bill that i had spent years trying to get passed. and we finally passed it. we finally ended the sweetheart deal that big pharma had because of congressional action that locked them into high prices and high profits at the expense of regular people where americans were paying, in many cases, twice as much as people in other countries. it's part of the reasons there were bus trips from minnesota to canada, to get less expensive drugs. my colleagues here all know bringing down the cost of prescription drugs has always been a top priority, because in the united states of america no one should be forced to choose between filling their prescriptions or filling their grocery cart. taking on these big drug companies was not easy. they had three lobbyists, still have three, for every member of congress, and spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to stop us.

aarp was with us in the fight. so many seniors with us in the fight. what they didn't have was the power of 50 million american seniors who came together to say enough is enough. we passed our bill. there's the $35 cap on insulin per month, which the companies now, because of competitive pressures, have had to offer to nonseniors. there's a $2,000 cap for medicare, for people that are paying for services, $2,000 cap on prescription drugs, and then we have the first ten drugs that have been negotiated with the prices taking effect in a little over a year. those first ten drugs are done, but this administration, as the torch was handed over by the american people, this new administration is going to have to implement it. what was the result of the drug negotiations in the last administration? they picked the first ten drugs and picked blockbusters.

i would have done more than ten, but that was the compromise. what are the first ten drugs? drugs like eliquis and darelto, jardiance, blockbuster drugs. the negotiated prices, the pharma companies agreed, even though they're suing and losing every case to question the underpinnings of this bill, republican appointed judges, democrat appointed judges said no, congress has the right to make that change. those ten drugs, the prices down 60%, 70%. this is my favorite number, it's going to save nine million seniors in one year in out-of-pocket $1.5 billion. $1.5 billion with a b. that's not even counting what it saves for taxpayers. now this program, this change in the law is in the hands of this new administration.

this new administration is going to have to make sure those ten drugs, with the negotiated prices, that that happens. but now the biden administration, at the end of this year, as they were on schedule for 15 drugs, that's what our law that was passed says, 15 new drugs, they have to negotiate that with the pharma companies. that's going to go well, when they're already talking about getting rid of some of the other drug programs to take on pharma when their nominee for hhs won't commit to doing it. those drugs are blockbusters too, diabetes, weight loss drugs like ozempic, wegovy, all those are on the line for negotiations. 2.3 million medicare part d enrollees take those drugs alone. in his confirmation hearings, the president's health and human

services nominee, rfk rfk jr., did not give a clear answer whether or not he would uphold drug price negotiations. that's unacceptable. make no mistake, these actions aren't going to lower costs. they're going to raise costs, and instead what do we see? the chaos and confusion of all of these. what else? talked about health care. next, on to education. here's what a minnesotan wrote me after the memo came out, that was later rescinded, but the white house said no, no, we want to freeze these funds. i am reaching out as a constituent and proud advocate for trio programs, which thousands of students across minnesota and wisconsin, are provided academic financial and personal support. i'm concerned about the recent directive from the office of management and budget to temporarily pause all activities related to federal financial assi

assistance. he went on to say this action could significantly impact trio program's ability to serve low-income first-generation students and students with disabilities who rely on our services. please work with your colleagues in congress to ensure these programs continue. another minnesotan called the funding freeze extremely upsetting for me as i am someone who works in this field and spends my time working to help sfunts, to help -- students, those less prif lends than me -- privileged than me. he said one of those includes trio. each summer i teach students, they're extremely bright. they don't have enough support. i write to you, he says, as a frustrated citizen and instructor to air my grievances as i am no longer sure what to do or how to proceed. i don't blame him. one bureaucrat can write a memo with a plan laid out by russell

vought, laid out by that guy, laid out and consistent with what was in project 2025. and now we're debating putting him back in the office of management and budget again. one, again, of the things i am quite astounded by is how much american citizens are looking at the constitution. listen to this letter, all these in the last few days, i am lying to express -- writing to express my deep concern regarding the white house's recent decision to freeze congressionally approved federal funding. let's look at that. very clear this constituent understands it's congress, democrats and republicans, that agreed on the funding, that agreed on the funding amount, and that unilaterally this administration thinks it can come in and take it away. that's not true. that's illegal. this action, the writer says,

not only disrupts essential services and institutions that rely on federal grants and loans, but also represents a troubling overreach of executive power that drivel violates our constitution. this practice is an abuse of power that must be met with swift congressional action. that's why we ask our colleagues on the other side of the aisle to listen to this constituent from the state of minnesota who's not a constitutional law professor, but all you have to do is open up the constitution, and this constituent is wondering why won't everyone stand up and say no, we're willing to work with you, donald trump, on efficiency measures, making government work better, but we're willing to do it only if it is consistent with the constitution. she continued, i urge you to take immediate steps to hold the administration accountable. i appreciate your leadership and look forward to your response on how you plan to address this pressing issue. please stand firm in upholding the constitution.

a different minnesotan, i'm writing to you to express concern over the pause of federal loans, grants, and foreign aid and ask you take all possible action to block the confirmation of the nominated omb director, russell vought. she continues, russell vought stated in his confirmation hearing he would not guarantee he would follow the laws. now they're watching the hearings. i think this is kind of good for democracy, when people realize these guys are serious, it's not just a campaign commercial or something you say at a rally or something you put on x. this is real. she says, rch stated in his -- russell vought stated he would not guarantee he would follow the law in expending funds congress appropriated. he seems to believe he and the president have the authority to selectively decide to make these pauses permanent, regardless what congress appropriated. this is a grave violation of the

constitutional authority granted to congress and shows brazen disrespect for the american people's elected representatives. i want to see people understanding that this is brazen disrespect. it's brazen disrespect of the people that work in the united states senate and in the house. put that aside. it's brazen disrespect of the people that sent us here. as i said on the day of donald trump's inauguration in that beautiful rotunda, that there were pretty powerful people in that room. people saw the photos. when it comes to the elected officials in that room, whether representatives, senators, the president or vice president, their power didn't come from the people in that room. their power comes from the people outside of that room. when this constituent says that this was brazen disrespect,

freezing the funds, devising this plan that russell vought had, she gets it. she gets it. this is brazen disrespect of our democracy, no matter what party you're in. she goes on, please begin educating constituents on the severity of this issue. i'm trying to do it tonight. hopefully some are watching on c-span. please also stel them how to reach out to representatives and the white house to voice disapproval. most do not understand the power and leverage the office of management and budget director has. that's true, most people don't understand it. that's why we're here. they need to understand direction action -- the impact these actions have on people and their neighbors and options for making their voices heard. this chaos and corruption and assault on our constitutional powers, we have been seeing this since day one.

chaos is up. corruption is up. yes, egg prices are up. because none of this is going to help people with their bills. one great example of this, when you look at everything and say how do i tie this together, we know it's distraction, talking about things that aren't really going to help people, one of the things that was also hard to understand but is all connected when you connect the dots was the firing, the illegal firings of the nonpartisan inspectors general. this was, remember, about ten days ago, the middle of the night purge of government watchdogs. it was a serious abuse of power. these are the people watching over the taxpayer money. these are the ones, no matter if the president is democrat or republican, they go in, look at what's going on, they often discover fraud. they discover paybacks.

they discover bribes. because they're looking at the books and not just people inside the agency. those were the people purged. those were the people fired. those were the people that have been appointed during both democratic and republican administrations. what is it shakespeare said? the first thing you do is kill all the lawyers? with this administration, the first thing they did was kill off the inspectors general. congress passed the inspector general act in 1978 to establish independent, nonpartisan inspectors general in each agency, to investigate waste, fraud and abuse and prevent improper political influence and favoritism. inspectors general also save taxpayer money. they investigate corruption, and wa waste, under administrations, regardless of party. studies have shown for every dollar invested in federal spo inspectors general, americans

save approximately $13. they discover problems. to protect inspectors general from political interference, congress has passed safeguards into law, including specific requirements that must be followed if they're going to be removed from their positions by a president. the law, which can be found, i'm doing this for my very informed constituents that have been writing the office, now they can look at a new law because we care about the laws, that's what we're supposed to do here, we pass laws, the law which can be found in title 5, section 403-b states if an inspector general is removed from office or is transferred to another position or location within an establishment, the president shall communicate in writing the substantive rational, including detailed and key specific reasons for any such removal or transfer to both houses of congress, including the appropriate congressional committees, not later than 30

days before the removal or transfer. congress wrote the requirements into law to provide inspectors general protection from political interference, to let congress know what was going on. the president's decision, which he completely ignored these requirements and fired them in the middle of the night, is a violation of law. firing these critical watchdogs, like freezing the funding from an unnamed bureaucrat with a plan put in place with russell vought, like as my colleagues have been talking about tonight, firing justice department officials or asking for a list of people who work at the fbi because they were assigned to a certain case, this is not consistent with democracy. i'm a former prosecutor. i always believed that my job was to do my job without fear of favor, no matter who you were prosecuting, no matter who is working with me, we followed the law. that is what has gone amuck

here. that's why americans are reading the constitution. that's why they're calling this senate so much that they shut the phone lines down the other day. that's why they're writing the e-mails. the benefit is we have a record of the harm caused. more than ever, the responsibility will fall on congress and the people that elect us to conduct oversight and to ensure that the people in our government are working for the american people, not their unelected billionaire friends. more, federal aid now foreign aid. why would people in my state care about that? well, we actually do a lot with the world around us. we have a number of businesses that do business all around the world. we have one of the highest rates of adoption from foreign countries. we have a number of refugees that have come to our state, somali, liberia that are a big

part of the fabric of the state of minnesota. we have one of the lowest up employment rates in the nation. we are a successful economy in our state. and a lot of that has to do with the fact that we didn't close down our doors, that we brought in people to work in the jobs, to work in the farms, to work in our manufacturing companies. so that's one of the reasons we care about the world around us. but there's another. my constituents actually see that if you just shut off foreign aid as what's happening right now in our country in the world around you, you're going to have a less secure america. you're going to create this huge opening for countries like russia and china which have been expending money in developing nations to come in and fill the void. one minnesotan wrote, the freeze on u.s. foreign aid will prevent many vulnerable people from accessing critical resource, including clean water for

infants, help for farmers to feed their families, medication for kids, people will needlessly suffer and die. he continued, the freeze also risks irreparably damaging our country's reputation and credibility and gives opening to malign governments and terrorist groups. further, it may increase irregular migration both in the western hemisphere and beyond. in short i hope the -- halting the programs will create instability, undermining the administration's important foreign policy goals to make the u.s. safer, stronger and more prosperous. and could i say a number of leading republicans in my state have come out very strongly against what's going on with usaid for two reasons. one, they care about the world around them. maybe three. two, they understand the impact it has on america. and three they figure if he's going to start cherry-picking one agency and just decide to shut it down and vie -- in violation of the article 1 and all these things i talked before congress' right to have the

decision of funding, if he can do that what agency is he going to pick next? he could just cherry-pick anything. someone else said, i'm deeply concerned that any cuts to u.s. foreign assistance programs that save lives, promote global stability and keep americans safe will be a bad thing. she continued, u.s. foreign assistance is not only the right thing to do, it's the smart thing to do. at less than 1% of the federal budget, it's a cheap and effective tool for improving global stability, gaining u.s. allies and reducing the need for more u.s. aid in the future. without the support, millions of people will face devastating and in some cases deadly consequences. she's exactly right. yet yesterday as our colleagues know, the administration announced its intent to end usaid. the decision to abruptly end this when it counters extremism, fights diseases and creates more markets for u.s. exports -- my

state for instance is the fourth biggest ag exporting state in the nation -- that decision was reckless and it was dangerous, just like the decision to suddenly assess our allies of canada and mexico, 25% on tariffs. 25% tariffs. this is not good for our economy. when i think about the importance of usaid, i always think about a story that former president bill clinton used to tell about how at one point he went to an african nation and he toured some new factories that america had helped invest in. and they were making shirts and he got a shirt and he put that shirt in front of the closet so every single time he opened the closet he saw that shirt and thought they don't hate us. they actually like us. they like our country. and when they grow, as we've seen around the world, they're going to want to do business with america. they're going to want to buy american goods. they're going to stand with us

when we have foreign enemies that attack us. all that just pluck all that out of there. that is exactly what the trump administration is doing right now. when we turn our backs on our friends across the globe, they will look elsewhere for support when they need it, including countries like china and russia. it isn't only about being there for countries in need. it's also about our national skec security. then other constituents of the thousands and thousands and thousands of e-mails and calls that we've gotten in just the last few days are concerned about what this is going to do for jobs. one minnesotan wrote, i had a meeting with a nonprofit canceled this morning that is working on energy projects in southwest minnesota. it was funded by a department of energy grant. at least half a dozen people will stop working on a project because of this due to the freeze on approvals i could be laid off with thousands of other people i work with.

a different constituent who runs another nonprofit was shocked this grant was only a drop in the budget bucket but this is just a tiny example the ripple effect this will cause in funding throughout minnesota where for doubt hundreds if not thousands rely on some funding. this pause will not harm us as an organization but i can imagine how services will be impacted. other minnesotans fear the freeze could upsend their entire family's livelihood just to have this happen so suddenly. as of today, they write, my wife and i will both lose our jobs. i will be unable to make phone calls as a deaf person using the video relay phone systems president we'll lose our house and be unable to care for our disabled son. it will also affect the hundreds of thousands of disabled people, my small u.s. department of education grant serves. another constituent, a reverend wrote, we are a family that has a disabled son. he is 15 years old, a freshman

in high school and is active in the community. she continued, we are -- leaders to protect programs essential to individuals who are often excluded. we especially want people with down syndrome, autism or other developmentally disabilities and their families to be recognized as valuable and important for their role in the world. so what this is chaos and people are starting to think of how will this work in my own family. just today we had a hearing of the agriculture committee, as you think about jobs and you think about the effect on people. and we had the witnesses of the head of the national farm bureau and the head of the national farmers union there as witnesses. both of them had submitted pretty pointed letters that completely set out the alarms on this administration's plans to put in these tariffs. and i'm a fan of targeted tariff. i think you can do it.

i've seen it with steel dumping from china. i've seen once we did that and fought back, that we were able to keep iron mines open in minnesota and i supported other tariffs as well. but that's not what this is. this is across-the-board tariff. the day after imposing these tariffs -- again more chaos just like we saw with the funding freeze -- the administration decided to delay them. only created more uncertainty for americans. but one thing is certain. these tariffs aren't going to lower the price of groceries like the president promised in his campaign. they're going to raise the price of groceries. they're going to -- not going to lower the price of gas. they're going to raise it. they are going to -- they aren't going to lower the price of housing. in fact the builders association came out against him. they're going to raise it. tariffs are taxes and the new tariffs would be a tax increase on families of over a thousand dollars a year.

beyond the higher costs these tariffs would threaten our critical trade partnerships with our neighbors like canada and mexico. the u.s.-canada relationship is particularly important for my state. president harry truman once said, canada's relationship with the united states was compounded of one part proximity and nine parts goodwill and common sense. i couldn't agree more. our two countries share the word's largest land -- longest land border, more than 5,500 miles and almost 400,000 people and about $3 billion in goods and services cross it every day. minnesota exports more goods to canada ranging from ag products to machinery to medical devices than we sell to our second and third largest markets combined. minnesota exports about $7 billion worth of goods to canada each year and overall, canada

imported over $-354 billion in american goods in 2023 alone. that trade relationship with an ally, an ally that at one point at our embassy draped their embassy with banners that said friend, ally, partner. that strengthens our economy and our national security. it supports our manufacturers, farmers and ranchers. it creates jobs. but the administration announcement unravels these ties. when you look at the groups that came out against the new tariffs within 24 hours of the announcement, you could see why the president had to scramble back and get a pause. but again damage down because fewer business in another country, you think i don't know if i'm going to -- there might be a tariff on that. if you're in canada, you're like maybe i should get my next shipment from somewhere else because i don't know if i'm going to be able to depend upon the united states as a trading partner. the u.s. chamber of commerce

said the tariffs will only raise prices for american families and upend supply chains. then you have both the national association of manufacturers and the international association of machinists saying they would put american manufacturing jobs at risk. these tariffs threaten a another blow to the finances of farm families. and the national association of home builders said they would increase the cost of construction and consumers will end up paying in the form of higher home prices. so you have complaints from the workers side. you have complaints from the business side. and you have complaints from the farm side. i'd say you're in trouble. it's not only these groups which do represent thousands and thousands and thousands of businesses and workers. it's people right in this building.

and it's not just the democrats who are here speaking tonight about what this chaos is doing to american families. senator mcconnell put it pretty well when he talked today about this at the agriculture hearing. but he said, it will be paid for by american consumers. he's absolutely right. slapping new taxes on american families while planning more massive tax cuts for billionaires is not how you strengthen our economy. lives and livelihoods are at stake. when i look at these constituent letters and i literally have only read a fraction of them, i see that people are waking up. they are energized. they are starting to see that i don't feel like i have much control over my life. maybe that's why i voted for change in this election. but i actually wanted it to happen. the other thing they say, i

actually wanted democrats and republicans to work across the aisle like we do so much in this senate. but what they didn't vote for, they didn't vote for was chaos. what they didn't vote for was corruption. what they didn't vote for was an unelected billionaire deciding he's just going to come in and run the government. they actually said okay, i want to tip the scales a little. want to see what can happen. someone else in there. then they thought we were going to work it out. they thought we were going to work on how to make government more efficient. they thought we were going to work on how to get more housing with all these things i've seen that are incredible around my state with incentives for private entities to work to do things like expand child care, a bunch of businesses get together, we could do some things to create more incentives to make that happen, to expand existing private child care. or this idea of creating more

smaller child care facilities so that there are all ones in a row, apartment after apartment, so that they can bring in kids and the smaller businesses. they thought maybe they're going to do something about con consolidation or maybe they're going to do something so my kids when they look at the internet, they don't see pornography and they don't get fentanyl dealers online. but instead what do they see? i guess, talk about panama and greenland and talk about all kinds of things that really aren't relevant to their lives. they want us to do things that are relevant to their lives. and they do not want some unelected guy to come in and make all these decisions for them. mr. president, these minnesotans are only some but not all of the lives that this administration

is playing with. they deserve better. the people of this country deserve competence, not chaos. we have already seen what happens when russell voukt's vision -- russell vought's vision for the office of management and -- it leads to disorder. it leads to uncertainty. it leads to unconstitutional power grabs that hurt americans. and that was even before he had the job. because you see, this was his plan from the very beginning. i implore my colleagues on the other side of the aisle to vote no on this nomination, to stand up as our constituents have asked us to stand up, whether they're democrats or republicans. no to chaos. no to corruption. uphold the values of our

constitution when. when you look at these nominees, fulfill your duties of advise and consent. why rubber stamp every single one of these nominees? why would you do that? instead look at what they plan to do. are they truly qualified or do they actually have the interests of the agency they're supposed to run and the interest of the american people at heart. then make your decision. we cannot put someone in charge of the office of management and budget which by the way has now become a household word, an agency that many people never heard of in my state but they're now writing letters in droves about the fact that they don't understand why an unelected bureaucrat could issue that memo and why we could put someone in place that devised this strategy, someone who has already demonstrated that he

will abuse his power. article 1 of our constitution which so many of my constituents are now reading up on, makes it clear that decisions about federal funding belong to congress, not the president and certainly not the director of the office of management and budget. russell vought has shown blatant disrespect for the american people and the constitution. he is not the man for this job. thank you, mr. president. i yield the floor. a senator: mr. president. the presiding officer: the senator from new jersey mr. kim: mr. president, i rise today because we have a crisis of confidence in our government.

it's a crisis that's being driven by the trump administration with one goal in mind, to let the well off and the well connected play by their own set of rules while you, the american people, continue to scrape by. it's a crisis that put paz us at a crossroads. will we take the steps to restore trust or will we break our institutions even further and usher in a golden age of corruption? in order to answer those questions, we need to have a real understanding of a few things. one, how deep is this crisis in confidence? two, in what ways is the trump administration putting their thumb on the scale for the we will-off and well-connected?

three, how is that impacting the rest of us and how will it impact america's future? four and finally, how can we fight back? now, let's start with the crisis that we're in. when i talk about this crisis in confidence, what we're talking about is the belief that your government is working for you. that it's working for the american people, all of its people. a belief that no matter the challenge you face or the ambitions that you have, that your government has your best interests at heart. that is the fundamental credence of our democracy. and it's of, by, and for the people. and that belief is always important.

but when times are tough, it's even more critical than ever. now, let's be clear. these are tough times. i don't think there's a single person in america that would disagree with that. we have challenges before us. we have challenges with the high cost of living, affordability problems. it is a top issue that i hear about in my home state of new jersey. we have a lot of crisis of confidence in this moment, about whether or not we can step up as a nation and be able to rise to the challenges that we face, and the challenges we face are significant. we have to acknowledge that. over the past couple years, as we recover from a generationally defining pandemic, i've heard from so many families who don't -- who just don't believe

that they can get ahead. they don't believe and think that they'll do better than their parents and that their kids won't do better than them. i think about that in my own family situation. my parents coming here, emigrating to this nation 50 years ago, and i remember asking them why they did it, and my parents, they said to me just one simple line -- they said, we did it because we felt that here in america we could guarantee that the family that we raise, that you and your sister would have a better life and more opportunities than we did. that was it. that was that simple. they weren't driven by greed. they weren't trying to take it all for themselves, as if this was some zero-sum survival of

the fittest. it was a sense simplify america and a -- it was a sense of america and a sense of the opportunity that it can bring for everyone, including two immigrants from south korea who were born during the korean war into poverty and came to this nation. and now, as they get older, the challenges that they face being seniors, the elderly, the health care and other challenges that they face with their budget fixed, and now myself as a father of a 7-year-old and 9-year-old wondering about a kind of america are my kids going to grow up in? and i know it's not just my family that worries about this because when the costs of basic goods go up, it makes it harder to save for everybody. and when families can't save, it makes it harder to achieve that crown jewel of the american

dream. owning a home, something that my family has struggled with over the years, something that so many other families are facing right now as we see the cost of owning a home skyrocket. it puts that dream even more out of reach. and for those that can't own even the cost of rentingal prices are going through -- rental prices are going through the roof. demoralizing people. i remember hearing from this one young man, a recent college graduate, and he just came to me with just feeling so deflated. he said, i don't think i'm ever going to open a home is how he put it. i have to tell you, just hearing that from him, just how pessimistic he was, just how demoralized he was about his place in our society, but it wasn't just about his place, it was about this moment for this

country and the fact that he doesn't see us moving in the trajectory where someone like himself and people in his geneva reagan administration aring -- and people in his generalation are going to have that chance of generations before him. you throw in that rising cost of education that he's struggling with, trying to pay off the bills, try to keep up with student debt and you have that general sense that we're losing that sense that we're part of something bigger than all of us, and it's easy to understand why people just don't think the system that should be working for them is working for them. that's the place that we're in right now, that in this moment we find ourselves living through the greatest -- through the moment of the greatest amount of inequality in our nation's history. even worse than the robber baron

ages that we study in history books. somehow we see such extraordinary wealth but just for the few. the vast majority of americans are struggling paycheck to paycheck, won't be able to step up if they face some type of crisis, a car accident or something else that could just lead them into catastrophe. that lack of trust is very clear in the numbers that we see from the american people. a pew study from last summer showed that public trust in the federal government is at approximately 22%. and in 2023, only 16% said that the government, quote, always or most of the time is something that you can trust. according to pew, that was amongst the lowest tally in nearly 70 years.

that number reflected in a survey conducted by the partnership for public service in the spring of 2024. their research shows that only 23% of americans trust the federal government. that's down from 35% the year before. we're just seeing it go down and down and down. only 15% think the government is transparent, down from 21% the year before. this erosion that we're continuing to see in our country and in the public trust has to be at top of mind because how can a government function, how can a democracy function with that much distrust? alamping in that -- alarming in that group is trust amongst people aged 18 to 34. that age group of the young man that i told you about who had such pessimism about his future.

and in that group, we saw trust decline by half, from 30% to 15%. now, you might think this is just maybe a red state problem. but let me tell you, it is a massive issue in my home state, in new jersey as well. in may of 2023, a poll by fairly dickinson university sowed that over 80% of new jersey residents, that over 80% believe that their state's politicians are corrupt. that shows you just such a devastating number of the distrust that is out there and how widespread it is. i remember, you know, we've certainly had our challenges of late in new jersey, and when you see the corruption, when you hear about the news of indictments and convictions, i remember one time i went to a neighbor of mine, asked him what

he thought about the state of corruption in new jersey, and he just said, that's new jersey. threw up his hands. this sense of helplessness, this sense of apathy, the sense that that's just how things are now. there's nothing we can do about it. now, there are a variety of reasons why this is the case in new jersey. but it all comes back to the same thing -- a singular question. are the people in your government working for you or are they working for themselves? are they trying to lift up their own personal wealth or look out for their friends or their associates, their families, for special interests? i always often felt like one of the most important questions you can get a sense from from the people is this question of, do your elected officials, do your

government officials care about you? because sometimes it just feels like we're in this moment in this country where we have this crisis of empathy right now, and we are losing touch with that idea that we're part of something bigger than all of us. we're having trouble, we're struggling to be able to see the world through someone else's eyes and walk in their shoes. and in this nation of over 330 million people, how can we continue, if we continue to only think about ourselves and lose sight of that which is around us? now, obviously this is all the more important in times like these, when we need our government working to solve the problems that we face. as we said is we face significant challenges. so what happens when we have a government where the people

aren't working in the public interest, when those that are charged by the people to take up the public common good are not following through? what happens when we have a government where those people working to protect the public interest are fired, are pushed out, or marginalized? luckily for us, history may not repeat, but it certainly rhymes. the founding fathers established the federal workforce to be one built on merit. it was something that they took quite seriously. so seriously, in fact, that during debate in the weeks after washington's first inauguration, james madison stated that, quote, wanton removal of a meritorious officer is an impeachable offense.

george washington himself wrote that appointments into public service would be -- appointments into public service would be the most difficult and delicate part of his work. in a history of the federal service, a record published by the office of personnel management, the evolution of this debate from one of merit first to one of political gain becomes very apparent. as political parties grew, so did the pendulum swing of retaliation and actions that further politicized public servant positions. but the dam broke just a generation after the founding of the republic. the tenure of office act of 1820, not exactly a household name, was one of the first dominos to fall, that led to

what was eventually called the spoils system. by limiting the terms of many officials to four years, corresponding to the president, it basically meant that public servants would come in and out with the tides of the pre presidency, and not based on need or qualifications, just the pendulum swing of partisanship, the qualification being that of loyalty rather than skill or merit. and the impact of the spoils system became very apatient, which was -- apparent, which was wholesale patronage and corruption, and a rejection of the status quo that looks very familiar to what we see today. senator henry clay on the senate floor called it, quote, a d detestable system. a detestable system. george william curtis, one of

the leaders in the fight to reform the civil service, said that the spoils system, quote, presents a most ridiculous, revolting, and disheartening spectacle. he said that through it the united states, quote, sees with intrigue and corruption. over time, the pushback against this system and the damage it did to the united states government and its people built a reform movement that eventually resulted in the passage and enactment of the pendleton act in 1883. in many ways, the pendleton act brought our public service back to its original roots, codifying it, protecting it by calling for an open selection of government employees and creating a civil service commission, our modern civil service. it required that the applicants pass a civil service exam.

the bill was the first domino in several that helped to restore trust in government by ensuring that those that serve serve the people and not themselves, serve the people and not just some loyalty test. in so many ways, the battle that led to the passage of the pendleton act continues today and answers the first question i posed, how deep does our crisis in confidence in our government go? in short, it goes back to a friction we've seen for most of our history. it's a friction between those who want to use power for their gain, to enrich themselves and their party at the expense of other americans. on the other side, those who seek only to swear an oath to the constitution and to deliver

on the promise of making the next american generation more prosperous and secure, to have that sense of progress as a nation, which we know we cannot take for granted, we have to work for it. when you look at donald trump, or look at elon musk, you're not seeing something new, you're not seeing the disruptors they tell you that they are, you're not seeing an innovator. you're seeing something that's very old, just another power-hungry politician, elite figure seeking to hoard power at the expense of real american families. in this moment right now, as i said, that is the moment of the greatest amount of inequality in our nation's history. and doing that by attacking the

very people who work for the people, they are not beholden to the well-off and the well-connected. another person leading the charge to bring us back to the golden age of corruption of the 18-00's is a -- of the 1800's is a man named russell vought. now, russell vought was born to make corruption safe again. as a staffer in the house and senate, he worked with members of both chambers who attacked and demeaned civil servants to get them out of the way and let big corporate interests through. he worked for nearly a decade at the heritage foundation, taking dark corporate money and translating it into a systematic takedown of the same protections those corporations were lobbying against. when the trump administration came into office in 2017, mr. vought was one of the first in the building at the office of

management and budget, omb. then, like now, senators had serious concerns when he was nominated. then for deputy director, and eventually director of omb. now, this brings me to my second question -- in what ways is the trump administration putting their thumb on the scale for the well off and well connected? well, let's look at it. let's look at project 2025, mr. vought's guidebook for attacking the core of the very principles that our founders wrote into the constitution. our founding fathers wanted to ensure checks and balances. they wanted to make sure we didn't swap one monarch for another. vought believes that the president has a right to stop funds that congress has approved from getting to the places we approved them to go. that means that even if your

elected officials approve money to go towards building a road or investing in a school in your community or trying to get your kids child care, russell vought believes that donald trump should be able to just stop it from getting to them just because. now, i say donald trump, because russell vought is a champion of something called the, quote, unitary executive theory. i know that may sound like a half-baked physics idea, but vought believes all of the idea in the executive branch belongs to the president, and the president alone. mr. vought even said in an interview a few months ago that, quote, there are no independent age agencies. now, move -- having the power of the presidency supersede congress and the independence of

agencies that have massive authority given to them, by the way, by congress, they have these massive authorities to protect the american people, this is core in clearing the field for the well off and the well connected, by warping that and trying to change the fundamental balance of our government, across three branches. finally, by weakening the ability to fund the work that they do, and to operate independently, did is mr. vought's attacks on civil servants, the very positions put into place more than 140 years ago to stop rampant corruption and patronage, it is his attacks that threaten to bring us back in time. in a speech last year mr. vought said he wants civil servants to be, quote, traumatically

affected. he said, quote, when they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. he went on to say, we want their funding to be shut down so that the epa can't do all the rules against our energy industry, because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. we want to put them, our civil servants -- our public servants in trauma. he used that word, trauma. i want you to think about that for a second. this is an american, an american asking for our vote here in the u.s. senate to be confirmed as a senior government official. someone who will lead an incredibly important part of our

executive branch, be a top advisor to the president, an american who will take an oath to support and defendt the constitution -- defend the constitution, an american who is actively saying he wants to traumatize his fellow americans, other americans that have also sworn that oath to our constitution. now, mr. president, i may disagree with my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, you but -- but i don't wish to traumatize them, i don't wish them harm. how is it that we have found ourselves in this place where americans call and see other americans as the enemy? i talk with democrats and republicans across new jersey. they may have disagreements, but they don't want to traumatize each other.

this is not who we are as americans. but it's what mr. vought wants to inflict on the people who show up to work each and every day to serve you, the american people. these are people trying to serve you, not themselves. but they're being demonized. they're being attacked. disrespected. for those he can't traumatize out of a job, he's going to try to change their status as employees of the federal government so that he can push them out. maybe you heard of something called schedule f. even if you haven't, let me put it into simple terms. russell vought wants to basically bring back the same policies that started the chain of events that led to the spoils system. he wants to make it so that

civil servants have their protections removed, giving partisan leaders the ability to fire them and put in their own political staff. we're already hearing and seeing this. reports that those at the white house and elsewhere are asking civil servants, asking those in jobs or seeking jobs who they voted for the last election, about campaign donations, about party affiliation. rather than just their commitment to the constitution. now, my colleagues on the other side of the aisle would say that a president should have the ability to appoint their own staff, and i have agreement with that in broad strokes. but there's a reason why we have different kinds of government workers, it's because the government is meant to do the work of the people.

not be completely bent to the will of a particular political party. i speak from personal experience. i was proud to be a civil servants. i believe i'm actually one of only a handful of members of congress that currently serve that worked as a civil serve ants -- civil servant. i worked under president bush and president obama. i served the nation, not a party or a specific president, and that's the way it should be. frankly, the oath that i swore as a civil servant is the same as what i recite here in this chamber. we could all be better off if we take the mindset and approach of our civil servants. if we just let president trump fire civil servants and replace them with people like mr. vought or the people that mr. vought deems loyal enough to the

president to bring on board, the protections our founders envisioned to prevent the cor corrupting influence of power and the corrupting power of that influence will completely override any ability to make change for the rest of us. and we're seeing this in real time right now. this leads me to my third question -- what is the impact of this corruption and these attacks on our neighbors and our national security? mr. president, the nf calls and e-mails and visits to my office i've gotten over the past weeks has been overwhelming. first of all, i want to thank everybody who has reached out to express their opinions and their concerns. we would be better off if we have that kind of consistent engagement from the american people paying attention to the work that is being done in

government, and having their voices heard. and i want to thank my team for their service in being responsive to those concerns. now, starting with a memo from omb, freezing federal funding, there has been panic across new jersey and frankly the country by the funds we approve as congress, funds that are your funds as taxpayers. and they have been taken away from you by the trump administration. i want to share a couple of examples of the note i've gotten from people in my state who are being hurt by the systematic attempt to fire civil servants and strip away programs that help working families, to clear away for the trump administration to let the well off and well connected take control. as they get ready to plan for their big tax giveaway to the wealthiest americans and the biggest corporations, taking

that away from the rest of the american people. i got a letter from julia, a community leader who runs an organization in central new jersey that helps kids and seniors and people just trying to get by. she said, quote, the new administration's pause on all activities related to obligations or disbursements of those funds for federal grants, to nongovernmental organizations would have an immediate and negative effect on the low-income working folks we all serve across new jersey. she went on to say, quote, children in head start and early head start, quality child care and after school services improve the physical and cognizant while parents pursue training.

wick, nutrition programs that provide essential access to healthy foods, for pregnant women and young children leading to life-long health benefits, that this would be on the chopping block. pregnant women in our maternal health programs are less likely to have preterm or low birthrate deliveries with immediate and sustained health benefits and cost savings. that that would be a detriment. medicare navigation services for seniors on fixed, low incomes are helpful and enable them to live independent and longer. and that's something they won't be able to count on. for every child raised by a kinship caregiver, our state saves thousands in foster care payments it would otherwise incur with public dollars. it matters that these programs are delivered by nonprofit organizations that provide a

continuum of services that support economic activity and make our whole community more resilient. this is one organization helping tens of thousands in our state. i want to share one quick figure that stuck out to me, one of the approximately 13 million in grants they received. they estimate an economic benefit to new jersey of around $52 million saved. so for my colleagues not convinced by our attempts to feed children and provide health care to seniors, you might be interested to hear that providing these services is the fiscally responsible thing to do as well. let's look at the other impacts these draconian cuts could have on new jersey families. we should work to keep our communities safe. if these cuts persist, grants to

law enforcement and homeland security activities will be cut off putting us in danger. we should work to be prepared for disasters like wildfires and hurricanes. public assistance and hazard mitigation grants from the disaster relief fund help communities quickly respond to, recover if, and prepare for major disasters. i might not go to the many communities that are struggling after severe natural disasters. as our neighbors in new jersey continue to recover from storms from even more than a decade ago as superstorm sandy shattered so many lives, continued to wreak havoc and many of those families still not back in their homes, our government should never abandon them. we should work to build the best infrastructure. roads and bridges and public transit and more.

take it into the next generation with universal broadband and connectivity on so many fronts that are necessary for all fam families. we should be able to work together to build that infrastructure so that your families can get to work and your kids can get to school and our businesses can thrive. but that funding is at risk. we should work to combat the fentanyl crisis and the mental health crisis by investing in proven programs that save lives, programs that could be on the chopping block if these cuts persist. we should invest in lifesaving medical research so that this is the last generation that will have to suffer through cancer, alzheimer's disease, diabetes. cutting this funding means cutting clinical trials at nih clinical centers all across the country. the american people deserve

better than that. we should work to provide the best education for our next generation. as a father of a 7-year-old and a 9-yard, i see -- 9-year-old, i see every day the impacts of a good education has on them. i myself a public schoolkid from new jersey, something that we're proud of in new jersey but knowing that we still have so much more work to do to make that available to everyone. this is a process we have to continue. you cannot take it for granted. right now head start programs that provide comprehensive early childhood education for more than 800,000 kids are being frozen. with teachers and staff not getting paid, programs may not be able to stay open. child care programs could also be next to close without funding being delivered. and our k-12 schools will lose

critical funding from title one ieda,ism pact aid and other programs that can keep their doors open, lights on in the middle of the school year. from health care to small business support to protecting our veterans and providing support for those suffering through hunger, the examples of the kinds of impact and the people impacted by these cuts are almost endless. and they are a reminder of who is on the losing side when corruption and corporate greed win out. and beyond the impacts of our communities -- on our community, impacts on our national security is real. and these stories of mr. musk and his band of 20 somethings making threats to workers isn't some example of brave tech disrupters innovating their way to efficiency and better results.

in fact what we're seeing from this administration is quite the opposite. stories of dangerous incompetence. yesterday "the new york times" reported that the white house ordered the cia send an unclassified e-mail listing all the employees hired over the past two years. many of these new employees were hired to help us deal with the rising challenges of china and russia, of other threats that we face out there. now they are effectively being exposed, made vulnerable to our adversaries because trump administration simply wants to traumatize public servants. we are doing the work of our adversaries for them. one example of this are the attacks that we see against usaid. and as i've seen what's unfolded this week at usaid actually reminded me of my first moments in public service. a little over 20 years ago i started my very first day

working for the u.s. government. i remember walking up to the doors of the ronald reagan building because i was starting my first day at usaid. i had just graduated college. and i was proud to have a chance to serve this nation and proud to serve at a place like usaid. and it was the public servants there that showed me what community meant, showed me that someone like me has every bit as much right to represent and to work and serve our country. because it was something i wasn't sure about. when i first showed up to this town, i remember stepping out at union station and seeing the beautiful dome of the capitol. and i was simultaneously inspired but also terrified. i felt an imposter syndrome. who am i to able to represent and serve this country?

i'm from -- i'm a son of up grants, from a family of political nobodies serving this cou country, working in government, wasn't for me. i worked alongside public servants at usaid who helped with the rehabilitation of ex-child soldiers in uganda. others that worked on combatting malaria and helping save millions of lives. i was working at usaid around the time of the indian ocean tsunami, if we remember that catastrophe. a 9.1 magnitude earthquake killing an estimated 240,000 people in 14 nations across two continents. and usaid stepped up. helping support those families, living in dire conditions. having faced a catastrophe unlike anything we had seen in

generations. but also building towards the future, creating early warning systems across the world. it was usaid that helped deliver that to countries all across this world to help better prepare for the next disaster. later in my career, i worked at the white house national security council. i was working on helping coordinate the counter isis fight about a decade ago. i remember one particular moment in august 2014 where we saw isis going in and attacking a religious minority of a people called the u zee di people. they were forced out from their communities and they fled on top of a mountain, trying to take refuge there while they were surrounded by isis terrorists

who were hell-bent on committing genocide and a mass atrocity. and we in the u.s. government, we're trying to figure out what can we do, what can we do to try to help save these people, tens of thousands of people trapped on a mountain deep in enemy territory on the other side of the world. can we help them with humanitarian airdrops? is there a way we can build a humanitarian corridor off that mountain. are there ways in which we can try to protect them from being annihilated. you want to know who the first americans were that went there? under dangerous issue ises, deep in enemy -- circumstances, deep in enemy territory, it was a usaid dart team, disaster assistance response team there alongside our military, that helped the president of the united states make decisions in

the situation room about what to do next. about whether or not we were going to decide to protect this -- these people or not. and the president based off of the information provided by usaid made the decision to conduct humanitarian airdrops, to be able to provide overflight coverage and be able to provide support and security to those people when we were able to get them off of that mountain. it was one of the finest moments i had ever seen in government. on those days i saw the best of us, and i saw a government that can inspire. we see usaid working on disease eradication, on agriculture, global health, humanitarian aid and economic growth, food security, clean water, helping with the eradication of smallpox, saving countless lives through simple oral rehydration

therapies, things like that that had immeasurable, countless benefits. it was a legacy that excited me when i walked up on my first day of work as a recent college grad. and then just this past monday, i walked through those same doors at the reagan building yet again only to find it empty, apart from a security guard who i went up to and he told me that he had instructions to bar and prevent any usaid employee from entering the building that day. to bar public servants from going to the office to do the work that they are entrusted by the american people to do. it was just despicable. the demonization of public servants. now, let's remember why usaid exists. that american global leadership has always been hand in hand with our foreign assistance, from the marshall plan forward, under both democrats and

republicans. kennedy in 1961, he said, quote, the program requires highly professional, skilled servants, attracting high numbers of men and women capable of sensitive dealing with other governments, and with a deep understanding of the process of economic development. he went on to say, in the face of these weaknesses and inadequacies of the previous system that it's proper -- is it proper that we draw back and ask with candor, is a foreign aid program really necessary? the answer to that is that there's no escaping our obligations. our moral obligations as a wise neighbor of free nations. he said to fail to meet those obligations now would be disastrous and in the long run more expensive for the

widespread poverty and the chaos would lead to a collapse of existing political and social structures which would inevitably invite the events of totalitarianism into every weak and unstable area. thus our own security would be endangered and our own prosperity imperiled. so he went on, kennedy went on and called for an effort to, as he said is unified administration and operation, a single agency in washington and in the field equipped with a flexible set of tools. this was going to be drawing upon the most competent and dedicated career servants, now in the field and attracting the highest quality from every part of the nation. and he went ton say that he wants to ensure that this was separate from our military assistance, for instance, because he said, our program of aid to social and economic development must be seen on its own merits, judged in the light

of its vital and distinctive contribution to our basic security needs. and he was clear in saying this was a bipartisan legacy, one that would move forward under the leadership of two great presidents, harry truman, dwight eisenhower, drawn on support of foreign-looking members of both political parties in the congress and throughout the nation. and he said it's about american global leadership. now, there is a reason why the usaid headquarters is at the reagan building. reagan continued that emphasis on development and humanitarian aid. he said, quote, the ultimate importance to the united states of our security and development assistance programs cannot be exaggerated. another quote that's actually quite apt for this moment, he said, you know the excuses, we afford foreign aid anymore.

we're wasting money pouring it into these poor countries or we can't buy friends. other countries just take the money and dislike us for giving it. well, all these excuses are just that, excuses. and reagan said, they're dead wrong. now we have a secretary of state, marco rubio, saying usaid takes taxpayer funds and, quote, spends it as a global charity irrespective if it's the national interest or not the national interest. but you know who else said that the work of usaid isn't charity, like kennedy, like reagan? it was marco rubio just a few years ago. quote, foreign aid is not charity, he said. we must make sure it is well-spent but it is less than one percent of budget and critical to our national security. rubio went ton say, quote, we don't have to give foreign aid.

we do so because it furthers our national interest. that's why we give foreign aid. he said, quote, anyone who tells you that we can slash foreign aid and that will bring us balance to our budget is lying to you. foreign aid is less than one percent of our budget. it's just not true. look, there can always be space to review our foreign assistance. i worked in these organizations. i know there are places that we can try to fine-tune, make more efficient, make nor effective. if there are places that members of congress have questions about, that's ripe for our oversight role. but to undermine usaid as a whole is flat wrong. we see this with secretary rubio's first trip this past weekend. he went to canada -- he went to panama, complained about panama accepting support from china through the belt and road initiative. yet he then goes on to help trump and musk gut usaid, a

critical tool we have to counter chinese influence. and it very much exposes that this america first foreign policy really means america only. and if we continue down this path, we will find ourselves alone. over the years of our global power, our strategic advantage has always been in building coalitions, and in this dangerous global environment, this america first approach leaves us distracted from the real threats and challenges. this is about american global leadership. i think about my own family. my parents, born during the korean war, they group the very first americans they ever met were american servicemembers and other americans that were there to try to help korea rebuild. it wasn't just america's resolve in the war. it was about what happened afterwards in terms of helping

provide assistance. americans taking action to feed kids like my parents. as i said earlier, 50 years ago my parents decided to come to america. they knew nobody here. not a single person. they didn't know anybody in the entire western hemisphere of planet earth, but my parents moved here to america because america meant something to them. it's because they met the best of us, americans abroad willing to work in dangerous places, in tough circumstances, wanting to try to live out the values of our country. and we learned it's not just the gdp of our nation that makes us a leader. it is the projection of our values and ultimately it is our people. now we are pulling back our foreign assistance. we are closing the door to immigrants like my parents.

this is unfortunately a moment of american withdrawal. that is not what the american people want. they wanted a government that was focused on them instead of billionaires and the biggest corporations, but they understand the importance of american leadership. when i talk to leaders and officials in other countries, i remember there was one situation where i talked to one, and he said something to me that really just stuck in my mind. he said, i just want you to know when i talk to other leaders around the world, when we talk about america, this official i was talking about, he said, we ask ourselves a question -- is america a reliable partner? and he asked that question knowing full well what the answer is. and we know what the answer is, which is we are not the reliable partner we should be. and this isn't just about usaid. we know usaid, that these

attackers it's only just the beginning. it's the canary in the coal mine. next it'll be the department of education or justice or fbi or elsewhere, scheduled f, an effort to kill the civil service, return to the spoil system of 200 years ago. and it goes back to russell vought. i want to emphasize that quote i said earlier. he said, we want the bureaucrats to be tau matterically -- tau matterically affected. when they wake up, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villians. we want their funding to be shut down so that the epa can't do all the rules against our energy industry because they have no band bandwidth financially to do so. we want to put them in trauma. when you thereon those words -- when you listen to those words,

doesn't that sound exactly like what happened over the past week? when i get these phone calls and texts from people at usaid, people i worked with texting and calling me, telling me how disrespected they feel. and it saddens me greatly to think that trump and musk and mr. vought and others are relishing in that anxiety, fear, and pain. that they are purposefully, purposefully trying to create. in an interview with tucker carlson, vought says, trump, quote, has to move executively as fast and as aggressively as possible with radical constitutional perspective to be able to dismantle that bureaucracy and their power centers. now, why do you think they need to move so fast? it's because when you want to grab as much power us a can, you -- as you can, you want to do it before the american people understand what's happening.

they feed off the apathy and helplessness. they want people to be disengaged. they're using terms like shock and awe, a term of war that now they're using against the american people. i believe that the opposite of democracy is apathy. we have to stay engaged. there is a massive division in our country, no doubt about that. it's not just between democrats and republicans. it's between those who are engaged and those who aren't. these actions are builted to paralyze -- are built to paralyze you with anger, fuelled with disinformation and distraction to make you disengage. but don't let them. so what comes next? all we have to do is look at mr. vought's past statements to know exactly what's coming. he said, quote, what we're trying to do to identify the pockets of independents and seize them. when he was talking about the

federal reserve, he said, it's very hard to square the fed's independence with the constitution. that quote of his led me to ask him in the confirmation hearing if he believes that the president has i think right to set interest rates in our country. mr. vought refused to answer. couldn't answer something as simple as that. the answer should be very easy. it should be clearly no. i talked to a number of leaders at the fed recently. they family sighed the long-standing bipartisan agreement that we do not want someone approaching decisions about fiscal decisions for america based off of what's best for the next election? we don't want to see that kind of politicization. the goal always needs to be towards the stability of our economy and the responsibility towards growth and prosperity. vought, he just believes in power. not just any kind of power.

he believes innage an -- in an all-powerful president, something our founding fathers specifically avoided. we have coequal branches of government. but is that what the american people have seen since january 20? no, we've seen blatant power grabs, illegal actions, disregard of laws passed by congress, chaos. but, remember, as you see this, tay 0s is their plan. it's trump's plan. it's mr. vought's plan. it's the reason why they're going after public servants, and it's the same reason that happened 200 years ago because public service is about serving the people while corruption, we see, is about serving themselves. public service was the answer to countering corruption in the

1800's, and it is my belief it is the answer to the current threat to our democracy. when you see these attacks on public servants, when you see what is unfolding before our eyes, that's not the golden age that trump tried to talk about in his inaugural address. it's not the make america great again slogan that he's been using. it goes back to another phrase that he used over the campaign when he talked about, quote, the enemy from within, those three words. the enemy from within. that's what this is all about. painting our public servants who swear an oath to protect our constitution as the enemy. earlier i talked about my parents coming to the united states 50 years ago. now my family, we think about the next 50 years. parent -- i'm a parent of a 7-year-old and 9-year-old, two

little boys. i wonder what kind of america my boys are going to grow up in. what will this country look like when they are my age? so that's why i'm here. that's why i stand here on the floor of the senate. i'm here because i refuse to believe that my kids and their generation are doomed to grow up in a broken america. i still believe in the america that inspired my parents 50 years ago to travel halfway around the world, and i know we're not the only family out there that believes in this. there is a hunger in this country, for reform and change. people don't want to see the status quo, but that doesn't mean they want to hand over our country to corruption. hand it over to patronage, hand it over for another generation of the worst inequality our nation's ever seen, where every

day it gets worse. as i mentioned before, we just took on and fought against machine politics in new jersey. i heard it straight from the people -- they don't want to see that kind of rise of broken machine politics across our nation. corruption is the quickest way to take the strongest, most powerful nation in the world and send it into decline. in just a little over a year, we will have our 250th anniversary as a nation. as i close here, i want us to reflect on that. 250 years. i hope we can commit as a nation to have that more than just about fireworks, that we use that as a moment to try to rededicate ourselves to the mission of this country, to the purpose of this nation and why it began. after the january 6 riots, the

way i framed it, i said i was going to dedicate the rest of my life to trying to solve one singular question, which is how do we heal this country. i believe the answer to that question is service, that we need a new ask not what this country can do for you moment, a reminder that we're bigger than something -- part of something bigger than all of us. that we should be promoting and encouraging service. we hope on our 250th anniversary we rededicate to the project, build a national service, invest in civics education, reject divisiveness that is ineffecting our nation and re -- infecting our nation. restore a sense of trust. we start by rejecting this dangerous nomination, to do just that. thank you, mr. president. and i yield back the balance of my time.

mr. schatz: mr. president. the presiding officer: the senator from hawaii. mr. schatz: thank you, mr. president. i want to say how much i have come to admire in a short period of time the junior senator from new jersey. that was a real speech. you know, we're obviously spending 30 hours on the floor to oppose russ vought's nomination, and a lot of people have come here and speak for 60 minutes or 30 minutes or 90 minutes, and we'll take anything, right? some people just read whatever they've got, and we appreciate all of it, because we have to take the floor and maintain presence on this floor. but that was a beautiful, well-crafted speech about american democracy, about his life story, about his dedication to public service. so i'm very honored to work alongside him.

last week, without any advance notice, omb issued a memo freezing all federal funding in order to, end q, quote markist, transgenderism and green new deal social engineering policies. we can pause here, right? this is not the kind of thing that the omb is supposed to say, right? it's the office of management and budget. they're not supposed to have an opinion about wokeness or not wokeness or anything like that. it's a very odd way to view what is otherwise a kind of technocratic position, and that's what's very important about this particular omb and this particular omb director. he does not view it as merely

administering the budgets and the spending bills within the government. he views it as a power center through which all of his ideology and all of project 2025 is going to be implemented. to think of the office of management and budget as a place to fight wokeness and marxist equity? i don't know what any of that means, but i think a lot of us know the previous omb director, she was really well regarded by both sides of the aisle. i think the presiding officer actually knew her from louisiana. and you know, like she was left of center, but she would never say anything other than what is sort of straight down the middle as it relates to the office of management and budget. and that's why -- why would we take the floor for the omb director?

well, it's because he's the author of project 2025, he's essentially the architect behind the federal funds freeze, and in project 2025 among all the things they talk about, they also devote a huge passage to how important omb is and how powerful the next omb director should be. it just so happens that the author of that section saying the omb director should be like pretty close to all powerful and essentially representing the president in all things, policy and budget. it so happens that the guy that wrote that is going to be in the job to do that. that seems kind of neat. i think omb should be all powerful. also i think i should run omb. so that's what we're talking about. but just understand what happened last week was not some attack on wokeness, whatever the hell that actually means.

it was an attack on all of us. it really was an attack on all of us, all federal funding was susp suspended, millions of americans around the country were in the dark how they would access basic things -- health care, education, child care, small business loans, v.a. loans, disaster relief, opioid treatment, everything from road repairs to cancer research were shut down. across the country. you have to ask, aside from the obvious fact that withholding funding that congress has already appropriated is plainly illegal, you have to ask what does so-called wokeness have to do with repairing a road? or letting people fill their prescriptions at a community center? or helping survivors of a flood or wildfire to try to rebuild

their lives? is a child having a healthy meal wokeness? is that dei? is that, i don't know, gender ideology? is that the green new deal? seriously, what the hell are we doing here? a president is allowed to make policy. a president is expected to make policy. but they can't take a law and repeal it by executive order. and especially as it relates to a spending law. those laws are not actually optional. there's a very simple way for a president to get his way in the spending context. they can -- listen, the republicans control both chambers of the congress, the house and senate and the presidency. they had a big victory. i didn't love it, but they had a big victory. if they want changes in spending

policy, they can just do it the american way. so this is like a combination of laziness works impatience, but not -- a not inconsiderable splash of illegality. but this is amateur hour. you want to change something, you want to fight wokeness, again, whatever the hell that actually means? have we gotten to the point where shutting down a construction project is like attacking wokeness? then the actual word has ceased to mean anything. and dei is this other epithet they throw at things, but the dragnet has caught all of indian country, most native people everywhere. you know what they did? they literally control f

searched for keywords, and then pulled those things out. they don't know anything about these programs. they pulled these things out if it said gender in it, or if it said equity, or inclusive, or if it said climate. they pulled it out, said we're not funding that. first, what a goofy way to make policy. seriously, what a goofy, like childish way to make policy. second, just to reiterate, you don't get to do that. if you want to make a change in a law, you have to make a change in a law. you can't just write a memo saying i don't like the law, therefore it no longer exists because i won. it is true that the president won. free and fair election. absolutely a free and fair election. i didn't like the result, but i was absolutely prepared to tolerate policy outcomes that i

didn't like. but this is not that. this is them skipping a step, and by skipping a step i mean literally skipping the legislative branch. there's been a lot of consternation on the republican side. i mean a lot of consternation. right wing republicans, moderate republicans, all of them are a little like i don't know about this. but you can't stand up for the legislative branch in secret. you can't uphold the constitution privately. at some point you have to stand up for your prerogatives. listen, there's a lot of very talented people here actually. i don't agree with them. some of them i don't even like. but super talented people, high-achieving human beings who could be doing something else. my view is if you're going to forfeit your constitutional prerogatives, go be, i don't

know, whatever. do something else. do something more interesting. do something more lucrative. do something more easy. if you're going to be here and go through all the pain of running for election, of getting beat up by everybody left, right, and center, of people complaining about you, of putting your family through challenges, i'm serious, why would you do that and then forfeit like i'd say two-thirds of the power you're in possession of? you rant pre -- you ran presumably to achieve some measure of influence so you could actually change things. and now there's just a collective shrug of the shoulders. so the problem with mr. vought is twofold. one, we have a government with three coequal branches and congress as the article 1 branch holds the power of the purse,

and we decide what to fund at and at what levels. in the face of an illegal action, the courts can step in and strike it down as several judges did with the original funding freeze memo. this is one of the things, to the extent there are at least 20, 30 people still watching, donald trump and his team are running a huge bleach. it's not that they're not causing damage. i know they're causing damage. but understand that what they want to do is multiple, illegal things, and then see if they can get a few of these things to stick. they have articulated that pretty clearly. mr. vought has said that. jd vance said a version of that. to just say we're going to defy the federal law and see whether we can come up with some judges who will give us a different interpretation. so the reason that that is an

important thing to say is not just for me to be another democrat saying i can't believe he did this, but to understand donald trump is not the only person in the world who's not constrained by federal law. we saw last week the federal funding freeze was found to be illegal, and it was suspended, and there's an injunction against it. last week, maybe two weeks ago, the birthright citizenship nonsense was rejected by a federal judge. even what's happening with the access to the treasury payments is being constrained in the court system. so, i'm not, like, pollyanna, i'm frustrated, especially with the supreme court. i won't be surprised if it's not a close call to break our way, but these are not close calls.

these are clear violations of federal statutory law. so we don't want to give up in advance. the roots of democracy are still strong, and like my old now friend, one time adversary, the former speaker of the house in the state of hawaii, calvin sai, used to say, be like the bamboo, bend but don't break. so, we all have to understand that donald trump is a dis disruptor. and it's going to be rocky. but this idea that he's just going to rack up wins and there's nothing anybody can do about it is a dangerous premise because it can become self-fulfilling. people out on the streets, people in the courts, people in the legislature -- we are out of

power, but we are not powerless. and so everybody needs to understand that russ vought represents a very specific view of presidential power, which is essentially unitary executive, whatever you want to call it. but it is this view that once you win, you're basically a monarch. and that all those niceties, rules -- i mean, literally rules, right? -- you make a law and then usually the agency has to make rules about how to explain how to implement any law and they view that as just an impediment to the inherent constitutional power of one man. and this is also consistent with the way that the tech bros view government, right? they view government as, like, unnecessarily slow, right?

too many checks and balances. why doesn't the government run like a business, right? and let me tell you why. because if you ran government like a business, you would shut down every rural hospital. if you ran government like a business, you would actually not have a national transportation network. you wouldn't have a library in kaio. if you ran government like a business -- by the way, most of the money would be spent in the cities. and so we have a system of government that we all have to be committed to defending. i want to spend a little bit of time with some letters that i received from constituents last

week. and i just, like, wasn't expecting at all to go sideways so quickly. after the omb memo came out that said federal agencies must temporarily pause all activities related to the discussment of all federal -- to the mr. durbin:ment of all federal -- to the shatt-al-arab this person is not like new to this. issuing a memo saying, paws all activities a related to obstacles or disbursement of funds. i knew immediately, i was like, oh, my god. there's these portals, basically websites. mr. schatz: if you are the hawaii department of transportation, almost daily you're doing draws. you have your little code words, you sent your little invoice. then there is a little electronic transfer of known a clinic or a construction project

or the veterans administration or whatever it is. and those portals were shut down and everybody was in an actual panic, and i'm not exaging. people voted for trump for all sorts is of reasons but one reason that kept coming up was that they thought he would bring down the price of eggs, the price of groceries, the price of the pump. what they did not vote for was their -- to lose their ability to get a home loan or health care or child care or a healthy meal or a good education for their children. i want to the read a couple of letters from constituents. i'm reaching out with a heavy heart as a program planner and student advisor who works directly with students across several maui county schools. i also want to include representation of our sister programs which collectively provide vital support for first-generation and hawaiian

students. this year has been one of the most difficult in recent memory for our students and their families. the devastating lahaina wildfires have left deep scars on our community and many students are still working to recover from the emotional, physical, and financial toll that that disaster caused. for many of them, this catastrophe was a breaking point where they saw their homes, schools, and sense of stability go up in flames. despite overwhelming loss, these students are still resilient. they are fighting to stay afloat to keep their dreams alive and continue their education, despite the trauma that they have endured. these support programs have been there for them every step of the way, offering them emotional support, academic assistance, and a safe space for students to process their grief and focus on the future. through our programs, they have found a sense of community and hope. our academic advisors and mentors have been working tirelessly to ensure that even

in the wake of the fires, these students know that they are not alone, that there is a path forward, but now we face a crisis that could further jeopardize these opportunities for these young people. omb has imposed a federal freeze on funding set to take effect on 5:00 p.m. eastern time. this freeze will halt the discussment of funds, including those essential for our programs. without access to these funds, we will be unable to continue providing services that our students need to heal, thrive, and succeed. the support that they so desperately need -- academic tutoring, mentorship, college prep and a strong network of peer support -- will be in jeopardy. for many of our students, this isn't just a program, it is a lifeline. these students are not just looking for a way to finish high school. they are looking for a chance to rebuild their lives, to break the cycles of poverty and hardship and to find their footing in a world that has been turned upside down. to take away the programs that

have supported them through the wildfires and their ongoing recovery would be devastating. is this program woke? is it dei? is it marxist? what the hell are we doing here? what the medical are we doing here? -- what the hell are we doing here? why would we cause this amount of pain? some sense of, like, fiscal discipline? we're not saving the money. on top of everything else, thousands and thousands and thousands of employees, not just at usaid but the small business administration, at the cia, were sent home. and by the way because of civil service law, we can't lay them off. you're not -- it's not a private-sector situation. you can't lay them off as a

matter of law, so we sent them home to not work. we're shutting people out of their e-mails to not deliver service to the public. awesome, let's run the government like the worst business ever. where we're just going to, like, pay people not to work. i'm an eighth grade student in honolulu, hawaii. i am writing to ask for your support in protecting federal funding for native hawaiian education. the proposed freeze on federal financial assistance under executive memo m-2513 puts programs like ours at risk. without them, students like me will lose access to the cultural education that connects us to our identity. our learning is different from other schools. we don't just sit in a classroom every day. many care for the land. we learn from cultural experts

and study through real experiences. programs funded by federal grants allow us to go on educational journeys, restore fish ponds, grow food and learn traditional skills. these experiences teach us about our past and prepare us for the future. i guess it was too woke. as your constituent, i am wright to express strong opposition to the white house order to freeze federal funding across all federal agencies. millions of families will lose access to services provided by snap, tanf and hud housing assistance. millions of students in head start, grade schools and cleanse will lose -- will lose access to federal loans and pell grants. millions of local firefighters and public safety officials will lose federal grants and resources needed to protect communities.

millions of veterans would lose access to v.a. mortgages and home loans and suicide prevention services. is that woke, marxist ideology? you see, what's happening is they want to dismantle the public services that we all rely upon. can you imagine a week ago, a little more -- i guess it was a little more than a week ago, air traffic controllers were told to quit. and we got like a -- i think it is a 30% vacancy rate. we are short of air traffic krollers. and this is not something -- look, i had understand -- like i've been in politics, an appropriator for a while. sometimes people cry wolf. if you don't give us this money, it's going to be dire. but the air traffic controller situation is dire.

we saw the impact of the understaffed last week. and so the language about woke and marxism and all that stuff is a smoke screen. what they truly want to do is dismantle whatever the federal government does. if it's firefighting, if it's the cia, if it's the national weather service, if it's v.a. home loans their project -- project 2025 -- is to -- they call it dismantle the administrative state. but real lay what they want to $is provide less service to people. and the reason that they want to do that is they got a yawning $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion gap that they have to fill because they want to provide a $1

trillion to $2 trillion tax cut for the wealthiest corporations that have ever existed, literally have ever exist canned. and they got a bunch of contests of hard core fiscal conserveties on the house side that just won't do it on a deficit finance basis, so they have to find savings, and that's what this is. they really are cutting stuff is that matters to regular people and then they are going to book that as savings and then they're going to shove it in the direction of billionaires and billionaire corporations. i see my friend, senator murphy, is here, and you know it's a little bit like old times to see you on the floor at 2:00 a.m. and it used to be easier when i was on hawaii time, but i've been here for a couple weeks, so this is actually late for me. i just with a with to recognize that. we've got most democratic senators speaking at some point

through this 30-hour speared, but -- 30-hour period. but murph decided to take the 2:00 to 5:00 shift, so i hope you haven't had too much mountain dew at this point. so i would be happy to yield to the senator from connecticut, and with the permission of the chair, i ask unanimous consent to engage in a colloquy without having to go through the chair every time. the presiding officer: without objection. s why ever mump muff just for the -- mr. murphy: just for the record, senator schatz, it is diet mountain dew. mountain dew is disgusting. diet mountain dew is acceptable. mr. schatz: i did not know that this whole national is powered on celsius. everyone had a celsius. mr. murphy: i think it is two or three times the amount of caffeine that a red bull has.

not that i have an understanding of which beverages have which amounts of caffeine. but i am motivated to get up at this point because i think you hit on something really, really important. there are a number of different lanes that the policy we're talking about and the agenda of russ vought occupies. but i thought you just talked about a really important one, which is the effort to take anything left in the common space and shift it off to the private sector to become a commodity. so much of what we are discussing today is an effort to raid services that help poor people and kids and middle-class families and just bank that money so that they can afford this giant tac tax cut that's

going -- giant tax cut that's going to go primarily to the wealthy and the corporations. and the people that wrote project 2025 and the other people still believe in this longest credited theory of trickle-down economics in which if you just give a ton of money to the very, very richest, then eventually that money will tri trickle its way down to everybody else. that's not how economics works. it was a fraud from the beginning. it's just intellectual window dressing for the rich and the powerful to get more rich and powerful. but there's this other lane you're talking about which is finding the last remaining elements of public services that we decide to do together not for profit and turn it into a source of profit.

tsa is one of those targets. so project 2025, written in part by russ vought, says tsa, the transportation security administration, the agency responsible for the security at our airports, should just be outsourced to the private sector, that some private equity firm should be running security at our airports. to a lot of americans, that idea is frightening. the idea that we would just turn security at the airports over to an entity that is doing it only for profit. it seems like we should have a public mission at the heart of airport protection. but you are reading this letter from, it sounded like a student, who may not see what's coming for our school system. this is, i was going to talk

about this later but i'll bring it up now, and without objection i'll enter this article called back to school: investors are bullish again on education, into the record. the presiding officer: without objection. mr. murphy: this is a long article on a massive play being made by p private equity into education and in particular into elementary education. it's kind of hard to think about this, but it may be coming. and that is a private equity firm or hedge fund or investment firm owning your child's elementary school. right now private equity investors are lining up to put money in funds because they believe they are going to have a chance to bid on your child's elementary school, to bid on your child's middle school, that we are literally going to outsource the education of our kids to investment firms.

if you read this article, it is absolutely chilling because the folks that cover the private equity industry, they're kind of used to being unapologetic about the fact that the only thing that matters is money. if you read this article, there's not a single word in here about quality or about making sure that there aren't 50 kids in a classroom. it is just about the private equity industry realizing that, oh my gosh, there is a ton of money that we can pull out of our looks like and our middle schools. this is a wonderful source of profit for us. they're not mission oriented. they are profit oriented. and so in addition to this agenda about stripping their services in order to create the illusion that you're saving money so you can pass along to the very wealthy, this is also

just a simple play to take every element of public services that haven't been commodotized and turn them into a commodity so somebody can get rich. i get sick at the idea of my kids' middle school becoming a source of profit. i'm a capitalist. i believe this country is great because we allow people to get fabulously rich off of entrepreneurship and great ideas, but i think there should be a couple things that we don't do for profit. i just think there should be a few things that we do because it's just the right thing to do, whether it's police protection or fire protection or building a road or educating our kids or protecting our airports. like not everything has to be for profit. so i just wanted to pick up on

this really important element of the 2025 plan and the l trump administration's agenda. mr. schatz: i want to drill down on why the profit motive is so dangerous to public service. if you're in the business of trying to figure out where to drop a starbucks or whatever, you've got to figure out where the people are, right. and you would not drop a starbucks in a place where it's, you know, 300-person town. fair enough. you don't have to drop a starbucks there. but you do need a health clinic somewhere around there and you do need a public library somewhere around there, and you're going to want a fire station somewhere around there. and if everything becomes a question of profitability and arithmetic and roi, what's going

to happen is that rural communities are not going to get what they need because if you do that arithmetic as if you are a private sector investor, i promise you, the only place anything makes any sense to do it is in the cities. that's what they're going to do. they're going to eviscerate public services across rural america. i think the senator from connecticut knows this, i care very much about p noaa and the national weather service. part of project 2025 is this idea that we should privatize noaa like these people launch satellites, provide us with data, and then people can make, i mean basic plans, what they're negotiate that day, but aviation depends on it, shipping depends on it. the backbone is a pretty

expensive enterprise, and in the back of that there's accuweather and these private sector companies and they'll put a skin on it and give you an app that tells you what the weather is but they're all using the noaa data, they're using the national whether service data. what they want is to be able to monetize this public service. it is always that. it's socializing the losses and privatizing the gains. and i think that's what these folks want to do. but they have always kind of wanted to do this, always had this point of view. some of our republican kreegz have a point of view where at the edges we can have an argument about what ought to be a private sector enterprise. those are within the bounds of normal political discussion. but that's not what this is. this is like arson. mr. murphy: to your point, when

profit is the only motive, somebody loses out. your example about a health clinic in a rural area is true also of education. it's pretty costly. it is not monetizable to have a school in a very rural area where teachers have to drive long distances, where there isn't a high volume of kids. so if you live in a world in which the private sector gets to run our schools, then you're going to have haves and have-nots. you might have in person education in the cities or in the suburbs, but those private equity firms will figure out pretty fast that it doesn't make a lot of sense to run a bricks and mortar school in a rural area, and those kids will be constantly telehe learning. those kids will be staring at their screens all day long.

mr. schatz: if there's any internet. mr. murphy: if there's any internet. there are places when it comes to government and government services where there's a proper role for the private sector. we have long had public-private partnerships. inside the department of defense, i think we have very well married together a fundamental public mission. we don't privatize the army with a private sector mission. the technology for the army gets developed a little bit faster if the private sector has a role to play. what we have realized is that there are limits to the degree to which the private sector wants to own unprofitable services. one of the grants that got turned off before the court injunction was issued was grants to community health centers are.

community health centers, which are not for profit health care centers, that are primarily funded by the federal government, often exist in the places where there is not a profit motivation to run health care either in rural areas or in very low-income areas of cities. they run on very, very thin profit. excuse me, very thin margins at all. they don't make profit. very thin margins. when they miss one payment from the federal government, they are talking about p immediately laying off workers. mr. schatz: i used to run a social service agency. we had a couple hundred employees, we delivered mental health services. we are a medicaid provider. we weren't receiving electronic payments. i would wait for the mail every

wednesday and thursday to see if we had to dip into our line of credit to make payroll. and we ran a successful agency and we were one of the bigger social services agencies on the island of oahu. that's what this is like. even if you're a pretty solid social service agency or health clinic, it's always hand-to-mouth. you don't have cash reserves. when they turned off that spigot, it was instantaneous. i think part of what's happening with 2025 -- and excuse me for, you know, maybe diverting our conversation slightly -- is that there's just a lot of very ideological people in cubicles that sprnt been outside of washington, d.c. and haven't been thinking in abstractions.

it is billionaires but other people who wrote the document who believe, i mean deeply, that no one's going to miss the federal government if it doesn't deliver these services. and i think one of the things that has given me some comfort in the last couple of weeks, and it's been a rough couple of weeks, is that, boy, it was instantaneous. people were freaked out across the country, red states, blue states, rural, urban, suburban, ex-urban. everybody was like what the hell, right? i might have voted for donald trump, i might not have, but nobody wants this. you're at the helm of the federal government. you're at the helm of the federal government and then you just, like, within the first two weeks go i'm going to destroy this place. isn't that what you wanted? no, people didn't vote for donald trump so he could destroy the federal government. they like that these a disrupter, that he doesn't talk like the rest of us. they were issed about the cost of eggs and groceries and

gasoline. i understand that. i don't think they were like i would like this guy to shut down the medicaid portal, to have head start have difficulty making payroll. i would like construction projects to be staged and send everybody home because there is no money to pay them. this is not the kind of disruption people thought they remember getting. they thought it was going to be like i'm going to make those democrats uncomfortable, or i need a businessman to, quote-unquote, think outside the box. but this is not that. this is arson and people saw it for what it is. it wasn't one of those things where we're arguing about the impacts and a few weeks from now we see the impacts. it was pretty violent. the i don't mean physically violent. but what are you doing to us? all of a sudden this marxist

ideology, woke, dei. you put cliches about democrats into the chatgpt and bring out an executive order. mr. murphy: we are talking about public outrage at an executive action midwifed in part by the nominee that only existed for about a day before it was enjoined, before it was stayed. but if that executive order had actually been fully implemented, there literally would be today rural health clinics that would be shut down. there would be hundreds of thousands of children who would not be in preschool tomorrow morning.

there would be a national catastrophe because whether or not these billionaires who don't need many government services unless their house catches on fire, even though they don't understand that people actually rely on government funded services sometimes, this would have been an absolute nightmare and disaster. so we need to remember that, we feel like we're in a constitutional crisis right now, that crisis would be fundamentally different if not for the courts stepping in. let me just raise another issue with you, because i think you started by talking about the assumptions that the young men in these cubicles made when writing project 2025, when implementing these orders. there is this wild assumption about people who do public jobs, the contempt that this

administration and these billionaires and the authors of project 2025 have for public employees is just extraordinary. who are public employees? you can envision somebody sitting in a cubicle at a desk in washington, d.c. pushing papers. that's a public employee. but so are teachers, and so are police officers, and so are firefighters. here's what russ vought said about the federal workforce. he said when they wake up in the morning, we want them to not go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the vil villains. we want to put them in trauma. he's talking about researchers at nih that are trying to cure cancer. he's talking about people who are trying to just get special

education funds to our schools, to make sure that our kids get a fair shot at learning. he's talking about the people at noaa just showing up to work every day, trying to make sure we're prepared for natural disasters. the contempt that they have for people that get up every day and don't go to work for a bank or hedge fund or private equity company, but instead go to work because they want to make the world better, or community better, or country better is absolutely extraordinary. it's as if these folks have never spent any time with a teacher or firefighter or nih researcher. mr. schatz: i think about my constituents in the ifpte who work at the pearl harbor naval shipyard. about 20 years ago, i guess, the pearl

pearl harbor naval shipyard was low performing. it was not great. and there was the brac commission to determine if they were going to get rid of some of these bases and installations. quite reasonably, people were looking at pearl harbor as one of those to possibly get rid of because it was so low performing. they have, in the great tradition by the way of after pearl harbor was bombed, and they quickly built a few storage facility and rebuilt ships in months when they were expected to take a couple of years. what they did was literally miraculous and caused us to win the war. without it, we wouldn't have won the war. those guys dug in, understood that there was a need for improvement. now it's the best performing naval shipyard. are they woke?

are they dei? what are we doing here? i really just -- i want every american to share our sense of outrage on behalf of nurses and the firefighters and the technical workers and the welders and the boilermakers and the tsa agents and the coast guards men and women. these are patriots, right? by the way, someone also in a cubicle pushing paper, that paper probably matters. it might be your v.a. benefits. it might be your social security benefits. it might be your aca subsidy. nobody like a big bureaucracy. i'm a kaiser member. got bless everybody who works there. but i have my frust rayings getting through to someone, navigating the system. so it's easy to hate anything big, whether it's verizon or comcast or kaiser or the federal government. you don't have to love

everything that happens in any big organization, and you don't have to think it's perfect. it's not perfect. the federal government needs reform. i think there are some really interesting opportunities to provide better service using a.i. i'm all in if you want to make the government work better. but doge is kind of dressing up what they're doing as some sort of effort at efficiency and a better delivery of service. that's not what they're doing. you don't terrorize your employees. anybody who's run an organization larger than two people knows if you're going to get stuff out of someone, then you can be tough, but you can't actually terrorize them. mr. murphy: we want to put them in trauma. what ceo says that about their workers? mr. schatz: i was about to swear. it's the senate floor. i will not. they'd get canned. these get immediately sacked.

mr. murphy: their board of directors would get rid of them. mr. schatz: this guy is nuts, get rid of him. there are differences between the public and private sector in terms of civil service protections and unions, and i'm happy for that. unions are standing up not just for the rights of the workers, but services they provide. look, i know not everybody is paying super close attention to all aspects of this, but i think in the abstract people might have gone, yeah, maybe you should cut the federal workforce by x, and there's probably a lot of waste, fraud, and abuse, and conceptually thinking who cares? suddenly i realize that's a v.a. home loan. i don't want a shortage of air traffic controllers. no, i don't want a private company collecting my biometric data as i go through the airport. there's a broad recognition, there's a waking up to the idea that destroying the federal

government is doing damage to the united states of america. it's not doing damage to woke something. it's not doing damage to the left. it's just the federal government has an important role in society, whether you like it or not. we can argue about the size and scope of that federal government, but that's not what we're arguing about anymore. they're out to destroy it. they don't want to make it 4% smaller over a period of time, or 20%. they want to commit arson. i want to talk about usaid. i understand usaid is not an animating issue for most voters. fair enough. you have got your own problems, and imagining money going elsewhere is sometimes hard to swallow powe. i want to set that aside, whatever your view is of foreign aid, which you and i both strongly support, because instability elsewhere is dangerous to the united states of america. set all of that aside. they literally just shut

everybody out of their e-mail, told them all to go home. we were standing there, trying to enter usaid to conduct oversight and say what's happening. we were told by the security guard no one is there. no one was there. this isn't some efficiency effort. they're sacking everyone. i think now it's 1400, might be more, foreign service officers across the planet got an e-mail. they're everywhere, at the embassies in europe, asia, africa, central america, everywhere, and they just got an e-mail saying come home. you have 30 days. if you want an exception for any health reason or any specific circumstances, you can submit to us, but otherwise you're out. these people have their kids in school. these people are there to respond to disasters. these people are there to build relationships on behalf of the united states of america.

imagine the kind of person who takes the foreign service exam, and then says i want to work in ghana, i want to work in ecuador on behalf of this country. those are legit patriots, and they get deployed wherever they get deployed -- sent. i shouldn't say deployed. they try to dig in, their kid is going to the american school in whatever city, and it's challenging, but exciting. it's important. then they just get an e-mail saying, we're recalling you, and there's no choice. that's not an efficient way to do anything. that's just arson. mr. murphy: and they dressed that up for like two days, suggesting they were reviewing usaid for fishen sis -- efficiencies. for one day they said they were folding it into the state department because it would be more efficiently run inside the

state department. that was never the plan, right? we just sort of have to call out the fabrication, right? the plan clearly from the start was to eliminate usaid, and they pretended, willfully pretended for a handful of days that the agenda was efficiency, when the agenda was in fact the wholesale elimination of the agency. and the stated on-the-record reason for the elimination of the agency is bananas, bananas. they are calling usaid a, quote, criminal organization. it's extraordinary. i was on a radio program the other day, and the interviewer wanted to talk to me about the constitutional crisis and whether legally the president

can dismantle usaid. the answer is no, he cannot. but the buffer was -- but the interviewer was like, they say it's a criminal organization, but let's set that aside for a minute. i was like, no, wait a second. don't let them get away with the idea that usaid has to be shuttered because it's a criminal organization. apparently, the conclusion they've come to, the allegation they are making, is that because many of the usaid employees on their free time may support democratic candidates for office, that it is a criminal enterprise, because you are apparently not allowed to have any political views. there are certainly many other agencies and departments and public functions in which the majority of employees support republicans. so, public services are staffed by people who have a variety of

views. but the rationale on its face for getting rid of the agency is just absolutely -- mr. schatz: it has too many democrats. mr. murphy: absolutely absurd, too many democrats. i guess we're going to shut down any agencies with 50% plus one democratic affiliation. we're going to hold on to agencies in which the agencies are 50% plus one republican. it shouldn't matter. i don't care whether a republican or democrat is teaching my kid. i don't care whether a republican or democrat is staffing the domestic violence shelter or putting out the fire at my neighbor's home. and most americans don't care. but this war that has been wanldz -- that's what woke means, right? woke means a service is provided by somebody who's got views or lifestyle that i don't agree with. we have never approached public service like that. we have decided as a country we're going to have people called civil servants that get

up every day to serve the country, no matter their background, ethnicity, rate, political views or religion, that their reason for getting up and going to work is to serve ever everybody. we are now retreating to this world in which, no, the only legitimate people to work for the federal government are people who share the political views of the president. the purge is happening so many different ways. mr. schatz: i want to pause on that, because chris, you're right. this is a purge, and i was sort of yelling in the press gallery. maybe not the best idea, but it was a press conference. i pointed at all these people whom i have a lot of respect for in the media, but i'm getting quite frustrated because this is actually not that hard to see if this were happening somewhere

else. we're both on the foreign relations committee. we do a lot of travel. a lot of times you sit with some foreign leader, minister, prime minister, another legislator from another country, if you can see autocratic behavior, it's on your talking points to encourage them to not engage in purges, to maintain a free media, to the importance of an independent judiciary, blah, blah, blah. but when it happens to our own country, we just can't see it, right? if there were happening in belarus, we would be like, ah, creeping autocracy, right? if in a middle eastern country, we would know what this was. so i think you're really hitting the right point as it relates to public service, and i think about the united states military, which has been always, always a bastion for inte

integration, right? mr. murphy: all sorts of integration. mr. schatz: all sorts of integration. now we're sdieting some people are not eligible to serve. not because they can't meet the requirements, but because somebody finds it weird. we're going back not five years, but 20 or 30. by the way, this anti-dei and anti-woke thing, i want to drill down on it for a moment. if what you don't like is like the whole consultancy, someone comes into your workplace with a powerpoint and makes us feel guilty for your personal ethnic backgrounds, i've been in some of those meetings. there is a lot of eye rolling and they do not increase diversity, equity, and inclusion.

there's a lot of people who got frustrated with dei because when they think of it, they think of a consult tant guy telling everybody how to divide everybody in the workplace appeared be sensitive in the workplace and a lot of people are thinking, i'm fine. i don't harass anyone. i don't strdiscriminate flynn. what dei has become is the anything that's related to civil rights, right? and so as these people, mostly kids, are getting access to the federal payment system, they're literally -- they're clearly just looking for words like gender, right? so i think in the nsf -- national science foundation -- or cdc, i think forget -- research they're no longer allowed say gender -- mr. murphy: they can't use the word female. mr. schatz: the problem is, you have to do research on females in order do work on females.

mr. murphy: no, no, no. that's dei. mr. schatz: i'm ashkenazi jew. i have a pro-chafety to having it, so we have to have a special check. the reason we know that is we actually do the kind of medical research to know how people of different he wanting nick extractions and different sexes will respond to medicine and what they will need. african americans need certain things that jewish americans don't need and this isn't some woke dei thing. it is like a biological fact. but now because these guys are, i mean, childish, right, they're not just saying, hey, we should have a colorblind workplace. they're saying you can't say the word sex in medical research. >> mr. murphy: you can't say fee pavement you can't say gender. it is absolutely, patently absurd, right? do you remember -- okay, so

that's an element of d. i. there is another element of dei. when that tragic plane crash happened, within hours donald trump was hustling to organize a press conference for one purpose and one purpose only -- to blame the crash on dei. now, what did he mean in that context? it's crystal clear when what he meant. he meant that if you employ women or black people or latinos or asian americans, the country is maybe in jeopardy. maybe, maybe, maybe the skunk not safe if white men aren't in charge. and so sometimes dei means the consultancy that legitimately some people think has gone a little bit overblown. sometimes it means we just can't discuss the differences that we

actually have with each other. but sometimes it just means real old-fashioned misogyny and discrimination and prejudice, right? it stands for a lot of things, most of which are pretty sick and creepy and outdated. mr. schatz: and, you know, we have fair housing law. we have equal employment law. like you're not allowed to discriminate in housing. and so just to understand, they're not trying to, like, just cancel these programs related to dei. they're trying to cancel the civil rights movement, like in statutory law and defund anything that mentioned a woman or mentions gender or mentions civil rights, right? and these are, like, long-settled questions. and so everybody needs -- we don't need to spend all night talking about this, but we do need to -- like to me when i saw that thing where maybe dei was

the cause of the plane crash, i thought this is when the dei thing jumped the shark. as i see these pages, you can google jump the shark -- mr. murphy: i don't think they know jump the shark. mr. schatz: anyway, this is the end of a useful way to understand something. it is now just an epithet that you hurl when you're not sure what else to say. ries right? so, look, back to russ vought for a moment. he's part of a crew, right, and it's homan, it's brandon carr who is now trying to intimidate -- at the fcc who is you a trying to intimidate the media. the project 2025 crew is -- i mean, they are really rolling. they are populating the cabinet of the president. and the president was clever

enough during the campaign to disassociate himself with project 2025, but that did not last long because about two-thirds of his senior staffers are, like, closely affiliated with project 2025. this isn't some ancillary thing. they're, like, in it. let me read to you something from my local fox affiliate. hawaii's rural health care at snake federal funding freezes. the freezing of federal funding has thrown many nonprofit organizations in hawaii, especially those providing health care services, into a state of uncertainty. amongst these organizations, the maui aids organization which serves some of the most vulnerable populations on maui, linda popowo is deeply concerned about the potential consequences. many clients fear being expose.

we have quite a lot of clients who are terrified right now because they feel like they'll be exposed anywhere else. the foundation's operating budget is about $2 million but a significant portion of that comes from federal funding. some grants are directly administered while others flow through state agencies. one of the most at-risk programs is the housing subsidy for people living in hiv. she fierce the worst. what the -- she fears the worst. without the housing grant -- those over $1 million of our housing subsidies right there, people are going to be homeless. anythings to the financial -- in addition to the financial strain, she expressed frustration with the lack of transparency. quote, there is a gag order on federal employees and we can't get any straight answers. and by the way, this has been the case i'm sure, chris, you have seen this in connecticut. like people are actually -- russ vought has already done it. he's not even confirmed, not even a government employee, but

he's clearly already at the helm and clearly already achieved his objective, which is to terrify and terrorize public employees. and so one of the things i've been saying -- and it is easy for me to understand. i understand that. but i will tell you that the federal employees i've talked to who got that e-mail saying fork in the road were, like, now i'm not going anywhere. right? and i know 20,000 people say they signed up for it, but i was thinking about it. 20,000 people out of two million. first of all, i don't know if that's true. and i'm certainly -- certainly it is unclear whether that will be honored. but that's actually 1% of the workforce. mr. murphy: that's pretty normal attrition. mr. schatz: i you we just did was the people who were planning on retiring anyway, we just gave them a six-month payout. we get nothing. they get paid through september,

if this thing sticks -- very unclear -- but they retire early. we don't achieve any sort of turnover savings. so i just think these people are trying to terrorize the workforce. mr. murphy: and all the federal employees who've been furloughed from the usaid employees to all the folks who are doing dei to the fbi agents, they're still getting paid right now, right? for the last week all those usaid employees were sent home, they were doing nothing to protect america and still getting paychecks. mr. schatz: just to be clear, they don't even haveary e-mails -- have their e-mail accounts working. think about that. if you want to send people home -- first of all, it is a little weird to send people home and say we're still operational and then they can't get their .aid.gov a mail to work. so i know someone who said i'm reading spy ■novels

i'm just killing time. mr. murphy: it's a like almost -- it's almost like the agenda isn't efficiency. mr. schatz: right. mr. murphy: it's he'll almost like if you read about all the people who were going to quit anyway but quit and got at payout and are locked out of their emakers it's -- emakers it's will -- e-mail, it's almost like there is a different agenda. they have paid it absolutely clear to try to keep them silent and to try to make everybody decide that there's a different line of work that would be better for them. but you know what? i know the folks that work at prudence crandall domestic violence shelter and they didn't go into that line of work because it is lucrative, right? they didn't go through that line of work because it is an easy job and when they get home every night at 35:00 -- at 5:00, it is

easy to unplug. it is the hardest work to show up every day and work in a domestic violence center and deal with women mostly at the worst time in their life, having just fled a home in which they were regularly abused, often to the brink of death, by their spouse or boyfriend. so, yes, they are scared today because they got told a week ago that their phones were being cut off and that domestic violence shelter in new briton, connecticut, it can't run for more than a week without federal dollars. our domestic shelters do not make a profit. news flash -- your taxpayer dollars actually do pay for domestic violence shelters. we need to fund that publicly because that's not something you can make a big profit on. the women who are fleeing violence don't show umat the

door with -- show up at the door with a check to pay for the shelter they need for a couple days. those people are scared. they are feeling harassed. they don't know whether the doors will remain open. but they are not going home. they are not going home because they have decided to live their life in a way devoted to a mission, to a mission. and so this is a moment to just say thank you, frankly, to all the folks who work either for not for profits that rely on government funding, who are public employees doing the good work, who are staying on the job. i don't begrudge anybody who says they're better off doing something else. but i'm thankful, on behalf of abused ways and means in connecticut -- on behalf of abused women in won won, that are deciding today stay on the job, despite they are getting threatened and harassed by the trump administration and nominee

we're discussing today. mr. schatz: i think i've been on one level trying not to overreact. but i also think there's a little danger of you know reacting. i -- of under reacting. i have been talking about this with my brother who is a professor with expertise in former soviet union countries, kazakhstan in particular. so you know in this town, and you know this, chris, in this town the worst thing is to be overreacting. like that's just very not cool for the cocktail party and pundit circuit. everything is always going to be fine and if you are alarmed, you're shrill, that means you're not salve rhode island and the salvery thing is -- and the savvy thing is this will land fine. and i feel like we're sleepwalking into a very

dangerous place. and so as i think of my theory of change, just mine -- i don't presume to know exactly what we should do, all of us -- i know in the legislative context we got to do a couple of things. we got to find opportunities -- we only have 47 of us. we have to find opportunities to find three or four republicans. and i had some very constructive conversations with republican appropriators who are superuncomfortable with what's going on. now, they might not be quite ready to go public, but they are certainly trying to figure out how they're going to exert their authorities and reestablish that you know, it's quo equal branchs here. so part of our strategy has to include find republican support where we can. i think part of our strategy has to be where we can't to not make it easy for our republican colleagues, as they try to march to the beat of donald

trump's drum. i think we also have an obstacles to just speak out and -- an obligation toll speak out and explain to the public, especially when powerless to stop things, what is happening and why it is bad. but the rest of society has a role here, too. i think the media mass an obligation to stop underreacting, stop treating like super unconstitutional, illegal, thuggish acts as if it's like the president proposed there be an a.i. commission for s the way these things are talked about, it's like president attempts to reform usaid. no, that's not what happened. they stormed in and they took over the servers. they stand over people and tell them what to do. and if those people don't do exactly what the doge folks say, they are relieved of their duty on the spot. and then they sent everybody

home, and then they got into the secure conference facility, the skiff. this is not to be characterized as something kind of mundane and this week there's a markup on the social media bill. this is different. we've got to treat it differently. and there also is a role for the federal employee. and to your point, where they can. because i don't presume to know anybody's personal situation, and a lot of people got other personal stuff going on, and i can't ask for them to be brave on my behalf. but there are some people who are deeply committed and deeply patriotic and care about the mission and care about public service. and all i would ask you is stay if you can. stay if you can. and if someone tries to shove you around, and if someone tries to tell you to do something that feels like it might not be permissible, don't do it. talk to your union. ask them whether this is

authorized by law. stick. because they are counting on you sort of vanishing from the scene. the other thing, and chris you and i talked about this, the difference between this week and last week is that individual citizens are physically showing up to protest what's happening all across the country. we've been here in washington, d.c., and we've seen it at the treasury building and at the senate. they call it the senate swamp, and elsewhere. it's been a minute since people have showed up in person this organically. and i think that's a really important aspect of any mass movement to preserve democracy. it can't just be your legislators fighting in the legislative context. we only get credibility if there are people behind us. and now i think, look, i think we were in a bit of a slumber

frankly and i think the american public were in a bit of a slumber. some people were excited about the election, but everybody was not animated in a way they were prior to the first trump term. over the last week people said oh my goodness, this is real. by the way, even republicans who were sort of imagining that this was all going to be manageable and you're going to get your conservative outcomes with some mean tweets. i really believe that, good people that i know thought this guy is going to be good for the economy. he's going to be provocative online and that will be that. mr. murphy: you had trump's first term as evidence. obviously president trump says a lot of things that he has no intent in doing, like news flash, we aren't going to invade and occupy gaza. but he says a lot of things -- i

would say 98%, 99% of americans are a no on that. in his first term he said a lot of things he never tried to do. he said a lot of reckless things he never followed up on. during the campaign he said many things that sounded a little crazy to folks. he said i'm going to be a dictator on day one. he said that the number-one enemy of the people are democrats and i'm going to use the military to take care of the enemy within, which he referenced as his political opposition. i think many americans said i heard him say a lot of stuff like that in his first term. he's not going to really do it. you're right, after the election, we had an election, he won. and people assumed that things were going to be different, a bit more topsy-turvy, maybe this country needed to be shaken up a little bit. but they actually didn't believe

he was going to act like a dictator. they actually didn't believe he was going to violate the constitution so brazenly in the first month. they didn't believe he was going to shut down funding for preschools and medical research. mr. schatz: everyone in the january 6 -- he pardoned everyone in the january 6. you know this and we talked about this on the floor. they recommended that he pardon essentially the people who improperly entered the building. i would have opposed that. but then he just said you know what, pardon them all. mr. murphy: because it was too hard, as he explained, to try to pick out the really violent ones from the nonviolent ones. later tonight i'm going to read through some of the very easily accessible stories of the really violent protesters. it wasn't that hard to just pick out a handful of people who literally beat police officers over the head with poles that

stuck tasers into the necks of police officers until they had a heart attack. it wasn't hard to identify those people and say those people should stay in jail, those people should complete their term. the american public didn't think that he was really going to absolve everyone who invaded the capitol and beat the hell out of police officers that day. and so the reason that it has taken a minute for the people to rise up -- and, by the way, we've seen big crowds in d.c., but that doesn't really mean much if there is nobody out there in the american public. today there were pretty big rallies in all 50 states. this weekend there are going to be many more. it's because people, even many who voted for him, but many who didn't and just wanted to sort of respect the choice of the electorate, are now realizing that this is so much more dystopian than the first term was and a crisis that is going

to immediately impact them in a real way. it's not somebody else's problem. it now seems to be my problem when a billionaire has access to my social security, medicare, and tax refunds data. that sounds like something that actually potentially hurts me. mr. schatz: i think you're exactly right that we are. every day i try to sort out of the 20 outrages, how many can i even focus on. to your point, the gaza thing was deeply offensive, right, deeply offensive. but also probably not worth devoting a ton of bandwidth to. it's pretty clear to me he does not have a plan. he was literally talking. sometimes we're going to have to not quite pull a punch, but not hair on fire freak out. to your point, that's not

happening. that's not happening. they would need an appropriation. they would probably need a war authorization. by the way, occupying a country in the middle east doesn't usually work. mr. murphy: it often doesn't go well. here's the difference, getting back to the nominee, russ vought is a serious person with the ability to execute on plans. p and so his plan, which is to destroy elements of the federal government and state governments and the nonprofit sector that help regular people, his plan to try to intimidate and harass federal workers, his plan to try to make folks who work in government pass a loyalty test to the administration, his plan to destroy access to reproductive health care, i mean

all of that is being put into place as we speak. what makes this moment so dangerous is that they kind of learned their lessons. they wanted to do a lot of these things in the first term but it snuck up on them fast. they had four years to put in place a plan called project 2025 so they could starting on day one destroy services for the middle class and poor people, root out of government anybody that doesn't swear a loyalty test, and endorse violence in a way that hopefully suppresses political dissent. that's not working right now, and i don't think it will work. but russ vought is dangerous because he's got radical ideas and he actually has the means to implement them very quickly. mr. schatz: he's a smart dude and he's a serious guy and he actually knows the government. part of the problem with the doge folks, they don't really know what they're looking for so they literally control, does it

say gender? maybe this is bad, maybe this is woke. that's terrible and irresponsible, also incompetent. but russ vought is not incompetent. he has an actual project. not just project 2025, but he's been like this for awhile. he has a view of the government, which is that the bigger the government is, the less freedom you have. ben sasse, our old friend and colleague who's now retired from the senate, he had that sincere view, right. it was a kind of radical view, but it was sincerely held that -- i mean i would go to him and go what about rural health clinics? he was consistent. no. what about federal firefighters? counties can take care of that.

i don't want to characterize all of ben's views but what the federal emergency management agency. there are some things that if you're going to have a country that your federal government has to do. i think of two examples. the town of lahaina burned down. county of maui is kind of small, a couple hundred thousand people. it's not a poor county. it has some tax base and all the rest of it, but it's not capable to respond to a disaster where a whole town burned down, was incinerated to the ground in like three hours. 2,200 structures. 2,200 structures basically between 6 and midnight, all of them gone. 110, 109 lives lost. and so the federal government

comes in. this is how a disaster declaration works. the county or the state submits something to the president of the united states and basically says we can't handle this. this disaster is bigger than our ability to handle it. then the president assigns a disaster declaration. that releases fema to go and be on the scene. if there's no fema, there's no recovery. fema prevented, i got into some fights with fema about the way they're doing it but they're good humans trying their very best to alleviate suffering. in the immediate wake of those wildfires, nobody went hungry, nobody lacked a place to live, and it's going to be a long recovery but people's most basic needs were met he. and when i think about western north carolina in particular, on

some level it's worse. it's bigger, more structures, actually more property damage. and it was so vast, i mean just the portion that got flooded is like the size of some small states. and these little towns are not even as big as maui county. these are 500 people, 700 people, 2,000 people, 75 people. if the federal government doesn't come in and help folks like that through fema, then you're just leaving people really to fend for themselves. and over the last year these disa disasters keep getting worse and worse. i suppose we can pretend it's not climate change. even if you want to pretend it's not climate change, you have to concede that something is out there that is causing us to have more frequent and more severe disasters. so let's set aside the question of climate and what we ought to do about it. everybody knows my view and

everybody knows your view. but the fact is we had about $150 billion worth of damage last year, and so i am not prepared to tell small states, small counties, little towns that they are on their own. but that's what project 2025 wants to do. mr. murphy: one of the things that's confusing for everybody, including us, about this moment is that it's not clear whether there is consistency or inconsistency. you may be right that they are going to try to destroy fema and erase from existence the ability for our country to come together in a patriotic way to try to help out our neighbors when a natural disaster hits. but it can't be coincidental that they launch the idea to destroy fema in california when a very blue state was responding

to a terrible disaster. that doesn't seem coincidental. it doesn't also seem coincidental that the first big infrastructure project that the president came out and said he would be defending was also in california, while an equally big city to city high speed infrastructure project in florida is on no one's radar screen. so this may be a consistent nationwide assault on public services, but it also may be, or in addition may be simply a grist -- grift in order to provide services and grants in states that are loyal to the be meaning they voted for him, and to deny services to states not loyal. we have not historically cared at all whether a natural disaster hit a state that sends

democrats or republicans to the united states senate. we have sometimes had fights over how much money and when we're going to authorize disaster assistance, but we have never fought over whether a blue state or red state should get it if the other party is in charge of the united states senate. all of a sudden, that seems very relevant. that seems very relevant. part of the reason why the constitution does not allow the president to have power over spending decisions is because that leads to a fundamental potential for corruption. mr. schatz: before you came on, senator kim talked about taking on the new jersey political machine. and just political machines everywhere work pretty much the same.

if you behave well, you get your stuff. right? and pork is distributed based on political alliances. so i think you're right to notice that the president of the united states wants to sort of create a tammany hall vibe nationwide. i will say, just to take your own advice, that on, say, withholding disaster aid from california, that feels like he's just ranting, and he's not actually in a position to do that, because of the stafford act provides that this is a disaster, and that once we fund it they have to help, and they will help. they're not permitted not to help. now, he may stretch the boundaries of the law, but i do not think he is in a position to

withhold aid. now, do i think mike johnson is going to initiate a disaster supplemental for california? no. but the terrible fact of the matter is there will be disasters going forward, and they hit blue states and red states equally. you can just never know. mr. murphy: but what trump says, whether or not he ends up implementing, sets the agenda for his party. and so what is the speaker talking about, and what are many of our colleagues talking about with respect to aid to california? yes, they are very worried about setting a precedent in which a state doesn't get aid if they are of the opposite party of the party in charge, but they know that they have to be loyal to the basic premise of the president. so they're talking about conditions, right? that california is going to have

to change its laws to, i would assume, more align itself with republican priorities in order for it to get money, which would be a perversion of federal law and precedent, and very dangerous. mr. schatz: it's not changing laws regarding disaster preparedness or infrastructure. it's changing laws on voter i.d. mr. murphy: right. mr. schatz: that is one of the thing i've noticed about this president is just the unapologetic i've got leverage and i'm going to use it aspect of it, and nobody bats an eyelash. if you behaved like that, you'd get lit on fire appropriately. so i think one ever the things i've noticed over the last couple weeks is there's people -- look, democrats need to understand, this guy is unusually talented. we used to think oh, what a buffoon or whatever.

maybe, but he's a develop talented politician in a very unconventional way. but he is also not infallible. he is capable of making incompetent decisions. he's capable of being beaten legislatively in the court of public opinion. right now he's in the saddle because he has all these e.o.'s, all these executive orders. but eventually events overtake, and a president usually is responding to events rather than creating conditions on the ground. so part of the thing that i want everybody to kind of understand as they feel their frustration, as they kind of process and try to metabolize the flurry of nonsense coming at the american people is just to understand it's not always going to be like this, they don't have 1200 days worth of executive orders ready to go, and that as these things

are -- some of them are just like wishes and could have been a tweet. many of them are illegal. some, in some cases, the president dot have pretty raw authority. tariffs he can do, and there's not much the legislature can do about it. my favorite e.o. was, i think it was a presidential memo not e.o., but after the plane crash last week they did a memo like this was joe biden's fault. i was like okay, now we're cooking. he's like, i want another e.o. to just say it was biden's fault. that's kind of like when they admitted what they're doing is when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. they understand that their agenda is so unpopular, their agenda is so unpopular they can't even get it through the congress of their own party, right? mr. murphy: as happened in 2017. mr. schatz: they couldn't do the things they promised, except for

the tax cuts. so i think they understand the fundamental weakness of their position, which is we've got a president likely to do very unpopular things, and although he's not unpopular at the moment he is relatively speaking very unpopular for a newly inaugurated president, historically unpopular for a newly inaugurated president, and this is only going to get worse because everybody knows the way he conducts himself does not age well. so they're in a hurry, but it's not always going to feel like this, it's not always going to be like this. they will lose in court, they will lose in the court of public opinion. i'm not suggesting we're not about to experience some bad public policy outcomes and that people will not suffer. a lot of bad stuff is about to happen, but the roots of democracy are deep, and like my calvin sei said, bend but don't break. i want everybody to understand, bend but don't break.

i'm so proud of chris for coming here, staying from 2:00 to 5:00. i may go get a little more coffee and come join you, or i may take a nap. i yield the floor. mr. murphy: mr. president. the presiding officer: the senator from connecticut. mr. murphy: thank you very much, mr. president. brian, thank you very much for your work in organizing this effort and always great to be with you on the floor today. i will not hold it against you if you go take an actual nap and get some rest. you exerted a lot of evident to make sure we were all here united, democrats on the floor raising the alarm. listen, i am going to try to go through the case as to why i do think this is a red alert moment, the reason i was so glad to jump in and jape you this

eke, and -- join you this evening, and why i volunteered for the 2:00 to 5:00 shift tonight. i'm very grateful for senator welch. we had a gap from 5:00 to 6:00, and to hear i may not have to go the full four hours. i've certainly got two hours of material here, because i think something really, really dangerous is happening to this country right now, something that is worthy of an overnight session on the floor of the united states senate, something that every american needs to be talking about. and i first want to just go through all of the events and developments of the last two weeks that matter, because senator schatz was referring to a phenomenon that i think is important. donald trump and stephen miller

and steve bannon and other people that advise him are pretty unapologetic about the strategy. they call it flooding the zone. the idea is they are going to make so much news, they're going to make so many outrageous statements every day, that it becomes really hard for americans to understand what's real and what's not real, what's important and what's not important. i'm not saying that the president's comments last night on gaza won't have deep impact. they will. i can guarantee you that hamas and hezbollah and other terrorist groups in the middle east right now are using the president's comments to recruit. the idea that the united states is coming to gaza to invade, occupy, cleanse, and level gaza,

that is bulletin board recruiting material for terrorist groups. our country is less safe today than it was yesterday because that is easy recruitment material for the groups that we are fighting, it keeps them alive at a moment when they were on the run, it separates us from our allies, because despite what president trump said last night, that tfsh agrees with the plan -- that everybody agrees with the plan, not true. nobody agrees with that plan. benjamin netanyahu doesn't want america coming in invading and occupying gaza. no middle eastern leader wants that. he says a lot of things that aren't true. it makes america look like a laughingstock, because everybody knows we're not invading gaza. when the president announces he's come up with this brilliant plan that everybody supports, and every world leader knows he's not telling the truth and he's never going to do it, it undermines america's credibility

and reputation around the world. i'm not suggesting that the president's absurd statements last night about gaza don't hurt america. they do. but he's not going to do it. he won't get support from congress to do it. nobody in the american public wants him to do it. i can't get into the president's brain, but i suspect it was part of this strategy, this articulated, purposeful strategy to try to confuse people about what's real and what's not real. i don't think it was coincidental that the president was making this outrageous, outlandish statement about gaza last night on the first day that you really felt the american people had figured out the game. the people turning out to protest were big, bigger than they had been since the election. all of a sudden, the president comes up with a new plan to invade and occupy gaza. i think one of the combers that i want to go through -- the

exercises that i want to go through today is to tell you the pieces of the agenda, an agenda set by russ vought that matter, that are the most dangerous, the ones that you should pay attention to. i wouldn't spend a lot of time worrying about the drama over the panama canal or greenland, just like i wouldn't worry too much about the president's statements on gaza. but here's what i would worry about, and i'm clearly going to cover ground that has been covered here today, but i want to lay it out because i've got more time to do it than anybody else, so i'll be a little more thoughtful and comprehensive about it. at the top of my list is the president's decision to seize control of federal spending. so this was his executive order from a few days ago that suspended all federal spending.

for that day, everything seemed to be turned off, even the medicaid program was not open for reimbursement, head start programs were not getting money, no state in the country could access dollars for different projects they run, not-for-profits weren't receiving funding. now, the order was for 90 days, but if you believe that, i've got some bridges to sell you. but even if it was for 90 days, that's patently illegal. that is patently illegal. so, the founding fathers spent a lot of time wrestling with a foundational question, how to preserve democracy in america and prevent what, up until that point, had been an inexorable retreat to despotism in countries that had tried to

engage in some kind of self-determination. the founding fathers thought relentlessly about the kind of tools that would be available to a president that could allow him to take control and rule as a king or as a monarch. now, some of the things they spent a lot of time thinking about feel today a little anachronistic. the founding fathers, for instance, were really focused on not giving the president a standing army. we have moved beyond that belief that a standing army is a threat to our liberty, but that was one of the things that the founding fathers worried greatly about. they didn't necessarily write that protection into the constitution, but they thought a lot about it. the protection they did write into the constitution was the protection to reserve spending power for the branch of government most directly

connected to the people. that's congress, the branch that gets elected every two years, the branch that has different factions, different geographies represented. they wanted the spending power to be invested in the most democratic body so as to make sure that the compromise on spending ended up benefiting the whole country, every geography, but also every political affiliation. so they said congress has the power to spend, congress has the power to decide how money is spent. and so for 240 years courts and the supreme court has broadly recognized that a president cannot decide by himself what

money to spend and what money not to spend. a president also cannot decide for himself to apply new conditions to spending beyond what the democratically elected congress selected. and the reason for that, the reason why that power is vested in congress is primarily a check on despotism. because if a president has the ability to unilaterally decide how to spend money, then of course the natural temptation is to only spend money in a way that benefits, preserves, and advances your political power. spend money on people who support you. deny money to people that don't support you in order to pressure more people to support you. i wasn't here for senator kim's

speech, but it sounds like he laid out the corollary that still exists unfortunately in some closed political systems in this country where you have party machines that give out favors and money and privilege based upon loyalty. we decided in this country the president is not going to get to do that because it is inherently subject to fraud and abuse and corruption. and as we have talked about, senator schatz and i talked about, this president has been pretty unapologetic. russ vought has been pretty unapologetic in their insistence that, yes, in fact people that are loyal to the president should be treated differently. it isn't as if we don't understand what the president is trying to do by capturing federal spending power.

he's criticizing projects in democratic states. he's saying we may not fund disasters in democratic states. they are targeting agencies that they believe are populated by people with different political affiliations than the president. they are firing fbi agents that engaged in any kind of law enforcement action against repub republicans. and so maybe this conversation would be a little bit less frantic, the moment would feel a little bit less urgent if you thought the president was seizing control of federal spending for some halfway legitimate reason. but in fact it looks as if president trump is trying to seize control of federal spending for the exact reason that worried the founding fathers so much that they were explicit in the constitution,

no, the president cannot seize control of federal spending. it will lead to fraud, corruption, and ultimately the erosion and perhaps destruction of our democracy. the founding fathers worried every single day about writing a document that prevented a slide to despotism. you can laugh that off as hyperbole. you can say that democrats are crying wolf. of course america is always going to be a democracy. every democracy dies. it does. every democracy has an expiration date, just like every civilization has an expiration date. there is an end and there are a series of events that lead to that end. maybe this isn't it, but, boy, when you package the list that i will give you together, it looks suspiciously like the road maps that caused other democracies to fall, and it looks suspiciously like the set of things that our founding fathers were clear

about protecting against. the second thing that matters is the president's decision to shutter certain departments. it started with usaid. we spent some time talking tonight about what has happened at usaid. absolutely extraordinary. this is the nonpartisan agency that fights for the united states abroad. our military leaders, i suspect most of which are republicans -- i don't really care -- are fond of saying if you get rid of usaid, if you were ever to stop paying for foreign aid, you'd have to double the number of bullets you buy us. our military leaders consistently, consistently make the case for usaid because usaid is a partner with our military

in preventing chaos and instability that ultimately leads to war and threats to u.s. troops. the army and the navy, the air force, they chase chinese influence. they try to protect us from russia. but so does usaid. china's power in the world is not just military power. every nation's power is multifaceted. china, frankly, gets more influence in the world from its nonmilitary tools than it gets from its military tools. china doesn't have the number of military p partnerships the united states does. it has very few. it's partnerships are information partnerships, technology precipitation, economic development partnerships. those are the tools usaid has. when usaid vanishes from the playing field, china wins,

russia wins. one of the things usaid was doing in lebanon was running programming trying to suppress hezbollah's influence and trying to help stand up a government independent and free of terrorist influence. what was usaid doing in mexico? trying to build up the capability of law enforcement so the drug gangs that send fentanyl to the united states didn't control areas of mexico which allow them, without interruption or harassment to be able to send fatal drugs like fentanyl to want united states. there are things our military can do to advance u.s. power, but they can't do everything. and so usaid was doing those other things. and now that they are off the playing field, america is fundamentally weaker. that's the merit-based case for

why it is a disaster for the united states and a gift to china and russia and terrorist groups that usaid disappeared. there is a legal and constitutional case. usaid is an agency established by statute. we passed a law establishing usaid. we pass a budget every year funding not just usaid but specific accounts in usaid. a president of the united states cannot by fiat eliminate a statutorily authorized agency. that's what a monarch does. p and you are already hearing that the elon musk crowd that so happily god reit of usaid -- got rid of usaid is now talking about usaid as a verb. they are going to usaid the department of labor.

they're going to usaid the department of education. they can't eliminate those departments from the statutes, but they could just send everybody home. that would be illegal, but they could just send everybody home. what a disaster it would be if the people that make sure that our factories are safe, that workers aren't abused by greedy corporations all of a sudden don't show up to work. that's great for the companies and the corporations. that's terrible for workers. pay attention to this effort to shut down agencies because these agencies, while certainly you can have a conversation about making them more efficient, provide essential services, the department of education provides essential services. two-thirds of our schools run on fends from the department of education. disabled kids are protected because of the laws administered by the department of education.

they make sure they don't get run over or abused. usaid protects america all over the world. there is a cost to america's pocketbooks to the quality of life to the defense of america when these agencies get shuttered. so you should pay attention to that. the third thing that you should pay attention to is the corruption that's happening inside the department of treasury as we speak. the department of treasury pays the bills of this country. those bills range from contracts we have with companies and not for profits to your tax refund or your social security check or your medicare benefit. that's really sensitive stuff, and so we historically have had totally nonpolitical people running that payment system. congress decides how that money is spent, what the level of your

benefit is, but a bunch of civil servants, people who are not loyal to democrats or republicans, who just want to make the payments run that sy system. what really caused this public tempest in the last few days was the disclosure that elon musk, a billionaire with all sorts of interest when it comes to the federal government, he became a billionaire based off of federal policy and federal contracts, has been given access to the treasury's payment system. not just him, but a bunch of kids that work for him. a bunch of 20-somethings fresh out of college with absolutely no expertise in payment systems have gotten access to these payment systems and they are apparently inside these payment systems right now fiddling around with them. they broke one payment system as

soon as they got access to it in the medicaid system. i'll be honest with you, we don't know why they want access to the payment systems. we don't know what they're doing inside the payment systems. but there aren't a lot of benign possib possibilities. are they getting ready to turn off payments to individuals and entities that they don't like? are they just sort of looking under the hood so that they can get your tax information or get the tax information about elon musk's competitors? this is unheard of. this is a private sector individual, an individual who actually cannot get a security clearance because he is deemed to be a security risk, who is inside the most sensitive part of the department of treasury with access to every single

americans personal data. that is a corruption. that is a perversion of norms and rules, and it matters. that matters. you should pay attention to it. the fourth thing that matters is the darkness that is descending over the federal government. a few hours, maybe it was a day, two days after president trump was inaugurated, he fired, i believe every single inspector general. what's an inspector general? an inspector general, again, is an independent, nonpartisan individual who's got an office and staff that work for them, that sit inside each of ours agencies. our federal agencies are big. they are. they spend billions of dollars. they do really good work, but

there is always the chance for fraud and abuse. p and so we historically, congress historically has authorized a little bit of money inside every department to have a watchdog. we call them inspectors general because they are inspecting how taxpayer dollars are being spent. to make sure that the dollars are being spent in accordance with the law. and they normally have the power to intervene when something's gone wrong, the power to issue an report to tell congress and the public, hey, guys, the money was supposed to be spent on, you know, trying to fight wildfires and instead it's being spent on something else. those inspectors general are gone and donald trump didn't get rid of them because he thought they were doing a bad job and wanted to replace them with

somebody else, he just got rid of them. he did that illegally. you have to at least give notice to congress. at the same time, they have begun issuing what we call gag orders to federal employees. the most notorious one happened at usaid as the purge started to begin at usaid when they started at first sending all the supervisors home, when they suspended all usaid programming all around the world, a corresponding order went out to employees saying, do not talk to anybody about what's happening. now, i can understand being sensitive about rank and file employees talking to the press, but they didn't just say the press, they said don't talk to members of congress, don't talk to elected members of congress who are in charge of spending

the taxpayers's money. don't talk to them about the purge that's happening. that all sounds a little suspicious. like that's a little worrying when with intention all the watchdogs are hired, with intention an order goes out to employees, shut your mouth. don't say anything. that probably doesn't mean good legal stuff is happening inside these departments. that probably doesn't mean this administration is it really focused on rooting out fraud and corruption and tackling inefficiency. when you get rid of the watchdogs, that normally means that you are preparing to engage in some pretty bad stuff. pay attention to the fact that the watchdogs are no longer

there. the fifth thing that matters, and i wrote it on my list here is the fifth thing, but it probably matters the most, and i'll spend some time later talking more about this. is the legitimatization of political violence in this country. there's something -- there's something special about force. the thing that matters most to us in life is the physical safety of ourselves and our kids and our family. i talk about this a lot because i do a lot of work on gun violence, and i try to explain to people that this is the issue that matters the most to people, the physical safety of their

family. i mean you would give up anything in life to defend your family from physical harm. you would give up your house, you would give up your savings, you might even give up your life to protect the life of somebody that you love. physical harm is really, really scary, and the threat of physical harm -- because physical harm is so traumatic, the threat of physical harm is impactful. it makes people do things and change behaviors if they think there's a chance that they are going to be hurt. every single person knows this because at some point in your life you were threatened with physical harm. and, yeah, maybe once or twice or maybe for some people more often than once or twice, you stood up to that bully or you fought back, but for most people

there were many times you changed your behavior. if the bully was on this street, you went the other block. i stood up to bullies a handful of times in my life, but i also changed my route home a bunch of times as well. there can no place for physical violence in politics. there just can't because it does change behavior when somebody is subject to the threat of physical violence. you are no longer making a decision based on what is best for the country or for your constituents, you are instead making a decision based on what keeps you physically safe and what keeps your family physically safe. democracies do not exist when the party in power -- when the

individual in power gets to use the threat of physical violence as a tool to try to influence behavior. that is by definition not a democracy. i am pretty confident none of my colleagues really thought that donald trump was going to pardon every single january 6 protester, but he did. but he did. and i will just tell you, subsequent to that decision, the threats of violence to my office, and i suspect the same is true for democrats, have risen. republicans have been subject to threats of violence before, they will continue to be, but this is different because donald trump

has not immunized violence at large, neither has he immunized political violence at large. what donald trump did pardoning the january 6 protestors, what he did was if you commit violence in my name against people who try to stop me from advancing my power, it's cool. it's cool. what were the police officers doing? they were defending the capitol from an attack that was designed to keep donald trump in power. those people were storming the capitol because they believed that the election had been stolen from donald trump. they were coming here to install him in power permanently. the police officers who were defending the capitol, they weren't political, they weren't democrats, but they were engaged

in an eft to try -- effort to try to stop the seizure of power by donald trump's supporters. and when every single one of those rioters got pardoned, the message was clear, if you commit violence against people who are trying to stop donald trump's political agenda, it's cool. do it. there will be no consequence. and so it is not shocking that threats of violence have increased to me and my democratic colleagues. right now we are trying to frustrate or stymie president trump's political agenda. and donald trump has said if you beat the hell out of people that will are trying to stop my political agenda, i will let you off the hook. the legitimatization of political violence, the

endorsement of political violence, that matters. and the final thing that has happened over the course of the last two weeks, really it's been happening since the election that matters, is the effort by donald trump to try to co-opt and control the media. obviously the founding fathers thought a lot about the independence of the free press. they knew that one of the bulwarks of this is -- in the bill of rights they guaranteed the freedom of the press. as we have watched other democ democracies all around the world, as we watched countries like hungary slide away from democracy, a key facet of that slide, engineered by a would-be autocrat is the seizure and

control of information. it's obvious why you would want to do that. if you can control information, then you can make sure that the dominant narrative is your spin and you can suppress any criticism. already one of the nation's biggest information platforms, twitter, is effectively an organ of the white house. donald trump announced that he wanted to take a 50% ownership stake using taxpayer dollars in tiktok, maybe the most inbe flungsal of mrat -- influential in platforms today. he has apparently cut deals with the owners of other platforms, most notably the ceo of facebook, right after the election came down to mar-a-lago

and trump bragged that facebook started to do what he wanted, stop fact checking all of the lies that get put online by trump supporters, and trump said, yeah, he probably did that because i threatened him. he was probably worried i was going to do something to hurt him. maybe not coincidentally that there is an fdc lawsuit against facebook. would it be surprising in that lawsuit disappears after the owner of facebook said, yeah, i will do what you want, i will take down my fact checking to make sure that your information and all misinformation, misinformation doesn't all come from the right, misinformation gets to exist freely on my platform. so pay attention to the hard

work that donald trump is engaged in to try and control to the best he can the information infrastructure in this country. i mean it wasn't a coincidence that not every billionaire was sitting up there on the chaos with trump on the inauguration. it was primarily those who control information, facebook is an information company, appear many is an information company, they are other business lines as well, but they control huge amounts of information in this country. it is not a coincidence that donald trump is trying to gain the most influence over. so those are the five things that i've identified as the things that should matter. the seizing of control of

federal spending, the illegal shutdowns of departments. and by the way i mentioned usaid, but as i said labor and education seem next on the chopping block. the infiltration of treasury's payment system by elon musk and -- the gag orders shedding darkness on our agencies, the politization of political violence, the endorsement of political violence and the attempt to put the president in a position to control the flow of information in this country. and why this matters tonight is that russ vought is going to occupy a space at the nerve center of all of those policies.

that's what omb is, the office of management and budget is essentially the government's nerve center. it's the place where all the departments of the federal government and all the accounts and all the policies, they all connect. in many ways the director of omb is the most powerful person in government. often one of the least well known, the job tends to exist behind-the-scenes, but omb is the place where all the pipes connect, where all the regulations and policies and executive orders have to be vetted, the place where all the department heads have to get signed off before moving forward with policies. and so none of this can happen or will happen, the seizure of federal spending, the shuttering

of departments, the infiltration of the treasury payment system, the firing of aig's without the director of omb being in charge, and by the way, it isn't coincidence that that comprehensive document that trump swore he had nothing to do with, project 2025, was authored in part by russ vought. he wasone of the primary authord organizers of project 2025, this document that explained exactly how you would do many of these things to push american democracy towards autocracy. it isn't a coincidence that one of the authors, one ever the primary authors of the project 2025 document is now the nominee to run the agency that perhaps has more influence than any other agency in the federal

government, the office of management and budget. okay, so having talked about the things that matter versus the things that don't matter, i want to talk about the why, and i want to talk about how all of the six developments that matter fit together, because this isn't a random set of priorities, events, or developments. all those things that i mentioned serve two major purposes, and this is what i want to spend the remaining time that i have on. the first goal is to enact a massive, massive transfer of

both money and power from poor people and the middle class to the corporations and the billionaires and the millionaires. senator schatz and i talked about this long discredited economic theory called trickle-down economics, in which if you just cut taxes for the very, very wealthy, the economic elites, the masters of the economic universe, eventually all that money will spill down to everybody else. that was a fraud as a theory. it was a fraud. it was essentially made up in order for rich people to just pretend like there was some intellectual underpinning to their greed. when people get really, really we

wealthy, they tend to just want to get more and more wealthy. for many people, being a billionaire is not good enough. you have to have two billion, three billion. so they came up with this idea that if you just continue to give us money, it will eventually find its way down to everybody else, but everybody knows that's not how it works. because people in this country in the middle of the economy are miserable. they're miserable because they're working harder and harder, and they're not getting anything back in return. wages have gone up a little bit, especially over the last four years, but they're not keeping pace with prices. they have not for decades. even though this country is becoming much more productive, every worker is way more productive than they were 10, 20, 30 years ago, in part because of technology. the gains from that productivity are not accruing to workers, it's accruing to the owner class, to the capital class.

so there's this separation happening in this country whereby everybody in the middle is just kind of like treading water, and then you have this set of super elites, people like elon musk and jeff bezos and mark zuckerberg, the people on that inauguration platform, that have more money than they know what to do with. and very little of it is actually ending up trickling down. they are hoarding much of the money that they are collecting. and so this theory has never, ever worked, but greed is powerful. it's powerful. and so that crowd, that economic

elite crowd, there aren't any poor people walking around mar-a-lago. everybody that trump hangs out with at mar-a-lago, those are really, really rich people. trump's not playing golf with his cleaner. the people that trump is talking to are people who are immensely wealthy, and they see a real opportunity. it's not just good enough to have low taxes. they want them lower. and they also want the ability to squeeze as much as they can out of the federal treasury for them themselves. so, what project 2025 is all about, and what the trump agenda is all about, is first and f foremost about a massive

transfer of wealth and power, from the middle of america to a very handful of elites. and so i want to try to walk you through that for a second. so, the first thing that they are doing is trying to set up another round of massive tax cuts for the billionaires and for the corporations. they're going to try to get money other ways, but the most important thing to them is for their taxes to be much lower, for the corporate taxes to be low or nonexistent, for them to be able to pass along all their wealth without any taxation to their kids, so that you have these permanent billionaire families where nobody ever has to work, the money just gets

handed down from generation to gene generation, for regulations to be gutted so that they can abuse the environment or workers in a way that will pile up more money. and they're going to do that there this bill that will be considered later in the year through a process called reconc reconciliation. now, when republicans did this bill in 2017, they made no attempt to try to pay for it. it was almost all borrowed money, and it was one of the reasons that the piece of legislation was really unpopular. people hated that tax cut, because fully enacted that tax cut would have sent about 80% of the benefit to the very, very we wealthy, but it also was just all put on the american credit

card. there was again this argument that, a., if we cut taxes for the wealth why i it will trickle down to -- for the wealthy, it will trickle down to everyone else, and it will create -- that magical economic activity and the tax revenue will pay for the fact that we're collecting less in taxes from the very, very wealthy. that didn't happen. just didn't happen. we've lost a ton of revenue because the rich and the corporations were paying much less. the economic activity they predicted did not happen. and the deficit grew. the deficit grew. it was a massive explosion in our deficit. no president, up until donald trump, added more to our deficit than he did during those four years. so this time, knowing that that tax cut was really unpopular, for a lot of reasons but not least of which the fact it

wasn't paid for, it was all borrowed, republicans are trying to create the illusion that they're serious about savings. and so part of what is happening with the cuts at usaid, the e-i havesration, the elimination of usaid, and the next round of cuts at department of education or the department of labor is about gutting a series of programs, or at least creating the illusion of cuts, that then create a pretext that, hey, we've saved a lot of money, we've cut a lot of government services, we can afford that massive tax cut for the rich and for the corporations. now, as i talked about with senator schatz, a lot of those

cuts are illusory. all those usaid employees that have been sent home, they're still getting paid. it's insane. we have thousands of federal employees right now who are home or about to be recalled, many of which have lost access to their e-mails so they can't even work from home, that are getting paid to do nothing. so, some of these cuts are illusory. they don't exist. it looks like you're saving money, but you're not really saving money. but eventually, if you do shutter the department of education, and you do shutter the department of labor, and you keep usaid illegally closed, then, yeah, some savings will ap appear, but where do they come from? they come from a retreat of

american power. they come from our decision to stop contesting the rise of power. they come because we've decided to hand ukraine to the russians. they come from our decision to stop fighting terrorists. if you close the department of education, you will get savings, but only because we abandoned children with disabilities, we stopped trying to fight bias and discrimination in our school, we are no longer helping kids afford college. if you destroy the department of labor, yeah, you will get some savings that you can apply to the billionaire tax cut, but it's because you shut down osha, which makes sure our factories and workplaces are safe. it's because you are no longer helping workers collectively bargain, so that they can get better wages and better

benefits. usaid protects this country. the department of education and the department of labor help regular people. it's easy for the billionaire class to say shut down the department of education. all their kids go to private schools. they don't need the department of education. even if their kids are discriminated against, they can hire fancy teams of lawyers. so some of the savings are illusory, some of them are fake, but many of the savings, if you shut down usaid and department of labor and department of education, they are real, but those savings are gleaned by hurting real people. shutting down schools, or withdrawing from a fight for civil rights and protections for kids with disabilities, or stopping trying to protect workers from harm done to them

by corporations, or a retreat from the world, the decision to just pack up and let china own the world. there's a cost to all of that. and the cost is borne not by the wealthy and the billionaires, but by regular people. why does the military say, military leaders say routinely, i'll say this again, i mentioned it earlier, if you eliminate usaid, if you stop soft power, right, you've got to buy us twice as many bullets? because they know that usaid helps keep really dangerous places, places that matter to the united states, like the middle east, stable. and if you stop focusing on stability in parts of the world that matter to the united states, conflict breaks out, and the united states often gets dragged into that conflict. and when the united states gets

dragged into that conflict, it is not the billionaires' kids that are fighting. by and large, we all know this, the people that sign up for our military are middle-class families, or often poor families. panned so the billionaires and the corporations, they won't have much to lose if the e-i havesration of usaid leads to american troops being sent into conflict around the world. it will be regular troops, the nonbillionaire class that will get impacted when their kids get sent overseas, when their kids don't come home. so this attack on agencies, this illegal shuttering of departments, it's all in service of trying to make it seem as if

there are savings happening so that we can afford that tax cut for the very, very wealthy. but then there's this other thing that's happening. again, we don't nope what it is yet but it looks really worrying. so why is elon musk inside the department of treasury? why has donald trump given him access to this incredibly sensitive payment system? i'm going to admit to you, we don't know yet. it just is unprecedented. and you saw the long time treasury employee -- this is a nonpolitical p guy. this is just a guy who shows up to work every day trying to make sure that you get your medicare benefits and you get your refund check. he left. he left.