today without the members not only on my team but on
Senator Merkley's team, and the broader Interior Appropriations staff.
They have worked extraordinarily hard and extraordinarily well
together.
I want to thank the members of my team, led by Daniel Mencher, Sarah
Jorgenson, and Anna Smith; and their counterparts on the minority side,
Melissa Zimmerman, Ryan Hunt, Rishi Sahgal, and Anthony Sedillo. These
folks worked day and night, around the clock, through Christmas,
through New Year's, and they have produced a very, very strong bill.
We overcame some long odds--again, some really long nights--to move
this forward and to fund the Department of the Interior, the Forest
Service, EPA, and related Agencies. But what we agreed to is going to
help our people, our communities, our economy, our security, and our
lands and our wildlife. It is something we should all be proud to
support.
I yield the floor.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for
the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Curtis). Without objection, it is so
ordered.
Vote on Motion to Proceed
Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, I know of no further debate on the motion
to proceed.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there further debate?
The motion was agreed to.
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