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18Senate Resolution 86: Expressing the Sense of the Senate Regarding United Nations General Assembly Resolution 2758 (Xxvi) and the Harmful Conflation of China's "One China Principle" and The...
21Senate Resolution 89: Expressing Support for the Designation of February 15 Through February 22, 2025, as "National Ffa Week", Recognizing the Important Role of the National Ffa Organization In...
Forty bills and eight resolutions were introduced, as follows: S. 643-682, S.J. Res. 20-23, and S. Res. 86-89.
Pages S1126-27
Measures Reported
Special Report entitled ``Report of the Select Committee on Intelligence United States Senate covering the period January 3, 2023 to January 3, 2025''. (S. Rept. No. 119-1)
Page S1126
Measures Passed
Budget Resolution: By 52 yeas to 48 nays (Vote No. 87), Senate agreed to S. Con. Res. 7, setting forth the congressional budget for the United States Government for fiscal year 2025 and setting forth the appropriate budgetary levels for fiscal years 2026 through 2034, after taking action on the following amendments proposed thereto:
Pages S1061-64, S1075-S1125
Adopted
By 51 yeas to 49 nays (Vote No. 70), Sullivan Amendment No. 1029, to establish a deficit-neutral reserve fund relating to protecting Medicare and Medicaid.
Page S1105
By 53 yeas to 47 nays (Vote No. 85), Lee Amendment No. 922, to establish a deficit-neutral reserve fund relating to Congress continuing its work to rein in the administrative state by supporting legislation that prevents Federal agencies from finalizing major rules without congressional approval, strengthens the Article 1 law-making powers of Congress, cuts spending resulting from costly regulations, reduces inflation, and unleashes economic growth.
Page S1117
=========================== NOTE =========================== On page D165, February 20, 2025, the following language appears
Adopted: By 51 yeas to 49 nays (Vote No. 70), Sullivan Amendment No. 1029, to establish a deficit-neutral reserve fund relating to protecting Medicare and Medicaid.Page S1105 By 53 yeas to 47 nays (Vote No. 85), Lee Amendment No. 922, to establish a deficit- neutral reserve fund relating to Congress continuing its work to rein in the administrative state by supporting legislation that prevents Federal agencies from finalizing major rules without congressional approval, strengthens the Article I law-making powers of Congress, cuts spending resulting from costly regulations, reduces inflation, and unleashes economic growth.Page S1117 The online Record has been corrected to read: Adopted: By 51 yeas to 49 nays (Vote No. 70), Sullivan Amendment No. 1029, to establish a deficit-neutral reserve fund relating to protecting Medicare and Medicaid.Page S1105 By 53 yeas to 47 nays (Vote No. 85), Lee Amendment No. 922, to establish a deficit-neutral reserve fund relating to Congress continuing its work to rein in the administrative state by supporting legislation that prevents Federal agencies from finalizing major rules without congressional approval, strengthens the Article 1 law-making powers of Congress, cuts spending resulting from costly regulations, reduces inflation, and unleashes economic growth.Page S1117 ========================= END NOTE ========================= Rejected: By 48 yeas to 52 nays (Vote No. 64), Merkley Amendment No. 473, to establish a deficit-neutral reserve fund relating to the impacts of hedge fund ownership of single-family homes and rent prices.
Pages S1100-01
By 47 yeas to 53 nays (Vote No. 66), Murray Amendment No. 878, to strike the reconciliation instructions and create a reserve fund to implement a bipartisan, multi-year agreement to provide up to $171,000,000,000 in discretionary funding for defense and up to $171,000,000,000 in discretionary funding for other programs, accounts, and activities to address border, veterans, farmers, food and nutrition, disaster relief, and other needs.
Page S1102
By 48 yeas to 52 nays (Vote No. 68), Bennet Amendment No. 540, to establish a deficit-neutral reserve fund relating to reinstating the fired Federal employees at the Forest Service, National Park Service, United States Fish and Wildlife Service, and Bureau of Land Management.
Pages S1103-04
By 48 yeas to 52 nays (Vote No. 69), Schiff Amendment No. 316, to establish a deficit-neutral reserve fund relating to supporting Federal wildland firefighters and associated personnel.
Page S1104
By 49 yeas to 51 nays (Vote No. 72), Ossoff Amendment No. 407, to establish a deficit-neutral reserve fund relating to protecting access to maternal and pediatric health care through Medicaid.
Page S1106
By 47 yeas to 53 nays (Vote No. 76), Reed Amendment No. 299, to ensure continued United States support for the Government of Ukraine to stand firm against aggression by the Government of Russia in Europe.
Pages S1108-09
By 24 yeas to 76 nays (Vote No. 77), Paul Amendment No. 999, to require an adequate amount of deficit reduction as part of reconciliation.
Pages S1109-10
By 47 yeas to 53 nays (Vote No. 78), Slotkin/Klobuchar Amendment No. 664, to establish a deficit-neutral reserve fund relating to preventing reductions in funding and staffing necessary to respond to, control, and prevent avian flu.
Page S1110
By 48 yeas to 52 nays (Vote No. 80), Shaheen/Baldwin Amendment No. 436, to establish a deficit-neutral reserve fund relating to preserving and extending vital tax credits enacted under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which make health care accessible and affordable and that have led to the lowest uninsured rate in our Nation's history.
Pages S1111-12
By 48 yeas to 52 nays (Vote No. 81), Lujan Amendment No. 699, to establish a deficit-neutral reserve fund relating to supporting police, which may include initiatives that provide funding directly to law enforcement agencies to hire or rehire additional career law enforcement officers in an effort to increase their community policing capacity and crime prevention efforts.
Page S1112
By 49 yeas to 51 nays (Vote No. 82), Duckworth/Booker Amendment No. 971, to establish a deficit-neutral reserve fund relating to protecting access to fertility services, and eliminating barriers for families in need of high-quality, affordable fertility services by expanding nationwide coverage for in vitro fertilization.
Pages S1112-13
Heinrich Amendment No. 101, to establish a deficit-neutral reserve fund relating to funding for grants awarded by the Office on Violence Against Women.
Page S1113
By 47 yeas to 52 nays (Vote No. 83), Blumenthal Amendment No. 659, to ensure full and uninterrupted funding for Department of Veterans Affairs health care and benefits provided by the Sergeant First Class Heath Robinson Honoring our Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics Act of 2022 (Public Law 117-168), also known as the ``PACT Act'', preventing any cuts or delays.
Pages S1113-14
Markey Amendment No. 911, to establish a deficit-neutral reserve fund relating to increasing funding for research on Alzheimer's disease and related dementias.
Page S1114
Coons/Schiff Amendment No. 1223, to protect Americans' privacy from unauthorized access by DOGE.
Pages S1114-15
By 47 yeas to 53 nays (Vote No. 84), Lujan/Klobuchar Amendment No. 957, to strike reconciliation instructions requiring damaging cuts to programs critical to rural Americans and food assistance for American families.
Pages S1115-16
Warren Amendment No. 734, to modify the provisions relating to the general reserve fund.
Page S1116
Kelly Amendment No. 984, to modify the provision relating to the general reserve fund.
Page S1116
King/Merkley Amendment No. 198, to modify the provision relating to the general reserve fund.
Pages S1116-17
Blunt Rochester Amendment No. 311, to establish a deficit-neutral reserve fund relating to preventing the indiscriminate termination of Federal employees who protect the health or safety of Americans, which may include scientists, emergency preparedness staff, frontline health care workers, drug or medical device reviewers, or other employees at the Department of Health and Human Services.
Pages S1117-18
Murray/Durbin Amendment No. 880, to establish a deficit-neutral reserve fund relating to reversing the Trump Administration's indiscriminate cut to biomedical research and the lifesaving work supported by the National Institutes of Health at research institutions across the country.
Page S1118
By 49 yeas to 51 nays (Vote No. 86), Merkley Amendment No. 1207, to establish a deficit-neutral reserve fund relating to ending price gouging on prescription drugs.
Pages S1118-19
During consideration of this measure today, Senate also took the following action
By 47 yeas to 52 nays (Vote No. 62), three-fifths of those Senators duly chosen and sworn not having voted in the affirmative, Senate rejected the motion to waive pursuant to section 904 of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 with respect to consideration of Schumer Amendment No. 454, to prevent unwarranted tax cuts for the ultra-rich. Subsequently, a point of order that the amendment was in violation of section 305(b)(2) of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 was sustained, and the amendment thus fell.
Pages S1099-S1100
By 48 yeas to 52 nays (Vote No. 63), three-fifths of those Senators duly chosen and sworn not having voted in the affirmative, Senate rejected the motion to waive pursuant to section 904 of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 with respect to consideration of Klobuchar Amendment No. 494, to stop tax cuts for the ultra-rich while families struggle to put food on the table. Subsequently, a point of order that the amendment was in violation of section 305(b)(2) of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 was sustained, and the amendment thus fell.
Page S1100
By 47 yeas to 53 nays (Vote No. 65), three-fifths of those Senators duly chosen and sworn not having voted in the affirmative, Senate rejected the motion to waive pursuant to section 904 of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 with respect to consideration of Warner Amendment No. 130, to create a point of order against any reconciliation bill that would not decrease the cost of housing for American families. Subsequently, a point of order that the amendment was in violation of section 305(b)(2) of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 was sustained, and the amendment thus fell.
Pages S1101-02
By 47 yeas to 53 nays (Vote No. 67), three-fifths of those Senators duly chosen and sworn not having voted in the affirmative, Senate rejected the motion to waive pursuant to section 904 of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 with respect to consideration of Hickenlooper Amendment No. 925, to create a point of order against legislation that would raise energy costs for Americans, including higher monthly electricity bills, building material expenses, and transportation costs. Subsequently, a point of order that the amendment was in violation of section 305(b)(2) of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 was sustained, and the amendment thus fell.
Page S1103
By 49 yeas to 51 nays (Vote No. 71), three-fifths of those Senators duly chosen and sworn not having voted in the affirmative, Senate rejected the motion to waive pursuant to section 904 of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 with respect to consideration of Schumer Amendment No. 776, to prevent tax cuts for the wealthy if a single dollar of Medicaid funding is cut. Subsequently, a point of order that the amendment was in violation of section 305(b)(2) of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 was sustained, and the amendment thus fell.
Pages S1105-06
By 47 yeas to 53 nays (Vote No. 73), three-fifths of those Senators duly chosen and sworn not having voted in the affirmative, Senate rejected the motion to waive pursuant to section 904 of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 with respect to consideration of Wyden Amendment No. 1156, to prevent millions of Americans from being kicked off their health coverage, suffering needlessly, getting sicker, and dying sooner. Subsequently, a point of order that the amendment was in violation of section 305(b)(2) of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 was sustained, and the amendment thus fell.
Pages S1106-07
By 48 yeas to 52 nays (Vote No. 74), three-fifths of those Senators duly chosen and sworn not having voted in the affirmative, Senate rejected the motion to waive pursuant to section 904 of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 with respect to consideration of Baldwin Amendment No. 276, to create a point of order against legislation that would take away health care from seniors, including those receiving care in nursing homes, through cuts to the Medicaid program. Subsequently, a point of order that the amendment was in violation of section 305(b)(2) of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 was sustained, and the amendment thus fell.
Pages S1107-08
By 49 yeas to 51 nays (Vote No. 75), three-fifths of those Senators duly chosen and sworn not having voted in the affirmative, Senate rejected the motion to waive pursuant to section 904 of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 with respect to consideration of Reed Amendment No. 172, to create a point of order against legislation that would reduce Medicare and Medicaid benefits for Americans. Subsequently, a point of order that the amendment was in violation of section 305(b)(2) of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 was sustained, and the amendment thus fell.
Page S1108
By 49 yeas to 51 nays (Vote No. 79), three-fifths of those Senators duly chosen and sworn not having voted in the affirmative, Senate rejected the motion to waive pursuant to section 904 of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 with respect to consideration of Van Hollen Amendment No. 233, to create a point of order against legislation that would cut funding from the school lunch or school breakfast programs. Subsequently, a point of order that the amendment was in violation of section 305(b)(2) of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 was sustained, and the amendment thus fell.
Pages S1110-11
American Heart Month
Senate agreed to S. Res. 87, designating February 2025 as ``American Heart Month''.
Page S1303
National Speech and Debate Education Day
Senate agreed to S. Res. 88, designating March 7, 2025, as ``National Speech and Debate Education Day''.
Page S1303
National FFA Week
Senate agreed to S. Res. 89, expressing support for the designation of February 15 through February 22, 2025, as ``National FFA Week'', recognizing the important role of the National FFA Organization in developing the next generation of leaders who will change the world, and celebrating the 90th anniversary of New Farmers of America and the 75th anniversary of the Future Farmers of America Federal charter.
Page S1303
Budget Resolution: Agreement
A unanimous-consent agreement was reached providing that for the duration of the consideration of S. Con. Res. 7, setting forth the congressional budget for the United States Government for fiscal year 2025 and setting forth the appropriate budgetary levels for fiscal years 2026 through 2034, the Majority and the Democrat managers of the concurrent resolution, while seated or standing at the managers' desk, be permitted to deliver floor remarks, retrieve, review, and edit documents, and send email and other data communications from text displayed on wireless personal assistant devices and tablet devices; provided further that the use of calculators be permitted on the floor during consideration of the concurrent resolution; that the staff be permitted to make technical and conforming changes to the concurrent resolution, if necessary, consistent with amendments adopted during Senate consideration, including calculating the associated change in the net interest function and incorporating the effect of such adopted amendments on the budgetary aggregates for Federal revenue, the amount by which the Federal revenue should be changes, new budget authority, budget outlays, deficits, public debt, and debt held by the public; and that there be two minutes of debate, equally divided, prior to each vote during consideration of the concurrent resolution.
Pages S1090-91
Driscoll Nomination: Cloture
Senate began consideration of the nomination of Daniel Driscoll, of North Carolina, to be Secretary of the Army.
Page S1125
A motion was entered to close further debate on the nomination, and, in accordance with the provisions of Rule XXII of the Standing Rules of the Senate, and pursuant to the unanimous-consent agreement of Friday, February 21, 2025, a vote on cloture will occur at 5:30 p.m., on Monday, February 24, 2025.
Page S1125
Prior to the consideration of this nomination, Senate took the following action
Senate agreed to the motion to proceed to Executive Session to consider the nomination.
Page S1125
A unanimous-consent agreement was reached providing that at approximately 3 p.m., on Monday, February 24, 2025, Senate resume consideration of the nomination; and that notwithstanding Rule XXII, the motions to invoke cloture with respect to the nominations of Daniel Driscoll, and Jamieson Greer, of Maryland, to be United States Trade Representative, with the rank of Ambassador, ripen at 5:30 p.m., on Monday, February 24, 2025.
Page S1303
Greer Nomination: Cloture
Senate began consideration of the nomination of Jamieson Greer, of Maryland, to be United States Trade Representative, with the rank of Ambassador.
Page S1125
A motion was entered to close further debate on the nomination, and, in accordance with the provisions of Rule XXII of the Standing Rules of the Senate, a vote on cloture will occur upon disposition of the nomination of Daniel Driscoll, of North Carolina, to be Secretary of the Army.
Page S1125
Prior to the consideration of this nomination, Senate took the following action
Senate agreed to the motion to proceed to Legislative Session.
Page S1125
Senate agreed to the motion to proceed to Executive Session to consider the nomination.
Page S1125
Nomination Confirmed
Senate confirmed the following nomination: By 51 yeas to 49 nays (Vote No. EX. 61), Kashyap Patel, of Nevada, to be Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation for a term of ten years.
Pages S1064-75, S1303
During consideration of this nomination today, Senate also took the following action
By 51 yeas to 47 nays (Vote No. 60), Senate agreed to the motion to close further debate on the nomination.
Page S1064
Statements on Introduced Bills/Resolutions:
Pages S1129-37
Record Votes
Twenty-eight record votes were taken today. (Total--87)
Pages S1064, S1075, S1099-S1119
Adjournment
Senate convened at 10 a.m., on Thursday, February 20, 2025, and adjourned at 4:51 a.m., on Friday, February 21, 2025, until 3 p.m. on Monday, February 24, 2025. (For Senate's program, see the remarks of the Majority Leader in today's Record on page S1303.)
Every speech and line is the Congressional Record's own text, read from GovInfo. Speakers are matched to members by GPO's own metadata. Referandom places each turn on the Clerk's video by matching its words: 126 of 460 spoken turns were found. Turns without a time are still listed; they just can't seek.
Legislative Session
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under the previous order, the Senate will resume consideration of S. Con Res. 7, which the clerk will report.
Mr. President, I take Congress's constitutional oversight mandate very seriously. What you learn in eighth grade civics, oversight responsibility is checks and balances of government.
In the 118th Congress, as ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee, I established the committee's very first Oversight and Investigative Unit. Its oversight touched on 97 percent of government taxpayer-funded Agencies, sending over 600 oversight letters to Federal, State, and private sector entities.
Last year, my team sent over one letter per day, on average. That oversight unit launched the committee's first subpoena since 1991, and I obtained records uncovering brandnew information about Credit Suisse's servicing of Nazi accounts. I thank then-Chairman Whitehouse for issuing that subpoena.
I hosted, also, oversight roundtables where whistleblowers exposed the Biden administration's failure at the southern border to collect DNA and protect unaccompanied children. My investigation resulted in a referral to law enforcement to find and protect unaccompanied children who were brought here in violation of our laws. But the Federal Government had a responsibility to make sure that they were protected.
My oversight team made records public and performed interviews to ensure accountability following the assassination attempt of President Trump in Pennsylvania. I published data for an EPA grant program showing most taxpayers' money wasn't spent like the law required.
My oversight also uncovered abuses by the FBI's Foreign Influence Task Force; FBI political bias in the Hunter Biden investigation and prosecution; the Obama-Biden State Department obstruction of law enforcement efforts against Iran; wasted money on misclassified ATF employees; private equity investments exploiting healthcare and damaging hospitals, even in Ottumwa, IA; Department of
In response to that, I got legislation passed to fix that problem. My oversight team also worked to protect whistleblowers and force government Agencies to amend their policies to comply with Federal whistleblower laws.
So we are in the 119th Congress, and as this Congress gets underway, I have become chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. My oversight work is already full speed ahead, and I look forward to what the next couple of years produce because we want to guarantee the executive branch faithfully executes the laws as the Constitution requires and to expose waste, fraud, and abuse and the wasting of taxpayers' money.
I yield the floor.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The assistant bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Well, Mr. President, the Senate is in for a very long day and a very long night. Over the next day or so, Senate Republicans will try to advance a budget resolution that clears the way to cut taxes for Donald Trump's billionaire friends. Democrats are going to hold the floor all day long and all night long to expose how Republicans want to cut taxes for billionaires while gutting things Americans care about most: healthcare, jobs, public safety, national security, housing, education. This is going to be a long, drawn-out fight.
This reconciliation budget bill is only the first step, albeit an important one. Days like today, where we vote on amendments late into the night, go a long way in revealing where each party stands and whom each party is fighting for. Democrats are glad to have this debate. We are happy to have it a few more times if the Republican leader so wants. Democrats will show, in each of these debates, where Republicans truly stand deep down--not with working people but on the side of billionaires like Elon Musk.
If you become wealthy fairly and squarely, we don't begrudge you, but you are doing fine, and you certainly don't need a massive tax break. And yet that is precisely what Republicans are getting ready to do-- give billionaires another tax break and make the American people pay the cost.
If Senate Republicans really think the best solution for inflation is to put more money into the pockets of the billionaire class, Democrats will make sure the American people know it. We will expose the Republicans' plan to cut healthcare so that billionaires can have another tax break. We will expose Republican plans to gut housing, to defund the NIH--stop cancer research? Stop research into diseases that are hurting, harming, and even killing our loved ones? Uh-uh. To cut nutrition? To make housing costs go up? To hurt food inspection? To stop the fight against bird flu here or Ebola overseas so that they don't harm us? Doing all those things that make no sense so they can cut taxes for billionaires? No way, we say. That is wrong for the American people, and the more they learn about it, the less they are going to like the Trump agenda that Republicans in the Senate are following.
Republicans can spin their agenda however they want. They can try to pass 1 bill, 2 bills, 50 bills. It doesn't matter. They can slice and dice their policies in whatever order they wish. It doesn't matter in the end. The end game is the same of Donald Trump and the Republican majority: tax cuts for billionaires paid on the backs of working and middle-class Americans.
That is not--absolutely not--what the American people signed up for. The American people want to see inflation go down. It has gone up in the last month, even though Donald Trump said it would go down starting on day one. They want to see their paychecks go up. They want to see more jobs. They want to see better jobs. They want to see more ladders to the middle class, and they want to find ways to stay in the middle class once they get there.
Republicans, meanwhile, have abandoned the working and middle class. In just 1 month, Donald Trump and Republicans have eviscerated so many of our institutions in order to cater to the whims of billionaires. Donald Trump has defied the rule of law. He has ignored court orders. He has even fancied himself a King, while all his billionaire friends spread through the government like locusts and put public services that serve tens of millions of people at risk.
When Elon Musk holds court in the Oval Office and meets heads of state, Head Start programs and community health centers have seen their funding shut off. Donald Trump preaches about corruption and fraud, all the while ridding the government of its independent watchdogs and letting DOGE go through people's Social Security numbers and even their private tax and health data with virtually no guardrails, no check.
All this chaos is by design. All this lawlessness has a goal. Everything we have seen over the last month from Donald Trump and Republicans has one endgame in mind: Undermine the rule of law in order to put more money in the pockets of billionaires like Elon Musk. Nothing criticizes the broken core of the Republicans' agenda better than their tax cuts for the ultrawealthy.
I yield the floor.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The assistant bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. President, I come to the floor today, having just seen the Democrat leader come to the floor to talk about the Senate budget resolution, and what I heard the minority leader say was that none of it is accurate.
Let me tell you: I have the budget resolution with me--the key portions--five pages long. That is it--five pages long. Every American can read it. They can read it for themselves. The resolution focuses on three things and three things only: No. 1, securing the border; No. 2, restoring peace through strength; No. 3, unleashing American energy. It is not complicated. It is common sense. Americans overwhelmingly support these goals. That is why Republicans in the Senate are moving forward.
So let's talk about border security.
This budget allocates $175 billion to secure our border. Now, that includes funding for President Trump's successful Executive orders to deport criminal illegal immigrants. Border Patrol agents and ICE agents need the resources to do it. There are currently more than 600,000 illegal immigrants with criminal records in the country today. President Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem are moving at lightning speed. They are moving to deport them. They are moving to make our communities safer. Their strong actions have led to double the number of arrests of illegal criminal immigrants compared to the arrests under President Biden. These arrests are making our communities safer, and they are sending a message to would-be illegal immigrants all around the world to ``don't come here.'' Actually, these people are turning around and going back to their own homes. Illegal border crossings between the United States and Mexico are at their lowest rates in the last 5 years.
The actions of President Trump are working. They are working so well that the Trump administration says it is running out of money for deportations. Border czar Tom Homan told us just that. Secretary Noem told us that as well. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth told us that. Attorney General Pam Bondi has told us that.
Senate Republicans are acting quickly to get the administration the resources that they have requested and that they need. The budget will allow us to finish the wall. It also takes the steps we need for more border agents. It means more detention beds. That
Now, let's talk about national security because the reconciliation bill that we are talking about allocates $150 billion to restore American peace through strength.
We live in a dangerous world. The threats against the United States are higher than we have seen in decades. There is a threat of terrorism. You saw the danger of terrorism in New Orleans earlier this year. There is the threat from the Chinese Communist Party. They are rapidly building up their military. Meanwhile, over the past 4 years, weak leadership from the previous administration undermined our military and our military strength. There is a real threat today from Iran. They are the largest state sponsor of terrorism in the world, and they are also racing toward a nuclear bomb.
Weakness invites conflict. Strength deters war. This budget is a big step toward rebuilding our military, to protecting our Nation, and we need to do that after 4 years of weakness.
We are already seeing a surge of young people who want to join the military. Recruitments are up. Under President Trump and Secretary Hegseth, recruitment is at its highest levels in 15 years.
With this budget, America will be stronger. Our military will be more lethal and more intimidating.
Now let's talk about energy and American energy dominance. This bill will take the handcuffs--the handcuffs--off of American energy producers. The previous administration caused painfully high prices with its energy mistakes, its blunders. It locked up affordable, reliable, American-made energy. We can never forget Joe Biden saying he wanted the EPA to prioritize climate over American energy, energy that was affordable, available, and reliable. Terrible mistake. Wrong for the Nation. We are here to correct that.
Families suffered from soaring prices. The economy struggled under those regulations of the previous administration. Passing this budget allows us to reject the energy failures of the last 4 years. It puts a premium on energy that is affordable, reliable, and American.
The Federal Government will also see its revenues increase as we produce more American energy. And the Presiding Officer knows that Wyoming is America's energy breadbasket. America is a superpower of energy, and we need to act like it.
If you listen to the Senate Democrats, it is abundantly clear that they don't support these goals of American energy dominance. They don't. They haven't. They still don't.
Democrats also are opposed to securing our border. They are opposed to rebuilding our military. They are opposed to unleashing American energy. They are standing in the way of commonsense priorities that Americans overwhelmingly support. They are a party in a panic mode. Their high prices and their open border agenda are completely out of touch with the American people.
Now, Democrats used this very process, reconciliation, a few years ago. And what was their purpose? They wanted to raise taxes and pass trillions of dollars in wasteful Washington spending. They wasted taxpayer money. They subsidized electric vehicles for the rich. They sent stimulus checks to criminals like the Boston Marathon bomber. It is almost unbelievable.
The Federal Government is too big. It spends too much. Republicans will end this wasteful Washington spending. We will get America back on track. After 4 years of high prices and open borders, our Nation and Americans deserve a path to safety and prosperity. Starting with this Republican budget, that is what the American people will finally get.
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. President, it has been 1 month since President Trump took the oath of office. Since January 20, the Senate has been hard at work confirming the President's Cabinet nominees--18 confirmed so far. President Trump has more of his team in place today than any President has had at this point since 2001, and we have done this despite obstruction by Democrats. Every nominee has received a fair process, as promised, and the Senate will continue to keep its foot on the gas until President Trump's Cabinet table is full.
Mr. President, later today, the Senate will vote to confirm Kash Patel to be Director of the FBI. Mr. Patel will lead the Nation's primary Federal law enforcement Agency at a critical time. We have seen a heightened threat of terrorism in the homeland. Illegal drugs continue to come across the southern border and take the lives of too many Americans. Violent crime spiked in recent years, and it is still a problem in many parts of the country. At the same time, the FBI has lost the trust of many Americans who fear the Agency has become politicized.
Mr. President, Kash Patel has spent his career working in criminal law and national security. He spent his first 8 years after law school as a public defender in State and Federal courts in Florida.
In 2014, he was brought on as a terrorism prosecutor at the U.S. Department of Justice, prosecuting terrorist organizations like al- Qaida and al-Shabaab.
From there, he went to work in national security for the House Intelligence Committee and then in the first Trump administration. He worked on the National Security Council, where he handled hostage rescues, among other sensitive missions.
He also served as Principal Deputy for the Acting Director of National Intelligence and later as Chief of Staff for the Acting Secretary of Defense.
Mr. President, as I said, the FBI has lost trust among the American people in recent years. Much of that stems from a perception that politics has infected the FBI's important work, and it is not hard to see why. In just the last few years, the FBI field office in Richmond, VA, circulated a memo suggesting that traditional Catholics could be violent extremists. In 2021, the Attorney General infamously obstructed the FBI to work with local law enforcement to target parents who attended school board meetings. Of course, there is the FBI's apparent double standard when it comes to investigating President Trump and its repeated failures to cooperate with congressional Republicans.
Mr. President, the next Director of the FBI needs to focus on rooting out politics so the FBI can enforce the law, uphold the Constitution, and keep Americans safe.
The Bureau also needs a renewed focus on empowering the FBI's field offices to be good partners to local law enforcement. I am encouraged that Mr. Patel has the support of the National Police Association, the National Sheriffs' Association, and multiple State attorneys general-- all of whom will be his partners in law enforcement should Mr. Patel be confirmed.
We have unfortunately seen that no community is immune from crime, terrorism, or illegal drugs, and we need all law enforcement working together and focused on the real threats facing our country.
I look forward to working with Mr. Patel to restore the integrity of the FBI and get it focused on its critical mission.
Mr. President, one of the most significant accomplishments of the first Trump administration was the passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.
This comprehensive bill reduced tax rates for every income bracket, doubled the child tax credit, nearly doubled the standard deduction, and enacted pro-growth policies for American businesses of all sizes. And what were the results? A growing economy, higher paychecks for hard-working families, millions of new jobs, small business growth, higher-than-expected Federal revenues. That is right: higher than expected.
Government revenues since the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act have exceeded projections by roughly half a trillion dollars. An end to corporate inversions, which is the practice of moving U.S. company operations overseas for tax purposes. Practically every aspect of the U.S. economy was strengthened by this pro-growth legislation.
Contrary to what my friends across the aisle like to claim, it was middle-class families, not wealthy Americans, who received the largest proportional benefit of the tax cuts.
Now, let me just repeat that. It was middle-class families, not wealthy Americans, who received the largest proportional benefit of the tax cuts.
Working families benefited from this legislation. Working families ended up with more money in their pockets. Working families had more breathing room because of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Anyone who pretends that this wasn't the case is either ignorant of the law or being deliberately deceptive.
The income tax cuts for individuals are expiring at the end of this year, along with a key small business tax cut called the section 199A passthrough deduction.
And one of our top priorities for this year is extending this tax relief--but not just extending it, making it permanent.
As I and several other Finance Committee Republicans noted last week in a letter on this subject, ``A temporary extension of these pro- growth and pro-family policies is a missed opportunity. Businesses need certainty while investing in their companies and taxpayers should not fear tax hikes due to congressional inaction.''
That is it in a nutshell. Hard-working Americans shouldn't have to live in fear of a tax hike every few years, and businesses need a clear picture of the tax outlook so that they can plan for the long term.
Making the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act permanent would protect hard-working families from uncertainty and ensure that they can keep more money in their pockets, and it would have significant economic long-term benefits.
The National Federation of Independent Business reports that making the small business section 199A deduction permanent would result in the creation of an additional 1.2 million jobs annually, with that number climbing as the law goes on.
And the Tax Foundation reports that long-run gross domestic product would increase by a substantial 1.1 percent. The President has called for making the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act permanent, and I am committed to ensuring any tax bill we consider does exactly that.
We have a real opportunity to improve the lives of Americans both here and now and for the long term, and we can't waste it.
Needless to say, drafting major tax legislation takes time. Senator Crapo, the chairman for the Finance Committee, has been doing an incredible job of laying the groundwork for a permanent Tax Cuts and Jobs Act extension, but there is still substantial work left to do to arrive at a bicameral agreement. We have to take the time to get it and do it right.
As we continue to move full steam ahead on this key part of the President's agenda, however, there are other pressing priorities that need to be addressed immediately.
When the President's border czar was here last week, he emphasized that the administration cannot sustain its effort to deport criminals here illegally without additional funding. And the last thing that we want is to delay other parts of the President's agenda, like border security, while we do the work needed to arrive at a tax agreement that can pass both Houses of Congress.
That is why the Senate is moving forward on a two-part legislative plan to accomplish our--and the President's--top priorities.
The first bill we consider will address immediate needs like securing the border and other key national security priorities. The second will focus on making tax relief permanent.
The budget resolution we are taking up this week will address the border security part of the equation, and then we will take up a second budget resolution for the tax portion. I want to thank Chairman Graham for doing the work to get today's resolution to the floor, and I look forward to passing it later this week.
I look forward to taking up that second budget resolution as well in the not-too-distant future to prevent a $4 trillion tax hike on hard- working Americans and making the individual and small business tax relief from the Tax Cuts and Job Acts permanent.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Pursuant to rule XXII, the Chair lays before the Senate the pending cloture motion, which the clerk will state.
The legislative clerk read as follows:
The PRESIDING OFFICER. By unanimous consent, the mandatory quorum call has been waived.
The question is, Is it the sense of the Senate that debate on the nomination of Kashyap Patel, of Nevada, to be Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation for a term of ten years, shall be brought to a close?
Mr. President, I have never liked calling too much attention to today's date, February 20, but I figured my birthday would be as good a day as any to share with our colleagues a decision I made last year.
During my time in the Senate, I have only really answered to two constituencies: the Republican conference and the people of Kentucky. Over the years, that first group trusted me to coordinate campaigns, to count votes, to steer committees, to take the majority, and, on nine occasions, to lead our conference.
Serving as the Republican leader was a rare and, yes, rather specific childhood dream, and just about a year ago, I thanked my colleagues for their confidence which allowed me to fulfill it.
To the distinguished Members of this body I have had the privilege to lead, I remain deeply, deeply grateful.
Today, however, it is appropriate for me to speak about an even deeper allegiance and an even longer standing gratitude.
Seven times, my fellow Kentuckians have sent me to the Senate. Every day in between, I have been humbled by the trust they have placed in me to do their business right here. Representing our Commonwealth has been the honor of a lifetime. I will not seek this honor an eighth time. My current term in the Senate will be my last.
I have been a student of history my entire life. I can't remember the last time I didn't have a stack of biographies or political memoirs on my nightstand, and I know well how tempting it can be to read history with a sense of determinism: assuming that, somehow, notorious failures were inevitable; that crowning triumphs were predestined; and in either case, that lives and careers followed orderly paths.
This isn't, of course, how things work, and I have never had to look further than my own life to recognize it. I have never lost sight of the fact that without my mother's devoted care, a childhood encounter with polio could have turned out a lot worse; that unless my father hadn't taken a job in the Bluegrass State, my politics might have run a course somewhere else; that if it weren't for an eleventh-hour, outside-the-box idea on the campaign trail, my Senate career would have been over before it began; or that if not for the people of Kentucky time and again agreeing that leadership delivers and electing to send me back here, it would have been someone else from somewhere else taking that seat at the table where I have had a chance to work, strategize, fight, and win.
I grew up reading about the greatness of Henry Clay, but there were times when the prospect of etching my name into his desk in this Chamber felt like more of a long shot than making it to the Major Leagues. I got a front row seat to the greatness of Senator John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky as a summer intern in his office; but in so many moments in my early career, the idea of following in his footsteps felt more distant than the Moon.
So the only appropriate thing to take away today, apart from a healthy dose of pride, is my immense gratitude for the opportunity to take part in the consequential business of the Senate and the Nation: gratitude to the people I represent--Kentucky's families and farmers and miners and servicemembers and small business owners; gratitude to loyal friends, dedicated volunteers, and talented staff, who have helped me serve much better; gratitude to this institution that has repaid my devotion so generously over the years and to so many colleagues who have become great friends; gratitude for my family's support and, in particular, to my ultimate teammate and confidante over the last 32 years. Elaine's leadership and wise counsel, in their own right, have made her the most seasoned Cabinet official in modern history. On top of all that, her devotion to me and to Kentucky is a lot more than I deserve.
When I arrived in this Chamber, I wasn't coming with a Governor's statewide executive experience or a House Member's appreciation for Washington dynamics. I knew my hometown of Louisville, and I had spent the previous few years working hard to learn what mattered to folks all across the rest of the Commonwealth.
And yet, within weeks of swearing the oath, sure enough, I was here on the floor talking with colleagues from other far-flung corners of the country, discussing solutions to a farm income crisis and infrastructure challenges that affected different States in the same ways.
I learned quickly that delivering for Kentucky meant finding the ways the Commonwealth's challenges were actually tied to national debates: seeing to it that major agriculture legislation remembered Kentucky farmers, particularly including when they needed extraordinary assistance, like the tobacco buyout; making sure that nationwide steps on transportation infrastructure included resources for modernizing the Brent Spence Bridge, which supports billions of dollars in economic activity in Kentucky and the surrounding region; and, with the trust of the local community, finishing a task first assigned by President Reagan: the safe destruction of America's legacy chemical weapons at the Blue Grass Army Depot.
So efforts like these have spanned the length of my Senate career, and I have been humbled by each and every opportunity to help Kentucky punch above its weight.
Of course, the Senate has to grapple with foundational questions that reach even more broadly across American life and even further into posterity. We are trusted, on behalf of the American people, to participate in the appointment of the Federal judiciary, to be the final check on the assembly of power in the courts, beyond the reach of representative politics, and to ensure that the men and women who preside over them profess authentic devotion to the rule of law above all else.
When Members of this body ignore, discount, or pervert this fundamental duty, they do so not just at the peril of the Senate but of the whole Nation. The weight of our power to advise and consent has never been lost on me, and I have been honored to perform my role in confirming judges who understand their role.
On this floor, there is no place to hide from the obligations of article I, the Senate's unique relationship with article III, or our role in equipping the powers of article II. Here, every debate over agriculture or infrastructure or education or taxes is downstream of the obligations of national security. Every question of policy here at home is contingent on our duty to provide for the common defense.
One of the first times I spoke at length on this floor as a freshman, I was compelled to join the debate over strengthening the deterrence of America's nuclear triad. Whether to expand the U.S. military's hard- target nuclear capability was an interesting question to pose to someone whose most recent job had been running a county government.
But there, of course, was the Founders' brilliance at work: The hopes and dreams of every American are tied up in our ability to protect and defend the Nation and its interests. Every family traveling abroad and every worker and small business owner whose livelihood depends on foreign trade, they depend in turn on the credibility of America's commitments to friends and the strength of her threats to enemies.
In turn, the safety and success of the men and women who volunteer to serve this great Nation in uniform depend on the work we do here to ensure that enemies think twice--twice--before challenging them and those enemies never face a fair fight. Thanks to Ronald Reagan's determination, the work of strengthening America's hard power was well underway when I arrived in the Senate. But since then, we have allowed that power to atrophy, and, today, a dangerous world threatens to outpace the work of rebuilding it.
So lest any of our colleagues still doubt my intentions for the remainder of my term, I have some unfinished business to attend to.
In our work, most of us in this body develop an appreciation for the Senate itself--its written rules, its collegial norms, its pace of play. Yet so often I have watched colleagues depart, venting their frustration at the confines of the institution or mourning what they perceive to be the decline of its norms.
Regardless--regardless--of the political storms that may wash over this Chamber during the time I have remaining, I assure our colleagues that I will depart with great hope for the endurance--the endurance--of the Senate as an institution.
There are any number of reasons for pessimism, but the strength of the Senate is not one of them. This Chamber is still the haven where the political minority can require debate. It is still the crucible in which jurists are tested for
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from North Carolina.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Members and staff and spectators in the Gallery be allowed to applaud for a period not to exceed 30 seconds.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. President, in about 2 hours, the Senate will vote on whether to confirm Kash Patel to serve as Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation for the next 10 years--10 years. If Senate Republicans confirm Mr. Patel, I believe they will come to regret this vote--probably sooner rather than later.
I, for one, am convinced that Mr. Patel has neither the experience, the judgment, nor the temperament to lead this amazing criminal investigative Agency. It appears my Senate Republican colleagues are ignoring the many redflags in Mr. Patel's record, probably because they fear retribution from the President and Mr. Musk.
Let me be clear: This is not a partisan issue. During my time in the Senate, I have voted for four FBI Director nominations before this one. Each one was clearly a Republican, and I voted for them nevertheless. Historically, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been apolitical.
I oppose Mr. Patel because he is dangerously politically extreme. He has repeatedly expressed his intention to use our Nation's most important law enforcement Agency to retaliate against his political enemies. Even before President Trump took office, Mr. Patel announced that he would force out FBI Director Chris Wray, whom he nominated in his first term before firing former FBI Director Jim Comey.
The Director is the only political appointment at the FBI.
Congress took steps to ensure that this Agency remains as apolitical as possible by providing for a single term of 10 years for Director and subjecting the appointment to the advice and consent of the Senate. Fifty years ago, we made this reform. We may see it all fall to ashes today.
As we have seen for weeks now, the Trump administration's purge of the FBI is a political exercise that has spread to service career officials. There is the FBI Agents Association, and the two leaders of that association came to see me recently in my office to talk about the situation.
Both of them are women. One is serving 17 years in the career job at the FBI and the other, 22. They were quick to add that their fathers had been FBI agents before that. It was clearly in their blood. They came to tell me about the situation at the FBI today because of this transition and because of the prospect of Kash Patel heading their Agency.
They said morale has never been lower. They have gone through many Presidential transitions and have never seen anything like this. The declaration that is required now of FBI agents is to whether they will participate in the investigation of the January 6 rioters who assaulted this United States Capitol Building.
Let's be honest about what is going on here. There is an effort to have Soviet-style historical revision. The Trump administration and the people they are pushing into leadership have to, basically, pass a loyalty of--in terms of the outcome of the previous Presidential election and what happened on January 6.
They are somehow asked to ignore the obvious that we see on the videotape over and over again. The rioters that assaulted this Capitol are so dangerous that the Vice President of the United States sitting in your chair was physically removed by the Secret Service for fear that he was going to be hurt if he stayed in his position.
Those of us who were on the floor of the Senate on January 6 were asked to evacuate this Chamber as quickly as possible. This was not simply a question of tourists getting out of line. These people who assaulted this U.S. Capitol Building were hell-bent on stopping the constitutional process of counting the electoral votes in the 2020 election.
And now the FBI and others are being asked to say the opposite, that this wasn't somehow a breach of law, a horrendous, terrible chapter in the history of this country, and that there was danger afoot.
Because the President has given a sweeping pardon for the 1,600 that were prosecuted for trespass, seditious conspiracy, and use of firearms in the Capitol and the like, we are supposed to somehow discount this as a significant moment in American history. It was.
For the FBI agents who participated in the investigation of that day, I say they were doing their job, they did it well, and now to remove them from the FBI because of that has obviously hurt the morale of the FBI Agency. When you stop and wonder what the future holds for them if another President comes in with another political agenda, will they be victims again?
As we have seen for weeks now, the Trump administration's purge of the FBI is a political exercise that has spread to senior current officials. In the FBI's long, long history, this has never happened before. This purge has dramatically weakened the FBI's ability to combat national security threats and make America less safe.
Senior leaders with collectively hundreds of years of experience have been forced out, creating a leadership vacuum. Thousands of line agents fear losing their jobs simply because they were assigned to work on cases involving the January 6 attack by President Trump.
I have heard directly from FBI agents who now fear for their safety and the safety of their families. To understand why, let me tell you about a January 6 rioter named Edward Kelley. Mr. Kelley was convicted of assaulting law enforcement during the attack on the U.S. Capitol. We saw it, didn't we, in terms of the videotapes that showed our law enforcement agents trying to stand their ground of this Capitol Building being beaten back and assaulted by these mobs?
Mr. Kelley was convicted of assault on law enforcement, and he was given a full and unconditional pardon by Donald Trump. But Mr. Kelley has also been convicted in his home State of Tennessee of conspiracy to murder the FBI agents who investigated his role in the January 6 attack.
Understand this: Now he is arguing that President Trump's blanket pardon--Mr. Kelley--should cover his attempt to kill FBI agents.
When asked about the possible firings of career FBI officials at his confirmation hearing, Mr. Patel under oath--under oath--said ``I don't know what's going on right now,'' at the FBI.
Mr. President, that is not true. Thanks to multiple brave whistleblowers, we now know that Mr. Patel likely committed perjury in making that statement. Even before being confirmed as an FBI Director, Mr. Patel is already directing the ongoing purge of honorable, career public servants, despite his status as a private citizen. He has no right to be part of this awful process.
I urge my Republican colleagues to seriously consider these credible whistleblower allegations before you vote on Mr. Patel's nomination.
Mr. Patel's claim about an FBI purge were not his only misleading statements under oath. At his hearing, Mr. Patel implausibly told me he could not recall Stew Peters, a man who has been identified as an anti- Semitic Holocaust denier.
I asked him repeatedly: What about Stew Peters?
Don't know the man, don't recognize the name.
This is simply not true, considering that Mr. Patel appeared on Mr. Peters' podcast eight times, Mr. President--eight times and he couldn't recall the man's name.
Mr. Peters has since revealed that he and Mr. Patel directly communicate via their personal cell phones ``constantly''-- ``constantly'' was the word he used. As far as Patel is concerned under oath: Never heard of the man.
Why in the world would he do that? Why wouldn't Mr. Patel admit the obvious--eight podcasts and constant communication with this man. And an even larger question: What is he doing as the man who wants to direct the FBI
Mr. Patel also claimed he ``didn't have anything to do with'' the recording of the so-called January 6 prison choir, which included at least six rioters who violently assaulted police officers. Mr. Patel thinks there is something interesting, maybe even amusing, about the fact that he created a choir of these individuals who had been prosecuted for what they did on January 6.
Here is what Mr. Patel said to Steve Bannon after he denied knowing anything about this recording before the Judiciary Committee's recently. He said to Steve Bannon:
So as Steve Bannon showed, he is the mastermind behind this recording of these prisoners saying something about the national anthem every night. That particular tape that he created of the January 6 choir was taken to Trump rallies to be played as some kind of interesting display of what Patel insists are just political prisoners.
One of Mr. Patel's choir boys, Julian Khater, K-H-A-T-E-R, was convicted of assaulting Capitol Police officers with pepper spray. One of those officers was Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick. Brian Sicknick suffered multiple strokes and died a day after the attack. Mr. Khater was one of the people who assaulted him.
Mr. Patel has called these violent January 6 rioters political prisoners. That includes Guy Reffitt. Guy Reffitt was sentenced to 87 months in prison for his role in the January 6 assault--87 months.
Mr. Reffitt brought a gun to the Capitol on January 6 and recorded himself saying the following, which I will paraphrase because I don't want to use profanity on the floor of the Senate: We are all going to drag them out kicking and screaming. I just want to see Pelosi's head hit every effing stair on the way out and Mitch McConnell, too. Eff them all.
Mr. Reffitt's 19-year-old son Jackson turned him into law enforcement after the attack, despite Reffitt's threats to shoot Jackson and his sister.
Here is what Reffitt said to his own children:
Mr. Reffitt received a full and unconditional pardon from President Trump. Guess where he was on January 30 this year? Back at the Capitol complex at Mr. Patel's confirmation hearing. Here is what Mr. Reffitt posted on social media from the hearing room:
Stew Peters: constant communication, holocaust denier; this gentleman he has become a hero to for his appearance before the committee; and we are all commies for questioning Kash Patel's politics and what it has led to. These are Mr. Patel's allies: Stew Peters; Julian Khater; and Guy Reffitt.
On the other hand, consider who is warning us about Mr. Patel: former Trump officials who know him, like Attorney General Bill Barr, CIA Director Haspel, Defense Secretary Mark Esper, and National Security Adviser John Bolton. All of these were Republican appointees who worked with Patel, who know him well, and warn us not to do this, don't give this responsibility to this man--all Republican appointees.
Mr. Patel has left a long trail of grievances, lashing out at anyone who is not completely aligned with him. He calls Democrats ``vindictive, evil, and vicious'' and repeatedly attacks Republican Senators who don't toe the MAGA line.
I read Mr. Patel's book ``Government Gangsters.'' It includes an enemies list at the end of the book, 60 names, ``members of the deep state'' in the word of Kash Patel, which includes distinguished public servants for both political parties.
What do they all have in common, the 60 people on this hit list? From Attorney General Bill Barr and Merrick Garland to former FBI Directors Bob Mueller and Chris Wray, they all had the misfortune of crossing paths with the vindictive Kash Patel.
Mr. Patel claims he respects law enforcement, but his words and actions demonstrate his disdain for the FBI. He said on day one he plans to ``shut down'' the FBI headquarters, and he has falsely claimed that the FBI ``was planning January 6 for a year'' beforehand.
There is no truth to that statement, Mr. President. He is casting aspersions on the FBI that are undeserved. Mr. Patel's record demonstrates that he is dangerous, inexperienced, and dishonest. He should not and cannot serve as an effective FBI Director.
Mr. Patel has been crystal clear that he plans on using the FBI's vast surveillance and investigative authority to ``come after'' the President's enemies.
It is shocking that my Republican colleagues are willing to support him, despite the serious threat he poses to our national security. And I am sorry to say I believe that we will quickly come to regret this vote. When I think of giving this man a 10-year--10 years as the Director of the leading criminal investigative Agency in the world, I cannot imagine a worse choice.
You want the person who has that job and that power to destroy people simply by investigation to show some temperament and some judgment. Kash Patel shows just the opposite. He is neither qualified nor prepared to assume this responsibility.
I will be voting no and plead with my Republican colleagues: Please think twice before creating this situation and making it even worse.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from California.
Mr. President, I too rise today to oppose the nomination of Kash Patel to serve as Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Now, let me begin by saying to Americans watching at home who may not be completely up to speed as to what is going on, the importance of this specific nomination or wondering, Who is Kash Patel?
You might have been distracted these past few weeks by a rush of headlines coming out of the White House, maybe preoccupied with the cost of groceries rising by the week. You may have--if you got any news--been hearing about how President Trump, the richest President in history, has given Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, unprecedented access to millions of Americans' sensitive private information.
Yes, Elon Musk has access to your personal, private information, from Social Security numbers, to home addresses, to your tax information. There has been a lot going on. All the while, President Trump has also tried to lay the groundwork to pass another massive tax cut for billionaires.
So if you have been busy and struggling to keep up, I understand. So let me try to break it down for you.
Only in the year 2025, when Donald Trump seems to have a headlock on the Republican Party, could a nominee this extreme and this unqualified be considered or confirmed to lead the FBI. No party of Reagan would ever support this big a threat to American freedom and our national security. No party of Lincoln could ever support this big a source of division among Americans. Yet here we are, pretending as if a man who promised to shut down the FBI headquarters on day one and turn it into a museum for the deep state is now fit to lead the FBI.
You see time and again, Kash Patel has shown that his loyalty lies not with the rule of law but with Donald Trump. Why? Because he knows that Donald Trump is his cash cow. Trump is Kash Patel's ticket to selling more books. It is his calling card to try to book the next podcast interview and certainly key to landing his next job.
Frankly, it is a pattern we have seen from all too many of the nominees that Donald Trump has picked for his second administration. These are people whose sole qualification is allegiance to Trump. This should disqualify any nominee, but it is particularly concerning for a nominee slated to lead the Nation's premier law enforcement Agency.
When it comes to protecting the security of our Nation, there is no room to choose between patriotism and patronage. The American people need and
Unfortunately, through his actions over the course of the last several years and his conduct this past month before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Kash Patel has demonstrated a dangerous lack of judgment, lack of preparation, and lack of independence. He has shown that he is either unwilling or incapable of putting politics aside in order to ``protect the American people and uphold the Constitution'' should he be confirmed to lead the FBI.
Throughout his career, he has shown a clear pattern of loyalty to Trump and of self-dealings at the expense of the American people. That includes undermining the FBI's work in order to protect Trump from investigation; profiting off of conspiracies about a ``Deep State'' and promoting an ``enemies list'' targeting public servants; selling picture books to spread conspiracy theories to children about the 2016 election; endangering the lives of American servicemembers after inserting himself into a hostage rescue operation; refusing to commit in his confirmation hearing to enforcing existing gun laws that protect lives and have saved lives; holding millions of dollars in unvested stock in a foreign company tied to forced and child labor; and even producing a song and financially supporting the families of insurrectionists who violently beat Capitol Police officers on January 6.
Now it appears that this list includes potentially having lied under oath in his confirmation hearing about the role he played in firing career FBI employees based on their perceived loyalties. After we heard him swear in committee that he played no role in the firings, whistleblowers are coming forward to tell us otherwise. At the very least, this charge is so serious that it warrants further investigation.
Colleagues, stretching the truth or potentially outright lying may score him points with President Trump, but as Director of the FBI, it will only put American lives at risk.
Think about it. To all the Americans who might be watching from home, you wouldn't put an arsonist in charge of a fire department, would you? But with Kash Patel atop the FBI, that is exactly what we get. Career law enforcement will continue to be purged, the FBI will be weaponized for political gain, and our communities will be less safe.
I want to make one final point to our Republican colleagues. Throughout this body's history, the Senate has had not just the opportunity but the responsibility to serve as a check on Executive overreach.
Senators of both parties over history have exercised our constitutional duty to advise and consent to the President's nominations, and in the past, the Senate has rejected extreme nominations. To stay quiet when a nominee so obviously unfit comes before us--that sets a dangerous precedent. Think about the damage you will be doing not just to the institution of the FBI or to the Senate but to the trust that millions of Americans deserve to have in our law enforcement.
But more important than that, today, consider this: Someday in the future, possibly the near future, when a loyalist FBI Director abuses the position and fails to protect the American people, it won't just be Kash Patel that will be held accountable, it won't just be President Trump we will try to hold accountable, it will be every Member of this body who supported his nomination that will also be held accountable.
So I invite you, I encourage you to have the courage to say no to Trump because lives are on the line. Have the courage to stand up and protect your constituents, protect the American people. Stand up, do the right thing, and vote no on this nominee.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Minnesota.
Mr. President, I rise to strongly oppose the confirmation of Kash Patel to serve as the next Director of the FBI.
The FBI Director leads our Nation's most important law enforcement Agency. It is made up of more than 38,000 nonpartisan public servants who work every day to take on violent crime, get fentanyl off of our streets, investigate cyber crimes, protect our national security, and so much more.
The Bureau's motto is ``fidelity, bravery, integrity,'' and its Director must be someone who embodies those core values above all else. That is not Kash Patel.
Let's start with fidelity. The FBI Director's loyalty is not to the President; it is to the truth, the Constitution, and the American people. But Mr. Patel has made it clear that his only loyalty is to the President.
Mr. Patel has threatened to come after the President's critics. On one podcast in December of 2023--by the way, that is 2023, just a few years ago, not two decades ago, not when he is in high school--in 2023, he said, ``We're going to come after you, whether it's criminally or civilly. We'll figure that out. But yeah, we're putting you . . . on notice.''
On another podcast last August, he said, ``When Trump wins in 2024, and is in power in 2025, we can prosecute them,'' referring to Justice Department officials. That was just last August.
At his hearing before the Judiciary Committee, we gave Mr. Patel numerous opportunities to explain, to walk back his threats. He chose not to, nor did he try to explain his so-called ``deep state'' list of former government officials, including many Republicans who served under the President's first term. This list of his deep state government gangsters, as he called them, included former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, former CIA Director Gina Haspel, former National Security Advisor John Bolton, and former Attorney General Bill Barr-- Bill Barr, who received so many compliments from people in this body, from so many Republicans, including the chair of the Judiciary Committee.
I remind our colleagues on the other side of the aisle that Bill Barr wrote that putting Patel in charge of the FBI, promoting him in any way, would only happen ``over [his] dead body.'' Gina Haspel threatened to resign to stop Patel from becoming her Deputy. John Bolton said that Patel ``demonstrated no policy aptitude at all.'' These are staunch, lifelong Republicans. They are experienced and respected people. I may not agree in any way with everything they have said or done, nor does everyone here, but we do agree that they are people of integrity. If these people can end up on Kash Patel's deep state list, we can only imagine what that would mean for anyone who might not be deemed sufficiently loyal to the President.
We know what Mr. Patel wants to do with the people on his list because he already told us. In one interview, he said the people on the list ``need to go to prison.'' And his comments about his so-called enemies are not empty threats. His desire to punish all but the President's most zealous loyalists is far too real.
At his hearing, Mr. Patel said that ``all FBI employees will be protected against political retribution.'' Yet, mere hours later, the administration forced out eight of the Bureau's most senior, nonpartisan public servants who oversaw national security, criminal, and cyber matters.
One day later, an email was sent to FBI employees requesting a list of everyone who had worked on January 6 cases ``to determine whether any additional personnel actions are necessary.'' It wouldn't matter if it is just a brandnew person who gets assigned to a case or a senior person; didn't matter if these people were prosecuting people and investigating people that actually tried to do us harm in this Chamber, chased down former Senator Romney in the hall--that all happened-- destroyed offices of the Parliamentarian and others, cut police officers' faces and injured them.
Then, when in any crime scene, you would have it investigated, this guy Kash Patel is questioning those FBI employees that were simply assigned to the cases to work on them.
This is not the person we should be putting in charge of the FBI. And I know my colleagues know this. So many of them that were there at the time supported Christopher Wray. I voted for Christopher Wray. He was Donald Trump's choice to run the FBI, but I thought that he would be a man of integrity, and he was. I will also note that applications to the FBI have tripled since he has been in office, during that time period, because he has
Mr. Patel's supposed enemies are not only government officials he disagrees with; he has threatened the press as well. No one agrees with every story the press writes. I certainly don't, and I am sure many of my colleagues have read stories about them that they don't like, but we believe in this country in the First Amendment. Mr. Patel, however, has referred to the media as--again, a recent quote--``the most powerful enemy the United States has ever seen.'' He said that not even on a podcast. He said that in a speech. Think about that. The media is ``the most powerful enemy the United States has ever seen,'' in the words of Kash Patel, nominated to be the Director of the FBI, to oversee tens of thousands of agents across the country--not China, not Russia, not Iran, not terrorists, but the press.
And Mr. Patel has already publicly threatened journalists, saying:
This isn't someone with any business running the world's premier law enforcement Agency. This isn't someone whom we can trust to be faithful to our Constitution. This isn't fidelity to the rule of law and impartial law enforcement; it is a direct threat to it.
Bravery. Fidelity, bravery, integrity--so let's talk about bravery. We all know that the Capitol Police showed bravery far and above the call of duty on January 6, 2021. We know that. We know that many of them--their gear was stuck on a bus, their riot gear. They weren't even able to access it, and so many of them were protecting us, people who worked in this Capitol when the people that were storming into this Capitol had better gear than the police had--and, of course, we made tons of changes since then, changes to the leadership of the Capitol Police with a new Chief, changes to the Sergeant at Arms, changes to our security profile. We have made those changes. Of course, we should have done that.
But what we do know is they showed bravery. But rather than recognize the officers' bravery, Mr. Patel accused those who testified in the January 6 hearings of lying. When asked on a podcast whether Capitol Police officers told the truth in the House of Representatives January 6 Committee hearings when they were under oath, Mr. Patel said:
Once again, our colleagues on the Judiciary Committee gave him the chance to walk back these comments during his hearings, and, once again, he chose not to. In fact, he claimed this ``wasn't accurate.''
It was exactly what he said. We have the evidence. We have the facts. We have the proof right there, his words. I would think facts and truth and the proof should matter to someone who is asking to be head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, but it doesn't. Literally, this is on YouTube. Anyone listening today could look it up.
The men and women of the Capitol Police aren't criminals; they are heroes. And so are the men and women at the FBI who every day put their lives on the line to keep us safe, but Kash Patel disagrees. He wrote in his book, again recently, that ``the FBI has become so thoroughly compromised that it will remain a threat to the people unless drastic measures are taken.'' And he called the men and women of the FBI ``utterly corrupt.''
How do you think that makes people feel, people out in Minnesota who are going after bank robbers or gangs or drug rings, because Kash Patel didn't like one investigation of a bunch of mobsters that came into this Capitol and beat up police. And then he said he wanted the list of everyone that was involved in that. I don't think the FBI is a threat to the people like Mr. Patel. I don't think it is ``utterly corrupt.'' And I don't think my Republican colleagues believe that either. I think that they admire the people that work at the FBI.
In fact, under Mr. Wray's leadership, as I noted, the morale of agents and personnel at the FBI has improved significantly, three times as many people, as I noted, applying as agents. These agents deserve a Director who will have their back and continue building the morale at the Bureau, not someone who denigrates their service and, as Kash Patel has done--again, we have got it, his voice saying it--called for their headquarters to be shut down and turned into a museum. That was one of his later comments.
The men and women of the FBI show us every day what it means to embody bravery, and now we need to show them that we, too, can be brave and tell the President on this one: No, this is not the right person. We know he is your friend. We know you have hung out with him a lot, but this is not the person for this job.
I ask my colleagues to vote no on just one of these nominees. I voted yes on some of them. I looked at their credentials. I made a decision. Maybe wouldn't have been the first person I picked, but I voted yes on some of them. I ask them to vote no on Kash Patel.
Integrity, FBI, integrity, ``I''--the FBI runs on facts. It runs on truth. Without truth, the whole system breaks down. And in his hearing, Mr. Patel made clear why Americans should be so concerned about putting someone in charge of the FBI who clearly does not have the integrity the job demands. Mr. Patel did not even have the integrity to stand by his own words that we had on YouTube. Instead of disavowing or providing explanations for his past statements, he repeatedly misled the committee, dodged questions, and claimed ignorance, claimed he didn't remember things he had said just a few months before. Why would you want someone in the FBI that doesn't remember things they said only a few months before?
This is irresponsible at best and deceitful at worst.
The Director of our Nation's most powerful law enforcement Agency must be forthright and trustworthy. He must follow the facts and carefully analyze evidence before drawing conclusions. Unfortunately, Mr. Patel has proven that his allegiance is to the President, not to the truth.
Independence of the FBI from the White House is critical. We recently saw courageous prosecutors stand up for an independent justice system. They resigned instead of carrying out politicized orders from the administration. These were not liberal lawyers. These were not members of the resistance. The Acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Danielle Sassoon, was a Federalist Society member and a clerk to Justice Scalia. She is a rising star. She is so respected, she has taken on major, major cases and won against criminals time and time again, and she gave up the position of the acting head of one of the most incredible prosecutor's offices in the country, the Southern District of New York.
And the lead prosecutor of the case, Hagan Scotten, was a decorated Iraq war veteran. He clerked for Justice Roberts and Justice Cavanaugh, when Justice Cavanaugh was on the Court of Appeals. In his resignation letter, he wrote:
I think we should think about those words when we take our vote.
My Republican colleagues need to show some of the same courage as these public servants. They need to stop acquiescing and stand up to this assault on our justice system, and a good place to start is by voting against Patel.
The fact is, Federal law enforcement and the American people deserve a Director who embodies the Bureau's motto: ``Fidelity, Bravery, and Integrity.''
I will be voting no on his confirmation, and I ask our Republican colleagues to join me in standing up for justice, in standing for the rule of law.
Mr. President, as the leading law enforcement Agency in our country, the FBI does critical work
But today, the FBI and the Department of Justice face a crisis caused not by any outside threat but rather by the men and women tasked with leading these Agencies. Instead of focusing on potential attacks, hacks, or violent criminal enterprises, we have a DOJ and FBI that have been turned inward on themselves.
In just the last month, dozens of senior career FBI and DOJ employees have been purged--purged--en masse by President Trump and his administration. Hundreds of thousands of the prosecutors and FBI special agents and analysts may be next--in fact, I shouldn't use the word ``may,'' will be next. Purging hard-working and dedicated civil servants does nothing to make us safe; in fact, it does just the opposite.
Attorney General Bondi recently announced the creation of a ``weaponization working group.'' It only continues this trend. Through this working group, she is doing what she told us she would not do in her confirmation hearings. She is ``investigating the investigators'' with this working group, and I expect will be prosecuting the prosecutors.
I fear what a DOJ and FBI focused inward on themselves means for the safety and security of our Nation, which brings me to Kash Patel, President Trump's nominee to lead the FBI. For many reasons, Mr. Patel is not the man to answer the many challenges of the moment. Mr. Patel spent his nomination hearings avoiding every hard question, not even the hard questions. I asked him, for example, if he would investigate people--60 people--on his ``deep state'' list. He would not say no. And it was pretty clear, this list--and I suspect it is growing--but the 60-person list are all the people who are not sufficiently loyal to President Trump. So it has many, many Republicans on the list, and what the heck is he planning do with that list? Believe me, it is not because they are going to be commended for the work that they did.
I asked him in his hearings whether he profited from selling supplements to detox the COVID-19 vaccine, supplements he promoted on his social media channels. He did not answer.
I asked him if Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. He would not answer.
He claimed not to know an anti-Semitic extremist named Stew Peters, despite the fact that he appeared on this person's program eight times.
He tried to claim no involvement with the January 6 Choir made up of inmates--made up of inmates--serving in prison for their part in the violent insurrection on January 6 at the Capitol.
And, of course, we all know all of these inmates have been pardoned en masse by the President. He claimed no involvement with this choir despite promoting them and hawking their merchandise for years.
He was unwilling to provide any details about his grand jury testimony related to the January 6 insurrection--testimony he had to be compelled to give after taking the Fifth Amendment. Of course, Mr. Patel has the same rights as any American to plead the Fifth. But we have an equal right to ask him, as the nominee for the FBI Director, no less, why he did so and to learn what his ultimate testimony was.
The one thing Mr. Patel did testify to was in response to a question from Senator Booker about whether he was ``aware of any plans or discussions to punish . . . FBI agents or personnel associated with Trump investigations,'' and his response was that he was ``not aware of that.''
We have since learned of credible evidence that Mr. Patel perjured himself with that statement.
Mr. Patel is totally unfit to lead the FBI. It is clear he won't discern fact from fiction and that he will be loyal to Donald Trump and Donald Trump only, which means total disregard for the Constitution and the rule of law.
Ours is a nation of laws. Mr. Patel's nomination is one more indication that Donald Trump fancies himself above the law, even referring to himself as ``King'' in a recent tweet, and will weaponize the law however he wants to, and that is to advance his political agenda.
Mr. Patel's is a dangerous nomination that will make our country less safe, less secure, and will erode America's trust in the FBI.
Mr. President, our administrative Agencies--and, certainly, the Department of Justice and the FBI--do not exist to be used as tools for retribution by Donald Trump, Pam Bondi, or Kash Patel, but that is exactly what is happening with our Agencies and the firing and the purging of thousands of people who are doing the job of the people.
What can we be thinking in supporting Mr. Patel to lead an Agency that has the tools to spy and go after all the people that he doesn't like?
I urge my colleagues to vote no on this nomination.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from California.
Mr. President, today, the Senate is on track to confirm Kash Patel as Director of the FBI. Think about that statement for a moment. Kash Patel--conspiracy theorist, January 6 denier, MAGA sycophant, and political provocateur--will be FBI Director.
The absurdity of it, the destructive consequences of it--and it is worth asking today: How did we get here to such an extreme point, to this moment when someone so patently unqualified--really, disqualified from any position of responsibility--is poised to become Director of the Nation's preeminent law enforcement Agency?
Earlier today, I stood with my colleagues out in front of the FBI headquarters, a building that Kash Patel promised to dismantle on his first day as FBI Director and turn into a museum to the deep state, the home of a Department that we all know he will convert into a political weapon for the President--the President who is a serial law breaker and will use Patel as a tool for retribution against his enemies.
But in a democracy, law enforcement does not serve the President, let alone someone who fashions himself as a King. Law enforcement serves the people. It is nonpartisan. It is not a vehicle of political payback for a political party. And yet we are watching the FBI and DOJ hollowed out, dismantled, and turned into an investigative and prosecutorial extension of Donald Trump's White House. We are watching it live in realtime. It is already happening in that building we visited this morning.
In just the last month, Donald Trump's Department of Justice has engaged in a brazen sweeping purge, a rolling Saturday night massacre, an unmistakable campaign to intimidate, punish, and drive out thousands of hard-working nonpartisan FBI and career DOJ employees. This is happening as we speak.
Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove fired roughly two dozen prosecutors involved in January 6 criminal cases--not for cause, not for corruption, not for misconduct. They were fired for failing what is, in effect, a loyalty test--a loyalty test.
A MAGA mob attacks the Capitol on January 6 to stop the peaceful transfer of power. They beat police officers, gouge them, bear-spray them, all in the service of an even bigger crime--stopping the peaceful transfer of power after Donald Trump lost his reelection. And they get pardoned by Donald Trump. The lawbreakers get pardoned, and the brave FBI agents who tracked down these violent miscreants--these agents get punished, they get fired, they get purged.
The one-man wrecking ball that is Donald Trump is turning the world upside down. The criminals are being pardoned and the cops are being punished.
Kash Patel sat before the Senate Judiciary Committee and, under oath, insisted he knew of no plans to punish FBI employees involved in investigations related to Donald Trump. He positively levitated at the suggestion that such a thing could even be true. Then, within days, top FBI agents were fired. Thousands of FBI employees--career professionals--were sent a detailed questionnaire demanding they disclose any involvement in investigations related to the January 6 insurrection. A warning accompanied this: ``Additional personnel actions'' could follow.
Yet Mr. Patel testified that ``there will be no politicization at the FBI.
He sat in that committee room and told the Senate all FBI employees will be protected against political retribution. That was a Thursday, 3 weeks ago. The very next day, the purges began. Before the ink had dried on the transcript of that hearing, the retribution campaign had begun.
In his written response to questions, Patel denies knowing about these actions in advance; denies knowing whether he discussed these dismissals with the White House, the DOJ, or the FBI. He wrote:
I asked him in writing about these actions and his answer was he doesn't remember. But, in fact, whistleblowers have come forward to testify or to state that, not only did Patel know about the upcoming purges, he was directing those dismissals.
How could he not recall that? It wasn't years ago or even months. It was days before--days before his written answers to those questions-- those written answers where he said he couldn't recall he was directing these purges covertly as a private citizen. But he doesn't recall-- purges of quality career professionals who dedicated their lives to the rule of law, who have been fired, laid-off, or forced out because they dared investigate a violent insurrection on our Capitol or the President's retention of classified documents that contained our nuclear and other national security secrets.
There was a time in our country when the FBI was weaponized, when it served as a sword for the President; and the DOJ served as his shield when Hoover authorized covert harassment campaigns against the perceived enemies of the President. We thought those days were over.
And they were over, until now.
We must not put in place a Roy Cohn for the President, someone who will bend and break the law to serve the President's personal and political aims, for therein lies the path to corruption, to unlimited power, and to malfeasance of the highest order.
We put up guardrails to prevent one man and his cadre of company men from turning the Bureau and Department into a partisan and lawless battering ram. We must not take them down because we know the road that lies ahead, and we know that Donald Trump cannot destroy the nonpartisan character of the FBI and the Department of Justice without his enablers.
And Kash Patel? Kash Patel is Donald Trump's handpicked enabler and henchman, the guy who would say yes when everyone else would say no to any immoral and unlawful request made by Donald Trump--the guy who publicized his ``deep state'' list, almost half of whom are Republicans; the guy who worked for--and retains millions of dollars in stock in--a company supported by the Chinese Communist Party.
In any normal world, that would automatically disqualify someone from leading the Nation's premier law enforcement and counterintelligence Agency. This is not someone we would want running the FBI.
It would be unthinkable to confirm a nominee who has written an entire book in service of ``dramatically limit[ing] and refocus[ing] the scope of the FBI's authority''--a nominee who has publicly said: ``It would be fun to go on a manhunt of government gangsters'' alongside those who ``represent Donald Trump's army to take this country back.''
I am of the opinion that the people the FBI should be going on manhunts for are actual criminals, not the President's enemies of the day. The FBI shouldn't serve as Donald Trump's army.
Alas, we will not soon forget the last time Donald Trump's army presented itself to us, when they beat down the doors of this Capitol, when they attacked law enforcement and sought to overturn an election.
Mr. Patel is quite familiar with that mob. He celebrated them in song. Mr. Patel tried to deny his association with the January 6 choir. He said he has nothing to do with their recording. But earlier, on Steve Bannon's podcast, he was all too proud to brag about it:
When I asked him about this, under oath, his response was--and you may never believe this--when he said ``we did this and we did that,'' ``we'' didn't include him. I don't know what is worse, taking credit for something he didn't do or doing something then lying about it. But what I do know is this is not the character of someone who should be Director of the FBI.
At the hearing, I also asked him to turn and face the Capitol Police officers in the room--these officers from the same department that suffered such grievous injuries on January 6. He couldn't do so. He couldn't look them in the eye. I don't blame him for being too ashamed. He should be ashamed, celebrating their victimization in a song. He should be ashamed, and anyone voting to confirm him should be ashamed.
Yet here we are, on the fast track to rubberstamp his confirmation, asked to turn a blind eye as he takes control of the most powerful law enforcement Agency in the country. That is what my Republican colleagues seem poised to do.
I will ask again: How on Earth did we get here? And where are we going by confirming a nominee who is so plainly unqualified, who is tied up in shady business dealings with the CCP and the Kremlin, who made songs with violent cop beaters, who made memes of himself sawing the heads off of Members of Congress.
How on Earth did we get here? Because we all know where this road ends: a weaponized FBI; investigations into anyone who stands up to Donald Trump--elected officials, journalists, Democrats and Republicans--anyone.
I know some of my colleagues seek solace in the belief that if they just toe the line for long enough, they will be spared, but we all know what happens when someone falls out of favor with Donald Trump--when you are inevitably asked to vote for something or do something so egregious that you cannot possibly continue to say yes. When you reach that moment when you are forced to cross the President or abandon your final line in the sand, it will be these moments you will remember: the concessions to a wannabe authoritarian that you were willing to entertain; the lines that you allowed him to cross so you would be spared his wrath. But you will not be spared. No one is--not the veteran, nonpartisan employees at the FBI, not the maverick, moderate Members of this body, nor even the most extreme supporters--left out in the cold the moment they are no longer valuable to this President.
When, not if, you fall out of favor with Donald Trump, Patel and others may be unleashed on you as well. My colleagues should remember there is more room under Donald Trump's bus than on it. Enabling his administration is a one-way street, and by continuing to go down it, you drive yourselves and the foundations of our democracy to the very precipice.
My colleagues, we have a duty today--a duty to the Constitution and a duty to the American people. We have a duty to the 38,000 men and women of the FBI who put themselves and their lives on the line every single day, those who work in the building where we stood this morning in the freezing cold and in communities and cities across the country, keeping us safe and secure. We must take that duty seriously because if we confirm Kash Patel knowing what we are getting, knowing where we are going, we will only have ourselves to blame.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Rhode Island.
Mr. President, I am here to join my distinguished colleague from California in opposition to the nomination of Kash Patel and to make crystal clear to this body what he is going to do in that job. He has shown who he is. So when these things go wrong, I want to be absolutely clear that our Republican friends were warned. They will own the consequences of Kash Patel's misbehavior.
Let's start with the fact that, unlike any FBI Director before, this guy is a vitriolic partisan. Those are the stripes he shows when he is left to his own devices, and those are the characteristics
Here are just a few simple examples. This is from his book called ``Government Gangsters,'' and this is a page of his enemies' list. Well, Attorney General Bondi said no one should come to a law enforcement job with an enemies' list, so then they had to pretend that this was not an enemies' list. Well, of course, it is an enemies' list. Here is what Kash Patel himself says about it: ``Names named. Roadmap unveiled. The man hunt starts tomorrow.'' If you are going to set up a manhunt against people, are they not your enemies by any logical definition of the term?
He goes on to a video that shows himself chain-sawing off the heads of the people on his enemies' list, including the handsome junior Senator from California and the daughter of former Vice President Cheney. It is a pretty gross image to be cutting the heads off of people with a saw. He didn't put it up, but he retweeted it. He loved it so much that he put it up on his own media.
Things like that are not appropriate for an FBI Director. They are bizarre for just a normally weird person, but for an abnormally weird person to be the Director of the FBI, things are going to go bad. Be warned.
He is also a completely sycophantic suck-up when it comes to Donald Trump. He wrote children's books in which King Donald rules, and his loyal little functionary Kash brings justice to him by pursuing the slugs of the FBI. Really?
When the FBI is asked to investigate corruption in Trump world, do you think Kash Patel will rise to the occasion or do you think he will participate in a coverup? All you have to do is look at his own conduct and his own history.
This is not Democrats saying this. What we are doing is relating what he has said and what he has done. This is Kash Patel on Kash Patel.
He spread the really abhorrent lie that Federal law enforcement was behind January 6. On one of the many podcasts and interview shows where he spewed so much disinformation and partisan vitriol, he was asked: ``It looks like you have a preponderance of evidence suggesting there may have been federal law enforcement involved in making [January 6] happen.''
Patel's response: ``I'll get you to beyond a reasonable doubt.''
``[B]eyond a reasonable doubt.'' He believed and said Federal law enforcement Agencies were behind January 6. We know that is preposterous. We know that is false. We know that investigations have shown that none of that is even remotely true. That is completely false information. Yet here he is spouting it, and that is what he is going to look like as FBI Director too.
The FBI is going to have to appear before judges and convince judges of the probity of the Agency, of the legitimacy of the Agency, of the propriety of the investigation and that the Department has done a fair job of marshaling the evidence.
Here is what he says about judges: We have to start impeaching judges if they have ruled against Donald Trump.
They were a political terrorist, in his view. In any case that Donald Trump has been charged in, almost every judge is handling this thing as if they were not a judge but a political terrorist. And, of course, he meant the Trump judge down in Florida as the only one excepted. When you start talking about judges that way, you can't then expect judges not to pay attention when you come before them in trying to do the work of the FBI.
Then there is the question of what his former colleagues have said about him. These are things that he has said himself. What have his former colleagues said about him, every single one a Trump appointee?
John Bolton, National Security Advisor: I didn't think he was qualified. I was forced to hire him.
Political pressure jammed him into the job, and Bolton said: I didn't want any part of this guy. I was forced to hire him.
With Attorney General Bill Barr, they tried to force him on Bill Barr as Deputy Director of the FBI, and he said that Patel had virtually no experience that would qualify him to lead the FBI. He said: ``Over my dead body'' does he get that job.
These are the job recommendations of his own colleagues that show his unfitness.
Over at the CIA, they tried to stuff him in someplace, and the Director of the CIA, Gina Haspel--I am no friend of Gina Haspel, but here is what she said about him: If he came over, she would resign before allowing Patel to assume a position as her Deputy.
This is a guy who has a record of engagement with Trump appointees that shows that he is not qualified, not capable, and somebody over whom they would resign before they would let work for them. And now we are supposed to let him work for the American people? It is ridiculous.
He testified once in State court on a Trump-related case, and his testimony was, to put it mildly, not convincing.
Here is what the judge said:
OK. People come into court. They lie, and the court doesn't believe their nonsense. Statements like this happen all the time in court. But here is where they don't happen: They don't happen with Federal law enforcement agents. When I was the U.S. attorney in Rhode Island, if one of my FBI agents had gone over into the U.S. district court in Rhode Island and testified in a criminal case in such a way that one of the U.S. district judges said about that witness that he was not a credible witness and that his testimony was illogical and devoid of evidence in the record, we would be looking into that.
This comes darned close to being what is called Giglio material-- material that the government is forced to disclose to future defendants when it bears on the credibility of a government witness, an agent who is a government witness. People lose their careers over Giglio material.
This, if he were an FBI agent, would have caused a response at headquarters to say: What the hell is going on? How did one of our people get involved in such vagrantly fake testimony that he was called out by the judge in a case like this?
This is the person they want to put in charge of the organization whose probity and whose professionalism and whose integrity are essential to the successful working of the organization? The guy was basically called out as a liar and a fraud in plain court. This guy is a hot mess.
When you have a character like this who lies in court and who runs chain-saw memes about your opponents, about whom every person he tried to work with who was senior in the Trump administration said: Get this bum out of here; I don't want to be anywhere near him--that is a record.
To you all, my Republican friends who are going to vote on this guy, when he gets there and he does what his character tells us he will do, don't think this isn't going to come back to haunt you.
By the way, don't think that his ``Trumpservience'' as FBI Director won't turn on you. Just because he is a vitriolic partisan who despises Democrats doesn't mean that when Trump's ire moves someplace else--to Republican officeholders--he won't be there to deliver the FBI as an enforcer against you. So there is a lot to be concerned about.
I will close with this: Never before in the history of American law enforcement has somebody sought to attain a high position in American law enforcement who has pled the Fifth Amendment. Not only did he plead the Fifth Amendment, but he refused to tell the committee what it was all about. You can't plead the Fifth unless you have a reasonable expectation that could put you in jeopardy of a crime. What crime? How in jeopardy? Explain that. You are not just a normal person; you are trying to be the head of the FBI.
In a civil case, pleading the Fifth entitles the judge to instruct the jury to draw an adverse interest about your testimony that the jury can find against you because you took the Fifth.
Why have we not had a straight answer yet from our Republican colleagues about why the guy who wants to be the head of the FBI pled the Fifth? It is an unprecedented, terrible situation.
With that, I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Connecticut.
Mr. President, I want to begin where my wonderful friend and colleague Senator Whitehouse of Rhode Island ended in opposing the nomination of Kash Patel to be Director of the FBI.
I served as a U.S. attorney as well, and I know firsthand what an investigation and a prosecution can do to an individual's life even without a conviction. I used to tell my staff that the most important thing we decide to do is to start an investigation or bring charges because that person will be under a magnifying glass, having to defend himself even if no charges are brought and to defend himself even if there is no conviction, and the charges themselves can do irreparable harm to a person's reputation, his finances, his family, his life.
We entrust these positions, investigative and prosecutorial, to people who deserve the credibility and reliance that we give them. So the position of Director of the FBI or Attorney General of the United States or prosecutors and investigators who work for them are not ordinary positions. Even potentially in certain situations, they are more powerful than a member of the U.S. Cabinet in the impact they can have on individual lives.
For the ordinary nominee, any of the defects in character or experience or performance in past jobs would have been disqualifying. We live in a time that is not ordinary, and this nominee is not normal. I have never seen any nominee to a position of significant responsibility that has as many disqualifying factors in his or her background, but I think that one comment about him that strikes me whenever I read it is the full quote from former National Security Advisor John Bolton.
Part of that quote has been cited by previous speakers. I want to read the whole quote:
Now, very few people remember Secret Police Chief Beria and the terror he caused in carrying out Joseph Stalin's edicts to destroy people's lives, to execute them, to eliminate their families but remember the mantra of Beria and Stalin: ``Show me the man, and I'll show you the crime''--make up the crime to fit the man, and we will eliminate him.
We are talking here about a nominee who has an enemies list. He calls it something different. He calls it ``Government Gangsters,'' and he is on a manhunt for them. ``Manhunt'' is his word. He can use different words, but the point here is he is on a mission to use the powers of this office, in Donald Trump's name, for political retribution against his enemies, against Trump's enemies, against MAGA's opponents. To use these institutions for political retribution is the height of irresponsibility. Even to hint at it ought to be disqualifying, and he has made it explicit in his past writings and his statements and speeches not just a couple of times. It is a theme that runs through his public comments; that eliminating enemies through the use of prosecution is not only acceptable but it is desirable.
The FBI is a very special Agency, with 38,000 civil servants, including 13,000 special agents who go after international and domestic terrorism, cybercriminal syndicates, foreign espionage, organized criminal enterprises, including drug cartels, child sexual exploitation, and human trafficking, and many other crimes that affect our lives and the lives of everyday Americans across the country.
All different backgrounds, races, and religions can be victims of crime that the FBI investigates. And the FBI agents put their lives on the line because pursuing these crimes often puts them at risk from bad guys who may not even know that they are shooting at an FBI agent, but it is somebody pursuing them; they may not know that an FBI agent is operating undercover, and they may be killing them. And so the FBI's work is a dangerous business, but it is for our good and our safety.
The American people deserve an FBI leader who is worthy of them. The American people deserve a Director of the FBI who will keep them safe and who will make that safety a priority.
But in recent weeks, the Trump administration has systematically weaponized and politicized both the FBI and the Department of Justice. On her very first day of office, Attorney General Bondi created a Weaponization Working Group--let me repeat that: Weaponization Working Group--and specifically named targets to be investigated: Letitia James, Alvin Bragg, Jack Smith. All of them have led legitimate prosecutions and lawsuits against President Trump.
There have been reports that prosecutors and FBI agents have been reassigned from drug trafficking to do immigration enforcement, from terrorism task forces to immigration enforcement. And the administration has issued allegedly unethical or illegal audits, causing many top prosecutors to bravely resign rather than betray their oaths of office. We are talking about men and women who love their jobs in the Department of Justice and do them well, and they have sacrificed those jobs because they were ordered to take action that was unethical or illegal, in their view.
We need--now more than ever--an FBI Director who is trustworthy and devoted to the ideals and values of the Department of Justice and the Constitution above all. Anyone taking one of those jobs raises their right hand and swears an oath to the Constitution--not to the President, not to the Attorney General, not to any other official; it is to the Constitution.
Kash Patel is not that person, not the person to have that immense responsibility, most especially at this moment. He lacks the judgment; he lacks the integrity; he lacks the character and competence to be FBI Director. Kash Patel's contempt for those agents who put their lives on the line has been clear. He has called them--the FBI--``one of the most cunning and powerful arms of the Deep State.''
And there are now highly credible whistleblower reports that he may have directed the purging of senior leaders at the FBI as well as potentially a mass firing of career FBI officials--those FBI officials who served professionally, with distinction, who put their lives on the line, purged as a result of Kash Patel involving himself, in fact, in those decisions even as, under oath, in response to my questions, he said:
Well, we stood in front of the FBI headquarters this morning. In that very building, there are individuals who will be fired because they took assignments they didn't choose; they were assigned to criminal investigations that happened to involve Donald Trump--political retribution at its very height. And if he directed the purging of those FBI agents, contrary to the assurances he made to our committee at his nomination hearing, Kash Patel was certainly less than truthful with us.
I have not been without criticism of the FBI. None of us have been. No Agency is perfect. But I am also betting that members of the FBI would say there is room for improvement in this Agency.
Kash Patel would slash and trash the FBI, not improve it. He would engage in political retribution, not constructive reform. He would weaponize the FBI with that enemies list. He may not say it is an enemies list. He may call them government gangsters, but that manhunt would involve political retribution.
And he has conspiracy theories. He has trafficked in them. He said he agrees with a lot of what QAnon says. He engages in election denialism, refusing to say that President Biden won the 2020 election. He has even suggested that the FBI planned the January 6 attack on the Capitol. And he has glorified those rioters by calling them ``political prisoners'' and, in fact, aiding them in their defense--even the rioters who attacked and assaulted police officers and did them grave injury and in some instances contributed to their death.
He has joined them in song, producing the J6 Choir's recording, and he has refused to be honest when it really matters, pleading the Fifth Amendment in the case about Donald Trump's handling of classified documents and then denying us--or at least refusing to
The litany of questionable comments and actions by this nominee shows he lacks the character and competence for this job. I have talked about roughly half a dozen various different facts in his background, statements, comments, actions that would be individually disqualifying. All together, they paint a picture of someone who has no proper role anywhere near a law enforcement agency, let alone Director of the FBI.
I am appalled that my Republican colleagues voted for him in committee unanimously on their side. I am appalled that so few may vote against him on the floor today. But I am absolutely sure of this one thing: This vote will haunt anyone who votes for him. They will rue the day they did it.
To my Republican colleagues, think about it. Think about what you will tell your constituents--more important, your family, and maybe your grandchildren--about why you picked and voted for this person who will so completely and utterly disgrace this office and do such great damage to our Nation's justice system.
Mr. President, I oppose Kash Patel. I believe he is the dangerously wrong choice to serve as Director of the FBI.
We all have great admiration for the FBI. The men and women there serve our Nation, do hard work every day. For decades, they have served as the nonpolitical Agency that protects us and defends the rule of law.
I believe that Mr. Patel is on a mission to wreck the FBI. It is his own words. He wants to turn the FBI building into a monument or museum to the deep state. You know, I believe that this country and Congress is in the midst of a slow-moving but rapidly accelerating constitutional crisis. This is real, and we can ignore it or see it.
It began most visibly, of course, on January 6, 2021, when two norms of this Republic--the peaceful transfer of power and the renunciation of violence to affect the outcome of the vote count and certification-- were breached, and where many Members of the House and Senate also voted against certifying the election of the person chosen by the people in their own States.
The President continues to say that the election was stolen, and he has coached his nominees to embrace the big lie. The first month of the Trump administration has shown the contempt for the Constitution and the acceptance of lawlessness that is dangerous to the future of our Republic.
President Trump's election denialism was an early sign of his disregard for the norms and requirements of the Constitution. Now empowered in a second term by a Congress and a judiciary which refuse to assert their independence, Mr. Trump has enacted Executive order after Executive order to dismantle our institutions. He doesn't have the authority to do what he is doing: the Federal funding freeze, clearly an unconstitutional invasion of the article I power of the purse; shutting down Agencies created by Congress without authority; revoking birthright citizenship, a constitutional provision that he asserts that he can do by Executive order; removing leaders of independent Agencies created by Congress, clearly unlawful; firing inspectors general in violation of notice requirements created by Congress, unlawful; firing government employees who have civil service protections, clearly unlawful; and pushing really a quid pro quo order at the Department of Justice to drop charges against a corrupt mayor in New York so he will accede to whatever the wishes are of the Trump administration regarding local enforcement. That is only a short list.
We have reached a point where a Federal judge has found that the White House defied his order to release billions of dollars in Federal grants, marking the first time that a judge has expressed and declared that the Trump administration is disobeying a judicial mandate. That is troubling. The country is headed into a situation where in addition to acting without authority, the President and his enablers are--he will defy rulings from the third branch of our government.
Vice President Vance has made it very clear what his point of view is on judges: Judges aren't allowed to control the executive's ``legitimate powers,'' and if the courts don't like it, let them enforce it.
Of course, under our Constitution, since Marbury v. Madison, the court is--the court is the final arbiter of what is legitimate or what is not, and the executive branch must enforce the laws as interpreted by the coequal branch of government.
It is my view that this administration is showing maximum contempt for core constitutional values, including, most importantly, the separation of powers. This is not about what the President's agenda is. This is about his disregard about the limits that apply to each branch of government.
We have a dilemma. There are many in Congress that are fully in support of President Trump's policies. That is his right to pursue them, any Member's right to support them, but it has to be that we accept our unique responsibility, each of the 100 U.S. Senators, that we have to guarantee that in pursuit of those policies, it is done within constitutional boundaries.
That is the glue that has held this country together through thick and thin for nearly 250 years. You know, this is not just talk about civic aspiration. It is a recognition that the separation of powers, that the system of checks and balances--we are custodians of that, each of us here--that the concept of the Executive's ambition should be matched with the ambition of the legislature. That is what has held us together through the turmoil of our own history.
We have fierce debates about important public policy matters, but what allows us to resolve those, despite intense disagreements, is staying within the guardrails of the Constitution. That process is being threatened directly and aggressively. The President's attack on our Constitution on January 6 has continued to this day.
We have witnessed the renunciation of the decision the American people made in the 2020 election by President Trump's nominees. Many of them who came before us, including Mr. Patel, were unable to simply say who won the 2020 election. They continued the ``Stop the Steal'' narrative even 4 years later, and now we have President Trump in his first month in office acting in ways that continue to challenge the constitutional order.
I am voting against Mr. Patel, primarily but not exclusively, because he is clearly an instrument in that effort to continue eroding the precepts of the Constitution on separation of powers. I urge all my fellow Senators, Republican and Democrat, to embrace the responsibility we have to assert our responsibility and authority as a coequal branch.
This is a difficult time, particularly for many of my esteemed colleagues on the Republican side. You may support, as I mentioned, the policies of the President, but we have got to take a look at how he is going about trying to implement them. That really matters.
We are all custodians of the constitutional order. I am regarding what President Trump has been doing in his first month of office as an illegal rampage. It is a rampage of illegality. He is showing a contempt for Congress and a contempt for the U.S. judiciary.
Mr. Patel has signed on to that agenda. He isn't just someone who will be forced to participate in the President's campaign of retribution. He is an active participant. He has got his enemies list.
We know this because his own words said:
No basis for that, other than to set up the attack on the good men and women of the FBI.
Mr. Patel is the one who created a list of deep state individuals. This is like Russia kind of stuff, half of whom are Republicans in the so-called deep state. Then he called them ``nothing more than a cabal of government gangsters and their allies.''
This is the Department he is going to be leading, really. He is the one who said ``thank you to President Trump for helping put so many government gangsters in their place.''
Mr. Patel is not the person to lead the FBI. My hope is that all of us should consider what Mr. Patel will do. He is going to use the power of the FBI to go after all those in government, those in the media, and those across the country that he doesn't agree with. He cannot serve as the next Director of the FBI.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there a sufficient second?
There appears to be a sufficient second.
The clerk will call the roll.
The bill clerk called the roll.
The result was announced--yeas 51, nays 49, as follows:
The nomination was confirmed.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under the previous order, the motion to reconsider is considered made and laid upon the table, and the President will be immediately notified of the Senate's action.
Mr. President, my colleagues will soon be starting what is commonly called a vote-arama. If you have never been in one, it is OK. But know it is a chance to have a spirited discussion and debate about policy and about the budget resolution.
So what has happened here is that the Budget Committee reported out S. Con. Res. 7. That will allow, through the reconciliation process, the spending of money and the reduction of spending based on different committees.
This resolution allows for $175 billion of border and immigration policy enhancements, but it doesn't spend a penny. It allows the Judiciary Committee and the Homeland Security Committee to come up with an up-to $175 billion plan to secure our border and do immigration reform.
And what will happen is that those two committees will work with the Trump administration to meet their priorities. There is nothing in this resolution directing one dime of spending, and no spending bill can be implemented without Presidential signature. So I want to make sure that is clear.
There is $150 billion in increased defense spending. Why? Because we have a lot of threats.
Since the withdrawal of Afghanistan, radical Islam is on the rise. We have got a hot war with Russia and Ukraine. Israel is facing enemies on seven sides. We have provided weapons to allies in Ukraine and Israel. We have run out of 155 howitzer rounds. We have got to reinforce our industrial base. We need more money into our military yesterday to make sure that we can deter a war, and, if we get into a war, we win it.
So the $150 billion will be allocated by the Armed Services Committee. We don't direct how the $150 billion is spent. We just allow the Armed Services Committee to spend that much, if they choose. They decide what to spend it on.
So this idea that there is somehow money in this resolution for Ukraine or any other specific purpose is not true. All we do is create a number for the committees to mark up to, and it is up to the committee as to what is in the $150 billion package.
And to all the colleagues here, you eventually get to vote on that work product, and, if you don't like it, you can vote no. And, eventually, that work product will have to be signed by the President. So that is the way the process works.
What we are doing today is jump-starting a process that will allow the Republican Party to meet President Trump's immigration agenda through the reconciliation process. And the Democrats chose this very process to pass ObamaCare and the Inflation Reduction Act.
We are going to use it to secure our border. We are not going to grow the government just for the sense of growing the government. We are not going to create a Green New Deal. We are going to create border security transformational in nature.
Ladies and gentlemen, we are about to embark on a plan to jump-start the most transformational border security bill in the history of the United States because we need it yesterday. We have had 11 million people come to this country illegally. Fentanyl kills 3,000 Americans every 2 weeks. It comes across that southern border.
We are running out of detention space to hold people. Tom Homan, the border czar, came to the Republican Senate last week or 2 weeks ago and said that ICE is out of money. This resolution jump-starts the process to get Tom Homan the money he needs to fulfill the promises we made, to build more detention beds so you don't have to let people go. Laken Riley's murderer was in detention and released because of lack of bed space and wound up killing the young lady. That should never happen again. When you are detained, we should hold you and process you according to law, not release you. We need more detention beds.
We need to finish the wall. This $175 billion will be allocated by the committees in question, and it will allow President Trump to finish the wall, secure the border, and deport criminals.
ICE is out of money.
If you think it is a good idea to go after the criminal gangs that have come here over the years illegally, then you are right.
To my Democratic colleagues, you should be working with us, not against us. Everybody should want to clean up the mess of the last 4 years. Everybody should want to go after criminal gangs. Everybody should want to secure the border because it is a national security nightmare. And nobody should want the dilemma of a nation having to let somebody go who could potentially be dangerous because you have no place to put them.
This $175 billion will allow for the most transformational border security bill in the history of the country at a time of great need.
The $150 billion will be allocated by the Armed Services Committee. They will decide what to spend it on. There is a lot of modernization we need of our nuclear triad fleet. We need more weapons. Our stockpile is low. There are a bunch of things we can spend $150 billion, but we will let the Armed Services Committee decide those priorities.
When it comes to border security--the $175 billion plan--the committees of jurisdiction will allocate that money, not this resolution. But without this resolution, we can't move forward.
Why is this resolution important? Without this bill passing, S. Con. Res. 7, there is no hope getting money for the border the way it needs to be done. Without this resolution passing tonight or early tomorrow, we are not
We don't have a lack-of-spending problem in our country; we have spent way too much on things that don't matter enough. Part of this process will be committees finding offsets, reducing spending.
So we are telling the Armed Services Committee: Spend $150 billion the way you see fit. We are telling two committees to spend $175 billion to secure our border. We are telling seven other committees: Find savings inside your committee to offset the spending we are creating in this bill.
I think they can do that. I think what DOGE is doing is good. This is a form of that.
Every committee that has been instructed to save at least $1 billion will be able finally to go into the committee itself, see what they spend on, and reduce spending because we are directing them to.
My hope is that the $342 billion we are going to spend to secure our border, help the military, and enhance the Coast Guard will be offset with $342 billion of cuts in other parts of the government. We can do it, but this resolution has to pass or we won't do it.
I am highly confident that the Republican chairmen of the committees in question will deliver. I am highly confident that we can find savings in the government to offset the spending we are creating.
The Democratic Party used this process for their Green New Deal. They used this process for ObamaCare. We are using this process to help our military, who needs help, to secure a border that has been broken, and to enhance the Coast Guard. That is the difference. We are doing things that need to be done to make us safe.
Mr. President, 3,000 Americans die every 2 weeks because fentanyl comes across the border. We are going to fix that.
Since President Trump has been in office, border crossings have gone down by 90 percent. We want to reinforce this success. We want to finish that wall. We want to make sure we never release another person in this country because we don't have a bed. We are going to make sure the criminal gangs keep leaving, not staying because ICE doesn't have enough money.
Why are we doing this? Because Tom Homan and Mr. Vought, the head of OMB, told us 2 weeks ago that we are out of money to finish the job President Trump started.
To my House colleagues: I prefer one big beautiful bill that makes the tax cuts permanent, that does the things we need to do on the border and with our military and cuts spending. I wish you all the best. I prefer what you are doing to what we are doing, but we have to have a plan B if you can't get it done soon.
What is the Senate doing? We have decided to front-end load security. We want to cut taxes. We want to make the tax cuts permanent. We are going to work with our House colleagues to do that. They expire at the end of the year, but we have time to do that.
It is the view of the Republican Senate that when it comes to border security, we need not fail. We should have the money now to keep the momentum going. When it comes to the Republican Senate, we believe the military needs money now because the world is on fire.
To my House colleagues: We will all get there together. If you can pass the one big beautiful bill that makes the tax cuts permanent--not 4, 5 years--then we will all cheer over here. Nothing would please me more than Speaker Johnson being able to put together the bill that President Trump wants. I want that to happen, but I cannot sit on the sidelines and not have a plan B.
This Nation is under threat. The illegal immigrants who have come here by the millions need to be sent back by the millions. The border needs to be secured. The wall needs to be finished. We need more detention space. We need to upgrade our military capability now.
The reason we are doing it now is because we were told ICE is out of money now.
I am hoping the House can deliver, but I am very confident that in the Senate, early in the morning, Republicans--not one Democrat vote-- will set in motion a process that will transform our border security to the most modern, aggressive border security plan in the history of the country, north and south; that it will set in motion $175 billion of new spending to secure the border in a way that has never been achieved in the past.
If this resolution fails, God help us all. If this resolution passes, help is on the way.
If you believe that America needs to be serious about securing our border, this bill gets the job done. If you believe the military needs to be stronger, not weaker, at a time of threat, this bill gets it done. If you believe the Coast Guard needs more capability to deal with drugs and national security threats, this bill delivers. This is a security bill.
This is a bill that will combat fentanyl killing Americans. There are more Americans dying every 2 weeks from fentanyl than on 9/11. Hundreds of thousands of young Americans--young and old but mostly young--have died from fentanyl poisoning coming across that southern border. We are going to go after those cartels. I am confident that President Trump is the new sheriff in town that we need. But without resources, it won't work.
Tom Homan came to us and begged us for money to continue the plan he has enacted to get gangs out of this country, to secure that border, and to add more detention space.
Tom, we heard you. We are going to meet your needs.
I am excited about this debate. I am excited about Republican-led chairmen finding ways to reduce spending to pay for this.
This is a big deal, folks. The Republican Party is going to go all in on border security. We are going to upgrade our defense capability, and we are going to pay for it.
Has anybody at home ever had to pick between two things? You couldn't do everything. You couldn't have it all. You had to spend because your child got sick or hurt, and you had to cut somewhere else because there wasn't enough money to do both. We are going to set priorities. If you have a sick child or something bad in your family happens, that goes first. That means you have to pick somewhere else--except in Washington.
That model is over. We are going to start a new way of doing business. We are going to spend on things that need to be done and should be done by the Federal Government to keep us safe, and we are going to offset it by reducing spending in areas that are not as important.
I am excited about this process. I urge my colleagues to come down on both sides of the aisle and participate in this debate. This is what I was elected to do, I think--make America safe and prosperous and do it in a fiscally responsible way. The idea that we are going to actually offset spending is a great day. We are going to deliver.
This is going to go into the night. Our Democratic colleagues are going to have a chance to offer a lot of amendments to our approach. They will want this and they will want that. What breaks my heart is they don't see the value what we are trying to do.
Every American should want more money going into DHS to secure our border. Every American should want more capability in the hands of the military at a time of great threat. But we can't get there. We can't reach common ground on those issues. So we are going to use the process they used. They used the process to create ObamaCare, the Green New Deal, and the Inflation Reduction Act. We are going to use that very same process to make the cartel's life miserable, to go after criminal gangs, to finish the wall, upgrade the capability of the Coast Guard, and make our military the most lethal it has been since Ronald Reagan, and we are going to pay for it all.
In a bit, I will read a script that starts the process.
To the Senator from Ohio, the Presiding Officer, this is why you came. This is what you promised to do. I was on the campaign with you, and you looked your voters in the eye and said: We are going to do things different. We are going to secure our border, we are stop the fentanyl from poisoning your kids, and we are going to be serious about fiscal responsibility. We are going to pay for all of this.
Mr. President, you have a chance here to do what you promised you would do.
All of us on this side of the aisle--people are counting on us. They are counting on this Republican majority to deal with the mess that has been created for the last 4 years. They are counting on this Republican majority to give the President the money he needs to do the job that he promised to do. And we are going to deliver. We are going to do it, and we are going to do it tonight. If it is 5 o'clock in the morning--I don't care how long it takes--we are going to deliver, and we are going to pay for everything we do.
In a little bit, in a small period of time, around 5 o'clock, we are going to start this process. This is a big deal, folks. This is not just business as usual in Washington; this is a different way of doing business.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Washington.
Mr. President, we need to be focused on solving problems. I think most of us here get that. No matter who the President is, our constituents expect us to work for them. They expect us to fight for them, and they expect us to do the hard work of passing laws to make their lives better.
People don't send us here to make their lives worse, but that is exactly what Trump and Musk are doing. They are looking at our most pressing problems and making them worse. This budget proposal will only add fuel to that fire.
Right now, even as egg prices hit an alltime high, Trump and Musk have done nothing to lower prices. They have done nothing to address the housing crisis or help families get quality, affordable childcare or address other issues I hear about from folks all the time. Instead, they are slashing programs that help our families make ends meet. They are gutting an Agency that saves working people money and protects them from scams and starting trade wars that will impose what is effectively a Trump sales tax entirely on the backs of American workers.
As China works to strengthen its global leadership, Trump and Musk have ceded the ground almost entirely, illegally cutting off investments we make to continue our country's leadership and help our allies.
At the most precarious moment for the Middle East in decades, Trump is casually proposing to ethnically cleanse Gaza so that Trump and his family can build waterfront property there.
When it comes to helping our allies in Ukraine secure a just peace, Trump is giving away countless concessions to Putin--out of the gate-- calling our ally a ``dictator'' and meeting with Russia without inviting Ukraine.
When it comes to the bird flu, Trump and Musk are firing the very workers who are responsible for tracking the disease and keeping it from spreading further; and now, suddenly, they are desperately trying to hire them back.
As Texas deals with a serious measles outbreak, Trump's Secretary can't even confirm the obvious and tell parents the vaccine doesn't cause autism, which, to be clear, it does not.
And almost unbelievably--just weeks after the deadliest commercial plane crash in the United States in over two decades--Trump and Musk are firing FAA workers who make sure flying is safe. Who does that help?
Now Trump is letting Musk run wild by inappropriately accessing and rifling through sensitive SSA and Treasury files, with the IRS being next--your data. How does that make sense?
But while President Trump is busy making problems worse and trampling our laws and quoting dictators, what are we doing here in the Senate? Are we holding President Trump accountable? Are we holding his ``co- President,'' Elon Musk--the richest man in the world who has billions of dollars in conflicts of interest--accountable? Are we putting a stop to the catastrophic cuts and reckless firings that are hurting people and our communities and setting our country back decades?
It seems to me that would be a good use of time. After all, I have even heard some Republicans admit that cutting things like medical research and firing people like our VA workers are bad ideas. So you would think, maybe, we could work together from that common ground, but, instead, Republicans are throwing all their effort behind a partisan plan to slash and burn programs that help our families and raise costs for everyday Americans and shovel billions of dollars to help people who already have billions of dollars.
Meanwhile, I would like to recommend to my colleagues that we are less than a month away from a deadline to pass bills to fund our government, and as we approach that deadline, the entire world is watching as President Trump and Elon Musk shut the government down bit by bit--whatever parts Elon doesn't like. Trump and Musk are already showing thousands of our essential workers the door despite the fact they have no clue what those workers do or why their jobs matter. They are just turning off the lights and hoping for the best.
I am hearing so much alarm on this from back home--from fired workers and from the people who depend on them. Trump and his ``co-President'' are shuttering entire Agencies. They are locking workers out of their devices and out of their buildings and demanding the work of the American people come to a screeching halt--again, for no good reason.
Let me really drive home just how damaging and extreme these firings are because we are not talking about some routine changing of the guard or some thoughtful or strategic plan to make government more efficient. Trump and Musk are just taking a wrecking ball to the U.S. Government. They don't care what they smash up. They don't care whom they hurt, and they don't seem to have any idea just how painful this is for American families. We are talking about tens of thousands of people--and counting--being pushed out the door without any plan and without any justification beyond Trump and Elon just wanting to slash and cut with reckless abandon.
This has nothing to do with making government more efficient; it is about breaking it beyond repair. Fundamentally, this is not about cutting waste or curbing fraud. Instead, this is about putting the Federal workforce into trauma. That is how OMB Director Russell Vought callously put it. So they are mass firing hard-working women and men-- many of them veterans--whose only mistake was serving our country, serving our communities, and believing they wouldn't get stabbed in the back by a wannabe dictator and the richest man in the world.
In setting aside the fact that many were illegally fired and without real cause, it is not just the workers who are suffering because of this. These cuts undermine essential services for the American people right down to some of the most basic functions of government.
Trump and Musk are firing people who help Americans find quality, affordable health insurance; people who help small businesses get a loan; people who help communities and families get back on their feet after a disaster; and people who help Americans get their tax refunds.
They are firing people who help our economy stay competitive--from firings that undermine energy projects and thousands of good new jobs to firings that undermine innovation and technology, to firings that are hurting our farmers and undermining agricultural research.
They are laying off national park rangers, which will mean longer wait times, dirtier bathrooms, delayed emergency responses, and closed parks. They fired Forest Service workers who are crucial to preventing wildfires.
Again, I have to emphasize they are firing FAA workers, for crying out loud, including personnel who work on radar and landing and other critical infrastructure that help our aircraft navigate safely. They are firing these people and pretending it is no big deal, all just weeks after, by the way, the deadliest crash our Nation has seen in decades. Trump and Elon might not fly commercial, but the rest of us do.
In the Pacific Northwest, the Bonneville Power Administration is losing hundreds of highly skilled workers, and that includes everyone from electricians, engineers, dispatchers, line workers, cybersecurity experts, and many more. These are literally the people who keep the lights on, and now they are being fired on a whim because Trump and Elon Musk do not have a clue about what they do and why it is important. And do you know what? They don't care. They don't even seem to understand, actually, that these positions are funded by ratepayers--by all of us who live in the Northwest. They are not from Federal funding.
Trump and Musk have even fired over 1,000 VA workers, including people who are doing lifesaving research for our veterans: research to prevent veteran suicide; to build life-changing prosthetics; and to address opioid addiction and more. These layoffs will mean longer wait times for veterans to see their healthcare providers. It could mean ongoing clinical trials coming to a sudden stop. It means delays in getting your disability claim approved because Trump and Musk went ahead and fired clinicians and claims raters even while, today, the current backlog of disability claims is over 250,000. That is not just a betrayal of these public workers; it is a betrayal of our women and men who have served us in uniform. It is also worth noting that many of the workers being fired are veterans themselves. Trump is firing veterans.
And let's not forget the thousands of NIH researchers who are having their research thrown into jeopardy and the patients who are watching President Trump carelessly toss their best hope for a cure into the shredder--or CMS experts. They are working on improving maternal health outcomes so fewer pregnant women die in this country.
Medical research layoffs aren't the only ones putting American lives at risk because Trump and Musk are firing public health workers who respond to disease outbreaks: cybersecurity experts who protect our critical infrastructure, sensitive systems, and our data; scientists who make sure our water and our air are clean and that we are ready for extreme weather; workers who help our communities prepare for, respond to, and recover from disasters, not to mention members of law enforcement who help stop violent criminals, and, of course, our nuclear engineers.
Seriously, people who manage our nuclear weapons stockpile are being fired by the hundreds with no real strategy, and we know there is no strategy because then Trump and Musk frantically turned around and rehired many of them. We also know they haven't learned their lesson because they just did the exact same thing to our workers who are responding to bird flu--reckless layoffs followed by: Wait. No. Come back.
That is not a plan. That is not a plan. To callously fire people who help us stay ahead of deadly diseases and to maintain a safe, secure, and reliable nuclear weapons stockpile--that is the height of dangerous incompetence.
Nuclear cleanup work has been hit as well. I have been fighting to get more resources for the Hanford cleanup in Washington State for years. It is already understaffed, and now Trump is actively making things worse. I have heard directly--directly--from workers at Hanford who have been laid off even after some were recognized just this past year for their outstanding work.
And, by the way, that underscores another reality of these firings: They have absolutely nothing to do with merit. In fact, they are targeting new employees, including people who were recently promoted. So now these workers are getting fired from their newly earned jobs-- literally pushing out some of our best performers and our most committed workers.
One more thing. They are even illegally firing the government watchdogs who provide accountability and prevent fraud. If Trump and Musk were really committed to tackling waste, fraud, and abuse, would they fire the very people serving in nonpartisan roles and whose very jobs are to uncover and reduce waste, fraud, and abuse? If they were really interested in transparency, would they have torn down websites where the public can find information about Agencies' spending and policy?
The list of pointless, actively dangerous firings goes on and on. It grows by the day as does the followup alarm being caused by it. My phones have been ringing off the hook, and I know I am not the only one. Again, these sweeping layoffs do not address fraud or waste. They are totally arbitrary, pushing out high performers and the promising next generation of our Federal workforce, which won't be easily replaced, not to mention the hiring freeze prevents them from even trying.
And here is the thing that is so important to remember: These are people who have families. They work hard. They love their country. They are not being sent packing because they have done anything wrong or because their work is not important. They are being pushed out simply because Trump and Musk are trying to break the government, trying to make it not work for the people who need it. It is wrong, and if this doesn't stop now, it will be catastrophic.
The scale and scope of Trump and Elon's purge will set our country back decades. It is not like you can fire anyone and say: Oh, wait--my bad--and hire them back with the snap of a finger. If you are a VA medical researcher, working for less than you could make in the private sector, and you are fired by a billionaire who decides your research on cancer and burn pit exposure isn't worth the investment, would you want to come back, especially with the chaos and sheer incompetence of this administration?
The Federal Government is not Twitter. You can't just fire everyone and break things and hope for the best. People's lives are at stake. Elon Musk has no clue what nuclear safety engineers do at Hanford. He doesn't care that the Social Security Administration is already understaffed, and pushing more of those Federal workers out the door will make life harder for our seniors.
This effort to push out and arbitrarily fire Federal workers is going to break something worse than it already has, and it is going to break it irreparably. When that happens, the blame will fall squarely on Trump and Musk and the Republicans.
And it is not just people being fired that is a serious problem. There are also still--still today--funds frozen without rhyme or reason or legal authority for Trump to do that. So I am not only worried about the fast-approaching funding deadline in March, I am worried about the de facto government shutdown that is happening right now. As we speak, Trump and Musk are still illegally blocking hundreds of billions of dollars in funding we all secured for the people we represent back home, putting good-paying jobs on the chopping block, creating incredible uncertainty for businesses, stalling funds for our infrastructure and energy projects, and a lot more.
As another week of Trump's illegally funding blockade has come and gone, still, reports are coming in from across my State and across the country of the chaos and cuts this is causing, and yet little to nothing has been done by this administration to restore investments in people in red and blue States that they are counting on.
Republicans here in Congress continue to sit by idly while our communities are robbed of hundreds of billions of dollars in bipartisan spending. Meanwhile, it is our workers, it is our families, it is our businesses that are feeling this consequence. With each day that passes, the uncertain fate of these investments takes a toll of its own: ever-growing anxiety for workers whose jobs are in jeopardy, for farmers who are eyeing the calendar and waiting on resources that they are owed, for business owners worried a ripped-up contract might put them under.
I have heard USDA grants have been cut off to rural businesses and farmers in my home State of Washington, and it is putting those hard- working Americans in dire straits.
A small laundromat ordered new machines, but now Trump is stiffing them on funds they need to make that payment.
A wheat farmer installed solar panels under a Federal program, but Trump is going to leave them holding the bag.
A greenhouse has completed its end of the bargain to install upgrades. Trump has stopped the Federal Government from doing the part it promised.
And there are so many other Federal investments on hold as well: Forest Service funding to reduce wildfire risks and restore ecosystems, EPA funding for clean water infrastructure and cleanup work on our Superfund sites, HUD and Department of Energy investments to bring down folks' energy costs and create new, good-paying jobs, funding for our roads and bridges and transit and flood mapping and fisheries--so many other things.
Medical research has also been completely upended at research institutions across our country, throwing lifesaving research, clinical trials, and patients into uncertainty.
Meanwhile, they have not only illegally blocked our foreign assistance and shuttered USAID programs that
And among the many contracts Trump canceled with his Executive orders was funding for a program that helps students with disabilities transition from high school to work and work to improve adoption of evidence-based literacy practices in Washington State.
These billionaires have no idea what programs they are cutting. Given the chaos of all these efforts--from Trump's sweeping, radical, and illegal Executive orders to Elon Musk jumping from Agency to Agency and doing seemingly whatever he pleases and whatever is good for his business--it is getting hard to even keep track of all the funding that is being illegally blocked. Even stuff they say is not blocked or say has been unblocked is still frozen.
But one thing that is clear: This is hurting our families, hurting our communities, and it needs to stop.
Remember, Musk is the richest man on Earth, with deep business ties to China and a direct line to Putin. Republicans have chosen to stand by and twiddle their thumbs as he unilaterally, clandestinely, and illegally cuts our constituents off from the Federal investments they are owed and badly in need of. We have zero insight or oversight of what conflicts of interest Musk has, as he chokes off government funding left and right and as he hands over our sensitive financial data and systems to patently unqualified individuals with no accountability.
This multibillionaire is operating completely in the dark, hoping his lies are loud enough to drown out any calls for truth or transparency.
You can agree or disagree about Federal spending. Goodness knows, we have a lot of debates on it here. But it is a complete lie to try and say this is all fraud, waste, or conspiracy.
As a longtime appropriator, I can tell you, we debate these bills publicly. We post the details out in the open. We pass them in a bipartisan way. Republicans overwhelmingly supported the individual bills we put together in committee last year--many unanimously.
Spending is not a ``conspiracy'' just because Elon Musk doesn't know how to read USAspending.gov. A program is not waste just because it doesn't help the richest man in the world. It is not fraud just because he doesn't like it. A law is not illegal just because he disagrees with it.
This guy just does not know what he is talking about, and it is, frankly, embarrassing. He doesn't know how to count.
The DOGE website says it is slashing $55 billion, but it only lists $16.6 billion, and half of that is a typo. They took $8 million, with an M, as in ``Musk can't count'' and counted it as $8 billion, with a B, as in ``BS.'' That is not saving money; it is poor reading comprehension.
Speaking of reading comprehension, I don't think Elon fully grasps what the concepts of transparency and accountability mean.
When he tweeted out the names of government employees months ago--and again this month, even--that was accountability. But when reporters name people gaining illegal access to Treasury's payment system, that is a crime?
Elon Musk gets to look at all of our most sensitive data, but no one gets to look at what he is actually doing? That cannot be the standard. It is not ``maximally transparent'' for Elon Musk to decide for himself what he shares publicly about his actions. It is maximally concerning, especially given that there are many obvious conflicts of interest but Elon has not recused himself from a single decision.
How is it not a conflict when the owner of SpaceX is gutting NASA while taxpayer funds to his company keep flowing?
How is it not blatant corruption when the owner of Tesla is freezing grants and loans that benefit his competitors?
How are we supposed to just trust him when he is probing Agencies that have done--or are doing right now--investigations into his businesses?
Trump fired the Ag inspector general who was investigating Elon's company Neuralink and then fired the FDA officials who were reviewing it. He fired the EPA inspector general and Transportation inspector general as they were looking at Tesla. He fired the Labor inspector general, as the Department has several investigations into Musk's companies. And Trump fired the Defense inspector general who was looking at SpaceX and, notably, Musk's connection to Putin.
And it is not just Musk who is concerning. He has brought on an army of walking redflags to pry into our government's most sensitive data.
How are Americans supposed to feel knowing someone who was previously fired for leaking sensitive information from their employer is digging through their most private financial data?
How are Americans supposed to feel knowing someone who engaged with prominent White supremacists and misogynists online is helping to shut down USAID?
How are they supposed to feel knowing someone who tweeted explicitly racist statements, someone who said they were ``racist before it was cool'' was given control over incredibly important Treasury payments?
What sort of vetting, if any, is going on here? Are they trying to pick the least qualified, most concerning people?
Hey, Elon, you were supposed to filter out redflags, not select for them.
The American people deserve transparency. If Elon Musk really has nothing to hide, then he should leave his safe place on X and at Trump rallies and come before us at a congressional hearing to be held accountable to the public.
What they are doing here is not just illegal; it is devastating for working people in every ZIP code in America, red and blue States alike.
Right now, we need to be speaking out with a unified voice to ensure that when Congress passes a bill, the law is followed. And we need to focus on negotiating serious funding bills on a bipartisan basis ahead of the fast-approaching March 14 deadline. That is exactly what I am trying to do right now, and a long-term CR should not be acceptable for anyone here.
As I have reminded my colleagues many times now, there is a world of difference between a short-term CR that gives us additional time for good-faith negotiations on full-year funding bills and a long-term CR that would not only create major shortfalls for critical programs but would also hand vast power over spending decisions to an administration that absolutely cannot and should not be trusted.
Passing a clean, full-year CR would, first of all, create major shortfalls and fail to adjust for new realities on the ground; it could mean that instead of babies getting fed through WIC, moms are getting put on a waitlist for the first time in that program's history, and instead of families getting rental assistance, they get cut off.
A clean, full-year CR means veterans are not able to get the care they need and the benefits they have earned in a timely way, and it means our military falling behind, from forcing cuts across DOD to pausing promotions, station changes, and other really essential functions.
It also means losing opportunities to provide resources for new challenges and to provide a check on Trump policies, including ones it is clear Members on both sides of this aisle have issues with.
And on that note, I want to emphasize--because this is really critical--unlike a short-term CR, a clean, full-year CR means hundreds of specific funding directives from Congress fall away, effectively creating slush funds for this administration to adjust spending priorities and potentially eliminate longstanding programs as they see fit. That is a nonstarter.
With a full-year CR, Congress would be turning over our power of the purse to a President who has already shown he couldn't care less about the separation of powers.
A year-long CR would be a green light for President Trump, Elon Musk, and Russell Vought to redirect funding to their own pet projects and slash and
Maybe they scrap all our oversight of immigration courts or end family reunification or dismantle the guardrails for detaining immigrants--something we are already seeing, by the way, with the use of Guantanamo Bay.
They could cut funding to eliminate HIV, address maternal mortality, or increase vaccination rates. They could turn our constituents' priorities into slush funds. Clean energy investments could become a payday for fossil fuels. Money meant to stop fentanyl and opioids could fuel private prison operations and mass deportations.
Congress must detail its spending priorities and direct President Trump to implement these programs faithfully by passing appropriations bills, just as it does every year. There is truly no telling just how far they would go in bending our Federal budget from what our constituents need to whatever Trump and Musk want.
If you don't think things could get worse, you are wrong. A clean, yearlong CR is, frankly, an unacceptable outcome. We cannot tell our constituents that instead of using our authority to check a President, we give him the keys to the kingdom. We cannot say: Instead of fighting to get you the resources you need, we will let a billionaire have more say in where your tax dollar goes instead.
So we need Republicans to get serious about these bipartisan funding bills. And we have got to know that once those bills become law, Trump will actually follow them. We cannot just reach an agreement, pass a bill, and then stand by while President Trump rips our laws in half.
There is a serious bipartisan path forward for our country, but it is one where Congress works together to avoid a shutdown, stops the de facto shutdown that is already happening, and reasserts its authority to protect the funding our communities need. But, unfortunately, that is a far cry from the path Republicans are going down with this pro- billionaire, anti-middle class budget resolution that is on the floor.
Let's be very clear: Republicans' budget resolution doesn't just accept; it actually doubles down on what Trump and Musk are doing.
And it is not about balancing the budget--we all know that--because they don't plan to reverse one of the biggest drivers of the debt: Republican tax cuts. Despite all of the bogeymen Republicans like to point to as driving the national debt, the reality is that the single biggest driver of our national debt since 2001 has been Republican tax cuts. The Trump and Bush tax cuts have cost our Nation over $10 trillion and counting.
And you will never guess what our colleagues on the other side of the aisle are focused on right now. Nothing to lower the cost of eggs. It is actually more Republican tax cuts.
And, no, they will not be paid for, and, yes, they will blow up the national debt. While Elon Musk hacks and chops his way through the government in the name of meager ``savings'' and Republicans are cheering him on, they are all hoping that we will ignore the elephant they brought into the room, even as this budget is a roadmap for painful cuts to programs families count on each and every day--all so they can give billionaires more tax cuts.
Republicans are going down this partisan path because they know Democrats are not going to join them in throwing Medicaid, nutrition assistance, and veterans benefits into the woodchuck so they can throw more tax cuts at billionaires and the biggest corporations.
Make no mistake, this budget resolution is the DOGE resolution, as it assumes a staggering amount of $1 trillion in unspecified cuts in 2025 alone and $9 trillion over 10 years. Where do we think those kinds of dramatic cuts are going to come from? It is going to come out of SNAP benefits that keep our kids from going hungry. It is going to come out of our public schools and community health centers. It is going to come out of lifesaving medical research.
It will mean costs going up--up--for everyday Americans. It means childcare costs going up when families lose access to Head Start and other quality, affordable options. It means heating and cooling costs going up when families get cut off from LIHEAP. It means rent going up as assistance programs get slashed. It means your healthcare costs go up as community health centers and family planning providers are forced to close their doors. It means grocery costs going up as programs like SNAP and WIC are gutted, not to mention what happens when you cut support for farmers and for ag research.
And make no mistake, if you are cutting that deeply, that painfully, you are going to start cutting things like veterans' disability and education benefits. You are going to start cutting Medicare and Medicaid, which, for the information of all Senators, 30 million children rely on.
There is just no other way to make those numbers work, especially when we know that this is just step one in their plan. And step two is tax breaks for billionaires and massive corporations.
So, first, they are handing Elon Musk a chain saw to cut programs that families rely on, with no accountability. Then they are rewarding him with enormous tax breaks, and that is completely unacceptable. We should not be taking kids out of childcare to give billionaires a tax break. We should not be taking food off the family table to put more fuel in private jets.
I grew up in a family that knew what it was like to fall on hard times. My dad, who was a veteran, got too sick to work. He had multiple sclerosis. My mom kept us afloat with my dad's VA benefits and food stamps and a new job that she got thanks to a Federal workforce program.
It wasn't easy. Mom always said they crawled--crawled--to Social Security and Medicare, but she worked hard, and our government was there for them when those hard times came. I know there are families struggling right now just like my family struggled then. I hear from them every day in the letters we get here in Washington, DC, and in the conversations I have back home in Washington State.
They work hard. They play by the rules. They deserve, at the very least, the same opportunity my parents had when I was growing up. And I am not going to stand by silently while Republicans try to sell that opportunity away to pay for even more tax breaks for billionaires.
I get why that sounds like a good idea to billionaires like Donald Trump. I get why it is a sweet deal for Elon Musk, the richest man in the world. It is great for them because they are not the ones footing the bill. The bill for these tax breaks--the cost of these cuts--is going to be paid by folks like my mom and dad.
Everyday Americans will pay for billionaire tax breaks with their healthcare. They will pay for billionaire tax breaks with abandoned medical research. They will pay for billionaire tax breaks with shuttered family farms and small businesses.
And Republicans can try and spin a fairytale about how this will pay for itself, how this will work out for everyone, and how nothing anyone cares about will be affected. But the reality is going to show through pretty darn quick and pretty darn painfully because spin is not going to put food on the table. It will not pay the rent. It won't fix the roads. It won't lower prices. It won't lower interest rates, and it won't put money in families' dwindling bank accounts.
When it comes to the job we are all sent here to do, helping people and solving problems, families need real solutions, not tax breaks for billionaires and talking points for everyone who loses out.
Mr. President, I urge all of my colleagues: Hit the brakes--and not just on this devastating partisan budget resolution. Hit the brakes on what President Trump and Elon Musk are doing right now. Let's, instead, come together and work on serious bipartisan bills to fund the government. Let's get investments that are sorely needed out to the folks we represent. Let's pass legislation that gives folks a hand instead of this Republican plan that gives billionaires a handout.
Mr. President, things are not as they appear to be, and in Washington, that is not unusual. In fact, that may be the norm--that in Washington, things are often not what they appear to be.
If you follow the news, you have been seeing reports of Elon Musk and DOGE and getting rid of waste and fraud and abuse by the billions, if not trillions, of dollars. And yet, we are meeting here today, though, because Congress, namely the Senate, wants to increase Federal spending.
So on the one hand, you have Elon Musk and DOGE, and the Democrats complaining to high heavens, ``They are cutting too much; they are cutting too much,'' and Senate Republicans are coming forward today to pass a budget to allow them to raise Federal spending. What gives?
Are Republicans for getting rid of waste, fraud, and abuse and reducing the deficit, balancing the budget, as the President says? Or are they really for increasing spending $340 billion?
The budget that we will vote on will allow increased spending in the military by $150 billion; increased spending for the border, $175 billion; $20 billion for the Coast Guard. That adds up to about $340 billion.
Well, if we were fiscally prudent, if we were fiscally conservative, why wouldn't we take the savings from Elon Musk and DOGE and move it over here and help with the border? Why would we be doing a brandnew bill to increase spending by $340 billion?
That is because the Senate is acting as it always has. The Senate hasn't gotten the message. President Trump came to town--a new way of thinking. They are shuttering the Agencies. They are shutting people down. They are buying things like $2 million spent in Guatemala for sex changes, $2 million spent in Brazil for girl-centric climate change, $4.8 million spent in Ukraine for social media influencers.
While you are at it, we spent--not we, but the people who voted for this. I voted against all of this. But the Members of the Senate who voted for this spent several hundred thousand dollars sending designers in Ukraine to the fashion show in Paris.
It goes on and on: thousands of dollars for a trans opera in Colombia, more thousands of dollars for a trans comic book in Peru, hundreds of thousands of dollars spent studying rats to see if lonely rats use more cocaine than well-socialized rats. Guess what. Lonely rats love the cocaine. They spent hundreds of thousands of dollars of your money on this craziness.
Why not take that crazy spending that DOGE and Elon Musk are finding and move it over to secure the border? Instead, fiscal conservatives are faced with a bill they are putting forward to just simply increase the spending.
I am all for moving it around. I am all for saving it from the craziness and pushing it over into something more valuable. There is a procedure for doing this. It is a special procedure. It doesn't require any Democrat vote. It can happen through simple majority, and it has a fancy name. It is called rescission. So all the administration would have to do is bundle together several million dollars of savings--which it appears they are finding--bundle it together in one bill, send it back to us, and by simple majority, without any help from the Democrats, Republicans can cut spending.
Instead, things aren't what they appear to be. You see all this great work being done to cut spending, to cut waste, fraud, and abuse, and then you see the Senate acting--we are going to vote all night long to set up a bill to increase spending by $340 billion.
There is a true philosophical debate within the Republican Party--and really within both parties--about what the biggest threats to our country are. Are the greatest threats to America from within or from without?
I would argue that they are from within. I don't lie awake at night fearing foreign invasion, that invaders are coming to our shores any moment. It doesn't mean we shouldn't be prepared, that we shouldn't defend ourselves. But it does mean that we don't have to have unlimited spending on our military.
Look, many of my family served. Soldiers have to be paid. We should take care of them. But, at the same time, we shouldn't be everywhere around the world, all the time.
We spent close to $300 billion in Ukraine. We have got soldiers all over Africa. We have got soldiers in Syria. We have got soldiers everywhere.
We don't need to be doing that.
If you want to put our military's money and spending in perspective, we spend more than the next nine countries combined. It is not that we are spending too little. We are spending a lot. But if you decide that you want more money for the military, take it from the climate change-- the girl-centric climate change in Brazil. Quit spending your money overseas.
Over the years, we have given Egypt nearly $60 billion. Who runs Egypt? A general, where there are no elections, kind of like Ukraine, where there is a president, but he doesn't have to run for reelection because he has canceled the elections.
Why in the world would we be giving money hand over fist to dictators and people who don't stand for election? In Egypt, we gave it to one family, the Mubarak family. When he was finally ousted from power, he had $20 billion on him.
Well, it actually wasn't on him. A lot of it was in Swiss banks and all over the place, but he was worth 20 billion. That is nothing. Each of his kids was worth another 5 billion. So he basically was able to steal 30 billion of the 60 billion that American taxpayers sent to Egypt.
That is foreign aid. That is the story of your foreign aid. It is that you have been being ripped off decade after decade.
But while Elon Musk and DOGE are doing their job working overtime until late at night, finding us those savings for foreign aid, send them back. We spent 40 billion in foreign aid. You could send 30 billion back and America would be safer and stronger, and you could put the 30 billion toward either the military or to the border--your choice.
There is money like that that can be saved and moved around, but it is going to have to come back. Ultimately, all the talk of the savings is ephemeral. It isn't real until Congress has the courage to vote on it. It has to be certified by a vote.
If Congress doesn't vote, it sort of wishes and washes around in the ether and may or may not wind up being savings. Ultimately, Congress is going to have to do their job.
But what we are doing today to vote on the budget is not doing our job. What we are doing today, which will be a Republican-led effort-- minus me--will be an effort to tee up a bill to increase Federal spending.
I would say, let's take the savings that we are finding, move that over to any accounts, do it through a vote of Congress, do it through a simple majority. It can actually be done even without the budgetary process.
A rescission package can be sent back without even going through the whole budget problem. What we are faced with, though, is come the end of the year--we are halfway through the year, so we are voting on a budget today that is really somewhat of a fiction because the year is already half over. We know what is being spent. We know that in the end, we are going to spend a little over $7 trillion this year. The problem is, we are going to bring in about $5 trillion, and we are going to spend about $7 trillion. We are $2 trillion short.
They are getting ready within weeks to add a couple hundred billion dollars for California. It is appropriate to have sympathy for people in their plight, but it is not good for the country simply to borrow money to send it to anyone. If we are going to help people in need, we should be taking that money from the taxes that come in. We shouldn't be borrowing it from China and sending it to California. No matter how noble the purpose is, we should be spending what comes in. We should not be borrowing a penny.
But come the end of the year, we are going to be over $2 trillion in increased debt for 1 year. What is our total? Our total is going to be over $37 trillion, maybe $38 trillion by the end of the year. Interest? The largest item in our budget is now interest--about $1 trillion in interest every year. One estimate is that over the next 10 years, it will be like $14 trillion in interest.
People voted for a change. They said: We are going to get a change. They like what Donald Trump is doing. They like what DOGE is doing. They like what Elon is doing. Yet here we are. The Republicans are acting like the Democrats. They are going to vote to increase spending by $342 billion. It is all going to be borrowed.
Now, some will say: We are going to cut spending to equalize the money we are going to spend here. But none of that is listed in the budget.
Now, the House has a budget. The House Republicans have passed a different budget, and in their budget, they list $1.5 trillion worth of savings. They have to get to this. They cannot do their special simple majority vote, the reconciliation vote, unless they find $1.5 trillion.
In the Senate bill, there is $4 billion. Now, they will say, ``That is just a floor; we are going to find more than that,'' but all they would promise was the 4. In the House, they realized that is not really believable, that is not really comforting, so the House said: No, we are doing $1.5 trillion.
So as this debate unfolds over the next 10, 12, 15 hours--we will be here for a long time. You know, get your popcorn. Turn your C-SPAN on. But as this unfolds, I will offer an amendment, and my amendment will say, let's alter the budget to not only say we are going to increase spending by $340 billion, my amendment will say we should cut spending to pay for it by $1.5 trillion.
Ideally, we would do this simply by bringing a rescission package of the savings that Elon and DOGE are finding, but it would work this way as well to at least show that we are serious about this. I have seen this happen again and again, and I know how the story is going to turn out. I know that come September, which is the end of our fiscal year, we are about halfway through it. As we get to the end of the fiscal year, Republicans are going to be going: Uh-oh, I have to go home and explain to people that the deficit is $2.2 trillion--one of the worst years ever. I have to explain to people ``Republicans are in charge; we are taking care of it now'' when it looks like the problem is getting worse.
We have to immediately start cutting spending. Every Republican needs to be voting to cut spending. There is a way to do it. It is called a rescission package.
If you continue to borrow, though, if you think ``I am going to be nice to everyone and give everyone money,'' you can do it, but the borrowing is going to crowd out everything, because we have made many, many promises. We have promised people Medicare. We promised people Medicaid. We promised people Social Security. We promised people food stamps. Well, guess what, that equals all of our tax revenue. Those four promises--Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, Social Security--that equals all of our tax revenue. We don't even vote on those programs.
The programs that we vote on--that is the budget, that is military and nonmilitary--are a third of the spending. It is all borrowed now. Essentially, our debt equals our budget. Everything we vote to spend in the budget is borrowed. So things are out of whack. You can't help everyone and be everything to everybody.
A way to look at this is, let's say you make $25,000 a year, and all of your money goes to your rent and your food and taking care of your family. You have nothing left over. You are working poor. You walk by somebody on the side of the street, and they are homeless, and you feel sorry for them. Would you immediately go to a bank and borrow $1,000 and give it to a homeless person? No, you wouldn't, because that would make no sense whatsoever.
That is what we are doing. We look around the world, and we see homeless people. We look around the world, and we see hungry people. So we just simply go to China, the bank, and we borrow money from China and then we send it to Africa. Well, you know what, if you send your own money, it is charity. If you send your own money, it is noble. If you send somebody else's money or you borrow the money and you make the country go further in debt and you put us more in peril, that is not charity. That is what is destroying our country. That is what is eating us up from the inside out. The greatest threat to America is from within, not from without.
What happens when the currency unravels? What happens when the value of the dollar doesn't lose 5 percent in a year but loses 5 percent in a week? That is what happens in the end stages of a currency being destroyed. People say it will never happen to America. Can't happen in America. We are the strongest dollar. We are the reserve currency of the world. Can't happen here.
It can and has happened to great nations. It has happened to great civilizations that have lost their currency, that have destroyed their currency. Does it always unravel gradually enough that you can fix it? No. Sometimes it unravels in the space of weeks.
When the German money lost its value in the early 1920s after the first war, in September, it took like 100 marks to buy a loaf of bread. Two weeks later, mid-September, it was 1,000 marks. At the end of September, it was 1 million. In the middle of October, it was 10 million.
The currency, if you look at the currency and what it would buy in a 2-month period, was completely destroyed in a 2-month period. The pictures from the history books will show people putting the German mark into wheelbarrows and wheeling it up to fires to burn for warmth. It was worth more as fuel than it was to buy things. The workers were demanding that they be paid more than once a day because you had to go out and get your pay at noon and spend it then because it was worth half as much by the end of the day. That is what it looks like when a country destroys its currency.
How do you destroy your currency? How does inflation occur? If you watch television, you see that these people are either dishonest or would fail basic economics. They are like: Well, inflation is transitory, and, you know, we are not sure where it is from, but maybe it could be--oh, greedy people owning grocery stores causes inflation.
No. Inflation is an economic fact that comes from borrowing money, and the Federal Reserve prints up money to buy the borrowed money.
Treasury--when we get behind on our payments, we spend more than comes in, so we have to borrow money. The Fed buys our Treasury bills. Well, the Fed doesn't have any money; the Fed creates that money. That is what inflation is. And so much of it gets passed on to government.
Everybody knows that in the last 3 or 4 years--and part of the election was over the inflation of the Biden administration. Prices were up about 20 percent over 3 or 4 years. But in order to keep up with that, we built in inflation protection to most of our government programs. So Social Security has cost-of-living increases. So they keep up with inflation or try to keep up with inflation, but as they do, the programs just get larger and larger and larger, and we get more and more behind the eight ball. That is what is happening.
But it is coming to a head. Social Security runs out of money in 2033. When it runs out of money, everybody gets 20 to 25 percent less in Social Security. What do you think is going to happen in our country when the poorest among us who live only on Social Security--when they lose the value of their check, they lose 25 percent of their check? What do you think is going to happen in this country? And nobody is preparing them for it. Nobody is doing anything to reform Social Security, reform Medicare, reform Medicaid.
You know, people are just petrified of everything. What is so horrible and so hard to say about people who are able-bodied ought to work? I think everyone should work. I think everyone who is able-bodied should work not as punishment but as reward. We should have a work requirement on every check that goes out. Everybody should work. I mean, it is how you get your self-esteem. You can't give people self- esteem. You can't say: Here, Johnny, here is a trophy. We know you can't spell or add, but here is a trophy for being a mathlete.
No, you have to earn your self-esteem. You earn it through work.
Just adding work to Medicaid and saying: You want free health insurance from the government--adding a work requirement saves $100 billion. Having the States pay more for Medicaid. Why
I had a conversation with one of my Democratic colleagues, and I said: We have to make a choice. You have to decide whether you want to help the poor in our country or help the poor in Ukraine or help whoever you are paying in Ukraine.
He said: We shouldn't have to make a choice.
It is like, you do have to make a choice. The fact that you think you don't have to make a choice is why we are $36 trillion in the hole. You have to make choices. Which comes first--Ukraine or America? You can't do both because we don't have enough money. We only have enough taxes coming in to pay for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and food stamps. Everything else is borrowed.
So maybe able-bodied people need to go back to work. Maybe there needs to be a work requirement. Maybe, for goodness' sake, food stamps shouldn't buy sugared drinks, chips, Ding Dongs, and Twinkies. Could we not reform our system such that we try to cure the obesity plague in our country by cutting back what the government buys as far as food?
But today, the opposite will happen. Things aren't what they appear to be. Things are never, in Congress, really what they seem to be. We will pass a bill ostensibly by the conservative majority, but the purpose of this bill is to spend $340 billion in new spending.
Instead, what we should be doing is taking the savings from the waste, fraud, and abuse that DOGE and Elon are finding--we should take those savings and use it to spend for things that people think are of higher priority, such as the border and/or the military.
But I will oppose this budget because I am not for spending more money. I will oppose this budget because I want to have nothing to do with a $2.2 trillion deficit. At the end of the year, those who vote for this budget and those who vote for the new spending will have to explain to people at home: How about that $2.2 trillion deficit? How did that happen under a Republican watch?
Until someone is brave enough to say no, it is going to go on and on, and there is a danger that if we don't stop it, we are going to destroy the country.
So I will offer an amendment later on to cut spending, to actually put teeth into this budget resolution, to cut real spending, to balance our budget, and to do and complete the promises that the President had in the campaign.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Hampshire.
Mr. President, I am pleased to come to the floor today with my friend and colleague Senator Tillis. He and I have cochaired the Senate NATO Observer Group. We have traveled together on a number of occasions, and we just came back on Tuesday from a very brief trip to Ukraine. We were joined by Senator Bennet, who is not able to join us right now. But I think it is important for us to come to the floor and to talk about what we saw and what we heard in Ukraine.
It was incredibly powerful to travel to Ukraine, to see firsthand the situation on the ground there, and we visited a number of places during the day. We met with residents in downtown Kyiv who had lost their homes in the January 1 missile attack there, an attack that landed only about 2 blocks from the Presidential Palace.
While we were there actually meeting with the folks who had lost their homes, the air raid sirens went off, which is a pretty usual occurrence apparently in Kyiv. Fortunately, it was not aimed at us in downtown Kyiv but another outlying community. But it was a warning of more incoming Russian missiles.
And I have seen the reports in the last couple of days that say that Vladimir Putin wants peace, but I have to say I am skeptical because if he really wants peace, nothing is stopping him from calling off those missile and drone attacks, attacks that are not targeting just Ukraine's military but that are targeting civilians throughout the country. They are damaging power stations that Ukrainians depend on for electricity for daily life.
And, in fact, we visited one of those power stations. This is us. You can see it was a very cold day. You can't see the power station in the background, but it was a unique design that had been done by the Ukrainians in a very short period of time with help from the United States to protect that site from Russian attacks. And, in fact, they had just had, in late December, a missile that hit the side of the transfer station in ways that, if they had not had the reinforcements, it would have taken down that station.
But what is interesting is that not only have they figured out the design on the station, but they had what they call a mobile firing team; that is, two machineguns--you can see, just barely see, one of them on the truck--and a radar, which is down here sort of out of sight, again, done with U.S. dollars.
They were able to protect that transfer station and have those mobile firing teams at a number of sites around the country to protect their electricity grid because what we know and what we heard is that the Russians are trying to shut down their power grid because they want to freeze out the Ukrainians in this war.
We also visited a children's hospital that was bombed in July. We visited with two teenagers, one young woman who was 16 who not only lost her mother in a Russian attack, but she lost her ability to walk.
I think she had had, Senator Tillis, about 16 operations at the point that we saw her, and they were pleased that they thought she was going to actually be able to walk again, thanks to the great care she got at the Ohmatdyt Children's Hospital that the Russians bombed--deliberately targeted in July.
But like so many Ukrainians, the young woman we met with hasn't given up. Her father sat by her side, surgery after surgery. And despite the odds, she is learning to walk again. She reflects, I think, the resilience, the perseverance that we witnessed every place we went in every meeting that we had.
Despite Russia's advantages in size and manpower, Ukrainians have not and will not give up, and we should not give up on them either.
Ukrainians have developed robotic mobile firing teams, as I said. They have been able to make incredible innovations to fix damaged battlefield equipment. We had a chance on our way into Ukraine to go through Poland, where they are moving equipment into Ukraine and where we saw the center where they have a group chat with people on the frontlines to help them with instructions on how to fix the equipment in realtime as it gets damaged.
This not only saves time and money for the Ukrainians but for us. It is an incredible learning opportunity for us as we think about what we need to do to support our own military. So the Ukrainians are sharing their battlefield innovations and insights. It makes the United States stronger, and it shows how much of the assistance we have given to Ukraine is actually going to benefit us here in America.
When the assistance was frozen in January, it had a major impact on the ground. We spoke to NGOs in Poland, people who are supporting Ukrainian refugees in that country. And as one of them was preparing to give us a presentation, he stopped. He turned to us, and he said: I can't give this presentation and act like everything is normal.
I thought he was one of the most impactful people we heard from. I don't know if you felt that way, too, Senator Tillis.
But he said that on January 24, the U.S. Embassy told me to stop all work. He said: I had to fire single Ukrainian mothers who escaped the war and now have no jobs and no way to feed their children. He had to stop psychosocial support services for those who are traumatized by the war. One girl they had been treating for self-harm is gone, and he doesn't know if she is alive or not. He was worried she might take her own life.
Along with the stop-work orders, the NGOs were told to remove all American flags. Think of that. American flags are coming down in Poland, one of the most pro-American countries that we can have.
The people that we spoke to said that their trust has been broken. The decades of investments in these alliances that we have made were gone with just one phone call.
Now, I understand that people are tired of this war. But if we think giving Russia or China free rein won't affect us here in the United States, we are wrong. The Russians are thrilled. Vladimir Putin has to be loving this. He has always wanted to undermine NATO.
``Peace for our time'' is what Chamberlain said when he signed the pact with Hitler. Appeasement doesn't work with dictators. When Vladimir Putin gets what he wants, it puts Americans in danger. We understand this. Putin can't be trusted. That is a realistic assessment of the battlefield.
One Ukrainian woman who lost her husband and son in the fighting told us she would support cease-fire negotiations but with security guarantees for Ukraine. Simply freezing the frontline won't do anything, she warned, because in a few years Russia will invade again. And she is right. Putin invaded Crimea in 2014. He invaded Ukraine again in 2022.
There must be a guarantee that Russia won't attack again in a couple of years. I believe NATO membership for Ukraine needs to be on the table. This is not only going to protect Ukraine from future attacks, it will put Ukraine in the best possible negotiating position.
Putin wants Ukrainians to be afraid. We saw that when we visited Bucha. Some people may remember this was a suburb of Kyiv. It was under siege for 33 days, held by the Russians. We talked to the mayor, to the priest of the church, we saw the mass graves where people were buried, the 500-plus people, civilians, who were killed in Bucha. They were killed just going about their daily lives.
This is the picture of the body of one of those civilians killed. You know how they identified her? It was her manicurist. She identified her by the manicure.
We met with the investigators who showed us the picture of the Russian commander who gave the order to kill the civilians. He did it because he wanted to frighten the population. Vladimir Putin is responsible for this. He is responsible for the bodies in Bucha and for thousands across Ukraine, and he has to be held accountable. We cannot let him get away with this.
I want to end by underlying an important point. There is bipartisan support for Ukraine in Congress. I believe we will continue to support funding and that if we had another supplemental bill that came to the floor, it would pass with Republican votes because Americans like Senator Tillis and I and Senator Bennet, who went with us, we have been impressed by the Ukrainians' courage, by their resilience, by their willingness to defend their freedoms and our freedoms. They have kept their economy and their people going throughout this horrible war.
But by June, Ukraine is going to start running out of what they need. That is why we need to use the nearly $300 billion of Russian-seized assets to help Ukraine rebuild. That is why I called on Secretary Rubio to prioritize the waivers for unfreezing aid to Ukraine.
Thousands of Ukrainians have given their lives in the fight for a sovereign Ukraine. They have been on the front lines for all of us defending democracy. To abandon them now would not only be a gift to Putin, it would endanger our allies and the security of the United States.
I want to thank Senator Shaheen for, actually, a long- term friendship and vision that she had back in 2018 when she came to me and wanted to reconstitute the Senate NATO Observer Group. It could not have been a better time for us to pay more attention to this very important alliance.
But it is also, right now, today--4 days away from the 3-year anniversary of the invasion of Ukraine--very important to talk about the nature of Vladimir Putin and the tactics that they use to terrorize populations.
President Putin, in October, prior to the invasion in February, said that he was sending troops to an area to do a training exercise. While we were getting intelligence that it looked like more than that, he was already lying to the world by saying: We are just going to train up our soldiers a little bit more.
Then after the first part of the year going into January, he said: Well, we are doing the training exercise that just, coincidentally, happens to be along the Ukrainian border, but it is just a training exercise.
And then he creates any number of pretext to then talk about how provocative Ukraine is operating a democracy within their borders. And he creates the pretext for a ``special military operation,'' invading Ukraine, trying to finish what he started when he invaded Crimea back in 2014.
Vladimir Putin is a liar, a murderer, and responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians. And that is bad by itself. But you know what is worse is when you employ tactics that intentionally terrorize a population.
Senator Shaheen talked about the power grid. I was in that meeting she was talking about. Let's talk about systematically how his mind works, the mind of Vladimir Putin, the leadership of Russia. It is very cold in Ukraine--very, very cold in the wintertime. And they have tried to systematically deny them heat over the winter to freeze them out. They have had to spend millions of dollars hardening substations just to prevent families, hospitals, critical businesses, first responders from having power. That is how this man thinks.
But that is not bad enough. Shortly after they invaded Ukraine and they got the surprise of their life that the Ukrainian people were willing to fight and die for their country--and they have done it in a way that Putin could not possibly have imagined. Putin should be embarrassed. A so-called world power got repulsed by what now is the largest army in Europe--standing army. It wasn't when the invasion occurred.
Just with our help through materiels, they have held off Russia for 3 years. Putin probably understood at some point that he wasn't going to be able to win it through conventional tactics. So what does he go to? Terrorist tactics--the same sort of tactics he uses in Africa with mercenaries, terrorizing populations, indiscriminately killing people. That is what Vladimir Putin does every single day, 24/7, 365 around the globe.
Now let's get back to Ukraine. He decides to allow, under orders, Russia military to go into a community of about 200,000 people. That is roughly the size of the community I live in North Carolina, just north of Charlotte. Imagine what they are doing. They are going through the city and indiscriminately, when somebody walks past them, shooting them, sometimes with 50-caliber weapons and tank armor, murdering them, stacking them up in mass graves.
I went to this site. I saw it firsthand. This is how he is trying to win the war because he can't win the hearts and minds of the Ukrainian people. He destroyed the hopes and dreams of anybody who has lived in the Soviet era. He wants that to reemerge. He is willing to do anything, including terrorizing innocent civilians to break their will.
But, thank God, the Ukrainian people are the brave people that they are because this hardened them. This made them go onto a battlefield and live in trenches 24 hours a day repulsing the Russian invasion.
There is no moral person on this planet who can consider Putin to have a legitimate reason to affect this sort of carnage. And I saw it firsthand. I will never be able to forget it. And what the American people and the world population will never be able to forget either is the aftermath of appeasing Vladimir Putin.
Ladies and gentlemen, China is already helping Russia. North Korea has sent thousands of troops. And North Korea doesn't really care about life. They have allowed 4,000 to 5,000 of their soldiers to die on the battlefield within 6 weeks of getting on the ground. They are throwing body after body trying to kill and break the will of the Ukrainian people. It is just unacceptable.
Look, I am a Republican. I support President Trump, and I believe that most of his policies on national security are right. I believe his instincts
Ladies and gentlemen, when I tell you that Vladimir Putin is a liar, a murderer, and a man responsible for ordering the systematic torture, kidnapping, and rape of innocent civilians, believe me because the evidence is a mile high.
So for those of us who have invested the time to understand this, believe me when I tell you this is important to every single one of you. If you believe that Ukraine is a country an ocean away and not relevant to our national security, think again. The world is small. The world is watching. The strength of our alliances are on the line and the future of democracy in the world is on the line if we do anything less than defeat Vladimir Putin.
Mr. President, today we are debating the narrow Senate fiscal year 2025 budget resolution that fulfills promises to secure America's borders, our national defense, and unleash our energy potential and finally start to get our fiscal house in order.
In the near future, I expect us to move forward with a budget resolution that allows us to prevent more than a $4 trillion tax hike on American households, the largest tax hike in the history of America. That will be felt by virtually every American if tax cuts expire at the end of this year.
Because the other side has filed a litany of tax amendments that rehash various false narratives and each side will only have 1 minute to debate, I am going to spend a little time right now explaining why we can't afford a $4 trillion-plus tax increase, the positive impact that the Trump tax cuts had on the economy, and some of the key provisions that expire at the end of the year.
At the end of this year, many key provisions of President Trump's 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act are set to expire, triggering an over $4 trillion tax hike on American families and businesses. While taxes will increase on Americans of all income levels, the majority of this tax hike, about $2.6 trillion of it, will fall on those making less than $400,000 per year. An average family of four making about $80,000 a year will see a $1,700 tax hike in 2016. Another $600 billion-plus will hit millions of small business owners who could see Federal tax rates skyrocket up to 43.4 percent. Tens of millions of families will see their Child Tax Credit cut in half from $2,000 to $1,000. The list goes on.
But, first, I will talk about what the Trump tax cuts actually did and why failing to extend key provisions would be economically devastating for millions of hard-working taxpayers.
So what did the Trump tax cuts do? There has been a lot of talk recently about how extending these tax cuts are for billionaires and corporations, but the facts actually show otherwise. The 2017 tax bill increased the take-home pay and powered a growing economy. Individuals across all income brackets received a tax cut, not just--as opponents suggest--for the uberwealthy.
In fact, the Trump tax cuts made the Tax Code more progressive, meaning the highest income earners now pay a greater share of all income taxes than they did before 2017. The majority of benefits accrued to the working middle-class families of America. Between the bill's passage in 2017 and 2021, the bottom 50 percent of earners received the largest reduction in average tax rates at 17.3 percent.
In addition to lowering tax rates across the board, the Trump tax cuts doubled the standard deduction and the Child Tax Credit and provided tax relief to America's entrepreneurs and small businesses.
The effect of pro-growth tax reform was immediate. Not only did taxpayers get to keep more of their hard-earned money, but a growing economy helped a median household income reach all-time highs. The labor market improved; workers saw wage growth; and the unemployment rate fell dramatically to 3.5 percent--the lowest in 50 years; and the lowest income workers experienced the largest wage growth. Corporate inversions became a thing of the past, and America became the place do business. All Americans reaped the benefits of a booming economy.
Extending this current, proven tax policy and building on it is the best way to restore economic prosperity and opportunity for working families, many of whom are still struggling to recover from the historic inflation of the last 4 years. As American families contend with increasing costs of everyday living, the last thing they need is another massive tax hike on top of that inflation. Failure is simply not an option.
What happens if the Trump tax cuts expire? As I have said, if we do not extend these tax policies, Americans will be hit with an over $4 trillion tax increase. More than $2.6 trillion of that tax increase will fall on households earning less than $400,000 per year. An average family of four making $80,000 will be saddled with a $1,700 tax increase. This is the equivalent of 6 to 8 weeks' worth of groceries for a family of four. Tens of millions of families will see their child tax credit cut in half to $1,000, and 90 percent of taxpayers would see their standard deduction cut in half.
Owners of over 20 million small businesses will face a massive tax hike, with taxes up to 43.4 percent, and 7 million taxpayers will be impacted by the alternative minimum tax, up from just 200,000 taxpayers currently. Many more small businesses and farms will have their death tax exemption cut in half. The National Association of Manufacturers recently highlighted that, if we allow the tax cuts to expire, 6 million jobs will be at risk; $540 billion in employee compensation will be lost; and the U.S. gross domestic product will be reduced by $1.1 trillion.
The bottom line: While we aren't considering tax policy as a part of this reconciliation package, it is important to set the record straight as to what is at stake in the upcoming tax debate. The stakes couldn't be higher. You are going to hear tonight dozens and dozens of tax amendments being brought. We are going to respond to each of those by explaining that that debate is not this amendment.
This budget that we are debating today is on the border, on our national defense, and on increasing our oil and gas production to strengthen our economy. That is why the Senate and House Republicans are working together to act as quickly as possible to make these tax cuts permanent--but that will be in the next step--to prevent a massive tax hike and to provide certainty and relief to families and businesses across this Nation.
Mr. President, the news is coming so hard and fast these days that it is hard to sort it all out. Every day seems to be something new that captures our attention, our concern, our interest.
What I would like to do today is to try to put some of it in perspective as to what is going on in our governing of this country. I don't believe what I am going to be talking about today is partisan. It should not be partisan because what I am really talking about is competent government and constitutional government--really, two categories: competent government and constitutional government. That should not be a controversial issue. Neither of those is something we should be arguing about. It is what we have a responsibility to carry through in terms of our jobs here in the U.S. Senate. So, of the two categories I want to talk about, my headings are ``thoughtless'' and ``dangerous.''
First, I want to talk about ``thoughtless.''
The hiring freeze. A hiring freeze can be an effective tool if it is used thoughtfully and systematically, but to do it across the board, without a process for exceptions that is built into it, you end up with all kinds of unintended and negative consequences with firefighters, parks, losses elsewhere by attrition. There should be a systematic exemption process. Now it is haphazard and random.
Park seasonal employees first were under the hiring freeze; now they are
VA frontline health workers were first subject to the hiring freeze. Then people said: Oh. Well, we didn't mean doctors and nurses, so that is OK. You can hire them.
My point is, it is not a rational process. It is ready, fire, aim. Literally, ready, fire, aim is what we are talking about, and people aren't doing this in a thoughtful and systematic way.
By the way, the difference between frontline deliverers of care at the VA and the people who answer the phones who are categorized as bureaucrats--I don't think there is a stark difference there. If you are a veteran and are seeking care and an appointment at a VA health facility and nobody answers the phone, that is a denial of benefits. That is a denial of benefits just as if they had closed the door in your face. That is what we are talking about--weakening the systems that are serving our public.
So the hiring freeze: It is possible to do a hiring freeze. When I was the Governor of Maine, I instituted a hiring freeze, but we did it in a systematic and thoughtful way. We had a process for dealing with exemptions and without destroying the morale and throwing the entire operation of government into chaos.
By the way, why do we have the government? To serve the people. To serve the people.
So let's talk about the next step--the firings. The famous ``Fork in the Road'' letter is a perfect example of a thoughtless way to approach a problem.
The letter went to everybody. The letter wasn't selective. It went to everybody--all civilians in the CIA, in the National Security Agency, in the Defense Department, and also, of course, to all the other civilian Agencies, but it wasn't targeted in any way. It was, ``If you want to leave Federal service, we will pay you through September,'' but it hit everybody. Again, it is not a rational or thoughtful way to trim the Federal workforce.
You should be talking about, Where are we over? Do we have too many people? Do we have overstock in terms of public servants, and where do we need more, for example. Instead, it went to everybody. By definition, that is not a rational process. Let me just put this in perspective by the way.
In the ``Fork in the Road'' letter, the estimate, as of today, is that 75,000 people have taken that option and left. I suppose the people who are behind this thing think that that is a good victory. The dollars saved to the Treasury from those 75,000 people represent one- tenth of 1 percent of the Federal budget. So the people who are saying that we are cutting the budget; we are cutting; we are saving; we are saving the taxpayers' money, it is one-tenth of 1 percent. Given the chaos and the uncertainty and the deletion of services to our American people, I would argue that is not worth it--one-tenth of 1 percent. Everyone got these letters. People are being fired now in the CIA, the FBI, the VA.
On this letter, what if only the best people take the option to leave? Then you will have really shot yourself in the foot. You will have encouraged people who were going to retire anyway or who could get a better job in the private sector. So it is almost--it is an anti- intelligent way to handle this.
Then you have got situations like at the Department of Energy. In the first weekend, they fired 350 people in the National Nuclear Security Administration. Of the people who handle nuclear materials and are responsible for our nuclear stockpile, they fired almost--I think it was--something like 20 percent of the personnel. Then, 3 or 4 days later, they realized: Uh-oh. That was a mistake. So now they are trying to bring these people back.
The point I am making is, a good, solid, thoughtful process wouldn't have made a mistake like that. They would have realized from the outset that these are jobs that we aren't going to be firing, that we aren't going to be eliminating. It seems to be based on some kind of quota. I don't know what it is.
OK. So now we are seeing everybody is being fired who is on probation, probationary people--people who have worked for the government for less than a year or two. OK. Again, that is arbitrary. Being on probation doesn't mean you are an effective employee or you are not an effective employee. You could be one of the best employees in the whole Federal Government, and you have just come on, and yet you are going to be fired. It has nothing to do with the productivity or skill of the worker. It has nothing to do with the importance of the position. It has nothing to do with the effectiveness of the Agency in question that is serving the people of Maine. If you are probationary, you are gone.
Here is another thing about probation: It turns out, in the Federal Government, if you are promoted, you are on probation in the new position. You may have worked for the Department for 5 or 10 years. You are promoted. You are on probation. You are fired. Even though you have 5 or 10 years of experience--you are capable; you are doing a good job--there was no effort that I can see. People did get these ridiculous letters saying: Your performance has not been adequate. There was no basis for those letters. It was arbitrary--arbitrary.
Remember, I said my categories are ``thoughtless'' and ``dangerous.'' This is thoughtless: probation.
Oh, by the way, about 30 percent of the Federal workforce are veterans. Now, we don't know the exact figures. That is one of the problems. We have no transparency about what is going on here and who is actually being let go and who isn't, but a reasonable extrapolation is 30 percent of the people being fired are veterans--people who put their lives on the line for this country. Then they went into public service, and they are being fired. That is outrageous.
Again, was no one thinking about this? A thousand were fired at the VA just a couple of days ago.
We learned that people supporting the VA crisis line were fired. What genius thought that was a good idea?
Last Friday, immigration judges were fired. We are talking about immigration and the border and the control of immigration, and we are firing immigration judges? What possible sense does that make?
Here is one: We have had, I think, three serious aircraft incidents in the last month, and they just fired, I think, 300 people at the FAA--great--including people who are in the business of maintaining the systems that keep our airplanes safe. In the wake of 3 serious airplane crashes, including 1 here in Washington that killed 67 people, we are firing people at the FAA? Give me a break. What kind of sense does that make? What kind of service is that to the people of the United States?
Here is one that is not life or death, but it is the National Park Service. A thousand people were fired last weekend at the National Park Service. I suspect they were probationary. That means, OK, they had only been there a year or two, but that doesn't mean they weren't in jobs that weren't important. The headline in this morning's paper: ``Chaos at the National Parks.'' The lines are twice as long as they normally are, and if there is chaos at the National Parks in February, Lord knows what it is going to be in June or July in Yosemite and at the Grand Canyon and in Acadia, which is in my State of Maine.
Here is a beauty: Some of these people who are being fired are the people who collect fees at the park. So, to save a buck, we are going to lose 5 bucks from fees not being collected. Genius. Come on. Five percent of the workforce at the National Park Service is being fired.
I can tell you I am the cochair of the National Park Subcommittee of the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. We need more people at the national parks, not less. We have had a staffing shortage going back a half a dozen or 10 years, where visitation is way up, and staff is flat or declining. Now it is really declining. This is a direct, hands-on experience for the American people.
Gettysburg: They have been laying off people at the battlefield. Last night, apparently, something called the Presidential Management Fellows Program--a training program that is decades old that brings talented people into the Federal Government--was eliminated. No explanation. No rationale. Eliminated.
OK. That is the thoughtless part. And let me give you a little personal experience. When I was elected Governor of Maine, we had a serious budget deficit. We were in the middle of a recession. So we went through a process very similar to the impetus for what is going on now. We looked at the entire workforce of the State of Maine, but we did it in a thoughtful and transparent way. We developed a task force that included private citizens, legislators, and members of the administration, and we took 8 months--8 months, not 8 weeks--and we looked at the entire structure of the State of Maine government and reduced our workforce by about 10 percent--a significant reduction, but we did it in a thoughtful way and in a way that made sense in terms of the ongoing service to the people of Maine.
So it can be done, and I am not unsympathetic with the idea of making things more efficient and even possibly downsizing the government where it is called for and where additional people aren't necessary. So I am not here to say we shouldn't be looking for efficiency and saying everything in the Federal Government is perfect. I don't believe that for a minute. But I think, if we are going to take on this exercise, it ought to be done in a sensible way by people who know what they are doing.
That brings me to DOGE. I don't know what they are doing. Nobody does. I don't know who these 25-year-olds are that are in the IRS, rummaging around in the IRS IT system or--we learned in the last couple of days--Social Security. What are they doing? Who are they? What are their qualifications? Do they have security clearances? Do they have conflicts of interest?
All of the rules that are designed to protect us from people making arbitrary decisions that aren't accountable--you talk about bureaucrats being unaccountable; these are the ultimate unaccountable people. We don't know what their relationship is to the Federal Government, what authority they have, under what law are they operating. It is pretty clear from mistakes like firing 350 people at the Nuclear Security Agency--it is pretty clear they don't know what they are doing, and they are firing people whom we need. OK. That is the thoughtless part, and it is inexcusable.
That is just pure efficiency of government, of doing the right thing, and it can be done, but these people aren't doing it.
The second part of what is going on is the dangerous part, and this is where I call upon my colleagues on the other side of the aisle who are standing by and watching the structure of our government be attacked with no response--elimination of entire congressionally created Agencies.
USAID was established by statute, and over a weekend, these people fired everybody, closed the Agency, took the name off the door, and threw the rest of the world into chaos where these people were working on important projects all over the world that were part of our outreach to the world.
And, you know what, as soon as we went out of business at AID, China is right in the market. It is like walking away from engagement with the world. It couldn't be a more self-defeating piece of work.
By the way, it is a tiny part of the Federal budget.
James Mattis famously said when he was a general: If you cut the foreign aid budget, you are going to have to buy me more bullets.
Foreign aid is part of the national security of this country, and to demolish this Agency without any input from Congress, without any relationship to the Foreign Affairs Committee or anybody else up here in Congress, is grossly unconstitutional. It is grossly unconstitutional.
Here is the problem: This isn't just a battle between the Senate and the House and the President and they are fighting about powers. No. The reason the Framers designed our Constitution the way they did was that they were afraid of concentrated power. They had just fought a brutal 8-year war with a King. They didn't want a King. They wanted a constitutional republic where power was divided between the Congress and the President and the courts.
We are collapsing that structure. And the structure wasn't there for fun. It wasn't there because, hey, we are just going to design this complicated system. It was there to protect our freedom because the people who wrote our Constitution understood human nature, and they understood a very important thousand-year-old principle: Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
So the whole idea was to divide power. To the extent we allow this assault on our Constitution, this collapsing and excessive power being granted to the Executive to ignore the laws passed by Congress--and, by the way, appropriations bills are laws passed by Congress, which the administration is also ignoring by freezing funding for programs authorized and funded by Congress. To the extent we do that, we are not only making a mistake now, but we are altering the essential structure of our Constitution that is there for a reason, that is there to protect our freedom.
The people who are cheering this on, I fear, in a reasonably short period of time, are going to say: Where did this go? How did this happen? How did we make our President into a monarch? How did this happen?
How it happened is we gave it up.
James Madison thought we would fight for our power--but no. Right now, we are just sitting back and watching it happen.
Article II of the Constitution--the President said: Oh, article II gives me a lot of power.
No, it doesn't. It makes the President Commander in Chief; that is true. But here is the key sentence in article II of the Constitution, which defines a President's power. The key sentence is not the power of the President. The responsibility of the President is to ``take care that the laws be faithfully executed''--not write the laws, not deny the laws, not ignore the laws, not pick which laws he or she likes. To ``take care that the laws be faithfully executed''--that is the responsibility of the President. Right now, those laws are being ignored.
Impoundment. Impoundment. The President is trying to say: Congress appropriated this money with an appropriation bill signed by the President, but I am not going to spend it because I don't like it. I don't like that purpose, whatever it is.
I am sorry. It is absolutely straight-up unconstitutional, and it is illegal. President Nixon tried to do that in 1973, and the Congress virtually unanimously passed the Impoundment Control Act, which said: No, Presidents can't do that; they can't ignore the will of Congress because article I of the Constitution gives the Congress the power of the purse.
We are giving it away this week. We are standing by and watching it, watching the essential power of this body evaporate--not evaporate-- migrate down the street to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The power was divided for a reason.
There is some criticism now in the press saying people are talking about a constitutional crisis; they are crying wolf. No. This is a constitutional crisis. It is the most serious assault on our Constitution in the history of this country. It is the most serious assault on the very structure of our Constitution, which is designed to protect our freedoms and our liberty, in the history of this country.
It is a constitutional crisis, and I will tell you what makes it worse: The President and the Vice President are already hinting that they are not going to obey decisions of the courts.
Many of my friends in this body say: Well, you know, it would be hard. We don't want to buck the President and everything. We are going to let the courts take care of this.
No. 1, that is a copout. It is our responsibility to protect the Constitution. That is what we swear to when we enter this body. But to stand back and say: Oh, we are going to watch all this happen, and the courts are going to take care of it--that is an abdication of our responsibility.
By the way, if you look at history, yes, it is true Presidents have gained power. In my reading of history, usually it wasn't because Presidents usurped power but because the Congress abdicated it. We haven't declared war, for example, since 1942, and yet that is a clear responsibility of Congress. And we sure have been in some scrapes since 1942. We have abdicated that power. And we are now in the process of abdicating the power to control the appropriations process.
I mentioned about DOGE: no authority, no accountability, no transparency. We literally don't know what they are doing. We can't find out what they are doing.
Then, just this week, the destruction of the independent Agencies created by Congress. They were created as independent Agencies for a reason--because they didn't want them to be dominated by the vicissitudes of politics.
The President gets to appoint members of the board, and they are very carefully balanced--not firing someone at the National Labor Relations Board so there is no quorum so they can't act. That is a direct violation of congressionally established policy.
These independent Agencies were created for a reason.
Oh, I forgot to mention the illegal firing of inspectors general. The Senator from Iowa is a champion of inspectors general. In the first few days, something like 18 inspectors general were fired, completely contrary to the law. The law is the Congress must be given 30 days' notice of the firing of an inspector general and reasons therefor. Not done. Not a peep.
What is it going to take for us to wake up--when I say ``us,'' I mean this entire body--to wake up to what is going on here? Is it going to be too late? Is it going to be when the President has accreted all this power and the Congress is an afterthought? What is it going to take? The offenses keep piling up.
As I said, leaving it to the courts, No. 1, is a copout. No. 2, when the Vice President said something--I can't remember exactly what he said--but why should we--the courts should not have the power to do this. And, of course, the President, over the weekend, famously quoted Napoleon: When you are saving your country, you don't have to obey any law.
Wow. A President of the United States quoting Napoleon about not having to obey the law.
So I intended to talk about Ukraine, but Senator Tillis and Senator Shaheen did it so articulately, I think I will let that pass except to say that it is shameful that we have suddenly pivoted from the support of a democracy that was grossly and illegally invaded--from the support of that country to the support of a murderous dictator.
I heard something about Zelenskyy is a dictator. The only dictator in this game is Vladimir Putin. He is the dictator. And to argue that somehow Ukraine started the war--what universe is somebody in that would say something like that?
Again, I won't pursue, but I can tell you, Putin is happy, Xi Jinping is happy, Iran is happy, and North Korea is happy. They love what is going on, to see us retreating from the world, whether it is AID or Ukraine. They love to see us retreating from the world, looking weak and looking unreliable.
Finally, on this point, we seem to be systematically alienating our allies. I have been on Armed Services now for 12 years, and I have learned that the key asymmetric advantage that this country has in the world is allies. China has customers; we have allies. Well, we are giving that away. If I wasn't on the floor of the U.S. Senate, I would use a slightly different term. But we are giving away our asymmetric advantage in the world by what looks like systematically alienating our allies, whether it is threats of tariffs or speeches in Europe telling them what their problems are, basically saying we are going to abandon Europe.
What a great idea: Abandon Europe at a time when there is a murderous dictator who has his eyes on the Baltics, on Poland, and who has said he would like to reestablish the Soviet empire. The worst possible geopolitical thing that we could do would be to abandon Ukraine.
So this is a constitutional crisis, and we have to respond to it. And I am just waiting for this whole body to stand up and say: No, no. We don't do it this way. We don't do it this way. We do things constitutionally.
Yes, it is more cumbersome. It is slower. That is what the Framers intended. They didn't intend to have an efficient dictatorship, and that is what we are headed for. This is a very dangerous moment. We have to wake up, protect this institution, but much more importantly, protect the people of the United States of America.
Mr. President, I rise to support the budget resolution that is before the U.S. Senate. Speaking to that, I want to remind people of some history.
These famous words came from Rahm Emanuel, President Obama's Chief of Staff. It dates from about 2008. He famously said:
There is no statement that better encapsulates the mindset of the previous administration. We all know Americans are struggling to cope with economic and social disruption still carrying on from the pandemic. The Biden administration saw a real opportunity, an opportunity to permanently increase the size and scope of government.
They said that they wanted to transform America. I hope everybody on my side of the aisle wants to preserve America. In my view, it makes sense, in times of national emergency, for government to take steps to help individuals, families, and small businesses weather that storm.
But once the crisis subsides, so should the programs and spending enacted in response. Yet here we are in 2025, and Federal spending, as a share of the economy, remains at levels never seen outside of war or national emergency like recessions or depressions.
In 2019, before the pandemic, the total Federal spending totaled $4.45 trillion. In 2024, the Federal Government spent over $2 trillion more. So that is a total of $6.75 trillion, a relative increase of over 50 percent.
We must begin to put spending back on a path of normalcy, and that is why we are having this debate that we call the budget resolution. The path to normalcy is a spending path that accounts for the historic inflation of the past 4 years as well as population growth.
Now, there are a lot of people in this body that would say that spending that much is still too much, but I think it fits in with the principle of the 1974 budget resolution.
Once inflation and population growth are factored in, Federal spending in 2024 remained roughly $1 trillion above prepandemic levels. If Social Security and Medicare and interest on the debt are set to the side, Federal spending was still over half a trillion dollars above 2019 levels. I hope you will study the chart here that shows what I just told you.
Unless we have a course correction, our national debt will set a new record as a share of our economy in 2028. That is eclipsing the previous high-water mark set in the wake of World War II. You can see that here in the period of time where it was at World War II.
As another Democrat said, elections have consequences. So as a part of the November mandate, President Trump is looking for ways to reduce wasteful government spending. Through this budget resolution before the Senate now, we plan to help in that process.
But, in fact, that power should rest here. The President shouldn't have to do it. But it is Congress that has the power of the purse, and we will have to do the heavy lifting. Getting out of the fiscal hole that we dug for ourselves requires that we first stop digging.
The budget that we are debating this week takes that first step, and some people would say it is too small of a first step. Any new spending will have to be accomplished by reductions in spending elsewhere. I look forward to continuing to work with my colleagues on a return to fiscal sanity, and that fiscal sanity is the prepandemic level of spending increased only by inflation and population growth.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Massachusetts.
Mr. President, the American people are being robbed in broad daylight. Big Oil is cashing in on their billion-dollar deal with Donald Trump from his campaign; the $1 billion to help Trump win. And in return, he will rig the rules of the game in line with the pockets of the oil, gas, and coal industry 10 times over.
So let's call Trump's energy agenda what it really is: Oil above all, not all of the above. Trump's billionaire friends promised to raise tens of millions of dollars; and, in return, he promised he would deliver policies that
Especially as the climate crisis continues to turbocharge extreme weather--costing billions in damages, sky-high energy bills--we know that working families don't have any more to give to the oil, gas, and coal industries.
Gas prices are up. Electricity bills are up. Home heating costs are up. And yet Donald Trump is going after the programs, the Agencies, and the workers that help keep our air and water clean and create jobs.
Meanwhile, Big Oil is raking in record profits, more than $172 billion in profits in 2023 alone. This administration isn't governing, it is groveling to Big Oil and Big Gas and Big Coal and the entire fossil fuel industry. Every dollar that goes into a billionaire's pocket is a dollar taken out of a working family's budget--money that should go toward food, rent, and education.
It is robbery in broad daylight from working families to create tax breaks for billionaires, and the Trump administration is trying to carry out their single biggest heist right now: attempting to illegally seize $20 billion from the congressionally authorized climate bank. As we speak, they are trying to loot the climate bank.
This bank, formally called the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, is based on my national climate bank legislation with Chris Van Hollen, and it is already at work for you, leveraging private dollars to cut energy bills for families and small businesses, improve resiliency against climate change-fueled disasters, and create local economic opportunity.
Trump and Musk are trying to get their hands on this money--your money--through whatever means necessary, even if that meant forcing Denise Cheung, head of the criminal division of the DC U.S. Attorney's Office, to say that there had been a crime committed in the climate bank, which then would allow Trump to reclaim all the money in the climate bank.
What did Denise Cheung say? She said she could not find a crime. They said: You are going to find a crime. She said she could not find a crime in the climate bank, and so she had to resign. She had to resign from being the head of the Criminal Division in the U.S. Attorney's Office right here in Washington, DC, because she refused to follow the orders of her supervisor who is getting instructions from the White House because that was the only way they could fulfill the promise to oil, gas, and coal to kill the climate bank.
They wanted to freeze that money in the absence of any crimes, any wrongdoing, which--surprise--just happened this week. Just happened. Their goal is to take money away from families, take money from clean energy, take money from disadvantaged communities and give it to the fossil fuel companies and special interests.
So, yes, they want to raid Medicaid; they want to raid education programs; they want to raid veterans' benefits. But also, for the oil, gas, and coal industry, they have got to kill the tax breaks for wind and solar; they have got to gut the climate bank, which is revolutionizing the way in which we generate energy electricity in this country.
That is not powerful leadership; it is political plunder. And working families are paying the price. Trump's farce of an energy emergency declaration creates a financial emergency for the American people. Instead of taking steps to lower energy costs for families, the Trump administration is actively driving up your energy costs by pushing for our energy, American energy, to get shipped overseas for higher profits and tying our energy market to the volatility of the global energy marketplace.
From late 2021 through 2022, surging exports of our energy from the United States, liquified natural gas cost Americans $111 billion in higher energy prices for natural gas customers here in the United States--consumers, homeowners, businesses. Why? Because Big Oil and Big Gas want to export our energy out of our country, send it overseas because they get a bigger price on the open seas. That is what it is all about.
In a recent study, the Department of Energy found that it is extremely likely LNG exports will lead to more sticker shock for Americans, an average increase of over $120 per year still coming-- again while oil executives, natural gas executives cash in on even bigger paydays. What is the Trump plan? Turn consumers in America upside down and shake money out of their pockets for profits for the oil and gas industry.
What happens? Prices go higher for consumers here. That is how they make their money. They are doing it hand in glove with the Trump administration. This is not an energy emergency. This is a Trump energy tax on the American people, an energy tax, which, to be clear, is only growing in severity as Trump cuts off funding for clean energy projects, fires hardworking government employees, imposes tariffs--all of which will make electricity even more expensive for American businesses, for American consumers.
It is a deliberate strategy to make sure working families stay dependent on a damaging fuel source that makes a handful of billionaires richer and richer and richer by the day. But make no mistake, they are not attacking us, because they are winning.
The fossil fuel industry is backing Donald Trump because they know they are losing. They are losing, despite Trump's attempts to kill the green revolution. The clean energy boom is happening all across our country.
The fossil fuel industry is terrified because they know that wind and solar are the future.
Last year, get this number, are you ready? This is why they are petrified. This is why they are scared, 90 percent of all new electricity generation capacity brought online in the United States was renewable--10 percent natural gas, 90 percent renewable last year.
Why do they have to kill the tax breaks? Why do they have to kill the climate bank? You do 90 percent renewables every year for the next 10 years, then it drives right at the heart of the business model of the natural gas and coal and oil industries in our country.
That is why they need to loot the climate bank. That is why they need to kill the tax breaks for wind and solar, all-electric vehicles in our country. Onshore wind. Onshore wind and solar power were the cheapest megawatts on the grid last year, 2024, from construction to operation.
And the Big Oil bosses know that if given the choice, Americans will pick the cheapest, cleanest energy source every single time. So they are killing your choice. They are not letting you pick which energy source you want.
Nearly 80 percent of clean energy investments from the Inflation Reduction Act, also known as the biggest climate bill in world history, but 80 percent of the energy investments have gone to Republican districts, creating hundreds of thousands of new jobs just in 2\1/2\ years.
Think about that. Trump is actively working to destroy economic growth and jobs in the very places that got him elected. Eighty percent of the jobs are in red States. Think about that. But that is the payback to the oil, gas, and coal industry for raising the money for him last year. We are talking about electricians installing solar panels, construction workers building wind turbines, engineers designing the next generation of battery storage. All of these are good-paying, family-sustaining jobs that are helping to build America's future. And yet--and yet--Trump and his enablers want to tear it all down just to keep their fossil fuel cronies happy, just to keep the greenhouse gas emitters happy, just to make sure there is no competition.
They don't believe in competition. This should be Darwinian paranoia- inducing competition. What oil, gas, and coal has extracted from this administration is killing the competition. It is killing them in the marketplace.
Adam Smith was spinning in his grave thinking about this cut. He had a big smile on his face last year, Adam Smith. The market is finally working. We finally have incentives for the competition. But that had to be killed. That had to be killed.
And if that wasn't enough, Trump is attacking the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Agency that warns and helps protect us against hurricanes and floods and wildfires.
Why? Because it gets in the way of his fossil fuel allies' ability to pollute and to profit without consequence. Just last year, get this number, disasters supercharged by climate change
What are they doing? They are taking down the defense in the future against superstorms. They are going to take it down. They are going to ravage homeowners, businesses across our country. Insurance rates are going to skyrocket. It is going to have a devastating impact upon our country. We are not even through the month of February, and already in Los Angeles and other places, we can see the storms; we can see the floods; we can see the damage.
So this is absolutely unbelievable what is happening. Families forced from their homes. Businesses wiped out. Entire communities devastated. And instead of preparing for the future, Trump is making sure it gets worse. Imagine, standing in the wreckage of a hurricane-ravaged neighborhood, with nothing but rubble left of your home, and knowing that your President, right now, is actively choosing to make future disasters worse and firing the workers that would help you rebuild. That is the cruelty of his administration.
It has become a wholly owned subsidiary of the oil, gas, and coal industry, giving them a permission slip to wreak havoc on every other American. At every turn, this administration is picking fossil fuel billionaires over working people, and they aren't even hiding it.
Since April of last year after Trump sat down with the Big Oil executives and asked for a billion-dollar campaign check, these executives' wealth has ballooned by more than $40 billion in 1 year, $40 billion more in the wealth of those individuals, while families across the country wonder how they will pay their heating bills.
Trump's fossil fuel donors are making a fortune. And let's not forget the bigger picture. Our global standing is on the line. While we stall and we let the fossil fuel industry dictate our energy policy, China is surging ahead. China is saying: Thank you, Trump administration. Thank you for letting us take over the renewable energy industry.
They are investing in clean energy, in electric vehicles, in battery storage--in all the industries that will define the 21st century economy. And what is Trump doing? Kneecapping our ability to compete. He is locking us into outdated, expensive, and polluting energy systems, while the rest of the world moves forward without us. You can't be an isolationist when it comes to climate change; it is global warming.
This isn't just about energy policy. This is about what kind of country we want to be. Will we be the leader or the laggard? Do we want to be a country that builds, innovates, and transforms, or do we want to be a country that clings to the past and knowingly raises costs on American families that pollute the air we breathe in order to line the pockets of the ultrawealthy? The choice is ours.
Trump and his fossil fuel friends want you to believe that you don't have a choice; that you have to accept higher prices, dirtier air, polluted water, and an onslaught of hurricanes and fires brought on by a worsening climate crisis that the President of the United States, Donald Trump, denies even exists, calling it a Chinese hoax. It is no hoax. Three events, $500 billion worth of damage, and I am not even mentioning all the other damage last year and early this year, but there were.
People want lower bills, not higher profits for Exxon. Our communities deserve good-paying jobs, not another handout to Chevron. It is not drill, baby, drill. It is plug in, baby, plug in. That is what this generation of young people want: plug into the electric revolution, plug into the nonpolluting future.
We have a choice. We can fight for lower costs, good jobs, and a livable future. We can invest in the industries of tomorrow instead of getting locked into the polluting past. We can stop exporting American fossil fuels abroad and driving up our own prices for our own consumers here in America. We can ban fossil fuel executives and lobbyists from being able to use our energy-related Agencies for their own personal pocketbooks or, as I call for in my ``BIG OIL from the Cabinet Act,'' they can't work; they can't work for the Energy Department. They can't be inside taking over the agenda. We can strengthen the low-income heating and cooling relief program so that the poorest Americans don't have to put so much of their paycheck toward heating and cooling.
We can safeguard energy efficiency standards for appliances so that people pay less on their bills. We can do that. We can remove the tax loopholes that prevent the oil and gas companies from paying their fair share.
We are talking about tax breaks for oil companies that have been on the books for 100 years. They call creating a climate bank socialism. What do you call 100 years of tax breaks for the oil, gas, and coal industry? That is socialism. That is allowing for a noncompetitive marketplace.
So the new technologies, the clean technologies, solar and wind, electric battery technologies, they can't be deployed. We can remove those tax breaks. That is what we should be debating here.
But at a minimum, we can't take away the competition. They are monopolists. They are all oligopolists. That is all it is. They want to stifle new technology. They don't have any new ideas, except making themselves rich.
If Republicans are here tonight looking for revenue to pay for the things that they want to pay for, let's start with ending those tax breaks now and having oil companies finally pay their fair share.
Ultimately, we can stand up to the corporate greed that is bleeding working families dry and demand a future where energy policy serves the people, not just the powerful. And that is exactly what we are going to do because the clean energy revolution isn't just coming; it is already here. And it is scaring the living daylights out of the oil, gas, and coal industry. They are petrified.
It is happening in red States, 80 percent, and blue States. It is lowering costs, creating jobs, making communities stronger. No amount of corruption, no amount of grift, no amount of fossil fuel money is going to stop it, and we are not going to back down. And we will not allow the Trump administration to sell out the American people, especially young people. We are not going to allow their future to get sold out. We are not going to surrender the way the oil, gas, and coal industry wants us to surrender because this is not about the highest bidder who can loot the programs like the National Climate Bank to pay for their billionaire tax breaks.
We will fight for the workers building America's clean energy future. We will fight for all families, ensuring they have lower energy bills, cleaner air. And we will fight for a livable future, not just for ourselves but for all coming children and grandchildren right now.
This is not just a political fight; it is a moral fight. This is about justice. This is about fairness. This is about the very future of our country. We cannot back down now. This is the time. This is the place. We must wage this battle on behalf of the coming generations or else the devastation will become catastrophically unimaginable.
So let's have this fight this year about our future. I think that is the least we owe to the young people in our country.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from South Carolina.
Mr. President, I have two unanimous consent requests. I ask unanimous consent that for the duration of S. Con. Res. 7, the budget resolution for fiscal year 2025, the majority and the Democratic managers of the resolution, while seated or standing at the managers' desk, be permitted to deliver floor remarks, retrieve, review, and edit documents, and send email and other data communications from text displayed on a wireless personal assistance device and tablet devices.
I further ask unanimous consent that the use of calculators be permitted on the floor during consideration of the budget resolution; further, that the staff be permitted to make technical
Further, I ask unanimous consent for 2 minutes of debate, equally divided, prior to each vote during consideration of S. Con. Res. 7.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
Without objection, it is so ordered.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Rhode Island.
Mr. President, the rhetoric of Donald Trump and Republicans on the budget is all over the map. Here is what is important to know. Republicans want $4.5 trillion in tax cuts, primarily for the richest Americans, paid for with sharp cuts in programs that help average Americans and the most vulnerable in our society.
Yesterday, I spoke on the floor about one of the most cynical parts of this resolution: gutting healthcare for children, seniors, and Americans with disabilities through extreme cuts to Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program, or CHIP.
Donald Trump said that Medicaid and Medicare would be off limits, but the budgets put out by Republicans indicate something quite different.
During the debate on this budget, Republicans will have the opportunity to vote on amendments to show where they stand, and, more importantly, who they stand with--everyday Americans or the roughly 750 billionaires in the United States. That is the stakes--hundreds of millions of nurses, firefighters, office workers, systems administrators, salespeople, and their children versus the interests of roughly 750 people whose wealth grows by millions every single day.
Ripping health coverage away from Americans may be the worst part of this budget, but it is far from the only bad provision. Instead, this budget is part of a broader decision by President Trump and congressional Republicans to force American families to pay more for food, healthcare, and education--again, all so the wealthiest Americans can get a huge tax break.
The ``big, beautiful bill'' that Donald Trump favors is expected to gut Medicaid by at least $880 billion dollars. The cuts would be devastating for the 80 million Americans who rely on Medicaid and CHIP, who are almost entirely children, seniors, people with disabilities, and working men and women who depend upon Medicaid protection. Forcing struggling Americans to pay more for health insurance or to lose health coverage altogether is heartless policy and a slap in the face to the millions of families who are struggling to make ends meet.
And yet Medicaid is not the only target in this resolution. Food for the dinner table is also on the chopping block with cuts of reportedly at least $230 billion to SNAP. Each of us has seen news reports about the long lines at food pantries in our States. Who hasn't heard that the price of eggs is up 15 percent in the last month alone? Who doesn't remember, also, the campaign promise of Donald Trump to bring grocery prices down on the first day of his term?
Yet here we are with a Trump-backed bill that makes groceries even more expensive for 42 million Americans who qualify for SNAP. Gutting this program, the SNAP program, doesn't lower prices, but it sure will increase the problem of hunger in the richest country in the world.
Put simply, President Trump's ``big, beautiful bill'' is forcing vulnerable American families to pay more for food and healthcare. Such policies directly contradict the President's campaign promise that ``starting on day one, we will end inflation and make America affordable again.
Republicans can't dodge the truth: $880 billion in Medicaid cuts and $230 billion in SNAP cuts will mean more kids go hungry, more seniors can't afford lifesaving treatment, and more households are forced into poverty.
The budget resolution's cost-raising trifecta ends with higher education costs. Instead of making college more affordable and offering young Americans more pathways to prosperity, this Republican budget will increase the cost of student loans and cut other programs that help Americans offset the costs of education.
Education cuts come at, perhaps, the worst time. Most jobs that provide living wages require some postsecondary education or training. A college education, which has long been a ticket to the middle class, is now too expensive for too many families. Meanwhile, the main source of government higher education aid for low- and moderate-income families, the Pell grant, has lost most of its purchasing power. At its peak in 1975 and 1976, the Pell grant--named after my predecessor, Senator Claiborne Pell--covered more than 75 percent of the cost of attendance at a public 4-year college. Today, it covers less than 30 percent.
Unsurprisingly, over 40 million Americans now have student loan debt, which prevents them, in many cases, from purchasing a home or moving to areas where they might be able to use their talents more effectively, and has many other consequences.
Forcing Americans to pay even more for college makes higher education less attainable, weakens our labor force, and will have long-term repercussions for American families, American prosperity, and American security.
Now, many Americans may be wondering: What is the point of all of these cuts?
It is not about reforming programs. There has been no serious cost- benefit analysis of any of these programs. All they have looked at is, What does it cost, and how can we use that money to fund taxes?
That is not government reform. That is not wise government. That is just ripping off most Americans to satisfy 750 billionaires.
And it is not even about reducing the deficit. As I said, it is just about unlocking a fast-track way to reward the wealthiest Americans-- some of whom are now in the Trump administration.
Republicans have been pretty clear. The central purpose of their budget is to permanently extend the failed 2017 Trump tax bill, which was an unpopular giveaway to the wealthiest Americans. Nearly half of the benefits from extending the Trump tax bill will flow just to the richest Americans, those earning $450,000 or more each year.
President Trump promised on the campaign trail that ``starting on day one, we will end inflation and make America affordable again.'' But we are now on day 32, and costs have not come down. In fact, inflation hit 3 percent for the first time in months this January, and the President took no action while egg prices hit record highs--a particular point of pain for many families.
And just like this budget resolution, the President has been intent on forcing families to pay more, not less, for everyday goods. In just 1 month, the President has implemented or threatened tariff taxes on nearly every item imaginable.
Nonpartisan experts are clear: These tariff taxes will not ``make America affordable again.'' The Peterson Institute projects the tariff taxes on Canada, Mexico, and China alone would cost U.S. households $1,200 a year--a tariff tax. Yale researchers have found the President's threat to place reciprocal tariffs on our trading partners would cost families $2,600. Analysts at the investment bank Jefferies projects car prices will jump by $2,700 under the President's Canada and Mexico tariffs, while the National Association of Home Builders found President Trump's lumber tariffs during his first term--which he promised to raise again--in his first term, raised housing prices by $9,000, and he still wants to do it again.
We have also heard a lot about Mr. Musk's DOGE and fraud, waste, and abuse, but that operation doesn't seem to be about preventing fraud, waste, and abuse, or lowering costs.
By the way, if you were really interested in eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse in the Federal Government, why would you fire all the inspectors general? They are independent agents who are charged specifically to root out waste and corruption in the Federal
In fact, the other aspect of DOGE is just to create mayhem to impact so much of government: firing responsible staffers who are handling key issues, weapons--nuclear weapons.
I was in the airport, on Monday evening, flying down from Providence, and a young lady came up to me and said she was fired a few days ago from the National Nuclear Security Administration because she was a probationary hire. But guess what. When they discovered that they could not protect nuclear weapons--not do sensitive maintenance on them so that they would be ready for deterrence--she was suddenly called back. Not very smart.
DOGE is also trying to fire researchers who are out to cure Alzheimer's disease, trying to get rid of experts who fight bird flu, and seeking access to computer systems at the IRS and the Social Security Administration--which contain personal and financial information for each and every single American.
I don't think most Americans want Elon Musk to know all of their financial information, their personal information, maybe even healthcare information. But that could happen.
It is not combating fraud, all of these things. In fact, it is close to--particularly with the IRS information--committing fraud.
Indeed, the budget resolution we will vote on tonight is just further evidence that Republicans and President Trump have no plan and no real interest in lowering costs for families, and I think that is wrong.
Now, I am all for tax cuts, but it should be tax cuts for the middle class, tax cuts for those struggling with high prices, and tax cuts for small businesses, not 750 billionaires. Forcing regular Americans to cover tax cuts to the richest Americans is not the sort of economic policy we should be pursuing in the Senate.
I urge my colleagues to rethink which Americans deserve their support.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Washington.
Mr. President, starting last week, the Trump administration began firing hundreds of Federal Aviation Administration employees. Today, we had a hearing in the Commerce Committee to talk about what kind of a key Deputy Secretary we need at the DOT, and we asked questions about this.
But what is perplexing is, while the American people were watching in horror as a Delta Airlines plane flipped over on the Toronto runway, President Trump was focused instead on purging dedicated FAA employees from the Federal workforce, something that I believe makes us less safe in the skies. Among those fired were aeronautical information specialists, legal instrument examiners, telecommunication specialists--all of whom played a key role in supporting the work of air traffic controllers.
In fact, there was a story today in Politico. The headline is, ``Air traffic controllers cannot do their work without us.'' That is a quote from the article. And inside the article, a statement, reading from the article, ``One of the people last week let go was an aeronautical information specialist, a member of a team outside Washington whose job it was to create maps and highways in the sky, the pre-planned routes that pilots control and controllers use to guide airplanes.''
So it is very perplexing that we have had these accidents, and now, we have an administration that wants to cut people at the FAA. This headline here refers to the fact that the last Trump administration actually blocked safety rules, and that is what today's Commerce hearing was about for the No. 2 person at the Department of Transportation, the people that served in the first Trump administration, and why did they block these safety rules?
In fact, some of these safety rules, which would have required manufacturers to have better safety, were written and proposed by the FAA--but when the Trump administration came in and then 9 days after the first MAX crash--somehow, the rule that was set to move forward was pulled.
So now, we are seeing an administration that is being, in my mind, thoughtless to the incidents that we have now seen in aviation and saying it is okay to cut people at the FAA. I disagree.
The administration has said that it is no big deal because it is 1 percent of the workforce. Now, I know the objective is to give a $4 trillion tax break to corporations and ultrawealthy people, but I don't understand how making the skies less safe helps you in that agenda. It doesn't. The individual lives and safety of the American people are worth way more.
These people that got fired are not just a bunch of junior hires, no--one news report stated that ``More than 130 of those eliminated held jobs that directly or indirectly support the air traffic controllers. They support the facilities and the technologies they use to keep the planes and their passengers safe.''
So you are going to tell me that a telecommunication specialist who supports the maintenance of key communications technology used by controllers is not important to aviation safety?
Are you going to tell me that the legal instrument examiners who ensure that the pilots are medically fit to fly are not important to aviation safety? Are you going to tell me that the air traffic controllers--the same workers that originally were not exempted from the administration's hiring freeze, but then, only after the fatal collision at DCA put a spotlight on the issue, they finally exempted controllers from the freeze.
Most astonishing of all, though, is that the administration has let go of aeronautical information specialists who evaluate and prepare navigational charts and helicopter routes used by both controllers and pilots.
Now, we have just had this midair collision in the DCA area, and what was it about? A route that didn't seem to be a decision somebody had made to let these planes fly too close together? Made no sense.
How did that route get approved? Who at the FAA said it was a good idea to allow the Department of Defense to fly in the same air space as a plane landing on runway 33 at DCA airport?
So mapping helicopter routes in a busy air space, I think, is critically important--and not somebody who should have been fired this week from a job.
Our aviation system is not a place where you can shortchange workers. This SMS rule proves it. This rule, which would have mandated that manufacturers of aviation implement a Safety Management System, constantly approving on analytical basis, is critical information about how to maintain safety. But it never got implemented.
So I am concerned that an administration that in the previous Trump years thwarted the safety rule and now is firing people at the FAA after these crashes are going to continue to erode the aviation safety net.
Surprisingly, after the helicopter crash with the CRJ from American Airlines--there was a lot of discussion about how and why a military helicopter would be in the same space as a CRJ regional jet trying to land in DCA from Kansas. One of the questions asked was, why was there not this Next Generation technology that would allow the helicopter to be detected? This included a DOD helicopter in the DCA collision incident.
The issue is that the controllers needed this information, but in an exemption done in the Trump administration, gave them an exemption to do this. And this week, we find out in a letter that they never, ever use ADS-B as a way to help us in our navigation safety.
Air traffic controllers themselves know that these firings are anti- safety. Ken Greenwood, a constituent of mine in Washington State, who is a former air traffic controller, wrote me on Sunday about how important these workers are. According to him, he said, ``These technicians and engineers maintain every piece of equipment that keeps our flying public safe, keeps radars and instrument landing to air traffic controllers on automation. FAA technicians undergo years of specialized training to maintain critical missions and systems and cannot be replaced quickly. In the 35 years since I began my controller career, we have
``To the contrary, it's a challenge to keep them in these jobs. Once our aviation system infrastructure is compromised, it takes decades to take it back, and money will not be saved and lives may be lost.''
I thank Mr. Greenwood for his service. I hope the administration is listening. I hope that you figure out now is not this time to shortchange aviation. Unfortunately, right now, we don't even have a confirmed FAA Administrator. They are critical to this job. We had a strong Administrator, Mike Whitaker, who was confirmed 98-0 by this body. But that didn't matter to Elon Musk, who went after Administrator Whitaker because he dared to fine SpaceX for not following the rules, and as a result, the FAA now does not have an Administrator at one of its most critical points in decades.
All the firing of employees and dangling resignations and trying to get people to resign to save money to give a tax break of $4 trillion to corporations and the ultrawealthy is not what we should be doing.
We should be working hard on aviation safety. We should not be rolling back safety rules. We should be enforcing safety rules and implementing them as fast as we can that says this body, this body knows that aviation safety is a priority.
Mr. President, I appreciate the opportunity to speak.
I returned from Ukraine earlier this week, where I saw both the suffering that the Ukrainian people have endured over the past 3 years at Putin's hand and the courage they have forged to save their country and their children--the suburban town of Bucha, where Russian troops tortured and massacred hundreds of civilians in the first day of Putin's unprovoked invasion; the shattered children's hospital Putin's missiles nearly destroyed; apartment buildings in central Kyiv struck by Putin's drones; and lawyers searching for the thousands of Ukrainian children who have been kidnapped from their parents by Russian soldiers.
By most estimates, at least 40,000 Ukrainian troops have been killed in battle and another 380,000 have been wounded since Putin's invasion. A draft of the general population in that country means that war has scarred nearly every neighborhood in this massive country. In cemeteries all across Ukraine, fresh graves piled with dirt and flowers testify to their sacrifice. At least 12,000 civilians have been killed.
Amid this torment, the Ukrainian people continue to send troops to the front in the dead of winter and to mobilize to keep their businesses and their homes and their kids in school. They did not ask for Putin's thuggish invasion.
From the very beginning, our intelligence Agencies have told us something that Putin never has understood--that the Ukrainian people will never submit to him; that if every weapon were denied them, they would fight with sticks and stones and their bare hands to protect their country from any invading tyrant but especially from Vladimir Putin of Russia.
Fortunately for Ukraine and for the rest of the free world, they have not had to fight this invasion with their bare hands. The American people have steadfastly supported them. We have sent $66 billion in military aid and $51 billion in nonmilitary aid. That is a lot of money, but it represents just 0.52 percent of our GPD. Unlike the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, not a single American soldier has been sent to fight.
Our European allies have stepped up as well. Together, they have actually committed more than the United States. But their sums represent a much larger percentage of their economy--which makes sense because they are closer to the danger that Russia poses. At the same time, even farther allies, like Australia and Japan, continue to support Ukraine as well.
Our allies and our partners know the stakes of this war. They know that supporting Ukraine means standing with people that are willing to fight for the country they love. They know that rolling over to Putin will embolden other dictators around the world, especially Xi Jinping of China.
The rest of us may not need this reminder, but the people sitting at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue apparently do since they seem to be the only ones in the free world who do not understand the stakes of this war.
Over the last few days, President Trump has chosen the side of tyranny of Putin, of Xi, and profoundly undermined our national security. Like someone reading Russian Twitter bots, he deliberately and falsely accused Ukraine of starting the war. He called Zelenskyy-- the freedom fighter who is leading the fight in Ukraine--a dictator.
Mr. President, he invited Russia to rejoin the G7, a group of the world's most powerful democracies that has met regularly since the 1970s and which threw out Russia after Putin invaded Ukraine in 2014.
Before negotiations have even started, President Trump's Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, took Ukraine's potential NATO membership off the table. And just this week, the Trump administration held talks with Russia in Saudi Arabia without the decency of even inviting Ukraine to the table. It pains me to say it, but our old colleague Secretary of State Marco Rubio even suggested that the United States should lift sanctions on and bolster economic collaboration with Russia while Russia shells civilians in Ukraine.
Some of our Republican colleagues believe that it doesn't matter what President Trump says, only what he does; that it doesn't matter when he says that he is going to send American troops to Gaza or seize the Panama Canal or falsely accuses Ukraine of starting this war. But a President's words matter more than most, and President Trump's harmful words and policies will only embolden Putin. They will further convince Putin that he is winning, that time is on his side, and that he has no reason to accept a peace deal that is anything less than overwhelmingly favorable to his maximalist desire.
In literally every one of his comments on Ukraine, President Trump has undermined our national security. Every time he opens his mouth, he weakens our bargaining position and makes the world more dangerous.
We all want this war to end. On that, the President and I agree. But for the sake of Ukraine and the sake of the free world, it must only end with a just and enduring peace.
While the United States and our allies and Ukraine work together to establish the terms of the peace and get ready to negotiate with Putin, the Ukrainians are going to have to keep fighting throughout this winter season--this freezing winter--where the civilian population is just doing everything they can to keep their houses and their businesses and their schools warm and livable. The Ukrainian soldiers are not asking to be relieved of this terrible burden. They are embracing it because they know that any cease-fire without meaningful security guarantees will allow Putin to rebuild his weakened army and attack again and again and again.
Obviously--obviously--everyone in this Chamber knows that any meaningful negotiation has to include Ukraine. Doing anything else, as the Trump administration just did in Saudi Arabia, would be an insult to the memory of every soldier who has laid down their life in this war.
I cannot claim to know Donald Trump well. It is obvious that I deeply regret his election, but I don't blame him for winning the election. He beat my party, the Democratic Party, badly in two elections. He even found a way to get elected after he was the first President in American history to take away a fundamental civil right from the American people--a woman's right to choose. He still got elected again. That is extraordinary, and it is a testament, I am sorry to say, to the Democratic Party's weaknesses and to his own skills and talents, particularly in this era.
I don't doubt that his experience as a reality TV star taught him things that helped him get elected. I am much less certain, however, that his checkered commercial real estate background prepared him to negotiate a hotel deal with Vladimir Putin, much less a deal that concerns the fate of the free world.
Donald Trump is not the only person with private sector experience in our
I have never seen a worse case of deal fever than Donald Trump's approach to the coming negotiation with Vladimir Putin. Never in my life have I seen it, and it has never been more important. I doubt the world has seen such an ill-conceived pursuit of negotiation since the infamous 1938 Munich Agreement in which the UK and France and Italy allowed Nazi Germany to annex part of Czechoslovakia. The damage he is doing is not only that we will get a worse deal; it is that we will undermine Ukraine's position on the frontlines. Without security guarantees from the United States and from Europe, Putin will only bide his time, regroup, and invade again.
After the fictions that President Trump has spewed about who started this war, not to mention the chorus of defeatism from his Vice President, his Secretary of Defense, and the Director of National Intelligence, does anyone--does anybody--including Putin and Xi Jinping, doubt what would happen if Putin invaded again? This is less the ``Art of the Deal,'' I am afraid, than it is the ``art of defeat.'' After all of these years, after all of these battles, it would be truly pathetic for the United States, the world's most powerful country, to accept a fever-induced deal with Russia, like the Munich Agreement.
Look it up--not, perhaps, on Twitter but in your much more reliable 10th grade Western civ textbook. After that deal, Hitler did not stop at Czechoslovakia but continued his war on Europe. Left unchecked, Putin will do the same thing, as Putin's propagandists have told us repeatedly.
To make matters worse, anyone concerned about Beijing's potential takeover of Taiwan knows that there will be no better test of how the free world will respond to Xi's potential invasion than how we respond to Putin. Come to think of it, if China does invade Taiwan, how would we evaluate the leadership capacity of an American President who claimed that it was Taiwan who had invaded China, not the other way around? That is the level of duplicity that we are seeing from Donald Trump right now.
So why the deal fever? That is a good question. President Trump's aspiration for a Nobel Peace Prize is well known. He can hang it next to his gold-plated faucets and his first editions of the ``Art of the Deal.'' But if he heard from people in this Chamber, even he might think twice if he understood that walking down this path of appeasement makes him more likely to be remembered like Neville Chamberlain.
Negotiations can end this war in a just manner only if Ukraine can negotiate them from a place of strength.
The American people have been incredibly generous in our support of Ukraine, but, even so, this war has cost us less than 0.6 percent of our GDP while allowing us to send Ukraine old weapons when we invest in our own cutting-edge replacements, permitting us to learn from Ukraine's extraordinary innovation on the frontlines and its world- class use of new warfighting technologies, such as drones, and boosting our economy without costing a single American soldier's life.
We and our European allies have to continue surging military assistance to Ukraine, not forever but so Ukraine is best positioned to make this deal not just for Ukraine but for us and for free countries all over the world. Contrary to what many people believed at the outset of this war and what President Trump apparently believes today, Putin's invasion of Ukraine has been costly to him--very costly to him. Three years of the Ukrainian peoples' tenacity and courage have degraded the Russian military. As we speak, Russia is losing twice the number of soldiers every month as Putin's war continues. In total, Putin has squandered more than $200 billion and suffered a staggering 700,000 in casualties at the hands of Ukrainian patriots. It is three times the number of soldiers Russia lost in Afghanistan--a country famously regarded as the graveyard of empires.
We didn't ask for this war, neither did Ukraine, but Putin is in a weaker position to threaten Europe today than when he first swung his iron fist at the Ukrainian people. The last thing we should do now is weaken our negotiating position when we and Europe have so much at stake--when the world has so much at stake.
Putin believes he can beat Ukraine not because he thinks Ukrainians are weak but because he thinks we are weak, and he thinks President Trump is a pushover and a sucker. At the beginning of his invasion of Ukraine, Putin, who was surrounded as tyrants are and as dictators are by yes-men who are scared to tell them the truth about their own weaknesses and, in this case, Russia's weaknesses, made three fundamental miscalculations going into the war.
One was about the strength of his own army. He had invested billions of dollars planning for the invasion, but much of it was siphoned off because of Russia's endemic corruption.
The second miscalculation was about the Ukrainian people's patriotism and willingness to fight to the death. No matter how President Trump tries to undermine this sacrifice, the honor roll of history will forever--will forever--record Ukraine's courage.
Putin's third miscalculation was that the world would roll over and allow him to invade his peaceful neighbor. Unlike the other two mistakes, he had evidence for the final point. After all, when he began his invasion in 2014 by lawlessly sending his ``little green men'' to occupy Crimea, which is part of Ukraine, the world did nothing. The United States did nothing. He thought the world would do nothing when he invaded again.
It turned out, unlike Putin, we actually learned from our mistake. The free world has stood up to Putin this time around. We have supplied arms and other support while the Ukrainian people have died on the frontline of their country and for the West. Their cemeteries are bulging with fresh graves. They have earned the free world's support.
But even more important to us and our allies, we have protected our national security and affirmed our commitment to the post-World War II rules-based international order. How this ends will determine whether that order persists and whether the United States continues to provide the leadership our parents and grandparents supplied since World War II. World War II was another war started by a tyrant, but it was ended by the world's democracies.
Many Americans inside this Chamber and outside understand the stakes. They know, as Ronald Reagan proclaimed 40 years ago, in advancing freedom, Americans carry a special burden: a belief in the dignity of man and that freedom is America's core and that we should never deny it nor forsake it. This is what we risk today by withdrawing our support of Ukraine. We will abandon both the Ukrainian people and the core of what America stands for, and we cannot do it.
This is personal for me and so many of us. My mom was born a Jew in Warsaw in 1938. She and her parents and an aunt were the only ones who survived the Holocaust. The Nazis killed everyone else in her family. Authoritarian aggression left an indelible mark on my family and countless other families in Ukraine and Poland in the 1930s and 1940s, where Stalin and Hitler killed together 16 million human beings. These victims of fascism died, believing that they were invisible to the rest of the world, forgotten people in unforgettable years.
The lesson I learned from my mom is that the United States can never let that happen again by trying to appease a dictator the way that Chamberlain did. That is not apocryphal, or a made-up story. I had dinner last night with my mom. She is 86 years old. She can't believe that she has lived long enough--I am happy that she has, but she can't believe that she has lived long enough to see another tyrant's invasion of their peaceful, democratic European neighbor. But she hasn't
Even if President Trump continues to ignore reality, my mother and millions of Americans who make up the ``greatest generation'' understand the United States has a special responsibility.
It has always been far too easy for some in high office to ignore their moral responsibility to people sacrificing their lives a continent away on behalf of our shared values and interests. History occasionally records their names--like Chamberlain's--in blood.
It is particularly easy today to play to self-defeating isolationist tendencies in the daily headlines, to make rash comments that are foolish and unpatriotic and that Russian trolls spread like wildfire across social media platforms. It is far too easy to do the wrong thing. It always has been.
It is a lot harder, but necessary, for the living to stand for freedom and democracy and those willing to give the last measure of themselves for those eternal values. At this moment, the United States is the only country who can lead the free world against these dictators, against these tyrants.
The Americans who serve in this Chamber must fulfill our responsibility to the American people and demand the President fulfill his patriotic responsibility in the days ahead. Everything now is in our hands. The moment demands that the United States of America lead-- for the sake of the Ukrainian people, for our own national security, and for democracy around the world. Our failure will not just be damaging; it will be devastating.
Mr. President, we live in difficult times, in times where people throughout our country are experiencing a great deal of anxiety for a number of reasons. And in the midst of all of that, it is important that we not forget what is taking place not only in Ukraine but back home here in the United States.
And back home, right now, tens of millions of Americans are struggling economically to keep their heads above water. Mr. President, 60 percent of our people are living paycheck to paycheck, 85 million are uninsured or underinsured, and we have the highest rate of childhood poverty of almost any major nation on Earth.
And as someone who has visited senior centers throughout the State of Vermont and has spoken to seniors throughout our country, I can tell you that there is a significant level of fear and anxiety among the older people in this country with regard to what is happening right here in DC. When we have a President of the United States and Republicans who are talking about massive cuts to Medicaid, let's understand--and seniors do understand--that we are not just talking about throwing millions of kids off the healthcare that they have at a time when we are the only major country not to provide healthcare to all people--not just kids off their healthcare, we are talking about massive cuts to community health centers, which receive over 40 percent of their funding from Medicaid and where millions of seniors go to get the primary care they need.
And at a time when we already have a major crisis in nursing home availability, let us understand that Medicaid provides funding for two out of every three seniors who live in nursing homes. In other words, massive cuts to Medicaid would be a disaster for senior citizens throughout this country.
But it is not just Medicaid cuts that worry our seniors. Today, quite unbelievably--and we don't talk about this anywhere near enough--25 percent of people in our country who are 65 years of age or older are trying to survive on incomes of $15,000 a year or less. I myself do not know how anybody, let alone a senior with healthcare needs, can survive on $15,000 a year, but that is what 25 percent of our seniors are trying to do.
Mr. President, this issue of so many seniors struggling to get by, struggling to heat their homes, struggling to buy the food or the prescription drugs they need, this is an issue we must address, and it is a crisis that is unacceptable in the richest country in the history of the world.
That is why I am proud to tell you that within the next several weeks, I, along with a number of cosponsors, will be introducing legislation that expands Social Security benefits and extends the solvency of Social Security for decades.
We are hearing a lot of talk about cutting Social Security. We should not be talking about cutting Social Security; we must be talking about expanding Social Security benefits. And the legislation that I will introduce would do just that. It would expand Social Security benefits by $2,400 a year, and it would not raise taxes by one penny on the bottom 93 percent of Americans, those who make less than $250,000 a year.
And how do we do that? By lifting the cap at applying the Social Security payroll tax on all income above $250,000. Unbelievably, under current law, a billionaire pays the same amount of money into Social Security as someone who makes $176,000 a year. Elon Musk, worth $400 billion, pays the same amount into Social Security as somebody who makes $176,000. That is because, under Social Security, there is an absurd cap on taxable income. If we lifted that cap and made sure that millionaires and billionaires paid the same percentage of their income into Social Security as the working class of this country, we could extend the life of Social Security for generations to come and lift millions of seniors out of poverty.
Further, when we talk about the needs of senior citizens in this country, I want to mention that I will also be introducing legislation to expand Medicare to cover dental, vision, and hearing. It is unacceptable that millions of seniors are unable to read a newspaper because they cannot afford eyeglasses, can't have conversations with their grandchildren because they can't afford hearing aids, and have trouble eating because they cannot afford dentures. That should not be happening in the United States of America in the year 2025.
Expanding Medicare to cover dental, vision, and hearing is an extremely popular concept. Poll after poll shows that 80 percent of the American people--Democrats, Republicans, Independents--support doing just that.
Mr. President, when we talk about the anxieties that the American people are now experiencing, it is not just, to say the least, senior citizens. All across this country, there is a growing fear that the Trump administration is undermining the Constitution of our country, a Constitution which has kept us a free nation, an example, a model for the rest of the world for the last 250 years.
During the last month alone, President Trump has attempted to usurp the powers of Congress, illegally and unconstitutionally refusing to fund programs passed by Congress. He has illegally destroyed agencies like USAID and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that were created by Congress. And under the leadership of Mr. Musk, they have illegally and inappropriately gained access to tax data and Social Security data of millions of Americans, et cetera, et cetera. Every day, they are acting in an illegal and unconstitutional manner.
And I would say this--and I don't know if people take it seriously or not; I do--just this week, President Trump tweeted:
Wow. In other words, Mr. Trump sees himself, the President of the United States, as above the law and immune from the basic rules of the Constitution and the separation of powers that have governed this country since the founding.
Hey, anything I want to do--I am President--I can do it. It doesn't matter what Congress says. It doesn't matter what the Constitution says. It doesn't matter what the rule of law is about. Hey, I am the President. I am trying to save the country. I don't need to hear from anybody else.
That is not what Americans fought and died to preserve. That is not what this country is about.
And with regard to the movement toward authoritarianism, let me say a few words about an area that I think has not gotten much attention at all, and that is Trump's attack on the free press, which is protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution. The Founding Fathers of this country considered freedom of speech and free
Mr. Trump has sued CBS and its parent company, Paramount, for $20 billion because he didn't like how they edited an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris. The company is now reportedly considering settling the lawsuit--and I certainly hope they do not do that--out of fear of retaliation from Trump's FCC.
He did not like a television program on CBS. Well, many of us don't like television programs on CBS or NBC or FOX or ABC, but you don't sue somebody for $20 billion because you didn't like the program. And, obviously, the intention of that lawsuit is clear, and that is that CBS and every other network and media outlet will now have to look over their shoulder: Oh, my goodness, we are saying something critical of Donald Trump. Is he going to sue us for 5 billion, for 10 billion? Is he going to drive us out of business? Maybe we should not run that program. Maybe we should not do that investigative report.
Not just CBS. In recent times, he has sued ABC. He has sued Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram. He has sued the Des Moines Register. What crime did a little newspaper in Iowa make? What was their crime? They ran a poll which turned out, in retrospect, to be inaccurate.
So pollsters all over America, be careful. There was a poll coming out just today--I saw it--that Trump's unfavorables are going up. Hey, you may be sued. Pull that poll.
I mean, how absurd is that? And what kind of threat is it to freedom of speech and expression in this country?
And when we talk about the Trump administration's movement toward authoritarianism, we should take note of another remarkable and troubling set of events that happened just this week, and my colleague from Colorado spoke at length on that. We saw the President of the United States openly aligning himself with the dictator of Russia--the dictator of Russia--Vladimir Putin, to undermine the independence of Ukraine and abandon our closest democratic allies in Europe.
Trump made it clear that he sees one of the world's most brutal dictators as his pal and our longtime democratic allies as his enemies. It appears that Mr. Trump wants a world that is safe for authoritarians and oligarchs but dangerous and unstable for democracies.
And when we talk about authoritarianism, we have got to mention the growing phenomenon in this country of the Big Lie. The Big Lie.
Say something that is blatantly untrue, repeat it over and over again, and then blast that lie out on social media until people actually believe it.
Let me mention one of the very big lies that Trump said recently regarding the war in Ukraine earlier this week. The President said that Ukraine started the war. Trump said that Ukraine started the war. Really? That is, as I hope every Member of the Senate knows, an absolute lie.
Russia invaded Ukraine twice; first, in 2014 and then again on February 24, 2022. And on that date, February 24, 2022, Putin's tanks and troops rolled into Ukraine. And on that day, Russian aircraft began bombing targets all over Ukraine. Russia started the war. Period. End of discussion. Trump is lying.
Since Putin's invasion, over 1 million people have been killed or injured every single day. Russia continues to rain down hundreds of missiles and drones on Ukrainian cities. Putin's forces have massacred civilians and kidnapped thousands of Ukrainian children, bringing them back to Russian reeducation camps. These atrocities led the International Criminal Court to issue an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin in 2023 as a war criminal.
Further, Trump called Ukrainian President Zelenskyy--not Putin, but Zelenskyy--a dictator, and that obviously is not true either. Zelenskyy won 75 percent of the vote in free elections, and in the midst of a brutal war, Ukraine's Parliament continues to function and open and unfettered political debate takes place.
Trump recently claimed that our European allies have done little to support Ukraine in its fight against Putin's invasion. He said the United States has contributed three times more than Europe. Well, that is another lie. In fact, Europe has provided more aid to Ukraine than the United States.
But it is not just that Trump is lying again. That is not new. It is what this all reveals about where we want to take our country and where we want the world to be moving--what direction.
Trump is cozying up to Vladimir Putin. So who is Putin, and what kind of world does Putin want to build? Putin is a dictator who crushed Russia's movement toward democracy after the end of the Cold War. Russia now holds sham elections where Putin wins 90 percent of the vote, and authorities there do not even try to hide their ballot stuffing.
There is no freedom of speech or free media in Putin's Russia. Protests are violently suppressed. Tens of thousands of people are imprisoned for protesting Putin's invasion of Ukraine.
Political dissidents are harassed or thrown into jail. The bravest people like Alexei Navalny are killed outright. Hundreds of thousands of Russians have fled Putin's Russia since his invasion of Ukraine.
That is the Russian leader that Donald Trump admires. But my Republican colleagues know all of this. And what is particularly disturbing to me--and I believe the American people--is my colleagues, my Republican colleagues, understand and know that Trump is lying; they know that Russia started the war, not Ukraine; they know that Putin is a dictator, not Zelenskyy, but their silence has been overwhelming on this issue.
I cannot tell you how many times I have sat here on the floor and I have listened to my Republican colleagues come to the Senate to condemn Vladimir Putin and his brutal invasion of Ukraine. Many of their remarks were right on the money. They were perceptive, and they were right.
And my simple question to my Republican colleagues right now is: Where are you now? Last I heard, this is still a democracy. Last I heard, we are still allowed to disagree with the President of the United States, even if he is a member of your own party.
Last I heard, we are allowed to call out the President when he lies-- blatantly lies--even if he is a member of our own party. And what really bothers me is I know that many of my Republican colleagues understand all of this.
I just want to give you an example of what is going on right now. Let me just quote a few of my Republican colleagues in statements they have made since Putin's invasion of Ukraine.
These are Republican Members of the U.S. Senate, and I am not going to mention names right now. I don't want to embarrass anyone, put anybody on the spot. These are quotes.
One leading Republican said:
That Republican colleague was obviously right.
Another Republican said:
That is a Republican colleague.
A third Republican colleague:
Fourth Republican--and this is just a few of the quotes. I could probably come up with dozens of quotes. Fourth Republican said when the war began:
That Senator later said:
Just recently that very same Senator said:
A fifth Republican--fifth Republican colleague here in the Senate called Putin a thug and compared him to Hitler. He said:
That is what my Republican colleagues have said time and time again.
This is an extraordinarily pivotal moment in American history, and all of us must have the courage to stand up for truth, to stand up for democracy, to oppose authoritarianism. This is the moment.
Mr. President, families lose, billionaires win. That is the proposition at the heart of the Republican budget resolution. Now, this plan is going to be explored tonight through a series of amendments.
As the American people watch how we vote on these amendments, it will become clearer and clearer what it is all about; families lose, billionaires win.
We will see tonight that Democrats vote against irreparable increases to the deficit, and Republicans vote to explode the deficit.
We will see tonight, Democrats vote against tax giveaways to the billionaires, and Republicans vote for tax giveaways to the billionaires.
We will see tonight, Democrats vote again and again to protect programs that support families while Republicans vote time and time again to slash those programs, those programs that families depend on to be on their feet and to thrive, to move into the middle class, to move beyond the middle class, to know with confidence that their children will have a strong foundation for growing up.
That is what we will see tonight; families lose, and billionaires win. Democrats will fight this terrible vision for America in every single way we can.
Now, our Republican colleagues earlier on the floor said: Oh, no, no. This bill is nothing except a little bit about border security and national security.
If that were true, then why isn't this a conversation in the spending committee, the Appropriations Committee? If that were true, why did our Republican colleagues repeatedly block bipartisan border and Defense bills?
Last year, the Appropriations Committee passed a strong bipartisan defense bill. Let's pass it. Last year, the Senate negotiated a bipartisan border deal, and Donald Trump, the candidate, killed it saying he wanted to exploit the issue of immigration on the campaign trail. Well, the campaign is over. There is a path now for that same bipartisan bill on the border.
All of this makes it absolutely clear that this bill is not about border and defense. This bill is all about this; families losing, billionaires winning.
This bill has a budget table that relays that they are going to slash $1 trillion in programs for families in just the last 6 months of this fiscal year--between now and September 30--and to do so, to fund more tax giveaways to megamillionaires and billionaires, cut the programs for families to fund tax cuts for billionaires. That is what this is about.
We saw that also last Wednesday in the Budget Committee. Democrats offered amendment after amendment to protect the programs, and what did we see to protect against the rising cost of groceries? Democrats voted for that protection; Republicans rejected it.
Make sure that we don't lose the tax credits that enable the middle class to buy health insurance on the exchange? Democrats defended those credits; Republicans voted against it.
Attack Medicaid, healthcare for the poor? Democrats voted to protect Medicaid, and Republicans voted against it.
Lower the price of prescription drugs so we don't pay more than people in other countries? Democrats voted for that protection; Republicans rejected it.
And on and on. Renting or buying a home, controlling the costs? Democrats voted to defend and lower housing costs; Republicans rejected it.
Making college more expensive? Democrats said: No way. We voted against that. Republicans rejected it so they could raise costs of college loans and childcare.
That is what this bill is about; families lose, and billionaires win. Republicans rejected every single amendment to help families stand on their feet and thrive, and families are going to pay a much higher price. In fact, this budget resolution opens the door to higher prices on groceries. That is Trumpflation. Trumpflation has arrived. This budget opens the door to making healthcare more expensive, both for low-income families and for middle-class families.
Trumpflation, this budget opens the door to making college more expensive. I was the first in my family to go to college. It was a really big deal that we found a way to be able to afford to go.
My family helped out, and I worked my way all through college. Making it more expensive, that is wrong. Trumpflation has arrived in the form of making college more expensive--all of this strategy to increase the costs for Americans.
Boy, I am not getting any calls to my office. Are you getting any calls to your office, colleagues? Saying we want to raise the cost for Americans? Didn't I hear Trump on the campaign trail saying he was all about lowering costs?
But tonight, this bill is about Trumpflation increasing the cost of goods to ordinary Americans. Yes, it is about decreasing the cost to billionaires through massive tax cuts. This bill is all about helping the billionaire team.
But those thousands of phone calls I have gotten--some days I have had over 2,000 phone calls--not one--not one single one said: We want Trumpflation. Not one single one said: We want tax cuts for billionaires. Not one single call at 2,000 a day said: We want you to cut the programs that enable families to be on their feet in healthcare and housing and education and childcare.
Candidate Trump is a different person from President Trump. Candidate Trump said: I am running to fight for families. But now who is he fighting for? He is fighting for the megamillionaires and the billionaires. This is a great betrayal.
And this connection exists between cutting the programs for families and funding tax giveaways to those megamillionaires and billionaires, and we have seen this movie before. We saw it in the 2017 strategy during the last Trump administration. They did a tax bill and almost all the money went to the wealthiest Americans.
So this isn't some, like, fiction about President Trump. This is a clear replay of the Republican plan. They did it before, and they are doing it again.
Now, you probably heard the expression during your life: Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. Well, America, you are getting fooled a second time. This is the great betrayal. Let's not let that happen.
We will fight it here, but it is going to take American citizens rising up to their feet, getting off of the couch, joining organizations, making their voice heard. That is what is going to make the difference in the course of what happens here in Congress. It is the voice of the people on the streets, as well as the battle we lead inside this Chamber, that is going to save us from Trumpflation, that is going to save us from the plan that attacks families and feathers the nests of billionaires.
This connection between cutting programs for families and increasing tax giveaways for billionaires, it is actually in the Republican bill on the House side. They made it explicit.
This House language says for every additional dollar they cut from the safety net, they can give away an additional dollar to billionaires in tax cuts.
It is in the Republican bill in the House just down the hall. That is a pretty remarkable and bold thing to lay out for all of America to read. There is an additional factor here in the Republican plan, and that is to run the Nation deeper into debt.
We have seen this play again before. Each of these bars represents an administration. The first President Bush administration, the Clinton administration, George W. Bush, his 8 years, Obama's 8 years, Trump's 4 years, Biden's 4 years, and what you see is the difference between the deficit their first year in office and their last year in office.
So what happened over the course of H.W. Bush's 4 years is the deficit went up. What you see in Clinton's 8 years is the annual deficit went down. His last deficit was not even a deficit, it was a surplus.
George W. Bush came along and said: Let's run that deficit right back up,
And then we come to the first Trump administration, and he just blew the top off it all. Talk about the biggest contributor, the biggest deficits, the biggest contributors to national debt, it is the first Trump administration. And along comes the Biden administration and says: We have got to lower those deficits; and in his 4 years, his fourth deficit was much lower than his first.
Now we are seeing Trump II, and this budget plan tonight, that is this bar. This is going back up. Maybe not as large to be planned as Trump I in terms of that, but absolutely going in the wrong direction.
So it is a mystery. My Republican colleagues, they campaign as fiscally conservative. They say they are going to lower the deficit, and every single time they fool us. They come in here, they cut the taxes for the richest Americans, revenues proceed to fail to compensate, and they run up the deficit.
And now they are going to do it again if we let this budget resolution pass. So let's not let it pass. Let's oppose it.
Republican colleagues, come and join us in fiscal responsibility and take this budget resolution that is laying out a vision of more and more deficits and more and more debt and put it in the woodchipper.
We have been hearing a lot about the woodchipper. Take this plan that cuts programs for families and put it in the woodchipper. Take this plan that gives tax giveaways to the richest Americans--the megamillionaires and the billionaires--and put it in the woodchipper because it is wrong for America to attack the programs for families in order to fund tax giveaways to billionaires.
President Trump has said he wants a ``big, beautiful''--beautiful-- ``bill.'' But you know what? There is nothing beautiful about the bill that is on the floor tonight. There is nothing beautiful about destroying the programs families depend on. There is nothing beautiful about using those cuts to fund tax cuts for billionaires. There is nothing beautiful about running up the deficits and debt Republican- style that they do every single time.
What we have right now is not government by and for the people. What we have right now is by and for the billionaires. President Trump made that very clear at his inaugural address. Who do we have standing right behind him? Mark Zuckerberg, the billionaire of Facebook; at this end, the scowl on his face, Elon Musk, CEO of so many companies, including Tesla. Who do we have? Jeff Bezos of Amazon, one of the richest men in the world along with Elon Musk. And we have Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Alphabet, the mother company of Google. By and for billionaires, that is what that is all about.
So Democrats will not rest tonight until we vote on each of our amendments to protect working families. We will not rest tonight till we vote on each of our amendments to stop the tax giveaways to billionaires. And tonight, Democrats will be fighting by ourselves, inviting our Republican colleagues to join us.
But we will not be fighting for ourselves alone; we are fighting for the American family. This Republican budget, it is the great betrayal; and we, the Democrats, will fight to stop it.
Mr. President, now, in a few moments, Senators will begin voting on amendments to the Republican plan that cuts taxes for the ultrarich. Everything--everything that Donald Trump and the Republicans have done over the last month--all the chaos, all the lawlessness that we have seen--serves one crooked goal. Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Republicans are trying to give their billionaire buddies a tax break and have you--the American people--pay the cost.
It can be summed up very simply in this wonderful chart that my friend from Oregon has put together. What the chart says, under the Republican plan: ``Families lose, billionaires win.''
What could be further from what Americans want? What could be further? Tonight, Democrats are going to force Republicans to defend their tax cuts for billionaires like Elon Musk.
We are going to be here all night. We are going to put forward amendments forcing Republicans to defend their unpopular agenda, exposing the Republican plan for what it is: a massive, massive billionaire giveaway, paid for on the backs of working-class and middle-class Americans.
The Republicans know they want to hide this. They know it is not popular. They know 80 percent of the American people dislike this plan. So Donald Trump and others obfuscate. They want us to pay attention to Gulf of America, building hotels in Gaza, annexing Canada. Why?
Why are they doing these bits of foolishness? They don't want the American people to see that the Republican plan has families lose and billionaires win.
Our amendments will come in three categories: One focused on tax cuts for the billionaires, trying to undo those; one focused on the damage Republicans will inflict on American families in order to pay for their tax cuts; and one bucket--the final bucket--focused on lawlessness and corruption done in service to create chaos so they can cut taxes for billionaires.
Those are the categories: one focused on tax cuts for billionaires, one focused on damage Republicans inflict on American families to pay for those tax cuts, and one on Trump's lawlessness and corruption done in service to create chaos, so they can cut taxes for billionaires.
Let me repeat: Tonight, Democrats will force Republicans to defend their cuts for billionaires, and tonight will just be the first time. We will be doing this over and over again.
Because we know that they don't want the American people to know that that is their North Star. Almost everything they do is aimed at getting those tax breaks for the billionaires. We are also going to force Republicans to defend their cuts on American families, cutting healthcare and Medicaid and education and housing and more. All to pay for the tax cuts of their billionaire buddies.
Finally, Democrats will force the Republicans to defend Donald Trump's scorched earth assault on the rule of law, an assault he is waging in order to put more money in the pockets of billionaires.
That is what tonight is all about, how Republicans want to help billionaires win, American families lose, and the rule of law burned to the ground.
I thank my colleagues for bringing the amendments to the floor. We are going to be here all night. We have lots of amendments that are in these three categories. It will be a long night, but it is a debate the American people need to see, deserve to see. And that is why we are here.
We Democrats are glad to have this debate. Let's have it two, three more times, when they come up with this new reconciliation and that, when the House and Senate Republicans finally get their act together. Bring it on.
I am proud to offer tonight's very first amendment, one that makes a simple proposal: Nobody, nobody, nobody making more than a billion dollars should get yet another tax break. That is it. That is the amendment. If you make a billion dollars, God bless you, you are doing fine, but you don't deserve a tax break.
I would love to hear the Republicans argue why of all people who need a tax break right now, it is the billionaire class.
In this era of high inflation and growing inequality, billionaires aren't the ones who should be getting the massive tax giveaway. They are doing just fine. Instead, we should be helping working- and middle- class Americans get better jobs, earn higher paychecks, and pay lower costs.
So, tonight, the very first question Republicans must answer is this: Do you agree--Mr./Mrs. Republican Senator, Ms. Republican Senator, all the Republican Senators--do all the Republican Senators agree that billionaires should not be getting another tax break? Yes or no? And if you don't think they should get a tax break--that billionaires should get a tax break--just vote with us in supporting this amendment.
We are going to get our answer very, very soon, and that answer, the American people are going to see over and
The second amendment will be offered by Senator Klobuchar to prevent Republicans from lowering taxes for billionaires if the price of food keeps going up.
Donald Trump said, when he was campaigning, he was going to bring inflation down on day one, but inflation is going up.
Donald Trump--Mr. President Trump--it is going up. What about your promise--it is going to go down on day one?
Grocery prices are up: chicken, pork, steak--more expensive--eggs, up 15 percent from last month.
While Americans continue to struggle paying for groceries, feeding their kids, the last thing we should be doing is cutting taxes for the richest of the rich in this country.
And I will offer the third amendment of the evening, one that stops Republicans from kicking people off Medicaid to pay for their billionaire tax breaks.
Eighty million Americans, a little less than a quarter of all Americans--80 million--get health insurance through Medicaid, from newborn kids to working moms, to seniors in nursing homes and assisted living homes. Republicans have made it crystal clear that gutting Medicaid is one of their main strategies for paying for their massive tax cuts. Look no further than the House Republican proposal: a huge amount of the cuts to Medicaid.
What do you tell people who need healthcare who are working people who use Medicaid? What do you tell people who use community health centers, which give efficient healthcare, Mr. Musk--efficient healthcare? What do you tell a family who has a mom in a nursing home and that nursing home will get cut so mom has to come home and live with that family? Build a new room in the house? But wood prices are going up if Trump puts in his tariffs. What do you tell them?
And remember, I would remind my Republican colleagues, when you tried this in 2017--tax cuts for the rich, cutting healthcare, in that case the ACA--America didn't like it. They are not going to like it again.
My amendment will ask Republicans: Do they really want to cut taxes for billionaires so badly that they are willing to take healthcare away from kids, that they are willing to kick grandparents out of nursing homes and abandon Americans with disability and take away healthcare from rural America? We will see what they do.
Now, Republicans can spin their agenda however they want. They certainly will try to change the subject. They won't admit that their tax breaks are aimed at the wealthiest.
They can try to pass one bill. They can try to pass two bills. They can try to pass 50 bills. It doesn't matter. They can slice and dice their policies in whatever order they wish. It doesn't matter in the end. Republican's North Star is singular, unchanging. They are trying to give their billionaire buddies a tax break and have you--the American people, American families--pay the cost.
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.
And I ask unanimous consent that the following amendments be the first amendments in order; that the amendments be reported by number, with no amendments in order prior to a vote in relation to the amendments: Schumer No. 454, Klobuchar No. 494, Merkley No. 473.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. President, I am proud to offer tonight's very first amendment. It makes a simple proposal: No billionaire should get another tax break. I ask my Republican colleagues, yes or no, do you believe billionaires should get another tax break or not? Vote yes on this amendment if you think billionaires should not get another tax break.
Mr. President, the targeted budget blueprint before us today would secure the border, strengthen the military, and facilitate energy independence, and take initial steps to get our fiscal house in order.
While the Finance Committee does have a $1 billion deficit decreasing instruction, this is not a tax bill nor a healthcare reform bill. The instruction makes that clear.
To meet this instruction, the Finance Committee will reverse a Biden administration nursing home rule that would increase taxpayer costs by billions and jeopardize patient access to the long term, especially in our already underserved rural communities.
Mr. President, I have been advised that this amendment would be corrosive to the privilege of the budget resolution if adopted. Because the amendment contains matters that are inappropriate for a budget resolution, its adoption could jeopardize the resolution's privilege.
Additionally, this amendment violates the Congressional Budget Act because it is not germane to the budget resolution.
Since the amendment does not meet a standard required by law, I raise a point of order against the amendment under section 305(b)(2) of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974.
Madam President, I rise today with a commonsense amendment, and that is that no one should be cutting taxes for billionaires while food prices are rising.
Democrats and Republicans alike can agree that food prices are just too high. The price of eggs recently hit a record high of $4.95. That is 53 percent higher than a year ago. And wholesale egg prices have increased 30 percent since the President took office to more than $8. That means egg prices will continue to skyrocket.
And as an aside, accidentally firing frontline avian flu workers isn't going to change any of that.
Prices of other groceries like beef, fish, and fresh fruit have also increased, with the most recent consumer price index showing overall food prices rising.
Instead of focusing on $2 trillion in tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, we should work together to lower food prices for Americans across the country. That is why I call on my colleagues to support my amendment, which will ensure that there are no tax cuts for billionaires unless food prices are lowered for regular Americans.
Madam President, the targeted budget blueprint before us today would secure the border, strengthen the military, facilitate energy independence, and take initial steps to get our fiscal house in order.
While the Finance Committee does have a $1 billion deficit-decreasing instruction, this is not a tax bill nor a healthcare reform bill. The instruction makes that very clear. To meet this instruction, the Finance Committee will reverse a Biden administration nursing home rule that would increase taxpayer costs by billions and jeopardize patient access.
Madam President, I have been advised that this amendment would be corrosive to the privilege of this budget resolution if adopted. Because the amendment contains matter that is inappropriate for a budget resolution, its adoption could jeopardize the resolution's privilege.
Additionally, this amendment violates the Congressional Budget Act because it is not germane to the budget resolution. Since the amendment does not meet that standard required by law, I raise a point of order against the amendment under section 305(b)(2) of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Minnesota.
Madam President, colleagues, the dream of home ownership is dying, and this is a big deal. Your home is your castle. This is a major source of wealth for middle-class families. And a factor killing the dream of home ownership is private equity and hedge funds buying up homes all across America.
In fact, ordinary families can't compete with their all-cash, no inspection offers. They are driving up the prices to buy homes. They are driving up the rent. So today, let's take a step toward restoring the dream of homeownership. This is a deficit-neutral reserve fund that creates incentives for private-equity hedge funds to ease their way out of this market so that families can continue to be homeowners in America, their children can continue to be homeowners.
Let's not let this dream die on our watch. I encourage you to vote for this because houses should be homes for families, not a profit center for Wall Street.
Madam President, I urge my colleagues to oppose this amendment. Here is why: They are putting the blame in the wrong place.
We all agree the housing prices have skyrocketed over the last 4 years. Unfortunately, my colleagues across the aisle aren't interested in new solutions. They are willing to place the blame anywhere except where it belongs.
The real culprit in the failed housing policies is the Biden administration. Under the previous administration, rental costs rose 20 percent. We should be discussing how to make housing more affordable for more Americans. I plan to do just that at the Banking Housing and Urban Development Committee.
I urge my colleagues to work with me. Working with President Trump and Secretary Turner, we can achieve a housing comeback for the blue- collar workers. I urge my colleagues to reject this amendment.
Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the following amendments be the first amendments in order; that the amendments be reported by number, with no amendments prior to a vote in relation to the amendments: Warner No. 130, Murray No. 878, Hickenlooper No. 925.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Madam President, I rise in support of this amendment, which would prohibit any reconciliation bill that does not decrease the cost of housing for American families. I don't think there is any of us in this body that doesn't hear about the enormous rising cost of housing.
Throughout the years, both under Biden and Trump, we kept saying: We are getting to housing next; we are getting to housing next. President Trump said, on day one, that he would come in and lower the cost of housing. He has done nothing of the kind. Instead, we have 3.7 million Americans who have a shortage of housing units, and 30 percent of all renters pay more than half of their income in rental cost.
We have got to make sure we send a message to the American people that we are going to take on the rising cost of housing. One way we can do that is supporting my amendment.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from South Carolina.
I urge my colleagues to oppose this amendment. Democrats are the ones who caused the record-high inflation and soaring consumer prices with their reckless partisan spending. The cost of everything is up 20 percent, and the cost of housing went up 40 percent during Joe Biden's Presidency.
Reducing illegal immigration and cutting energy costs through reconciliation are critical components of reducing costs at the checkout aisle.
Mr. President, this amendment, however, is not in order. If adopted it would jeopardize the privileged status of the budget resolution and could derail our efforts to use reconciliation.
Since the amendment does not meet the standard required by law, I raise a point of order against the amendment under section 305(b)(2) of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974.
While I have great respect for my friend from South Carolina, and I do hope we can find some common ground on housing, pursuant to section 904 of the Congressional Budget Act, I move to waive and ask for the yeas and nays.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The question is on agreeing to the motion.
Madam President, I call up my amendment No. 878 and ask that it be reported by number.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report the amendment by number.
The legislative clerk read as follows:
The amendment is as follows:
(Purpose: To strike the reconciliation instructions and create a reserve fund to implement a bipartisan, multi-year agreement to provide up to $171,000,000,000 in discretionary funding for defense and up to $171,000,000,000 in discretionary funding for other programs, accounts,
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Washington.
First of all, it strikes the reconciliation instructions. Secondly, it creates a reserve fund to implement a bipartisan, multiyear agreement to provide $171 billion in discretionary funding for both defense and nondefense.
Democrats do agree we need more resources to invest in our national security and address the challenges at the border and counter China, but we cannot leave the rest of the budget in the dust while we do that. So let's deliver investments to do both and make sure we also support our veterans, agriculture, disaster response, biomedical research, FAA, childcare, and more.
These are all big challenges. Democrats stand ready to work with our colleagues, as we have in the past, including through our bipartisan efforts on the Appropriations Committee. But that can only happen if the Republicans are willing to work with us, and working with us means actually working with us, not telling us to accept Elon Musk's cutting $1 trillion in fiscal year 2025 to our priorities, which is assumed in this Republican plan, and, at the same time, spending $342 billion on their own priorities. It also means not sitting on your hands--
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator's time has expired.
Madam President, yeah, this is a big-time no. They are rewriting the budget resolution. They want to take half of the $342 billion and spend it on things not related to what we want to do.
We want to secure the border. We want to give President Trump $175 billion to secure the border through Homeland Security and Judiciary, and we will figure out how to spend it. We want to do $150 billion for defense because the world is on fire. We want to do $20 billion for the Coast Guard to help us become safer.
They are rewriting the resolution. They are taking half the money we have dedicated for border security and defense and spending it on more nondefense stuff. We are tired of that. We are not going to do that anymore. We are going to defend America in this resolution. We are not going to take half the money and spend it on more social spending. We are going to defend our border. We are going to make the military more lethal, and we are going to help the Coast Guard, and we are going to pay for it--something you would never do. So vote no.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The question now occurs on the adoption of the amendment.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the following amendments be the next amendments in order; that the amendments be reported by number, with no amendments in order prior to a vote in relation to the amendments. The first is Bennet No. 540, followed by Schiff No. 316, then Sullivan No. 1029, Schumer No. 776, Ossoff No. 407, Wyden No. 308, Baldwin No. 276, and Reed No. 172.
Mr. President, the United States is producing more energy right now than any country in the history of the world. We are in the middle of an energy revolution. We got here by embracing an ``all of the above'' approach to energy, including solar, wind, and geothermal, to keep prices as low as possible for working people.
Most of the energy that is ready to go today is clean and affordable. Any action that blocks the rollout of that will raise prices for working Americans. It is going to kill jobs and seek complete control of emerging industries in China.
In fact, in the last few years, we have passed bills that make historic investments in American-made energy. These bills create more than 400,000 good-paying jobs, and yet there is an effort by this administration to trash the progress we have made.
These actions will balloon energy bills for families--at least 240 bucks a year for working families everywhere--at a time when they are struggling to afford eggs at the grocery just as inflation begins to rise again.
Rather than limiting energy or firing critical government employees, let's welcome our new energy future, a future marked by resilient energy, rebuilt by American innovation for cheaper, more reliable energy for every Coloradan in America. A simple yes-or-no point of order will ensure nothing in the budget will increase energy costs for working families. How could you vote against that?
Mr. President, reducing energy costs for all Americans starts with reducing rent pay to develop our energy resources. If we built more gas pipelines, if we built more powerplants, more transmission lines, it will lower costs for consumers across the country.
Now, our friends on the other side of the aisle, the Democrats, spent decades attempting to force unreliable, expensive nonbaseload sources of power--things like solar, wind, and battery storage--not using the free market, using mandates and subsidies. That is not how we do things. It doesn't actually reduce costs.
This just forces American taxpayers to subsidize those industries. If we end the clean energy mandates and cut through the redtape that is stifling the energy development, we can make energy affordable and reliable for all Americans.
But, look, since the amendment does not meet the standard required by law, I raise a point of order against the amendment under section 305(b)(2)of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974.
Mr. President, I call up my amendment No. 540 and ask that it be reported by number.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report.
The senior assistant legislative clerk read as follows:
The amendment is as follows:
(Purpose: To establish a deficit-neutral reserve fund relating to reinstating the fired Federal employees at the Forest Service, National Park Service, United States Fish and Wildlife Service, and Bureau of
Mr. President, this amendment reinstates the thousands of fired National Park Service, Forest Service, Fish and Wildlife Service, and Bureau of Land Management employees.
Our public lands are the crown jewel of America. With drought, wildfire, and record visitation, our public lands are facing more pressures than ever before. Now is not the time to fire dedicated public servants who perform wildfire mitigation, manage visitors, clear trails, permit grazing and mining and oil and gas operations.
Fewer boots on the ground means more wildfire risk and less access to our public lands and puts enormous burden on communities across the country, from Alaska to North Carolina, to Maine.
Mr. President, article II of the U.S. Constitution declares the
Now, for decades, staffing for the Federal land and wildlife management and outdoor recreation Agencies has been a bipartisan issue. This amendment does not do that. Instead, it attempts to turn Federal land management Agency employment into a political football.
As chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, I look forward to working with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to address issues affecting Federal land management and Federal land management employees, including finding innovative solutions for their housing, working to ensure the concessionaires have flexibility and are not held up in endless paperwork, and giving land managers flexibility to work with their counties and gateway communities to hire qualified employees and work with gateway community businesses.
This is not that amendment. This goes the wrong way, and I oppose it.
Mr. President, I stand here on behalf of Western States colleagues--Senators Padilla, Heinrich, Lujan, Bennet, and Hickenlooper--to ask this Chamber to take a clear stand on behalf of the firefighters who help fight and prevent wildfires.
Wildfires don't discriminate. They hit red States and blue States. Even as deadly devastating wildfires were burning in L.A. County, President Trump adopted a freeze on hiring so widespread that it is blocking the Forest Service from onboarding the seasonal firefighters we require to prevent future fires.
Not only that, President Trump has also empowered an unelected billionaire to run rampant through the ranks of our public servants, not with a scalpel but with a hatchet. As a result, firefighters who had just finished weekends of around-the-clock shifts fighting these dangerous fires were given a thank-you note from their Commander in Chief that said: Please quit.
Please quit--this was the reward our firefighters got.
Our amendment would make it very clear that we are committed to reversing these cuts to the ranks of wildland firefighters.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator's time has expired.
Mr. President, I ask my colleagues to oppose this amendment.
Reserve funds can accomplish nothing beyond political messaging, are unnecessary, and, frankly, distract or delay the budgeting process.
This amendment would, in no way, impact the great firefighters who fight our Nation's fires out West. These firefighters deserve recognition. They deserve fair pay. In fact, we have the bill that does that, the Wildland Firefighter Paycheck Protection Act. It is bipartisan. It permanently addresses securing increases in their wages. If we want to support our wildland firefighters, let's pass this bill and get it on President Trump's desk.
Republicans are committed to protecting our environment and our public lands without suffocating the U.S. economy. I urge my colleagues to do the same and oppose this amendment.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The question is on adoption of the amendment.
Mr. President, it is going to be a late night with a lot of votes. I want to take this opportunity to demonstrate our strong Republican support for Medicaid and Medicare right now.
My amendment is very simple. It says we are going to strengthen and improve Medicaid for the most vulnerable populations and strengthen Medicare so that it is available for years to come.
Now, I know my Democratic colleagues are going to try tonight to use scare tactics to message that Republicans don't support these vital programs, but we do. These are critical programs that Republicans support. Heck, President Trump has repeatedly said that these programs are not going to be touched. People rely on Medicare and Medicaid. Alaskans rely on Medicare and Medicaid, and we are here to strongly support them. We should all agree that we want to weed out waste, fraud, and abuse in our healthcare system, including in Medicare and Medicaid, and we must maintain our safety net programs. We can do both and make them stronger.
So I hope every single Member of the Senate tonight votes to support my simple amendment, which would strengthen both Medicaid and Medicare for the most vulnerable Americans. I ask for everybody's vote.
Mr. President, I rise in opposition. This amendment claims to protect Medicare and Medicaid, but it does neither.
In particular, the Medicaid language seeks to talk about a group called the most vulnerable. Obviously, we care about them, but the language of the Sullivan amendment would leave millions behind, and we don't want to go there. The language in this amendment is code for kicking Americans with Medicaid coverage off their health insurance if they are not sick enough, not poor enough, or not disabled enough. This amendment does nothing to stop Republicans from cutting these essential healthcare programs, kicking millions of Americans off their coverage, all to pay for the tax cuts of billionaires.
Mr. President, this amendment is very simple. It allows no billionaires to have any tax cuts if a single dollar of Medicaid funding is cut. The American people need to know where Senate Republicans stand on Medicaid.
On Tuesday, Donald Trump claimed he is opposed to Medicaid cuts. Then, Wednesday, he supported it. And, today, he doubles down and even opened the door to Medicare. He is flip-flopping left and right. So the American people deserve to know: What about Senate Republicans? Where do they stand?
Cutting Medicaid to pay for billionaire tax cuts would be a gut punch to working people. Medicaid serves nearly 80 million people across the country in States red and blue, from our sickest kids to our infirm in nursing homes and vulnerable seniors.
These are the people we should focus on--kids, seniors, and rural Americans--not billionaires. They are doing well enough already.
My amendment will ask Republicans: Do they really want to cut taxes for billionaires so badly they are willing to take healthcare away from kids and kick grandparents out of nursing homes? How are you going to vote, colleagues?
Mr. President, the Democrats know very well that this targeted budget blueprint does not cut Medicaid or Medicare. The blueprint before us focuses on securing the border, strengthening the military, facilitating energy independence, and taking the initial steps to get our fiscal house in order.
To meet this instruction, the Finance Committee will do one thing and one thing only, and that is reverse a Biden administration nursing home rule that would increase taxpayer costs
Mr. President, I have been advised that this amendment would be corrosive to the privilege of this budget resolution if adopted. Because the amendment contains matter that is inappropriate for the budget resolution, its adoption could jeopardize the resolution's privilege.
Additionally, this amendment violates the Congressional Budget Act because it is not germane to the budget resolution. Since the amendment does not meet that standard required by law, I raised a point of order against the amendment under section 305(b)(2) of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974.
Mr. President, the momentum that is growing in Washington to gut the Medicaid program is alarming my constituents in Georgia, and I call up my amendment No. 407 and ask it to be reported by number.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report.
The legislative clerk read as follows:
The amendment is as follows:
(Purpose: To establish a deficit-neutral reserve fund relating to
protecting access to maternal and pediatric health care through
The sheer number of people affected: In Georgia 5 out of 7 seniors in nursing homes are covered by Medicaid; nearly 50 percent of all births are covered by Medicaid; two out of five children in Georgia are covered by Medicaid. I was disappointed to see just moments ago the majority adopt an amendment to lay the foundation for deep cuts to Medicaid.
I hope we can build bipartisan support for my amendment to ensure that maternal and children's healthcare through Medicaid is protected.
Mr. President, once again the targeted budget blueprint before us today is not about cutting Medicare or Medicaid. It doesn't deal with Medicare or Medicaid. It deals with securing the border, strengthening the military, facilitating the energy independence of our country and taking the initial steps to put our fiscal house in order.
While the Finance Committee does have a $1 million deficit decreasing instruction, this is not a tax bill nor a healthcare reform bill, and the claims that we have heard continuously tonight, to me, seem just to be the politics of fear in the face of trying to deal with our Nation's critical issues.
To meet this instruction, the Finance Committee will reverse a Biden administration nursing home rule that would increase taxpayer cost by billions, jeopardize patient access to long-term care, especially in our already underserved rural communities.
I urge my colleagues to vote against this amendment today, as it is not relevant to the Finance Committee's instruction.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The question now occurs on the adoption of the amendment.
Mr. President, I call up amendment No. 1156 and ask that it be reported by number.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report.
The senior assistant legislative clerk read as follows:
(The amendment is printed in today's Record under ``Text of Amendments.'')
On page S1106, February 20, 2025, third column, the following appears: Amendment No. 1156 Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, I call up amendment No. 1156 and ask that it be reported by number. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report. The senior assistant legislative clerk read as follows: The Senator from Oregon [Mr. Wyden] proposes an amendment numbered 1156.
The online Record has been corrected to read: Amendment No. 1156 Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, I call up amendment No. 1156 and ask that it be reported by number. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report. The senior assistant legislative clerk read as follows: The Senator from Oregon [Mr. Wyden] proposes an amendment numbered 1156. (The amendment is printed in today's Record under ``Text of Amendments.'')
Mr. President, this amendment is simple, it is direct, and, I believe, the only legislation tonight that is comprehensive on healthcare, that protects Medicaid and Medicare and the Affordable Care Act. It does that by taking cuts to these vital programs off the table in the Senate.
So what that means is, if you pass this amendment and the House sends us a budget resolution with severe cuts to healthcare, the Senate will have gone on record as being against the cuts.
Let's not jeopardize the health of millions of Americans. Support the amendment.
Mr. President, once again, I think I have said this 10 times tonight. I will say it again. The budget blueprint we are working on does not deal with Medicare and Medicaid. It is to secure the border, strengthen the military, and facilitate our energy independence.
The instruction given to the Finance Committee deals solely with reversing a Biden administration nursing home rule that would increase taxpayer costs by billions and jeopardize patient access to long-term care, especially in our rural communities.
Mr. President, I have also been advised that this amendment, too, would be corrosive to the privilege of the budget resolution if adopted. Because the amendment contains matter that is inappropriate for a budget resolution, its adoption could jeopardize the resolution's privilege.
Additionally, this amendment violates the Congressional Budget Act because it is not germane to the budget resolution. Since the amendment does not meet that standard required by law, I raise a point of order against the amendment under section 305(b)(2) of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974.
On page S1107, February 20, 2025, first column, the following appears: Since the amendment does not meet that standard required by law, I raise a point of order against the amendment under section 305(b)(2) of the Congressional Budget Act of 1973.
The online Record has been corrected to read: Since the amendment does not meet that standard required by law, I raise a point of order against the amendment under section 305(b)(2) of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974.
I will use my 24 seconds to say the reality is the House is looking at a budget in the Energy and Commerce Committee with the prospect of significant cuts in healthcare. That is why I want us to go on record. If they send us something that cuts healthcare severely, we will be on record as protecting healthcare.
Mr. President, pursuant to section 904 of the Congressional Budget Act, I move to waive and 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 executive clerk called the roll.
The yeas and nays resulted--yeas 47, nays 53, as follows:
The PRESIDING OFFICER. On this vote, the yeas are 47, the nays are 53.
Three-fifths of the Senators duly chosen not having voted in the affirmative, the motion is rejected.
The motion was rejected.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The point of order is sustained, and the amendment falls.
Mr. President, Medicaid is a lifeline for 8 million seniors who rely on the program to access healthcare. Medicaid helps almost two-thirds of all nursing home residents have a safe roof over their heads.
Republicans would like us to believe that their proposed cuts are tackling waste, fraud, and abuse. But make no mistake, stripping away healthcare and nursing home funding for our parents and grandparents is not reform nor is it eliminating waste. Rather, it is a deliberate choice to give tax breaks for their billionaire friends instead of ensuring that seniors across the country have access to the long-term care and support they need. It is a deliberate choice to prioritize tax cuts for billionaires over ensuring that nursing homes can keep their doors open. It is a deliberate choice to take away healthcare from millions of seniors.
Mr. President, I will just say what I said before: This amendment violates the Congressional Budget Act because it is not germane to the budget resolution. Since the amendment does not meet that standard, I raise a point of order against the amendment under section 305(b)(2) of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Wisconsin.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the following amendments be the next amendments in order; that the amendments be reported by number, with no amendments in order prior to a vote in relation to the amendments: Reed-Shaheen No. 299, Paul No. 999, Slotkin No. 664, Van Hollen No. 233, and Shaheen No. 436.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to call up amendment No. 172, which is cosponsored by my colleagues Senators Lujan and Alsobrooks, and ask that it be reported by number.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report the amendment by number.
The senior assistant legislative clerk read as follows:
The amendment is as follows:
(Purpose: To create a point of order against legislation that would
Mr. President, the other day, President Donald Trump said:
If that statement had any truth behind it, then my colleagues on the other side of the aisle should be voting for this amendment, which calls for a point of order against any legislation that cuts Medicaid or Medicare.
Medicare serves 67 million seniors and people with disabilities, and nearly 80 million Americans rely on Medicaid. Failing to pass this amendment will be a signal that these programs are on the chopping block.
This vote will be a test for all of us, particularly my Republican colleagues. Are we going to protect Medicare and Medicaid or are they, my Republican colleagues, going to use this as a piggy bank for tax cuts for the wealthy?
Mr. President, I repeat what I have said before. Because this amendment violates the Congressional Budget Act, it is not germane to the budget resolution. Since the amendment does not meet that standard required by law, I raise a point of order against the amendment under section 305(b)(2) of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Rhode Island.
Heroically withstanding barbaric attacks and unspeakable violence by Russia.
The Ukrainians have achieved hard-won victories and have refused to bend to Putin's demands, but they require continued U.S. support to sustain their progress.
In those same 3 years, in this body, we have heard extensive criticism of the Biden administration's Ukraine policy. They were not going fast enough. They were not allowing Ukraine to be aggressive enough. The strategy is not enabling Ukraine to win on the battlefield. And yet, now, when the Trump administration is cutting deals with Putin and walking away from Ukraine, we do not hear much at all--a deafening silence. What has happened?
Well, regardless of what has happened, we cannot abandon Ukraine. We
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator's time is expired.
Mr. President, I rise in opposition to this amendment and urge my colleagues to oppose it. There is no greater supporter of Ukraine in this Senate than I am, but this is not the right vehicle.
This is a budget to add for national security investment, missile defense, shipbuilding, munition, cybersecurity, taking care of our troops, and protecting our borders.
There is a place to talk about Ukraine. It is not this budget. But passage of this amendment, though Members might wish to, will make it harder to pass this very valuable budget, and that is what this is about. That is why even I, a huge supporter of what we are doing in Ukraine, have to vote no on this, so we can pass a good budget.
I urge a ``no'' vote.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The question now occurs on the adoption of the amendment.
Mr. President, the budget bill before us instructs the Senate to find $342 billion in new spending. The budget bill, as written, is a spending bill. My amendment would add language to cut spending. The cuts would
This year, the deficit will exceed $2 trillion. It is a fiscal imperative that Congress begin to cut spending.
Mr. President, all evening we have been pointing out that, with this bill, families lose and billionaires win. That is certainly put onto steroids with this amendment because this amendment would add a quarter trillion dollars directed at the SNAP program. It would add a third of a trillion dollars directed at reducing the viability of student loans, and almost three-quarters of a trillion dollars to devastate Medicaid--programs that families depend on to be able to thrive, to live in the middle class, to pursue opportunity.
I encourage everyone, if you don't want to have a bill in which families lose, vote no.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The question now occurs on the adoption of the amendment.
Madam President, my amendment is simple. It prohibits cuts to the funding and staffing necessary to respond to and control avian flu. This should be an easy no-brainer. Avian flu is jumping between species. We are culling thousands of birds, and egg prices are the highest they have ever been in U.S. history.
I want to believe that this body should be able to agree that a biohazard that impacts every single one of our States should be something that we maintain funding for. It is our job to protect our constituents. That is basic. Avian flu is a threat. You know it. I know it. The world knows it.
I urge you to put partisanship aside. Vote for this very simple amendment. Maintain funding and staffing on avian flu.
Madam President, I rise in opposition to amendment No. 664.
Agriculture Secretary Rollins and the White House have made clear that addressing avian flu is a top priority.
I share my colleague from Michigan's concerns about avian flu, but this is not the appropriate venue for policy discussions on animal disease. This budget resolution is focused on securing the border, strengthening the military, and bolstering American energy independence.
I look forward to working with the Senator from Michigan, a fellow Member whom we are glad to have on the Agriculture Committee--a new member--to address animal disease threats in the farm bill.
I urge my colleagues to vote against the amendment.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The question now occurs on the adoption of the amendment.
Madam President, I offer this amendment with my colleague Senator Hirono. It is very straightforward. It creates a point of order against any legislation that would cut funding from the National School Lunch Program or the School Breakfast Program.
I think our colleagues know that nearly 14 million American children were hungry last year. One in five kids doesn't know where their next meal will come from or what it will be. So let's ensure that those kids get healthy meals and can focus on their education and their studies instead of their stomachs.
Madam President, 91 percent of public schools participate in the USDA meals programs. Over half of our kids are eligible for free and reduced lunch programs. They provide breakfast programs for over 2 billion of them a year.
So colleagues, let's not abandon those kids in order to provide tax cuts for Elon Musk and very rich people. I urge the adoption of our amendment.
Madam President, I rise in opposition to amendment No. 233.
I appreciate the concerns of my colleague from Maryland, and I share support for the school meal programs. I am eager for the Agriculture Committee to turn to child nutrition reauthorization this Congress. However, this amendment threatens the privilege of the resolution.
Senators on the Ag Committee are openminded and welcoming of our colleague's involvement in important child nutrition programs; however, the budget process is not the proper venue to make policy changes to our school meals programs. For this reason, I urge my colleagues to vote no on this amendment.
Madam President, since the amendment does not meet the standard required by law, I raise a point of order against the amendment under section 305(b)(2) of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974.
Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the following amendments be the next amendments in order, that the amendments be reported by number, with no amendments in order prior to a vote in relation to the amendments: Lujan, No. 699, Duckworth-Booker No. 971, Heinrich No. 101, and Blumenthal No. 659.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Madam President, I call up my amendment No. 436 and ask that it be reported by number.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report the amendment by number.
The legislative clerk read as follows:
The amendment is as follows:
(Purpose: To establish a deficit-neutral reserve fund relating to preserving and extending vital tax credits enacted under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which make health care accessible and affordable and that have led to the lowest uninsured rate in our
Madam President, this amendment would extend vital Affordable Care Act tax credits for millions of Americans. We all know that healthcare is still too expensive. Unfortunately, this reconciliation bill that we are ultimately going to vote on is going to make that worse.
In New Hampshire, we hear every day about people rationing medicines, skipping appointments, and delaying care all because of costs, but we can act now to lower those costs. We can extend those premium tax credits because if we don't act, they will skyrocket and 4 million Americans will lose their health insurance.
I urge a ``yes'' vote on my amendment to reinforce our support for working families and their access to healthcare.
Madam President, once again, this targeted budget blueprint before us would focus on the border, the military, and our energy independence. While the Finance Committee does have a $1 billion instruction, this is neither a tax bill nor a healthcare reform bill. That instruction makes that clear.
I urge my colleagues to vote against this amendment today as it is not relevant to the Finance Committee instruction.
Mr. President, we are experiencing a nationwide shortage of police officers. Police departments are stretched thin, making our communities less safe. In the worst cases, some small departments have disbanded completely. Small towns need Federal dollars to bolster their ranks.
The Musk-Trump freeze took funding away from our police departments and law enforcement officials. The COPS hiring program is a lifeline to many law enforcement agencies. COPS hiring grants provide funding directly to law enforcement agencies to increase their community policing capacity and crime prevention efforts.
On behalf of all Americans who care about public safety, I introduce this amendment to provide increased resources for local law enforcement.
This is a bipartisan issue. It should be easy. I hope my colleagues just accept it, and we don't even have to have a vote on it. There is no reason to oppose this amendment. I urge my colleagues to support this amendment.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from North Carolina.
Mr. President, I urge my colleagues to oppose this amendment. We should ensure that all law enforcement have the necessary equipment, training, and resources to keep our communities safe and thoroughly investigate crimes committed against all people. I have come to the floor and have spoken on this many, many times in the 10 years that I have been here.
Securing the border must remain the top priority in reducing crime, and this amendment does not adequately support necessary safety improvements. So I urge you to vote no.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The question now occurs on the adoption of the amendment.
Mr. President, this amendment would protect the right to IVF and other fertility care, and it would require insurance to cover IVF.
I know my Republican colleagues will claim President Trump has already solved this problem, but don't be fooled. Donald Trump's recent toothless, overly-vague Executive order does nothing to expand access to IVF. It was just lipservice from a known liar. In fact, it is because of President Trump and Senate Republicans that Roe v. Wade was overturned, causing IVF to be at risk in the first place.
If President Trump is supposedly so committed to making government more efficient, he could stop wasting time and resources on more bureaucracy.
The solution to this is simple and all laid out in the Right to IVF Act. If Senate Republicans want to put their votes where their mouths are, they must vote for this amendment that would provide hope for millions of Americans whose most desperate hope in the world is to have a family of their own.
Mr. President, IVF is legal and accessible in all 50 States. This amendment is nothing more than a Trojan horse. It is far more expansive than they would want you to believe. It actually creates a universal right to ``assisted reproductive technologies,'' allowing future administrations to move this into human cloning and gene-edited designer babies. It also contains no religious freedom protections.
Aside from being bad policy, let's take a step back and think about what has occurred. Two days ago, President Trump took the most pro-IVF Executive action ever towards increased treatment, access, and affordability, while President Biden played politics with IVF, hoping it would help that side of the aisle win on November 5. The American people saw through that. All 49 Republicans here in this Chamber at that time said we strongly support nationwide access to IVF.
We look forward over the next 90 days to working with President Trump to make sure that we increase access and affordability of treatment.
Mr. President, for that reason--today we are here to talk about the border, defense, and energy, and I urge my colleagues to vote this Trojan horse down.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The question now occurs on the adoption of the amendment.
Mr. President, I rise to offer this amendment to support grants for survivors of domestic violence and sexual abuse.
Over the last several weeks, I have heard from thousands of New Mexicans about how Donald Trump and Elon Musk have thrown their lives and communities into chaos. That includes Alexandria Taylor and her New Mexico Coalition of Sexual Assault Programs. She called me about President Trump's blockade on Federal grants under the Violence Against Women Act. These grants do two things: They support survivors of rape and sexual assault, sexual abuse, and domestic violence; and they help law enforcement hold predators and abusers accountable.
These are not woke ideas. These are American values. If you support survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence, if you support law enforcement holding abusers and predators accountable, I hope you will support this amendment.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. If there is no further debate, the question occurs on the adoption of the amendment.
The amendment (No. 101) was rejected.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Connecticut.
Mr. President, this amendment very simply seeks to
Now it is threatened because the Trump administration is aggressively attempting to decimate the VA workforce. It has imposed a freeze, and it is cutting men and women employees who are integral to fulfilling our promise under the PACT Act.
We should be proud of it. We should preserve it. And if President Trump has no plans to erode the PACT Act, voting for this amendment should be easy for my Republican colleagues.
Mr. President, this amendment is unnecessary. Full funding to carry out the Sergeant First Class Heath Robinson PACT Act is not in jeopardy. The PACT Act received widespread bipartisan support, bicameral commitment, because we care about toxic-exposed veterans and their families, and this is not a partisan issue.
Republicans have always fought to fully fund the VA. When the VA comes back to Congress asking for more money, like they did last September, because of unexpected shortfalls, we said yes. The administration and this Congress will continue to prioritize full and uninterrupted funding of the VA, including funding necessary to fulfill the laws, like the PACT Act, that Congress enacted.
I urge my colleagues to oppose the amendment.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. If there is no further debate, the question now occurs on the adoption of the amendment.
Mr. President, I think for the benefit of all Members, I hope that very soon we will have a final agreement that will enable us to wind this down with a finite number of votes. And when that happens, I want to ask everybody to be in their seats so we can move fairly quickly through those. And in the intervening time period, while they are working that out, we have a couple more amendments.
I am going to ask unanimous consent that the following amendments be the final amendments in order; that the amendments be reported by number; that following disposition of the amendments, the Senate vote on adoption of the concurrent resolution, as amended, with no intervening action or debate; finally, if agreed to, the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table: Markey 911; Coons 1223.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. President, funding for Alzheimer's research at the NIH is essential. Nearly 7 million Americans are living with Alzheimer's right now, and if nothing changes, 15 million Americans--15 million baby boomers--will have Alzheimer's by 2050 with a cost of $1 trillion a year to our healthcare system.
We need to tackle this challenge head-on by increasing funding for NIH research for Alzheimer's. Trump and DOGE have already cut and slowed down NIH research, interfering with our ability to cure this disease. This is a ``Make America Sick'' agenda. A ``no'' on this amendment means taking away hope from millions of Americans with Alzheimer's and their families. After the Bush billionaire tax cut in 2001, the NIH budget was cut in spending power by 20 percent over the next 5 years.
We must guarantee that Alzheimer's research is protected. I urge an aye vote.
Mr. President, I urge my colleagues to oppose this amendment. As we all know by now, the purpose of this budget resolution is to unlock reconciliation so we can once again secure the border and keep America safe.
I do look forward to working with the Senator from Massachusetts to prevent and better treat Alzheimer's, but the reserve funds in this instance are unnecessary and distract and delay the budgeting process.
We need targeted solutions, not broad funding that doesn't directly address the immediate needs. I urge a ``no'' vote.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The question now occurs on the adoption of the amendment.
Mr. President and colleagues, unvetted and unaccountable DOGE agents have seized control of government systems and databases that contain vast troves of personally identifying, sensitive information about nearly every American--financial data, health data, Social Security numbers, home addresses. The risks to our privacy are immense, and the opportunities for corruption alarming.
The possibility that unqualified and inexperienced individuals will break critical systems through malice or incompetence is chilling.
In the past few weeks, I have received literally thousands of calls from concerned constituents, and I expect many of my colleagues have as well.
Musk and his DOGE bureaucrats are accessing private data, and I am urging a ``yes'' vote on this amendment that would prohibit their access to this data or misusing private information.
Voters are worried. They are worried that if they say the wrong thing or speak up against Trump or DOGE, their bank account information will end up on Twitter, their tax return won't come, or their family member won't get their Social Security check.
Mr. President, I urge my colleagues to oppose this amendment. This amendment is unnecessary. We already have laws on the books to protect people's information.
The most recent cases I can remember of leaking information like this involved an IRS contractor who illegally leaked the tax returns of President Trump, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos to the delight of many on the other side of the aisle.
That person, fortunately, though, is now in jail, which proves the point that we already have laws in place to take care of this. This amendment is a thinly veiled attempt to prevent DOGE from doing the constructive job of finding waste. This is an amendment that says it is OK to spend $2 million in Guatemala on sex change surgery. This is an amendment that says it is OK, look the other way, transgender comic books in Peru are great. This is an amendment that says it is OK to do trans operas in Colombia. This is an amendment that attacks people who are looking to save our money and spend it on legitimate diplomacy, not crazy, looney, leftwing ideas. And I am done.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The vote is on the amendment.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the following amendments be the final amendments in order; that the amendments be reported by number; that following disposition of the amendments, the Senate vote on adoption of the concurrent resolution, as amended, with no intervening action or debate; finally, if agreed to, the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table: Lujan 957, Warren 734, Kelly 984, King 198, Lee 922, Blunt Rochester 311, Murray- Durbin 880, and Merkley 1207.
Mr. President, 41.2 million Americans rely on SNAP to put food on the table. I would like to call up my amendment No. 957 and ask it to be reported by number.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report.
The senior assistant legislative clerk read as follows:
The amendment is as follows:
to programs critical to rural Americans and food assistance for
Mr. President, 41.2 million Americans rely on SNAP to put food on the table, and 40 percent of SNAP recipients are children.
The Republican budget resolution before us tonight will dramatically slash nutrition; conservation; other farm programs for our children, families, and farmers--all to pay for the Trump tax scam. And we all know it is only going to benefit the wealthiest Americans.
Now, I want to get a farm bill done, and I think most of us here want to do that. Taking critical Federal dollars from our rural communities will make that nearly impossible. And that is not all. This means that costs will go up for families across America at a time when prices are already high. The result: Children and families will go hungry. We all know that that is unacceptable.
Mr. President, I urge my colleagues to oppose this amendment. Striking the all-powerful Agriculture Committee's reconciliation instruction will make it more difficult to pay for critical improvements for border security and our national defense.
A vote for this amendment indicates the Democrats don't believe there is a single area of waste, fraud, or abuse in our Federal nutrition programs.
In 2022 alone, the staff program had an overpayment rate of 10 percent, which amounts to billions of dollars in erroneous payments. Republicans will find commonsense savings in the Ag Committee's jurisdiction while ensuring we have a well-targeted, nutrition safety net for those in need.
I urge a ``no'' vote.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The question now occurs on the adoption of the amendment.
As we begin the budget process, Democrats are asking Republicans questions about the basic principles of what they are planning to do. The first question is whether there is anyone who is so rich that Republicans think they don't need a tax giveaway.
My amendment says that anyone who earns more than $10 million a year won't get a tax cut in the new Republican budget, and I want to know if Republicans will agree to that. I urge everyone, Democrat or Republican, to say yes.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Louisiana.
Mr. President, it seems to me that it is important, as we conclude tonight, that we admit to the American people what we know to be true ourselves, and that is that most of these amendments are fiction. It is professional wrestling. It is the Undertaker v. Andre the Giant. They have been all foam and no beer. All salt and no tequila.
Unless you do your research on Instagram, you know that our bill is going to be not about taxes but about immigration and defense.
There will be time to consider my friend Senator Warren's amendment, but it won't be on this bill. There will be time to point out that 60 percent of tax cuts in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act affected the middle class. For that reason I ask for a ``no'' vote.
In my 24 seconds, I would like to say we all know what this is about. You are starting the process for a budget, and we just want to know the basic principle. Is there anyone so rich that Republicans think they shouldn't get a tax cut? And my view is, let's just start the bidding at $10 million. Is that rich enough to say they are not going to get a tax giveaway from the Republicans?
Mr. President, since we now know that $10 million did not meet the threshold, we are debating who in this country is so rich that they don't need a tax cut. That one didn't pass. So here is my proposal: Can we at least agree among all of us that no one making more than $100 million per year should get a tax cut?
The median income in this country is about $80,000 per year, and it would take 1,245 years for someone making the median income in America to earn $100 million. That is about 15 lifetimes.
Does somebody that rich need a tax cut? I don't think so. Vote yes if you agree.
This afternoon I was on the floor. I was privileged to attend to the remarks of the distinguished chair of the Finance Committee where he characterized the upcoming tax bill that will be before us shortly. He characterized it as principally benefiting the middle class and working class and denied that it would be especially or in any way beneficial to the superwealthy in our country.
Well, I have always subscribed to Ronald Reagan's motto: Trust but verify. I am simply asking to verify what the chairman of the Finance Committee said this afternoon. My amendment would just say: no reduction in tax liability to someone making more than $500 million. There are about 400 families in America, and $500
I urge a ``yes'' vote to verify what we were told on the floor this afternoon.
Mr. President, the third time around, Senator Kennedy's debate still remains. Vote no.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The question occurs on the adoption of the amendment.
The amendment (No. 198) was rejected.
On page S1117, February 20, 2025, first column, the following appears: Vote on Amendment No. 198 The PRESIDING OFFICER. The question occurs on the adoption of the amendment. The amendment (No. 984) was rejected
The online Record has been corrected to read: Vote on Amendment No. 198 The PRESIDING OFFICER. The question occurs on the adoption of the amendment. The amendment (No. 198) was rejected
Mr. President, I call up my amendment No. 922 and ask that it be reported by number.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report the amendment by number.
The senior assistant legislative clerk read as follows:
(Purpose: To establish a deficit-neutral reserve fund relating to
Congress continuing its work to rein in the administrative state by supporting legislation that prevents Federal agencies from finalizing major rules without congressional approval, strengthens the Article 1
law-making powers of Congress, cuts spending resulting from costly
Mr. President, Congress, not unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats, should be making our laws. Article I, section 7 of the Constitution requires nothing less. And yet we generate about 100,000 pages of new laws a year. This is choking the American people.
The prior administration imposed countless rules and regulations that imposed trillions in new economic costs on the private sector. Many of these rules have been estimated to increase Federal spending, Federal mandatory outlays, by hundreds of billions of dollars without congressional approval.
The Federal Government already spends too much money. This has contributed to persistent inflation the last couple of years and a debt level that will soon reach record-level highs that we cannot sustain.
Congress shouldn't allow regulatory-driven spending to continue to worsen our country's fiscal and economic health. I encourage my colleagues to support my amendment and demonstrate to the American people that they are serious about reducing excessive regulatory burdens. What we are trying to do is to push ``pause'' on these to bring about the reduction in these mandatory outlays. I encourage my colleagues to support this amendment.
Mr. President, I appreciate my colleague's commitment to empowering the legislative branch of government. We have worked together on a bill to rein in Presidential abuse of emergency powers. I hope we can get that across the finish line sometime this Congress.
Unfortunately, I am concerned that this amendment sets up a complex and arguably unconstitutional legislative scheme to get rid of regulations and undermine the bicameral legislative process. Under the regulatory approval scheme that this amendment tees up, one Chamber of Congress could effectively nullify the law previously passed by the whole of Congress simply by not approving a rule of implementation.
This amendment also undermines Agencies' ability to implement key environmental health and safety laws, endangering the American people.
If Congress wants to repeal a law, we should repeal the law, not create some new arcane process to sabotage implementation.
I welcome the opportunity to work with colleagues to pass legislation to strengthen the power of Congress, including to ensure that the President cannot tear up bipartisan funding bills enacted by Congress. But I urge my colleagues to reject this potentially unconstitutional and dangerous deregulatory amendment.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. All time has expired.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The question is on the adoption of the amendment.
Mr. President, this amendment would prevent the wrongful termination of Federal employees who protect the health and safety of all Americans.
At a time when our country is facing unprecedented workforce shortages, the Trump administration is thoughtlessly and callously firing thousands of public servants at the Department of Health and Human Services and other Departments, putting all of us at risk.
What does this mean? It means delaying cures for cancer. It means higher prescription drug costs for seniors, which we fought so hard to lower. It means higher maternity mortality rates and more American women dying needlessly while giving birth.
Who are these public servants? They are scientists, emergency preparedness experts, the frontline healthcare workers whom we call heroes. Bottom line: It is the people who keep us safe and healthy.
While Republicans work to cut taxes for billionaires, they are slashing the healthcare workforce our communities rely on. On behalf of our constituents and our country, I urge my colleagues to support this amendment.
Mr. President, I urge my colleagues to oppose this amendment.
As we have learned tonight, this budget resolution is about unlocking reconciliation to secure the border and keep Americans safe. This amendment is unnecessary and delays the budgeting process.
That being said, I look forward to working with the Senator from Delaware to make HHS great again.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The question now occurs on the adoption of the amendment.
The amendment (No. 311) was rejected.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Washington.
Mr. President, I call up my amendment No. 880 and ask that it be reported by number.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report.
The senior assistant legislative clerk read as follows:
The amendment is as follows:
(Purpose: To establish a deficit-neutral reserve fund relating to reversing the Trump Administration's indiscriminate cut to biomedical research and the lifesaving work supported by the National Institutes
Mr. President, the Trump administration is working to destroy medical research as we know it with an illegal, unrealistic cap on the NIH reimbursement rate for indirect costs. It means cancer researchers laid off, lifesaving clinical trials canceled, and more, and it violates the bipartisan appropriations law. I should know--I helped author that provision. Republicans should know--they worked with me to pass it.
Mr. President, my Republican colleagues know, as I do, that President Trump's cuts, freezes, gag orders, and firings are devastating medical research at NIH. Since we get sick on a bipartisan basis, shouldn't we stand together on a bipartisan basis for medical research at NIH?
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Louisiana.
Mr. President, all foam, no beer. This proposal deals with healthcare spending. I would remind my colleagues and friends that NIH recently announced their intention to cap indirect costs for grants. Many of our universities are spending all of the taxpayer money on overhead. Harvard is spending 69 percent; Yale, 67.5 percent--on overhead. Isn't that special? Johns Hopkins, 63.7 percent. This will make Bernie Madoff blush.
I will revise and extend my other remarks: all foam, no beer.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The question now occurs on the adoption of the amendment.
Colleagues, this amendment encourages the opportunity for Americans to purchase prescription drugs at or near the lower prices that manufacturers charge to individuals in other similar, developed nations.
Here is what every American knows: We all invest more in the research and development to develop drugs than the taxpayers of any other nation in the entire world, so we should be getting the best price, not the worst price. This amendment creates an opportunity for us to serve the American people and get them the fair prices they deserve.
Mr. President, to my colleagues, it has been a very long day. To the Budget Committee staff, Nick and your team, thank you very much.
Through this process, I have gotten to know Senator Merkley better. It has been a pleasure.
We are one step closer to fixing a problem that all Americans want us to fix, I think. The man who murdered Laken Riley was released from detention because we had no bed space. That should never happen again. There is $175 billion in this bill to make sure we have enough bed space; we complete, finish the wall, and kick gang members and other criminals out of the country; $150 billion for a military that has been worn out--they need the money; and $20 billion for the mighty, mighty Coast Guard.
We are one step closer to fulfilling the promise Republicans made to make you safer. I hope we can get one big, beautiful bill in the House, but we need to act on border security and national security now. We are running out of time.
Mr. President, I so much appreciate the collaboration and cooperation and communication between the Budget team here on this side of the aisle and Senator Graham's team.
We have had the chance to all be on the floor and have the discussion about issues that we rarely get to have. It isn't quite the give-and- take that you might see in some legislatures, but we are, in fact, here wrestling with the national issues.
This budget resolution comes down to one thing, and that is that families lose and billionaires win. I said at the beginning of the night that over the course of the evening, amendments would show that Democrats are standing up for families--on groceries, on healthcare, on housing, on education, on childcare--and that is what has been demonstrated tonight.
I still invite our Republican colleagues to join us--join with us-- and help the families of America rather than attacking the programs that serve them in order to fund tax giveaways for billionaires. Tax giveaways for billionaires will not make our Nation stronger; stronger families will make our Nation stronger.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under the previous order, the question occurs on adoption of the concurrent resolution, as amended.
Mr. President, tonight, one amendment at a time, Democrats exposed Republicans' true colors here on the Senate floor. For the first time this year, Senate Republicans were forced to go on record and defend their plans to cut taxes for Donald Trump's billionaire friends.
What happened tonight was only the beginning. This debate is going to go on for weeks and maybe months. Democrats will be ready to come back and do this over and over again because Americans deserve to know the truth. And what is the truth? Under Donald Trump's Republican Party, billionaires win and American families lose. Billionaires win and American families lose. That is it. That is the Republican agenda.
Tonight, we gave Republicans one chance after another to do the right thing and put the needs of American families first. We voted on amendments to prevent any tax cuts for billionaires paid for with cuts to Medicaid. Republicans said no. We voted on an amendment to protect maternal and children's healthcare from draconian cuts. Republicans said no. We voted on an amendment to make it easier for Americans to rent or own a home. Republicans said no. Again and again and again, Republicans sent a clear and consistent message from the Senate floor: Under their agenda, billionaires win and American families lose.
If Republicans continue with this reckless plan to help their billionaire buddies at the expense of American families, Democrats will make sure the American people know the truth at every opportunity.
Mr. President, I move to proceed to executive session to consider Calendar No. 22.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The question is on agreeing to the motion.
The motion was agreed to.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report the nomination.
The senior assistant legislative clerk read the nomination of Jamieson Greer, of Maryland, to be United States Trade Representative, with the rank of Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate resume legislative session and be in a period of morning business, with Senators permitted to speak therein for up to 10 minutes each.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.
There being no objection, the text of the bill was ordered to be printed in the Record, as follows:
S. 681. A bill to redesignate land within certain wilderness study areas in the State of Wyoming, and for other purposes; to the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.
Mr. President, I have five requests for committees to meet during today's session of the Senate. They have the approval of the Majority and Minority Leaders.
Mr. President, I have one request for a committee to meet during today's session of the Senate. It has the approval of the Majority and Minority Leaders.
Pursuant to rule XXVI, paragraph (5)a, of the Standing Rules of the Senate, the following committees are authorized to meet during today's session of the Senate:
The Committee on Armed Services is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Thursday, February 20, 2025, at 9:30 a.m., to receive a closed briefing.
The Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Thursday, February 20, 2025, at 7:30 p.m., to reconvene its business meeting.
The Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Thursday, February 20, 2025, at 9:30 a.m., to conduct a hearing on a nomination.
The Committee on Energy and Natural Resources is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Thursday, February 20, 2025, at 10 a.m., to conduct a hearing.
The Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions is authorized to meet in executive session during the session of the Senate on Thursday, February 20, 2025, at 10 a.m., to conduct a hearing on a nomination.
The Committee on the Judiciary is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Thursday, February 20, 2025, at 10:15 a.m., to conduct an executive business meeting.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Katherine Nikas, Caitlin Wilson, Lillian Meadows, and Walker Truluck from my staff, and Mike Jones, Melissa Kaplan-Pistiner, Josh Smith, and Tyler Evilsizer from Senator Merkley's staff be granted floor privileges during the consideration of S. Con. Res. 7.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Chance Mitchell, a law clerk on the Budget Committee minority staff, be granted floor privileges during consideration of S. Con. Res. 7.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent the Senate now proceed to the en bloc consideration of the following Senate resolutions, which were submitted earlier today: S. Res. 87, S. Res. 88, S. Res. 89.
There being no objection, the Senate proceeded to consider the resolutions en bloc.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent the resolutions be agreed to, the preambles be agreed to, and that the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table all en bloc.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
The resolutions were agreed to.
The preambles were agreed to.
(The resolutions, with their preambles, are printed in today's Record under ``Submitted Resolutions.'')
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that when the Senate completes its business today, it stand adjourned until 3 p.m. on Monday, February 24; that following the prayer and pledge, the Journal of proceedings be approved to date, the morning hour be deemed expired, the time for the two leaders be reserved for their use later in the day, morning business be closed, and the Senate proceed to executive session and resume Executive Calendar No. 21, Daniel Driscoll to be Secretary of the Army; further, notwithstanding rule XXII, that the cloture motions with respect to the Driscoll and Greer nominations ripen at 5:30 p.m.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
