[Pages S710-S740]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

Nomination of Russell Vought

We are here all night because of the nomination of a guy that
probably most people in Michigan, I know, have never heard of--Russell
Vought. He is to potentially run an Agency that most people have
probably never heard of--the Office of Management and Budget. But what
they don't know about this wonky side of Washington, they felt last
week. They felt it.
For the first time, the Trump administration reversed something that
they did in their first 2 weeks. Why did they do that? They reversed
themselves on a full Federal freeze of all funding. The Trump
administration froze every single dollar that was going out across the
country, not for a future budget but money that had already been
appropriated by this body, by people who sit in this room, by people
who have been here for 30 years.
Again, that might not have really caught much notice in a place like
Michigan except for the fact that that money had already been planned
for and in use by thousands upon thousands of organizations and people.
So we had an unprecedented number of calls in my office. I think we had
5,000 calls come into my office when that funding freeze went into
place.
We heard from people in law enforcement. I had deputy sheriffs in my
office saying: Hey, we get a chunk of money to pursue sexual assault
cases. We hire deputies with that money. Do I need to fire those
deputies or let them go?
We heard from cancer researchers and scientists, who said: I am
trying to research better treatment for cancer, and it has just been
cut off.
One of the most painful calls that I got was from a doctor at the
National Institutes of Health, a pediatric oncologist who does critical
trials for very sick children, who said: I don't know if I can continue
my trial or not.
We heard from Head Start. We heard from our superintendents. We heard
from people Democrat and Republican. This was not a partisan thing.
These were people who had built a budget and who were serving the
people of Michigan and who now couldn't receive their money.
We organized a very quick Zoom. We had a thousand RSVPs.
I think while it created chaos in the system and instability in the
system and questions about what these Agencies and organizations could
do, it spoke to a bigger issue, and that was the constitutional issue
of who gets to decide how to appropriate money and who doesn't.
Luckily, we have a very easy guide for this. You just have to read
the Constitution of the United States and the division of powers. It
made this body a coequal branch of government and said that money that
is appropriated by this body must be spent in that way.
The reason I bring this up, first, the Trump administration reversed
themselves in less than 48 hours because they don't like being
unpopular. They don't like when people in places like Michigan are
unhappy with them--Democrat, Independent, Republican--so they reversed
themselves very quickly.
But Mr. Vought, Russell Vought, who is up as the nominee for the
Agency that spends the money, that puts it out into the world, has said
very clearly that he does not believe that this branch of government
is, as the Founders intended, able to appropriate money for a specific
reason; that the President of the United States can actually decide how
to spend it.
I had the opportunity to personally question Mr. Vought. I am on the
Homeland Security Committee. He came in front of our committee. I don't
care that he has been in Washington for 25-plus years, that he has been
burrowing himself in in think tanks and has very specific kind of
Washington, DC, ideas about things. I don't care about that. What I
cared about and the one fundamental question is, Will you uphold the
Constitution?
You are going to swear an oath. Every single person who gets sworn in
swears an oath to the Constitution to protect and defend it. I have
taken it many times. Many in this room have taken it. You do not swear
an oath to protect and defend any one person, any one President, any
one king; you protect the Constitution. And he could not articulate
that if he was asked to do something that contravened the Constitution,
he would push back.
Again, this is a small soda-straw issue on a much bigger trend that
is happening in the first couple of weeks that President Trump has been
in office.
I personally do not question that President Trump won the election. I
do not question that he and his administration have the right to
nominate their own people, and they have the right to create a new
budget, forward-looking budget, that they propose here. I don't
question that they are going to perform policies and put out policies
that I am going to fundamentally disagree with. That is not in
question.
To me, the only thing that matters is that any administration uphold
the Constitution because if not, what are we? What are we doing here? I
certainly don't know what my colleagues across the aisle are doing in
this body if they are not interested in being a coequal branch of
government.
I understand you can have those conversations in private. I
understand people are concerned about sticking their necks out. We have
a culture of fear that is dominating Washington right now. But to me,
it is important to stand up for the very core things that make us
Americans.
Now, we all know that we are going through something as a country
right now. That is not hidden from anyone, no matter what your
political affiliation. We are going through turmoil. We are pendulum-
swinging between parties. Just look at going from Bush to Obama to
Trump to Biden to Trump again.
We make policies every 4 years, and then the next President comes in
and undoes them. That is not normally our tradition in this country.
Our tradition in this country is that administrations have different
policies, but they don't radically swing from one to another.
If you come from a State like Michigan, where my neighbors on both
sides are devoted Trump voters, where we are purple, and we have
political views that differ even within families--Thanksgiving dinner
has become uncomfortable in the State of Michigan--we understand that
there is something going on that is just different in the United States
of America.
So how do we understand what is going on? For me, I am aware that
next year, we will celebrate our 250th anniversary as a country. While
that seems like a long time on some scales, in the scale of human
history, that is not a long time. We are a pretty young country. I
personally believe we are going through our teenage years. We all know
what it is like to have a teenager who can't make up their mind, who is
angry and then happy and then sad and then excited and who is turning
against their own family and their friends but then wants a hug from
those same family and friends. We all know what it is like to deal with
a teenager.
What do you do with a teenager who is putting themselves at risk, who
is putting themselves at risk with their behavior? You just try to get
them through alive. You just try to get them through those teenage
years out the other side, where they are sort of settled, have a bit
more maturity, and can say: I am going to think clearly about what is
important in my life.
That is what I see as our job as senior elected leaders in the United
States. There are 100 of us. We have the responsibility to see our
country that we love through this period in our history, through our
teenage years. And how do we come out alive? What does it mean for our
country to survive? We have to support the Constitution. We have to
invest and believe in our democracy and not wipe it aside because we
happen to like one politician over the other.

[[Page S711]]

I understand that President Trump was elected with a mandate to bring
in disrupters to the government. That is very clear.
Colleagues on my side of the aisle will say: Well, this is disrupting
everything.
I say: That is the point. That is what President Trump ran on.
That, I don't question. But to me, what I can't understand is the
willingness to say: I am willing to violate or bend the rules of the
Constitution in order for my own party to win.
I would say last week, after we saw the reversal of the funding
freeze, it got a lot of people's attention--veterans groups,
universities, people of both parties. My mayors and town supervisors
were screaming from the rooftops. It woke people up to an issue maybe
they don't think about all that often.
Since then, we have heard incredible stories of people and what it
would mean to the average person if this funding didn't come through--
things like the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, just caring for our
Great Lakes, which is one of the most bipartisan things in the State of
Michigan.
We heard about chronic disease prevention, veterans programs, opioid
treatment--all kinds of things--rural health programs.
Then we heard about the things that were connected to national
security. This is the thing that I think people don't understand. We
are having this conversation about Federal funding. It can seem very
far away.
But when you yank Federal funding that has already been built into
local budgets, that has already been built into National Security
Agency budgets, you are literally putting people at greater risk,
right? These things have consequences.
I think the other pieces that we are seeing that, to me, are hard to
process are things like these sort of across-the-board pushing out of
people in the civil service--and I say this as a former civil servant--
what is going on at the FBI, what is going on now at the CIA, what is
going on at the Director of National Intelligence Office, the NSA.
I am a former intelligence officer, and I understand what people do
every single day, in the dead of night, when no one is watching, to
protect us. Again, as someone who was in the Federal Government, I will
be the first one to say that there is fat on the bone. I will be the
first one to say that, when I was a boss in the Federal Government, I
couldn't fire people who deserved to be fired as easily as I wanted to.
That is, to me, not a question.
And I actually don't have a problem with a group taking a hard look
at cutting back Federal Government and the different Departments and
Agencies. I think what I take issue is with the complete lack of
strategy or even understanding of what those across-the-board slices
are going to do to the average security of someone on the ground in
Michigan.
When those proposals first came out--the letter saying you can leave
the government--first of all, I think those letters have almost no
credibility. The letter, which was a carbon copy of what Elon Musk sent
to Twitter employees, said: You can go ahead. We will pay you out.
This body appropriates money. So any commitments of money by the
executive branch--right there, that is extremely fishy.
No. 2, they said: You can leave. We will pay you for sitting home for
8 months. But you know what? If you want--even better--go and get a
job. Go and get a job somewhere else. Like, best of luck to you.
I think they were misunderstanding that there is Federal law that a
Federal Government employee, as I was, cannot take a job in the same
field. It violates laws on conflict of interest. If you work on the
railroads at the Department of Transportation and then you go and work
for a private railroad company, that is an inherent conflict of
interest. And, by the way, if you are a CIA officer and you go sit at
home and then a Chinese company wants to hire you because they know you
understand the intelligence community--massive conflict of interest.
So those offers, to me, aren't worth the paper that they are printed
on, and I think, again, it speaks to this complete lack of awareness of
what this does to real people.
Some of the first people who got those letters in Michigan were FAA
flight safety instructors and evaluators. Is there anyone in America
who thinks we need fewer flight safety instructors? Is there anyone in
America who wants fewer people from the FAA watching and deconflicting
what happens above our airports, with everything that has gone on, with
all these tragedies that have gone on, including another collision, I
understand, just in the past 24 hours out in Seattle?
So, again, trim fat. But are we sure that the American people want
fewer people looking at their security, their safety here at home or
from threats abroad?
Most Americans don't understand. I was someone who specialized in
Middle Eastern terrorist groups and militias, the groups that were
shooting at U.S. forces and plotting against the U.S. homeland. Every
single day, decisions are made to keep Americans safe, and Americans
are sleeping at home in their beds and have no idea. By pushing those
people to leave and not being thoughtful about it, you are pushing out
some of our best in a generation and then purposely hiring no one
behind them.
And to me, again, this isn't about pieces of paper. This is about the
safety of American citizens.
The other thing that is just rubbing people the wrong way, that is
just fundamentally feeling wrong to citizens of all stripes is the idea
that a group of billionaires are coming in and leading around this
administration by the nose--leading them around, right? We are all here
talking about the confirmation of officials. What is the point of
confirming a Cabinet Secretary at the Treasury if a billionaire can
just parachute in with a bunch of 25-year-olds to tell him what to do?
I mean, that is humiliating for the Cabinet-level official, not to
mention what that does to the President of the United States. Right?
Just look online. American citizens don't want unelected billionaires
with their private data, all their tax information, their Medicare
healthcare records. Is there anyone who wonders what Elon Musk and
anyone else is going to do with that data? What do they want it for?
The goals of a billionaire are not the same as the goals of the
average American citizen. He has other conflicting interests. And let
me just say, the number of interests he has in China is public record.
The closeness of that relationship is well documented--and his
relationship, by the way, with his competitors.
I come from Michigan. We are American autos. He has no love for our
car companies, and now he has the data of every single competitor, of
every single person he has ever negotiated with, of every single person
that he doesn't like. Is there anyone who wonders that he is going to
put a backdoor on that information and have access to it for the rest
of time?
American citizens care about their privacy, especially their tax
records, their healthcare records. So I think this idea that this
administration is being led around by its nose by billionaires does not
pass the sniff test.
And I have had a lot of people call me, write me, text me--who are
Trump supporters--who said: Hey, you know, I voted for Trump, and I
still think he is the guy, but I don't like them sharing my data with
these seeming oligarchs.
So I think, again, I don't dispute that Trump has the ability to do
things that I am not going to like. It is the things that violate law.
And, make no mistake, a new government employee who hasn't turned in a
financial disclosure form, who hasn't gone through the full background
check, who has just been stamped an employee, does not have the right
to have all that information. And now we have lawsuits that are coming.
So this will be meted out in court.
But I think the bigger question is: What does it mean to have a
President that is beholden to a bunch of billionaires? What does that
change about their calculus when they are sitting in the privacy of the
Oval Office making critical decisions?
Why is the President of the United States tweeting about South
Africa? Is there anyone--at least in the State of Michigan--who woke up
this week and said: South Africa is super important to my personal
interests in Michigan? No. He is tweeting about South Africa

[[Page S712]]

because Elon Musk told him to. He is being led around by his nose, and
I think people are starting to see that.
And again, if Elon Musk wants to help look at how to reform the
government, that is one thing. Access to our data is a whole other ball
of wax, and it is not for the interests of the United States.
Now, I think there are a lot of questions about how we get through
this period, these teenage years of American history, this pendulum
swinging, this anger between people, neighbor arguing with neighbor
about politics. I know in Michigan there are a heck of a lot of people,
including in my own family, where we just say: We are going to get
together. We are going to tailgate. We are going to hang out, but we
are just not going to talk about national politics.
It has become something we can't talk about. And, by the way, in
Michigan that was never the case. We were always politically diverse.
My dad is a lifelong Republican. My mom was a lifelong Democrat. We
never used to argue with anger in Michigan. We were more likely to
argue about sports than we were about politics when I was growing up:
Michigan versus Michigan State, you know. Hands were thrown, but not
over politics. That was not our way.

And you would kind of rib someone. If my dad--again, a lifelong
Republican--and his friend from childhood came in and he was a liberal
or something, he would say: ``Here comes the commie.'' He would make
jokes. It was sort of a ribbing kind of thing. It wasn't this anger
that we can't stand, right, that has made us uncomfortable with our
neighbors.
So how do we get through it? How do we get through this period of our
history? Well, the first answer is we can't have our citizens just turn
off. I have heard from a lot of people who say: Do you know what? I am
just going to, like, stop reading the news, stop looking at the alerts
on my phone. I am just going to pretend nothing is happening in
Washington and just put my blinders on.
That doesn't work in a democracy. Guess what. This is a team sport.
But there are basically four things that we can do to help our country
get through this moment in our history. We have to be strict upholders
of the Constitution, even when that contradicts people we have
supported, and that goes for Democrats and Republicans.
So we have four options. We have legislation and appropriations, the
things that this body does. We can make laws that respect our values,
that push back. They have to be--based on how the Senate is divided,
that has to be bipartisan. Bipartisan answers are durable answers. They
last longer. They are not pendulum swinging.
We can appropriate money based on our values. That means making sure
we have flight safety instructors and making sure we have the right
people in the Pentagon and in the CIA who are protecting us.
We have litigation. And, unfortunately, that has become an important
tool. We have lawsuits going on--I mean, I think it must be dozens at
this point--that are just trying to uphold the law, and we want them to
move swiftly through the courts. We need people to be invested in those
court cases and watch them and start to educate yourselves on those
cases.
We have communication. We have the ability, each one of us, in our
phones, to communicate with our fellow citizens, to talk about how
concerning it is that we have a President that is being led around by
their nose by a bunch of billionaires. Talk about that. Your neighbors
aren't happy with that.
And then, ultimately, elections, the fourth category. That is how we
mete things out in this country. And we will have new Federal elections
in 2 years, where people can decide if they are comfortable giving the
President of the United States unfettered authority, if they feel like
he has been a good shepherd of our Constitution.
Now, I will just say, in closing, that this body has a special
responsibility. There are 100 of us. We are some of the most senior
elected officials in the country. That means we have the roles here in
legislation and appropriations. It also means we have convening power;
we have the ability to pull people together and lead. And that is what
the country is asking for right now. They are asking for leadership
from this body, from Democrats and Republicans, from people who are new
and people who have been here 35 years. They are asking for us to stand
up for them and to keep this country alive through these volatile
years.
History will watch this period. History will watch what we do on both
sides of the aisle. And for me, as someone who is new to this body--30
days in this body--I will always seek to work where I can with my
colleagues, but not at the expense of the fundamental freedoms and our
democracy. That may not be politically palatable back home, but I don't
care--because if we can't do it, what is the point? What is the point
of being senior elected leaders in this body if you don't stand up for
the country that you love?
There is no king in this country. There is an elected President.
Please, stand up on behalf of your country.
With that, I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Arizona.
Mr. GALLEGO. Mr. President, since the beginning of the Trump
administration a little over 2 weeks ago, my office has heard directly
from Arizonans about how the cronies of this President are impacting
their day-to-day lives.
In one his first acts, the President and the Office of Management and
Budget moved to freeze the grants and loans to Arizona organizations
that work tirelessly each day to better the lives of Arizona families.
These are not people who do the work because they are chasing a high
salary. They are not doing it out of a drive to be millionaires or
billionaires. They are doing it to help their fellow Arizonans.
The programs impacted by the Federal freeze include Assistance to
Firefighters Grants so our firefighters can purchase equipment;
Staffing for Adequate Fire Emergency Response--better known as SAFER--
Grants, which fund the hiring of firefighters; sexual assault services,
which provide rape kits to sexual assault survivors; and Preventing the
Trafficking of Girls, which supports the prevention and early
intervention services for girls who are at risk of or are victims of
sex and/or labor trafficking; the Rural Violent Crime Initiative, which
supports the implementation of violent crime reduction strategies,
improves investigations, improves services to victims, and enhances
collaboration between local stakeholders; Public Safety Officers'
Benefits Program, which provides death and education benefits for
survivors of fallen officers and firefighters; violence against women
formula grants, which improves our capacity to reduce domestic
violence; the Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grants, which are used
to purchase critical technology, infrastructure, et cetera, for police
departments and other public safety entities; and the CHIPS Research
and Development Programs to grow Arizona's semiconductor industry and
the country's.
These lifesaving programs and economic drivers were canceled not
because they were ineffective, not because Congress voted to cut them,
but because they were in the way of one man's crusade to tear down the
Federal Government, and that man is OMB nominee Russell Vought.
Russell Vought is a danger to the United States. He has been a
staunch advocate for drastically eliminating or cutting our safety net
programs, such as Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security. He helped
design Trump-era budgets that sought to cut trillions from these
programs, while simultaneously advocating for tax cuts that would only
benefit the wealthiest of Americans.
So let's make sure we understand what is happening here. He wants to
cut help for the poorest Americans to make sure that there is enough
money left over to give it to the richest Americans. His vision for
America is one where billionaires thrive while the families of Arizona
and America struggle to get ahead.
Vought has showed complete disregard for our democratic institutions.
He was a key architect of efforts to politicize the Federal bureaucracy
and push for policies that would replace career civil servants with
partisan loyalists.
He played a significant role in enabling the Trump administration's
refusal to cooperate with congressional

[[Page S713]]

oversight. His actions set a dangerous precedent, and it is a playbook
that the Trump administration is looking to deploy and has deployed in
this second term--a playbook of reducing transparency, accountability,
and disregarding the power of Congress in favor of an empowered
executive branch.
The Office of Management and Budget is one of the most powerful
Agencies in the country. It is responsible for crafting the President's
budget, overseeing regulatory policies, and ensuring the efficient
operation of government programs.
The OMB Director must believe in the fundamental mission of
government, which is to serve the people. Vought, by contrast, has
spent his career trying to dismantle government institutions and push
an extreme agenda that benefits only a select few.
If confirmed to lead OMB, Vought would have the ability to impose
cuts on essential programs, further politicize the Federal workforce,
and continue his assaults on democratic institutions. His leadership
would result in policies that worsen economic inequality, weaken
national security by defunding key Agencies, and eroding public
confidence in government.
The confirmation of Vought would not only be a step backward, but it
would also embolden extremists seeking to undermine the role of
government. His approach to governance is not about responsible
budgeting or efficiency; it is about dismantling the Federal Government
from within. The stakes are too high to allow such a dangerous
individual to return to a position of power.
Russell Vought is a major threat to our democratic institutions. His
track record makes it abundantly clear that he is unfit for any
leadership management role in budget, in government, especially one as
powerful as the Office of Management and Budget.
Confirming Vought would allow an individual with a history of
extremism, obstructionism, and divisiveness to control the country's
budget and regulatory framework. His vision for America is one where
government serves only the wealthy and the powerful, while ordinary
citizens are left without support and the services they need.
In the face of such a threat, it is crucial that we reject any
attempt to put Vought in any position of power. The future of the
country depends on leaders who believe in governance, transparency, and
fairness, not those who seek to destroy it and the institutions that
make this all work.
The Senate and the American people must stand firm against this
confirmation, ensuring that those who wield power do so in service of
this Nation, understand why they are doing it, understand that it is
not just for the sake of ideologic crusades that we should be putting
Vought in power but to make sure that we have a government that answers
for the people and by the people.
In conclusion, we must remember at the core what is going to happen
and what is happening.
Just yesterday, I met with many of my local healthcare centers in
Arizona--more than 50 of them--and I asked them: What is going on in
your communities? What is happening right now?
Many of them were telling me about the fear that they are hearing in
the communities. What many of them also told me--these are very
critical community health centers, some of the health centers that are
the frontlines of taking care of some of the poorest communities in the
country with some of the largest health disparities in the country,
people that are chronically ill and going to these places because it is
the last place that will see them since they do not have doctors, they
don't have access to hospitals, and they don't have access to
insurance.
These community health centers were telling me that right now, most
of them still cannot access payment. The organizations that are
essentially taking care of the poorest of this country cannot get
payments for services they are giving to these poor communities, for
the contracts that we signed with them as the Federal Government,
because people like Vought want to freeze those grants. They want to
freeze out those types of groups that are taking care of the poor in
order to save as much money so that they can give this money and these
tax cuts to the richest of Americans. It is the most cynical thing we
could be doing, the most cynical thing this Trump administration could
be doing, and certainly it is a very dangerous thing that OMB nominee
Vought will be doing.
With that, I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Democratic whip.
Mr. DURBIN. I want to thank my colleague from Arizona, originally
from Chicago, for taking time to come this morning to the floor of the
Senate.
Let me also thank the Presiding Officer and the staff who have
weathered this experience as we consider the nomination of Russell
Vought for the Office of Management and Budget. I know it has been a
personal and demanding sacrifice on their part, and I thank them for
being here.
Why are we doing this? We are hoping to call attention to this
nomination. Most people in America, if asked, would not be able to
identify the initials of OMB, Office of Management and Budget, and if
they could identify it as a Federal Agency, they would be hard-pressed
to know what it does.
I have been in politics in the congressional government for a number
of years, and I have insight into what the Agency can do. I want to
tell you, the head of the OMB, although not a very known figure across
America, has more power than almost anyone in the President's Cabinet.
This person decides policy and spending supports across the Federal
Government and can make a serious, serious difference.
Russell Vought has had a chance to show America what he will do if
given another chance to head the OMB. You see, in the final 2 years of
the first Trump administration, he had the same job, so we saw him in
action, and we saw what his philosophy might be.
I want to read you something which sounds incredible, but I am afraid
it is true, from the press release by the Union of Concerned
Scientists. Here is what they wrote in their position paper branding
Russell Vought as a ``dangerous choice to head OMB'':

As director of the OMB--

Under President Trump's first term--

Vought would occupy a powerful position over federal agencies
and the federal civilian workforce. Here's what Vought had to
say in 2023 about his intentions for these hardworking civil
servants under a second Trump administration:--

I am now quoting Russell Vought--

``We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected.
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. We want their funding to be shut down so that the
EPA can't do all of the rules against our energy industry
because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want
to put them in trauma.''

Russell Vought, what he would do if head of the OMB. Honest to God,
is that what we want in America--a person who takes a look at Federal
employees that do a myriad of responsible tasks in our Federal
Government and treats them as villains, traumatizes them?
For Mr. Vought, this sounds like a political game, but for many of
these people, first, it is their lives and their careers that they have
dedicated to their country and their government to do the best they
can, and some critical jobs, which we may take for granted on a regular
basis until that moment when we realize how important they will be.
It was just a few weeks ago when we had a horrible plane crash near
Washington National Airport. I followed that closely because I will
tell you, literally, I have flown that flight pattern a thousand
times--a thousand. I returned home to Illinois every week that I served
in the House for 14 years and then in the U.S. Senate now 28 years, so
I know that piece of real estate pretty well.
Planes come down the Potomac River to avoid noise in the city of
Washington, and some have to make a rather abrupt turn into the runway
33 that is available to them.
The evening of the accident, an American Airlines plane made the turn
and came into contact with an Army helicopter. Sixty-seven people died.
We checked to see what was going on with air traffic control, and we
realized that the air traffic controller was doing double-duty that
night. He had to do not only the civilian side but the military side.
It is not beyond a person's capacity, but it is not preferable. There
should have been more air traffic controllers on the job.

[[Page S714]]

Air traffic controllers are Federal employees, Mr. Vought. Want to
traumatize our air traffic controllers? I don't. I want to feel safe in
an airplane. I want to be able to travel with my family with the
comfort of knowing that a professional who works for the Federal
Government is doing his or her job well.
Of course, if you are going to traumatize and call them villains and
make them the object of your political fantasies, that is what you get
with Mr. Vought and the OMB. It is not fair. It is not fair to them,
and it is not fair to the American people. These people who work in our
Federal Government do responsible, important jobs day in and day out.
My staff advised me yesterday that this is reaching a point where no
one seems to be in control.
They have decided to save money by eliminating the publication of
public health brochures that are put out regularly on a weekly basis to
notify people all around the United States and the world of outbreaks
of illnesses and diseases that could be dangerous.
For the first time since 1961, we have stopped publishing those in
the last 2 weeks. The Trump administration has decided to ``save
money'' by reducing the information available to medical professionals
all over the world.
They used to look to us, count on us every single week to put out
this publication. We stopped doing it ``to save money.'' I am afraid
the day is going to come when we regret that decision and a lot of
things that flow from it. I want to say a word, too, about the
Department of Justice. Yesterday, I had an individual come to see me
who is seeking to be the Deputy Attorney General--a good fellow. I had
never met him before. And he talked about his career in the law and
what he had done as a prosecutor and as a defense attorney. His resume
is certainly strong.

I asked him a question: When he worked for the U.S. Attorney's
Office, was he given assignments, or did he choose his caseload?
Oh, when you are brand new, you take what they send you. They put me
to work on files and cases as they wish, and I did them willingly. That
was my job as a member of the Department of Justice.
So I said: So you have had no, really, personal decision over these
cases? You just did what you were given by your superiors?
And he said: That is exactly right, and that is how it works.
And I said: Would it be fair to say that when it came to the
assignment of these cases, some hierarchy made that decision, not
yourself.
He said: Of course.
I said: Do you know what is going on in the Department of Justice
now? They are asking the employees of the Department of Justice to fill
out a questionnaire. The Trump administration wants to know: Did you
play any role in the prosecution of those accused of violence here in
the Capitol on January 6, 2021?
And clearly this is being done to separate out those who prosecuted
those thugs who came into this building and attacked us. And I don't
know where this is going to lead. We are going to have to watch it
closely. It has not been done before.
If they are dismissed, terminated, it is fundamentally unfair.
As this individual who wants to be part of the Trump administration
told me, he had nothing to say about the assignment. He did what he was
told, and he did the best job he could. And now to fire these
individuals because of the January 6 rioters is just fundamentally
unfair.
Mr. President, you are new to this Chamber, and I have been here a
while. And I will tell you that day, January 6, 2021, is one that I
will remember for the rest of my life. I was sitting at this seat on
the floor of the Senate. Vice President Pence was the Presiding
Officer. We were going about our responsibility under the Constitution
to count the electoral votes and to announce who won the Presidential
election.
It was a rather routine assignment in the past, and people haven't
noticed. But it has taken on new importance and attracted more
attention now because of disputes over votes in various States. And
2020 was one of the most graphic examples of that, when President Trump
announced afterward that he did not lose the election; that it was
stolen. And he gathered together his supporters who believed that point
of view into a rally on January 6 on the Capital Mall.
Thousands of people showed up at the President's invitation, and he
invited them to come to the Capitol and go wild. They sure did. They
went wild by beating down the doors, breaking the windows, crashing
through the doors, coming into the U.S. Capitol Building while we were
meeting here.
Vice President Pence, at about 2:10 p.m.--I saw him turn to one of
the Secret Service agents who was protecting him, and the agent grabbed
his arm and pulled him out of the chair you are sitting in right now
and took him off the floor. And we were sitting here with no one
presiding.
Chuck Grassley, President pro tempore, was going to take the Chair,
and a member of the Capitol Hill police, instead, walked up to where
you are sitting and announced to all the Senators in the Chamber and
the staff people to stay in this room. This was going to be a protected
room, a safe room, and that other people were going to join us.
Meanwhile, outside, you could hear the roar of the crowd as they were
crashing through the doors and beating up on Capitol Hill policemen. We
were here for about 10 minutes when the same Capitol Hill policeman
came up and said: Change of plans. We can't keep this room safe. Grab
your belongings and leave quickly through that door, which we did.
We went to a building nearby and waited to see what would happen
next. I was part of the leadership that was called to a secure
location, and I was with Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer and Nancy
Pelosi.
As we followed the proceedings of what was happening on the floor, it
was a horrible scene. We were able to see the Senate Chamber through C-
SPAN and realize that the thugs who were taking over the building were
sitting in your chair, going through my desk, posing for pictures,
jumping off the balconies. It was a scene you couldn't image.
It was sickening to me. This building means something to me. It has
been an important part of my life. I went to college here in
Washington. I used to come up for my assignments in my part-time job
and get a chance to steal away for a few minutes and sit in the Gallery
and follow what was going on, on the Senate floor. Just to be in this
building, I considered a privilege, and I still do. And here were
people doing horrible things in the building and beating up on the
Capitol Hill policemen and the DC policemen who were trying to keep us
safe.
That was the reality of what happened. These people who work for the
Senate and the House are Federal employees. In Russell Vought's view,
the villains--the villains--that is what he calls them. Risking their
lives to keep us safe and being called villains by Russell Vought, for
goodness sake--has he no sense of responsibility for the men and women
and their families who risk their lives for this building.
Those who were prosecuted for this ended up being in the hundreds of
individuals--some for misdemeanors, for trespass; others for more
serious crimes, assaulting police officers.
One of them already has been released by a pardon from President
Trump. He went on to defy a policeman in Indiana, and there was a
gunfight that followed, and this individual was shot dead on the scene
just a few days after he was released by the President's pardon.

The point I am trying to make is that there are important and serious
jobs taking place here in Washington and around the Nation. We count on
Federal employees, and we count on people to be held accountable if
they violate the law. I am sickened by the fact that these men and
women in uniform, whom I have come to know over the years, are
considered to be disposable, dispensable. In my mind, they are not.
Their lives are worth something, and those who attacked them should be
held responsible.
So when the wheels of justice turned, and these individuals were held
responsible, it was through the Department of Justice. Now, there is a
hunt on in the Department to find out each and every one of their
names. If they are going on a list to be terminated, I would just say
to the Trump administration, you are in for a fight. These men and

[[Page S715]]

women did their jobs. They were responsible for prosecuting the
individuals who raided this Capitol, and they did it well, as far as I
am concerned.
I am sad to report that Kash Patel, who is President Trump's nominee
to head up the Federal Bureau of Investigation, does not agree with me,
and I will tell you why.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has 28,000 Federal agents around
the world, 400 different field offices. These individuals are the
premiere law enforcement Agency of the United States of America and
have an international reputation. Mr. Patel wants to be the person to
head that Agency.
And yet what he decided to do--this is Kash Patel--was to make a
project out of music from those who were convicted of crimes on January
6, 2021. He gathered together a number of them--he swears he doesn't
even know their names--and created a recording, a song that he wrote
and proudly played at President Trump's rallies, a song to be sung by
the prisoners, and they call them the J6 Choir.
We asked Mr. Patel to tell us more. He said: Well, all the proceeds
of the album go to the families of the prisoners.
I said: Did you ever consider the proceeds going to the families of
the men and women in uniform who were risking their lives to keep this
building safe?
No, he said. He focused on the families of the prisoners. He called
them political prisoners.
Of course, they were convicted under the court of law. Many of them
pled guilty. They couldn't deny the fact of what the videotape showed
of their conduct.
So Mr. Patel was raising money through this recording being played at
the Trump rallies of these individuals. He said he just didn't know
their names or who they might be. And we are considering this
individual to head up the FBI.
What would morale be like at the FBI if a person is put in charge who
was entertaining America with the songs by the prisoners in jail who
raided this Capitol?
I often think--I wonder what we would have thought if the tables were
turned a little bit on January 6, and it didn't happen here in
Washington, but happened in London. If we heard that a mob had crashed
down the doors of Parliament and taken control of the House of Commons.
My reaction would have been: It is impossible. I have been there. I
have seen that. It is carefully guarded and watched, and it is a
venerable institution when it comes to parliamentary law. I can't
imagine that a mob would take over the House of Commons in London.
Well, think about America, and think about the impression of what
happened on January 6 to other people around the world, and that this
happened in our time, in this building. We have to go back to the War
of 1812 to find an invasion of an enemy force.
And now we come to January 6, 2021, so-called political prisoners--
some call them tourists--who came in and desecrated this building. That
was the reality.
I am only making that point because I think it is a serious, historic
event, and one that we will think about many times again.
Individuals who were involved in that were Federal employees, and
they were doing their job and risking their lives in the process for
doing it.
So what is going on through the Office of Management and Budget?
There is a man named Matthew Vaeth, V-A-E-T-H, who issued an order. He
called for a freeze on Federal spending not that long ago, 2 weeks or
so. I don't know if he thought through what he was doing, but he said
he was doing it to make sure that there would be no Federal spending
which would support transgenderism--that was one of them--or what he
called Marxian--capital M--Marxian equity or some Green New Deal. So he
wanted to make sure there was no political investment in those causes
across America.
Do you know what he shut down? He shut down a Head Start Program in
Chicago, IL. It is called El Valor. It has been in business for many
years. Families of moderate income who live in the neighborhood send
their kids to the Head Start Program, and they are very proud of the
results. These kids are learning how to read. They are learning how to
socialize. They are going to be ready for kindergarten and ready for
school as a result of it.
Well, Mr. Vaeth at OMB decided to shut it down and cut off their
funds. And at least overnight, there was a fear that that was exactly
what would happen.
It was only when there was a national response in opposition to that,
that they reversed their position and decided to keep some of the
things open.
Head Start is open in Chicago, which I just mentioned, but there are
others that are questioning whether they are open as well.
I got a phone call, as well, from some doctors in Chicago during this
shutdown--this OMB shutdown under President Trump. And I said: What
impact has this had on you?
They said: We are researchers for the National Institutes of Health.
We work in laboratories looking for cures for diseases--heart disease,
cancer, all sorts of different challenges. And we, frankly, were told
at 5 p.m. on the day of his order to stop working on what we were
doing. Most of the projects that we are involved in are long-term
projects involving a lot of work that goes beyond regular work hours.
But we were told to stop--stop medical research--because of this order
from the Federal Government that came out of the OMB.
So when we consider what happened, just a few days ago--and it is
still reverberating around country--and consider the nomination of
Russell Vought, you have to ask yourself, honest to goodness, do you
consider that to be a villain who is working at that laboratory in
Chicago for a National Institutes of Health project?
I consider that person to be a great professional, and I wish them
all the success and luck in the world. To characterize them as
villains, as Mr. Vought has done, is unfair to them and an indication
of his values.
So we are trying to appeal to our colleagues on the other side of the
aisle to join us with a few votes to stop Mr. Russell Vought from
taking over the Office of Management and Budget.
This is an important responsibility, and it is one that needs to be
left in the hands of those who will accept that responsibility
personally.
I see that my colleague has joined me from Maryland. I am glad she is
here. I am going to wrap up by just saying: We are going to rue the day
if we put Russell Vought in this job as to what he is going to do.
When he characterizes our Federal employees as villains and says we
will put them in trauma--do you want our air traffic controllers to be
in trauma? Do you want the men and women who are responsible at the FBI
for keeping our country safe from terrorism to be in trauma?
I want them working for America's future, as they have in the past,
and to characterize them as the enemy is unfair.
I will be voting against Russell Vought, and I hope other colleagues
will join me.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Scott of Florida). The Senator from
Maryland.
Ms. ALSOBROOKS. Mr. President, Democrats have been here all night--
and guess what? We are not letting up, because, right now, in Maryland
and across this country, the administration is conducting a witch hunt
for Federal workers.
See, when the President said ``I am your retribution,'' he meant that
he will scapegoat, bully, and attempt to silence the Federal workforce.
It is a retribution that they do not deserve.
I really want to paint a picture of who these Federal workers are and
who they are not. They are not partisan hacks, hell-bent on pursuing
some kind of political agenda. They are not part of some deep state
conspiracy that, apparently, keeps this President awake at night.
In fact, to the contrary, these people are hard-working Americans who
believe in this government regardless of who the President is. As a
matter of fact, they are my friends; many of them are my neighbors; and
they are my constituents. They are Marylanders.
See, I represent over 150,000 Federal workers. In Maryland, we are
proud to have the highest number of Federal workers per capita in the
country.

[[Page S716]]

They are public servants in the truest sense of the word, who are not
guided by party and not moved by vicious news cycles, but they are
driven, instead, by mission--a mission to serve this country to the
very best of their ability under any President of any party. And in
just 17 days, this President has put all of their livelihoods on the
line.
How shameless. How reckless. How callous. How depraved.
There have been so many actions that this administration has taken to
villainize and hurt our civil servants, and I want to be explicit about
exactly what they are up to.
They have fired inspectors general--the people who conduct
independent audits and investigations within government Agencies to
detect and prevent waste, fraud, and abuse. It is to replace
independent watchdogs--this is the plan--with loyalists. Now you want
to talk about making government efficient? Might I suggest not firing
the very people who are committed to rooting out waste, fraud, and
abuse of our taxpayer dollars.
Next, we have the whole Federal buyout scheme--yes, a scheme--and
today marks the last day of the so-called ``Fork in the Road'' buyout,
but the administration continues to suggest that should enough people
not take the buyout, they will begin mass layoffs. Hard-working
Americans who have done their jobs dutifully--some for decades; I have
spoken with them--fired for no reason whatsoever.
This week, USAID missions overseas have also been ordered to shut
down. I have heard from Marylanders abroad who are doing critical work
to prevent wars, who don't know if they will even have a job anymore.
We have learned that FBI agents and employees were asked by Justice
Department leadership to fill out a 12-question survey detailing their
roles in investigations stemming from the January 6 attack on this
Capitol. This led to the FBI turning over details of 5,000 employees
who worked on January 6 cases to the Trump Justice Department.
We know the administration has issued a freeze on Federal hiring.
Dozens of employees at the Education Department have been put on leave,
and more are expected. Rumors continue to circulate that this
administration wants to shut down the Department itself. At multiple
government Agencies, Agency heads were asked to identify employees on
probationary periods or who have served less than 2 years, likely
because these employees are easier to fire.
The administration issued a memo pausing, potentially, trillions of
dollars in Federal aid, sowing chaos throughout the government.
Thankfully, this directive has been partially halted, thanks to legal
challenges.
They have issued a stop-work order in the U.S. State Department for
all existing foreign aid. And 160 National Security Council staff
members have been sent home while the administration reviews staffing.
They ordered a review of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or
FEMA, as the administration considers whether to close the country's
lead disaster response.
How reckless. How callous.
We have gotten reports of more than 40 Head Start providers still
unable to draw funds after last week's funding freeze. This is, of
course, despite a court order, because this administration not only
sows chaos but also has set the example of what lawlessness looks like.
These are illegal actions, and these providers who help make sure that
our vulnerable kids get what they need to thrive have all been put into
a position of being insecure and uncertain. They provide for our
children food, education, and so much more, and these are the very
people who have been targeted by this administration.
Our veterans haven't been spared either. The administration froze
Federal aid for critical programs serving veterans and their families
and then fired the VA's top watchdog official in charge of protecting
veterans from waste and wrongdoing. They are firing the very people
charged with making the Veterans Health Administration more efficient
to better serve the great men and women who serve this Nation.

How callous. How reckless.
Each and every one of these moves inflicts pain, and they all have a
ripple effect--pain on the civil servants who do the work these
programs and Agencies fund and pain on the people who rely on the work
of these programs and Agencies. It is a raw deal for Americans, period.
What is clear is this witch hunt has only just begun because, today,
this very body is going to be voting on a nominee who wants nothing
more than to see the Federal workforce burned at the stake. He said it
himself. About civil servants, he said:

We want to put them in trauma.

That is unbelievable. It is absolutely unbelievable.
I will repeat. He said:

We want to put them in trauma.

What man or a person speaks in that way? But those are the words of
Russell Vought, the man whom this President has chosen to lead the
Office of Management and Budget. So when Russell says he wants to put
them in trauma, I am going to take him at his word, because this isn't
one of those situations where we need to see what Vought is going to
do. History has already shown us.
In the President's first administration, Russell Vought was the lead
author of his budget requests for fiscal years 2020 and 2021. Each plan
contained a blueprint for robbing the American public of the services
that their tax dollars are supposed to fund. He called for $500 billion
to be cut from Medicare, and I will note, very significantly, that over
1 million Marylanders are enrolled in Medicare. Two of them are my
parents--77 years old--who worked their whole lives. These are the
kinds of people this President and his administration have determined
that they will target.
He called for $900 billion cut from Medicaid. I will note nearly 2
million Marylanders rely on Medicaid.
He called for up to $71 billion cut from Social Security. And I will
note 1 in 7 Marylanders receives Social Security benefits. By the way,
it is so important to note: These benefits are not ones that have been
given to these Marylanders; these are benefits they have earned over a
lifetime.
He called for $170 billion in cuts to college affordability
initiatives.
This flies in the face of everything that Americans say that they
desire. It has never been said that Americans want us to cut benefits
to our elders. It has never been said that they want to cut benefits to
those who are disabled, who rely on Medicaid and others.
And it sure has not been the case for so many of our young people who
came out and voted in this last election cycle, hoping to get a
government that would make their lives better, and, instead, they are
making it worse. I will note that 25 percent of Maryland's
undergraduates receive student loans, and over 100,000 Maryland college
students received Federal grants in the fiscal year 2023-2024 academic
year.
How shameful it is to target these students who will be the next
leaders of our country.
And this isn't just the classic case of the past becoming prologue.
In the interim, between administrations, Russell Vought has continued
on this anti-worker crusade because, yes, Federal workers are workers,
no matter what Russell Vought or anyone in this administration says.
They are hard workers, dedicated workers--Maryland-strong workers.
The crusade continued when Russell Vought raised his hand to help
write Project 2025. In particular, I want to hone in on the goal to
deploy Schedule F.
Here is what the American Postal Workers Union had to say about it:

Project 2025 seeks to undermine this expectation of
efficiency and expertise in public services by dismantling
the Federal Government and reinstating Trump's 2020
``Schedule F'' Executive order. This would allow the ruling
administration to reclassify many civil servants as
policymaking or policy-evaluating workers, thereby removing
their civil service protections and making them at-will
employees. President Trump could then install whomever he
pleases based on favoritism and loyalty to his
administration. Deploying Schedule F to replace dedicated
civil servants with inexperienced cronies removes the very
people who are experts at their jobs and have the knowledge
to help our government serve our communities in the best
possible way. Installing employees based on ``who you know''
favoritism effectively removes the nonpartisan and
professional nature of civil service--civil servants

[[Page S717]]

should simply be the most qualified for the job. That's why
tests like the ones postal workers must take for employment
exist [at all]. An unbiased exam means that workers earn
their jobs based on their skills, not who we know or what
color our skin is. Furthermore, in the long run, this
practice could effectively dismantle public trust and
efficiency in government services, letting billionaires like
Donald Trump and Elon Musk make the case for a privatized,
capitalistic government that profits off of its citizens
instead of a government that exists to uplift workers in our
communities.

Russell Vought isn't concerned with making the government more
efficient. All of us recognize this. No one is confused about this. I
highly doubt that he cares anything whatsoever at all about whether
government works or not. What he cares about is making sure that every
single Federal employee supports President Trump.
This isn't a blue State or a red State issue. This is a United States
issue. If this man is allowed to enact the President's revenge, there
will be a collective and uniting pain that courses across our country.
People, whether they voted for this President or not, will feel the
devastating impact of not only a less efficient government, but a
government unable to deliver on the services that it promises to
provide.
That is what this administration refuses to understand. When you
target Federal workers, you are also targeting the people who they
serve. Do you know who Federal workers serve? The American people.
When Russell Vought says ``We want to put them in trauma,'' let's
talk about who he is talking about.
A woman I spoke with who has worked at the Department of Health and
Human Services for over 35 years has been put on leave as a part of
this President's Executive orders. What has she done? Nothing to
deserve this. Yet her family is a family that has been targeted, a
person who has served 35 years.
Another woman I spoke with has worked for 37 years at the Department
of Agriculture. Believe it or not, she was placed in her current
position under the President's first administration. And guess what. As
a result of this crazy and callous and corrupt witch hunt, now she is
being let go as well.
Remember, of course, that these two women are women who have worked
now for several administrations, both Democratic and Republican
Presidents, and they have done so honorably.
There are the Marylanders at the FDA who make sure that the water we
drink is safe and that the food we eat is safe.
Let's talk about scientists and doctors who are actively researching
cures for cancer at the National Institutes of Health.
They are targeting civil servants at the Pentagon working every day
to protect our national security.
When I think about the Pentagon, I can't help but think about my own
grandmother. Her name was Sarah Daisy. Sarah Daisy was a person who was
a housekeeper, but it was her greatest dream to work in the Federal
Government.
Many will remember that there was a time, however, when you went to
work in the government, you would take a civil servant's exam and take
a typing test. Well, my grandmother Sarah couldn't afford a typewriter,
so she went into the family's kitchen and put a white piece of paper up
on the refrigerator, and she drew a keyboard on that white piece of
paper.
My father told me that in the one-bedroom apartment that they all
shared--my grandmother, her three children, and another family member--
she stood in front of her refrigerator every single night and taught
herself the keystrokes so that she could take the typing test to get
herself a job in the Federal Government.
Well, she went on and took that typing test. She passed it. She got
herself a job in the Federal Government, and she was so proud of the
work that she did as a civil servant. She showed up every single day,
took buses to get to her job at the Pentagon.
She would often tell me she was so proud. She couldn't wait to tell
me: I passed General So-and-So. I passed General So-and-So in the
hallway.
She was very proud to have served her country.
But Sarah Daisy isn't the only one of her sort--civil servants who
show up every day just to serve the American people. Those are the
kinds of civil servants who are being targeted by this administration.
We think as well about FBI agents. Look, I am a former prosecutor. I
spent 13 years working in courtrooms. I worked alongside many of our
best and brightest in the law enforcement community, including the FBI.
Never once did I ever wonder if they had voted for me. What mattered is
that they were honed in on the same mission that I was: building safer
communities for the people we collectively serve and people like my
grandma, whom I spoke about.
Again, these are all people who serve every day doing the very best
they can.
She never came home and told me whether the people she served at the
Pentagon were Republicans or Democrats because, guess what, it didn't
matter. It didn't matter. This is who we are talking about here.
There have been so many calls to my office.
You know, the question we should be asking ourselves about people
like my grandmother and about the other agents whom I worked with as a
prosecutor who have given their whole lives to civil service--what we
should be asking is, how can we repay them? Is it by villainizing them,
taking away their jobs? It is ludicrous. It is outrageous.
There have been so many calls to my office. Some people have even
shown up to my office in person looking for support.
I stepped out the other day, and there were three women who had
driven here from their homes. They were exasperated, couldn't even bear
the thought of calling or emailing. They needed to come in person to
let me know about their displeasure about the actions they are seeing
from this government.
We received a call from a Federal employee as well who has worked in
an Agency for 17 years and is now furloughed. On the verge of tears,
she was afraid not just for her own livelihood but for the fate of
those losing their title II food aid. She was thinking of malnourished
children who will stop receiving food because of this administration's
callous actions.
We received a call from a Federal employee concerned about Elon Musk
and his access to confidential information. He said he feels helpless,
and after 22 years of service to our Nation, he is afraid that he will
lose his job. He said: ``It feels like a bad movie.''
A former Federal employee of 10 years called my office, scared about
how this is impacting her neighbors and her community, how it will hurt
all her friends who work in the Federal Government.
There was one call from a woman in her sixties. She was debating
whether or not to take this buyout. She is close to retiring. In the
end, she told us that she wanted to continue this work.
When I learned of this particular call, I immediately thought of my
grandmother yet again and the pride that she had in her work at the
Pentagon, the joy that she carried with her, knowing that her job had
purpose, that her service was meaningful. The North Star she always
looked to was helping her fellow Americans.
It came as no surprise to me that this Marylander wanted to continue
her work. I don't think it would come as a surprise to any Marylander
who has answered the call to serve their government in this way.
We take great pride in this work. We believe in the power of the
Federal Government to do good things for the people of this country.
If you ask any civil servant ``Could the government use
improvement?'' well, you would hear a resounding ``Yes.'' I think every
Democrat and every Republican believes that we can make the government
more efficient. But firing a bunch of hard-working Marylanders because
you think they may not agree with your policy, gutting Agencies that
work on behalf of the American people--well, this isn't going to make
the government more efficient. In fact, dismissing experienced workers
who care deeply about the mission is only going to weaken government
functions. It is going to hinder the government's ability to do its
job--everything from Medicare to Medicaid, to veterans' benefits, to
law enforcement, to cancer research, to--I mean, the list goes on and
on and on.
In this brazen and callous mass firing, President Trump is going to
end

[[Page S718]]

up with a government incapable of doing what the people expected of it.
It is shameful, and it is un-American.
Let me say this painfully clear to anyone considering supporting this
nominee: The trauma that Mr. Vought describes won't just be exacted on
the Federal workers that he despises; it will extend to the people in
this country who utilize the programs of the Federal Government--the
exhausted mother of that child who calls the 9-8-8 lifeline for support
on the darkest of days; the single dad who has to call out of work
because his daughter's Head Start classroom closed its doors; the
family business that didn't get their disaster relief check to rebuild
after the floodwaters receded; the grandmother stretching her fixed
income to feed a nourishing meal to her grandkids, turned away at the
checkout line when her SNAP EBT card was declined; the woman seeking
refuge from an abusive partner--the kind of women that I represented
for many years as a domestic violence prosecutor--just to be turned
away from the local family violence shelter; the first-generation
college student who loses their Pell grant and Federal work-study and
can't afford to stay in school; the veteran whose appointment at the
Veterans' Administration gets canceled, delaying his screening and
treatment from his battlefield exposure.
When Russell Vought talks about inflicting trauma, none of us should
forget these people.
In these times of chaos, we must remain vigilant. We must not only
acknowledge the deep pain being felt by so many American workers now
but transform that pain into action. The tools at our disposal may be
limited, but our resolve must remain limitless. And my promise to the
people of Maryland is that it shall.
I would like to just end my comments because I see my colleague has
joined us on the floor and say that there is a Prayer Breakfast
happening this morning. It is my understanding that the President is
there to attend and many others. It is my greatest desire that their
prayers today will be for the American people and for our country.
There is a Scripture that is so clear in the Bible, and it reminds
us--and the President professes that he is a person of faith. It
reminds us of one fact, irrefutable fact: The Bible tells us that they
will know us by our love. In fact, it says, ``They will know you are my
disciples if you show love,'' that we should love one another. I
believe that ought to be the guiding principle that guides us in all
that we do--the only thing that will last is what we have done--and
that we will exude the light of God, and in so doing, we will have love
one for each other.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from California.
Mr. PADILLA. Mr. President, I rise today in the strongest terms to
oppose the nomination of Russell Vought to serve as Director of the
Office of Management and Budget. I do so not just for his poor
performance and lack of transparency before the Senate Budget Committee
during his confirmation hearing but because of his truly dangerous and
damaging vision for the future of our country.
I will be very clear. If Russell Vought is confirmed to lead the
Office of Management and Budget, it will be working families in America
that pay the price. If he is confirmed, he will work to slash the
social safety net, threaten Medicaid and SNAP benefits, and to balance
the budget on the backs of our most vulnerable neighbors--all in
service of cutting taxes for billionaires and for large corporations.
Let me start this morning by saying that if we were hoping for some
sort of clarity or some commitment, some reassurance from Russell
Vought during his confirmation process, we certainly weren't given much
to work with.
During the confirmation hearing--and, yes, I am a member of the
Budget Committee--at best, he was not responsive to our questions and
inquiries. In fact, he was actually pretty evasive when asked some of
the more pointed questions.
As I reflected on his testimony, I observed that it was what he
didn't say that spoke volumes. It told us everything that we needed to
know about the dangers of reinstating him to this hugely important and
consequential position.
Other Trump nominees at other confirmation hearings in other
committees that I have been a part of, at a minimum, they committed--at
least they uttered the words--that they would respect the Constitution
and abide by the law. That should be the bare minimum for someone
seeking Senate confirmation for any position that is to serve the
American people. That is the minimum. But Mr. Vought couldn't even do
that. He refused to commit to follow the law as it pertains to
implementing the spending plan and priorities established by Congress--
including us, colleagues. We are the U.S. Senate.

Why would he refuse to commit to that fundamental premise? Because if
he were to do that, he would be lying under oath. He made it abundantly
clear that, as Director of OMB, he has every intention of ignoring the
laws passed by Congress, including the spending plans. He has been very
explicit about that.
Now, if this was any other nominee by any other President and he
refused to make such a commitment, we might be left wondering about
what his true priorities are, what his true agenda is. But, for better
and for worse, Russell Vought has already shown us exactly what he
intends to do. We don't need to deal in hypothetical scenarios when it
comes to him.
For starters, he has served as head of the Office of Management and
Budget before, you will recall, during the first Trump administration.
In that time, in that capacity, on multiple occasions, he illegally
froze congressionally appropriated funds and withheld taxpayer dollars
in order to obey President Trump's political demands.
And, even today, Russell Vought has already restarted this effort, as
unlawful as it is--restarted this effort even though he hasn't even yet
been confirmed by the Senate. He has already played a central role in
OMB's attempt to withhold funding these last couple of weeks--funding
for programs including Head Start that so many families across the
country rely on, withhold funding for job assistance programs for our
veterans--yes, veterans, the very women and men that we honor for their
willingness to serve, their willingness to pay the ultimate sacrifice
on behalf of our country, who need our assistance. And when they return
home from service, that is who he is going after?
He has withheld funds from countless other programs that working
families across the country rely on. His actions in these last couple
of weeks have plunged not just the Federal Government but, frankly, the
country and our financial markets into chaos and confusion. And like I
said, he hasn't even been confirmed yet, and this is what is already
happening.
But, colleagues, if these early signals weren't enough for you to
grasp what he is capable of, what he is hell-bent on doing, if you are
wondering what else he may have in mind and in store for the OMB, I
guess you are in luck because he literally wrote a playbook for what he
intends to do. I invite you all and folks watching at home, if you
haven't done so already, to go to project2025.org. And as you call up
this playbook, as you call up this agenda, you will see that he is one
of the key authors.
And while President Trump claims he hasn't had a chance to review his
Budget Director's vision for the administration, and while many Members
of this body might have been a little too busy these last several
months to read it for themselves, let me try to help by giving you just
a very, very brief summary, some of the key points, because when you
boil it down, the main goals of Project 2025--as the authors, including
Mr. Vought, have expressed--are this: No. 1, give the office of the
President of the United States unprecedented power; No. 2: to use that
power to slash the rest of government in order to pay for tax cuts for
billionaires and large corporations.
It is that simple. That is their goal. That is their objective. That
is their agenda. They want an unchecked President to gut investments--
investments that Congress directs to help working families--in order to
give even bigger tax breaks for big corporations and billionaires--
billionaires, by the way, just like the ones he surrounded himself with
in his inauguration.

[[Page S719]]

It is not a secret. It is not a veiled attempt. It is blatant. It is
out in the open. They are literally working to steal from the poor to
give more to the rich. That is the Trump agenda, and that is all that
Russell Vought is working toward.
But again, colleagues, don't just take my word for it. Let's look at
the record. It is easy to chalk up these first couple of weeks of the
second Trump administration just to chaos. That is how they operate. We
have known this. We have seen it coming.
Well, it certainly has been chaotic. Some of that chaos may be due to
incompetence. I think a lot of it is very, very intentional, and
clearly a lot of it is due to an utter lack of empathy. But what is
intentional is chaos by design. You have heard these terms. They are
proud of it: Flood the zone. Traumatize Federal workers.
Yes, they said it. I will come back to that in a couple of minutes.
But they have sought distractions from the scale of what they are
trying to do. So, through it all, to my colleagues and to the Nation, I
urge us all to keep our eyes on the ball. See the Trump administration
exactly for what it is and who they are. To understand this
administration, you simply have to understand their single biggest
objective: huge handouts to the largest corporations and the wealthiest
Americans.

President Trump is trying to one-up his first term. His signature
legislative accomplishment wasn't infrastructure improvements, as much
as he tried to talk about that. It wasn't increasing access to
healthcare or quality of healthcare. In fact, they worked so hard to
try to take it away. The single biggest accomplishment of President
Trump's first administration was record deficits brought to you by
record tax breaks for the wealthy and by cutting the corporate tax rate
by 14 percent, from 35 percent down to 21 percent. That is right; he
was giving huge tax breaks to corporations to increase their profit
margins. And it is not that they weren't making money. They were making
plenty of money. Who wasn't making plenty of money were the workers who
made those profits possible. The wage growth wasn't what American
workers deserved it to be.
Now, that was the first Trump administration. We have just begun the
second Trump administration, where you would think that maybe, just
maybe, they would work hard on making good on their campaign theme or
campaign pledge--whatever you want to call it--of putting ``America
first.''
I would love to see it. They could put America first if they chose to
invest in our education system and to help educate and train our future
workforce in ways that would grow our economy in the years and decades
ahead. Or they could put America first by tackling the high cost of
housing and grocery prices.
But no, that is not what they are doing. They are right back to
focusing on tax breaks for corporations by hundreds of billions of
dollars. It is the only thing that President Trump is about, frankly.
Look at his record. Look at his life. He wants to make life even easier
for himself, for his family, for his wealthy friends, for the top not
just 1 percent but the top 0.1 percent of America.
But you can't just give these tax breaks away for free. You have got
to pay for them somehow. Somebody has got to fund them. So in order to
pay for these tax breaks, the administration is determined to cut as
much spending from our communities and our most vulnerable as they can.
Like I said, they are not even hiding it anymore.
On the campaign trail, President Trump enjoyed playing dress-up at
McDonald's and staging photo ops with garbage trucks, but on day one of
his administration, who did he surround himself with? Not a fast-food
worker, not a sanitation worker, not an autoworker, whom he claimed to
reach out to in recent years, or a steelworker, as much as he wants to
champion blue-collar workers in the Midwest. No, he chose to surround
himself with the richest men in the country--some of the richest men in
the world.
Remember his inauguration? They were right there in the front row.
You recognize the names: Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk.
To hard-working Americans who may have voted for him in November, I
am sorry to tell you, he used you. He used you for your votes. He got
what he needed from you, and now he and Russell Vought are about to
make you pay.
For an idea of what the next 4 years with Russell Vought and Donald
Trump in charge will mean, let's review again these last couple of
weeks. It has been decision after decision after decision following
Russell Vought and Project 2025's playbook: Empower the President, and
then enrich themselves and their wealthy friends.
Now, we have long known that this President could not care less about
the guardrails put in place in our Constitution. Since when has he
cared about what is constitutional or not?
But after the Supreme Court granted him blanket immunity, he is using
his newfound powers to eliminate any opposition or dissent around him.
From day one in the second administration, President Trump has used
his powers to seek retribution against anyone he perceives as a
political enemy. And he sought to undermine and threaten any potential
opposition. On day one, he issued 1,500 pardons for the January 6
rioters, if you want to call them that. Insurrectionists is what I call
them. Folks who desecrated this U.S. Capitol, who attacked law
enforcement officers in an attempt to overthrow an election.
The last couple of weeks, he has begun to investigate and fire
professional career prosecutors at the Department of Justice who did
their duty when asked to investigate the crimes committed on January 6
of 2021, prosecutors who were required--when assigned to--required to
investigate insurrection, sedition, violence against law enforcement
personnel. Serious crimes, folks, serious crimes.
President Trump's team even sent out a survey to members of the FBI
regarding their involvement in January 6 investigations. Now, just this
week, CNN reported:

FBI turns over details of 5,000 employees who worked on
January 6 cases to Trump Justice Department, as agents sue.

And:

President Trump has illegally fired 18 inspectors general
and over a dozen career prosecutors from the special
counsel's office who worked under Jack Smith to investigate
and prosecute criminal actions from his first term in office.

It is still early in the second administration, but the message is
already crystal clear. President Trump will threaten anyone who might
show a willingness to hold him accountable for his actions. It is the
same reason why he is not just firing folks, but he is installing
loyalists at the Department of Justice, especially at the FBI, so that
no one will dare tell him no.
Now, how do we know these are loyalists? The newly sworn in Attorney
General of the United States has served as President Trump's personal
attorney. Well, people say there is a conflict there, just delegate it
to the Deputy Attorney General. So who might that be? Oh, surprise,
surprise, another former personal attorney. Where will the conflicts
end?
But, of course, there is still dedicated public servants out there
willing to do what is right, even if that means standing up to Trump.
But it is, indeed, getting harder and harder.
Now, earlier this week, the New York Times reported that the head of
the FBI's New York office wrote to his colleagues and vowed to dig in--
that is what he wrote, ``dig in,'' in the face of this assault. Not
just on law enforcement personnel but Justice.
He wrote:

Today, we find ourselves in the middle of a battle of our
own, as good people are being walked out of the FBI, and
others are being targeted because they did their jobs in
accordance with the law and FBI policy.

That is what is happening, retribution for folks who were doing their
job, just because President Trump doesn't like it, fears the
consequences and accountability. And even if it was just at the FBI,
even if it was just at the Department of Justice, it would be cause for
alarm; but a similar trend is happening across Departments and Agencies
not involved in our Nation's law enforcement.
When President Nixon fired just a fraction of these numbers, it was
called the Saturday Night Massacre, and it led to his resignation. In
comparison, I can't help but note that what President Trump is doing is
not a Saturday Night Massacre; it was a January massacre.

[[Page S720]]

And as astonished as I am, about what President Trump is trying to
do, I am equally astonished at Senate Republicans who are standing by
and watching it happen, letting it happen--letting it unfold as if you
have no choice, as if you have no power.
They are unlike their Republican predecessors who had the courage and
the moral compass to recognize the harm that a President could do to
the country and to tell President Nixon that enough was enough.
The Trump administration is hoping to force out thousands of
experienced career Federal workers who have served both Democratic and
Republican administrations, so that he can replace them with people
whose only qualification is blind loyalty.
We have heard about the loyalty tests, right, that he required of
folks who wanted to be considered for appointments. President Trump is
attempting to twist the U.S. Code to redefine what nonpolitical career
workers are, to give him even more power to fire and torment our
Federal Government workforce. One of the ways he has initiated this
effort is by trying to offer a buyout or a severance to nearly all
Federal workers, hoping that nonloyalists would choose to leave rather
than stay and be tormented.
He is doing this, by the way, with absolutely no authority to do so.
I focus on this point because it truly hits home for us in California.
For Federal firefighters who have spent the first month of this
year working 24-hour shifts battling life-threatening fires in Los
Angeles County, they returned home--not just Federal firefighters from
California, but from a number of States. They returned home to find a
message from President Trump.

Now, you would think after weeks of 24-hour shifts fighting these
life-threatening fires, that they would come home to a thank you
message from the President of their country.
That wasn't the case. The message they came home to was a request for
their resignation. How outrageous. How insulting. How offensive. So
much so that I think it is worth repeating just a couple of the
messages that I received from Federal firefighters who reached out
after these buyout offers went out.
The first:

It's hard to put into words just how disrespectful this
feels to any civil servant, but especially to someone who has
given so much. Sacrificing precious time away from family,
risking everything for the greater good.

Another reads:

Today I returned home after a two-week fire assignment in
California. A slew of executive orders over this past week
have put myself and a lot of others on edge. I am worried for
my livelihood and my future. A purge of Federal wildlife
firefighters will have catastrophic outcomes. Our fire
seasons are only getting longer. Neighbors continue to expand
well into wild landscapes. We cannot control when a fire will
choose to wreak havoc on a community, but we will show up. We
want to show up.

Can't help but see it the way they see it. This is a slap in the face
to Federal firefighters, and it is a gut punch to the confidence and
the pride that so many dedicated Federal workers have in the job that
they do.
But I will remind us again that that is exactly what Russell Vought
wants. He has said--and I will quote him:

We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When
they wake up in the morning, we want them to not go to work
because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.

And:

We want to put them in trauma.

Let me repeat that last sentence.

We want to put them in trauma.

This is Russell Vought, on behalf of President Trump, speaking:

We want to put them in trauma.

Let that sink in. What kind of person says that about the people that
they are preparing to work with and about the workers who they will be
responsible for?

We want to put them in trauma.

What kind of person wants to inflict trauma on anybody else? Is that
really the kind of person you put in charge of the Office of Management
and Budget, the nerve center of our Federal Government?
Now, clearly, in Russell Vought and Donald Trump's governments, you
are not rewarded for your love of country and service to country or for
standing up for the Constitution; in fact, you are punished, and you
will be made to suffer. And by purging the Federal Government to make
way for loyalists, the Trump administration is trying to further
protect a reckless President from any accountability for his actions.
President Trump's goal remains clear. He wants to destroy the
founding principles of our country. He wants to eliminate the
separation of powers, the checks and balances enshrined in our
Constitution, and to strip Congress--yes, one of the three coequal
branches of government--of its power. That is not an
exaggeration. Congress, particularly those involved with the
appropriations process, know and respect the power of the purse.
Congress, of course, has the power to create laws. And Congress has an
important power to conduct meaningful oversight to serve as a check on
a Presidency and an administration, just as the Founding Fathers
intended.

After all, the United States was created fleeing a dictatorship. We
chose better: a democracy where the power lies in the people and the
Congress representatives of the people. And between the legislative,
the executive, and the judiciary, checks and balances. Let's not let
power become overly concentrated.
Well, despite President Trump's attempts and Russell Vought's
enabling of further concentration of power, no matter what President
Trump wants to believe, Congress, the President, and the courts are
coequal branches of government.
Yet at the start of the President's second term, once again, we have
also received calls from officials in our Nation's health Agencies
because they had to abruptly cancel meetings. Now with every new
administration, we might expect a temporary pause on some external
communication, right? There is often some legitimate transition
activity. So if there is a pause or a momentary stop to social media
communications--FaceBook and Twitter, maybe--that is one thing. But to
deny Congress and the American people important information on public
health? That is truly dangerous.
But, sadly, again, it seems that our Republican colleagues are simply
unwilling to exercise their constitutional authority.
I am 51. Now that may not be considered old by Senate standards, but
I am old enough to remember when Republicans used to be concerned about
Presidential overreach. And it wasn't that long ago. Like in 2017, when
then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions called former President Obama an
emperor for his use of Executive actions--Jeff Sessions, former Member
of this body, as attorney general using the word ``emperor'' in
describing President Obama's use of Executive actions. Or when former
Speaker Paul Ryan referred to President Obama's Executive orders on gun
safety as ``a dangerous level of executive overreach.'' The Republican
leader in the House, Speaker at the time, saying it was Executive
overreach.
It wasn't that long ago. And so I can't help but ask: What has
changed? What has changed?
Just 8 years later, in 2025, the Republican party is clearly the
party of Donald Trump. And with more power in the hands of the
President to gut the Federal Government, are Republicans willing to
serve as accomplices in selling out hard-working Americans in order to
pay for this big tax break for billionaires and large corporations?
That is the question.
Now let's take a minute to look at who is running point for Donald
Trump these days. Now, before he was sworn in for a second term as
President, Trump happily handed over the keys to the government to the
richest man in the world. Elon Musk paid nearly $300 million to help
elect Donald Trump, and now that wager is paying off in spades. The
richest President in history is now allowing the richest man in the
world to find ways to cut funding from the American people. And they
will lie to your face when they claim they are returning power to the
people. Because if you were to ask ``Which people?'' they certainly
don't mean average, everyday, hard-working Americans. They are putting
power and wealth further and further into the billionaire class.
That is right. Trump has now handed shadow President Elon Musk
control of

[[Page S721]]

your Social Security payments, your Medicare benefits and Medicaid
benefits, the government programs that you paid into to help you in
retirement--the retirement that you earned. That is all at risk now.
And now Elon Musk has access to the sensitive data for hundreds of
millions of Americans. He has your bank account information. He has
your tax data. He has your Social Security number. He has your home
address.

To be clear, no law has passed to create this so-called Department of
Government Efficiency, DOGE, and no law was passed, certainly, to give
it any authority to make spending decisions, to shut down programs, or
ignore Federal law. So we should all be concerned as Musk gives recent
college graduates who now work for him full rein over Treasury's
servers and payment programs.
If Treasury payments were ever intentionally or even unintentionally
stopped, it could paralyze our economy, and it would stop people's
Social Security benefits. Now, most people that I know truly rely on
their Social Security to get by.
So let's be clear. For Donald Trump and Elon Musk, this has never
really been about government efficiency. It is about a government
takeover to steal from the American people and further enrich
themselves and their friends.
It is the very same reason, by the way, that they are attacking
USAID, illegally dismantling an Agency that Congress created, working
to end humanitarian assistance. Dictators around the world are
celebrating. China, opening its arms, as Trump forces our allies to
look somewhere else for partnership and support.
Colleagues, USAID was created by Congress, has been annually invested
in by Congress--including your votes.
President Trump, Russell Vought's philosophy: Who cares what they
did. We are going to do what we want. Keep telling us over and over and
over again. They are standing by, letting him do it.
Now we hear that the Department of Education might be in Elon Musk's
crosshairs next, with Donald Trump promising to abolish the Department
as a whole. Think about that. Threatening support for millions of our
students and further holding back a generation of children who have
already suffered interruptions through a pandemic and who can't afford
more instability?
It all begs the question: Who is really in control here? Who is
calling the shots? Is it Donald Trump? Or is it Elon Musk?
Well, today, I say to you that to working families, it doesn't
matter. Neither one of them is looking out for them.
And, again, this is exactly what Russell Vought has envisioned:
billionaires cutting support for American families to make room for
even more benefits for the rich. And his fingerprints are already all
over Donald Trump's earliest steps to cut funding.
Now, as I mentioned, even before he was confirmed--and he is still
not confirmed--Vought had a hand in a constitutional crisis just last
week when President Trump issued a governmentwide funding freeze. He
hoped to withhold hundreds of billions of dollars from social safety
net programs that Americans have paid into, all to lay the groundwork
for his billionaire tax cuts.
These Federal programs might not mean much to the wealthiest people
in the country, but they mean a lot--a lot--to hard-working families
across the country.
In California alone, State agencies and local governments were
blocked from accessing Medicaid and housing assistance grant portals.
The director of a grant-funded program, the Los Angeles District
Attorney's Office, supporting victims of violent crime--is that who we
are trying to look out for? The local prosecutors working to protect
victims of violent crime were concerned about the future of their work
because Federal funding had been frozen--who knew for how long.
Funding for research on cures for childhood cancer was threatened.
Colleagues, childhood cancer. We are trying to find a cure, not freeze
them out of hope.
Local commuter rail officials in Sonoma raised concerns about their
ability to continue to service the community if outstanding Federal
funding was frozen. This is the kind of service that people rely on to
get to work, keep our economy going. Funding freezes make it difficult
to do that.
The city of Vacaville was worried about potential impacts to their
housing authority and vouchers. Head Start grantees were frozen out of
their Federal payment management systems. Health centers in San
Francisco met to assess their ability to provide services if grant
funding and Medicare reimbursements were frozen.
The Oakland Fire Department raised alarm bells about having to cut
staff if an outstanding FEMA grant to support pay for 35 firefighters
was paused. Northern California, Central California has seen what fires
have done to Southern California. They don't want the same. Yet we are
going to jeopardize firefighter staffing? Really?
Not to mention President Trump is still holding up hundreds of
billions of dollars that were promised for key infrastructure projects
in California, and communities are losing confidence that they will
ever see that money. And I will cite just two examples: The city of
Tracy was awarded $41 million for a key infrastructure grant that would
create good-paying jobs, but now they may never see that money. The
LOSSAN rail corridor that connects San Diego to Los Angeles to San Luis
Obispo--I know you all love that part of the California coastline. The
LOSSAN rail corridor was promised $27 million to help improve service
along that route. Now that is in jeopardy. I know this one well, this
corridor. There are great plans in the works, not just for efficiency,
improved service, but improved safety. Imagine that--improving the
safety of the rail lines in America. But no. You all are OK with
stopping that work.

Now, although President Trump has threatened to block hundreds of
billions of dollars to support families recovering from catastrophic
fires, law enforcement agencies that we rely on to keep us safe, and
the children and families who depend on Federal childcare and nutrition
programs--that is what they are doing.
I know some of you have said: Well, that order has been frozen, so we
shouldn't worry.
Technically, the OMB funding freeze order has been halted by the
courts--not by choice, by the courts--for now. We know that the fight
is far from over. This is just their first attempt in this
administration, not their final attempt. And we know because this is
exactly what President Trump and Russell Vought want--a constitutional
crisis to give the President more power and to make way for those
billionaire tax breaks that you guys are so hell-bent on. That is their
plan for our families, for our Constitution, for our country.
Here is another tool they have. They will use immigration and other
culture wars to divide us because if we are fighting amongst ourselves,
Trump and his ultrawealthy friends will just be helping themselves to
tax breaks. They will try to overwhelm the system to enrich themselves,
whether it is legal or not, because they are banking on us being
distracted by culture wars.
In fact, look at just how much has been struck down by Federal judges
appointed by both Democrats and Republicans. This isn't a partisan
deal. How much has been struck down already just weeks into this
administration? One judge has already enjoined President Trump's
blatantly unconstitutional Executive order on birthright citizenship.
Not one but two judges have enjoined the OMB spending freeze. Two
Federal judges also enjoined his Executive order on transgender prison
inmates. And that is just in the last week. Multiple suits have also
been brought challenging his illegal purge of the Federal workforce and
his attempts to interfere with USAID.
So we know that President Trump and his billionaire friends are only
in it for themselves. That has been well established. They have shown
us exactly who they are for years now.
But colleagues, I have to admit that what surprises me most--what
surprises me most--is that what I hear from my Republican colleagues
one on one is: Well, we agree on more than you think. Let's just keep
talking. Let's work to try to find this common ground. Let's do what is
right for our country.

[[Page S722]]

Call me an optimist, but I believe my Republican colleagues when they
say they came to Washington to help their constituents.
Now, while I disagree with it, I understand that some of our
colleagues are choosing to make political decisions with some of
President Trump's nominees. You may be thinking about a potential
reelection in 2026. Maybe you think it is just easier to stand up to
Trump on an issue somewhere further down the road than right now.
But here is what surprises me: What is different with Russell Vought
is that this is a nominee who embodies a larger vision about the
Presidency and about the country that would fundamentally hurt your
constituents too--not just our constituents, not just my constituents,
all of our constituents. And it already has. This short-lived OMB
funding freeze alone gave us a look at just some of the backlash from
cutting a wildly popular social safety net.
So to my Republican colleagues, respectfully, I know you are getting
the same calls as I am. I know you are hearing about the constituents
whose lives have been made harder because of this. I know you are not
blind to the real-world effects of Donald Trump and Russell Vought.
This week, I have had Californians come out in droves to my office
encouraging me to oppose this nomination. They are demanding that the
services they rely on be protected, and they are refusing to let
Russell Vought pillage programs like Head Start, like Meals on Wheels,
like so many others just so that the wealthiest Americans can get a
bigger tax break.
So today, I will end with this: a question to my colleagues across
the aisle. Who are you more loyal to--your own constituents or a
reckless President? What are we doing in Washington if we are afraid to
stand up for our States and for our constituents? Did any of you run
for Senate to cut veterans' housing assistance? Did any of you run for
Senate to slash school lunch programs and force kids to go hungry? Did
any of you run for Senate to make it harder for communities to get
support after a natural disaster and rebuild their home, to rebuild
communities?
I may sound crazy when I suggest this, but I don't believe it is any
political risk at all to stand up for your constituents. Even if you
hesitate to speak out publicly against Trump's unprecedented power
grab, at least join me in voting against Russell Vought and his
dangerous world view. Don't let Trump's allegiance to billionaires
crush your hard-working constituents because I won't stand for it as he
attempts to crush mine.
I invite you, I encourage you, I implore you to do the right thing.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oregon.
Mr. WYDEN. Before he leaves the floor, let me thank my colleague from
California, my southern neighbor, for his excellent comments that so
eloquently put in perspective what the choices are all about.
You and I want everybody in America to have a chance to get ahead--
everybody. That has not been the case with what we have seen with Mr.
Vought and the Trump administration. The breaks are going to go to the
people at the top, and we are going to offer a very different approach.
I am going to spend a few minutes following up your good remarks and
then yield to my colleague, who has been a wonderful addition to the
Senate Finance Committee, Senator Smith.
Mr. President, Russell Vought is the lead architect of the Trump
economic bait-and-switch. It is a pretty clear approach to follow.
Donald Trump spent months and months on the campaign trail promising
that workers and working families were going to be his focus. You might
recall that he promised he was going to lower grocery prices. He went
into grocery stores and he said: Prices are going to go down under my
Presidency.
It took just a few weeks before that one was dropped. Anybody who
wonders about grocery prices today, just go to the market and try to
figure out how to get through buying some eggs because it is the same
kind of problem.
All these kinds of efforts to tell working-class people that they
would come first have really given way to something that I call the
bait-and-switch. Instead of the relief being targeted to workers,
people for whom the big issues have the second word as ``bill''--it
might be medical bill, it might be rent bill, it might be gas bill, but
that is what is going on in their lives--they are hurting.
The reality is, Trump doesn't care about that, so he is going to cut
programs that they depend on, like housing and healthcare and
affordable energy, in order to take that money and move it over to
supercharge the 2017 tax cuts and give even more benefits to the people
at the top.
We are going to, on the Finance Committee--and I have my colleague
here, Senator Smith, who I know shares this view--we are going to push
back against that kind of economic bait-and-switch because we know how
unfair it is. Right now in America, if you are a firefighter or a
nurse, you pay taxes with every single paycheck, no question about it.
It is a responsibility of citizenship. You pay taxes with every
paycheck.
If you are one of the high-fliers though, Mr. President, it doesn't
work that way. You can, to a great extent, pay what you want, when you
want to, and sometimes go for years on end paying virtually nothing. In
fact, on the front pages of the Wall Street Journal, it was described
some time ago as ``Buy, Borrow, and Die.'' Buy lots of assets, maybe
houses you don't use at all; borrow against them for your very opulent
lifestyle; and then you pass. Buy, borrow, and die--the glidepath that
ensures that if you are at the very top, you will pay little or nothing
for years on end while working people get clobbered.
You can be sure this is going to be something that Mr. Vought and
President Trump are going to pursue very vigorously because this is
what they had in mind when they were making plans to do the bait-and-
switch and take from people of the working class and transfer those
benefits to the people at the top.
Mr. Vought was a coauthor of the infamous Project 2025. This has been
particularly curious because when Donald Trump heard about this, he
acted like he had nothing to do with it: Project 2025? What is that?
Who knows anything about that?
Well, it is pretty clear that he knew everything about it, that he
was working with Mr. Vought, and what started off as a rightwing wish
list quickly became the guiding policy agenda for Donald Trump and his
administration. It is the blueprint for Republicans to unravel the
Federal Government as we know it.
There are some highlights of Project 2025 that certainly deserve some
discussion here this morning.
A nationwide abortion ban is on the agenda; slashing food assistance
programs; eliminating Head Start early education; yet more goodies for
Big Pharma; a green light for various types of discrimination; and
then, to top it all off--the real essence of the agenda--take a
sledgehammer to checks and balances and give the President the power to
throw the Constitution in the trash can and defy congressional
authority--a pretty graphic parade of horrors.
Over the last few days, the American people have witnessed the
reality of one of the mainstays of Project 2025 play out right before
their eyes.
Last Friday, just 6 days ago, whistleblowers told me about something
that has turned out to be more alarming than I thought. We were told
that the Treasury Secretary was going to give the keys to the Treasury
payments program to Mr. Musk, and that has played out now before our
eyes.
I say to my colleague from the Finance Committee, we got this letter
a day or so ago saying: What is everybody worried about? Nothing to see
here. No big deal.
And you slap your forehead or something and you say: Are you kidding
me? Look at what Musk is announcing every single day that he is doing.
I have said it before, and I say it again: Elon Musk, take your hands
off the people's money. You are seizing control of the Treasury
Department's highly sensitive payment system containing home addresses,
bank account numbers, private Social Security and tax information of
hundreds of millions of Americans.
My colleague from Minnesota and I spent a lot of time advocating for
privacy rights. When Musk is done with

[[Page S723]]

that agenda that I just described--looking at people's home addresses,
bank accounts, Social Security numbers--there are going to be very
little elements of real privacy left.
Even more concerning, Musk has shown that he is willing to use
control of these payment systems to target nonprofits that he disagrees
with. He starts with religious nonprofits, providing crucial community
services.
So the whole point of this, as Senator Smith and I have watched this,
was supposed to be going after fraud and abuse. What did he do? He went
after religious nonprofits, providing crucial community services.
This DOGE takeover is the type of thing Mr. Vought and his far-right
buddies were dreaming about. It probably goes all the way back to their
dorm rooms.
Just last week, the Office of Management and Budget--the office Mr.
Vought would be tasked with overseeing--put in place a funding freeze
that would cut off Federal funding for any organization or group across
the country that relies on it.
Law enforcement, schools, small businesses, and firefighters--these
are services that are lifelines to small communities. All of them--all
of them--are being punished.
Within hours of that freeze going into effect, our staff received
word that the Medicaid payment system had gone completely dark in all
50 States.
I remember what this was all about from my days as director of the
Gray Panthers. This kind of program was a lifeline in terms of giving
people information about their medicine, and nursing home benefits, and
the services of Medicaid. So when I heard about this, I put something
up online: All 50 States--all of them--had Medicaid portals that were
backed up, maybe not working at all.
For several hours, States were locked out, leaving the fate of
Medicaid and healthcare coverage for tens and millions of vulnerable
Americans unknown and leaving patients, States, and providers
scrambling.
Because of the tremendous outcry from senior citizens advocates,
disability rights folks, community leaders of all political
philosophies, that portal got up and running. But it is a sobering
reminder that Republicans have their sights set--particularly Mr.
Vought--on doing everything they can to unravel Medicaid and rip away
health coverage for millions of Americans in the process.
While OMB seemingly tried to walk back parts of the funding freeze
just a day later, confusion and chaos has had lasting impacts and
likely will for weeks and months to come.
To continue in that vein, my office is still hearing from Head Start
providers back in Oregon that are locked out of their payment systems.
Unless those funds are turned back on soon, these schools that serve
the rural parts of Oregon will have to start closing their doors
because they can't afford to keep operating.
All of this makes sense if you understand that one of the main goals
of Project 2025 and its key author, Mr. Vought, is taking away
Congress's power of the purse and giving it directly to the President.
That means giving the President the authority to redirect or cut off
Federal funds to programs they don't like or that didn't align with
their personal agenda, because the painful truth is Donald Trump
doesn't care if the economy crashes and these communities I am talking
about suffer.
He and Mr. Vought want hungry kids and seniors to just try to get by
on their own. They want domestic violence survivors to have nowhere to
turn for shelter. They want to deny law enforcement the resources they
need to keep our communities safe.
I just had groups of law enforcement people come to see me pleading
for help with resources. They didn't come as Democrats and Republicans.
They came as folks from Oregon and the Pacific North West to say: We
want to make sure that our communities have that added measure of
safety.
Unfortunately, the Trump people want to end lifesaving research that
is going to be so important to dealing with cancer and other diseases.
They don't seem to be at all concerned about patients being turned away
from basic healthcare.
It is clear to me that with this array of challenges that I have
described, the Trump people--particularly the President--have walked
back the pledge that was made in the campaign to put working families
first, and to give everybody a chance to get ahead. Those campaign
promises from the vault have vanished. Poof, they are gone.
What is taking place now is a very different agenda, the bait-and-
switch agenda, where instead of following through on those promises to
working families, they are going to make sure that the people who get
the fruits of the economic reforms that are coming are going to be the
people at the top.
America can do better. We always do better when we give everybody in
our country a chance to get ahead, and we come together to pursue that
in a united way.
I am voting no against Russell Vought because that kind of economics
is not on his agenda.
I yield to my colleague from Minnesota.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Minnesota.
Ms. SMITH. Mr. President, I would like to thank my colleague from
Oregon for his remarks. As he serves as ranking member of the Finance
Committee, I know that he is always thinking about how our tax system
is working for regular people in this country and how we make sure that
it is fair, that it is funding the critical services that we have, and
that we are not putting the burden on regular people and letting
billionaires and big corporations off the hook.
So I just want to thank you for your words. I was listening closely
to what you were saying, and I think it is very important in this
moment that we hear this.
Colleagues, we have been up all night long. It is a quarter to 9, I
think, in Washington, DC. It is 7:30 or a quarter to 8 in Minnesota,
where my family is. My grandchildren are just about getting up and
getting ready for school. I think we are going to get some snow in
Minnesota this morning. And in New Mexico, where my 95-year-old father
lives, it is only about 6:45 in the morning, and he is probably
thinking about getting up.
Senator Wyden, in your home State of Oregon, it is only about a
quarter to 6.
Every place around this country, people are getting up, and they may
be noticing that we have kept the Senate in session all night long.
They may be wondering what this is all about and why we are doing this
and what impact this has on their lives.
Because, after all, we are talking about the nomination of a man--
Russell Vought--to lead something called the OMB. I would guess that a
lot of people in this country don't even really know what the OMB is.
The Office of Management and Budget oversees Federal Agencies'
performance and administers the Federal budget. It sounds pretty
innocuous, right? It is not anything that you should be too worried
about. It seems like the role of this Agency would be to make sure that
the laws that are passed by Congress are implemented; that the Federal
budget, which is the purview of Congress, is implemented in a way that
reflects what the representatives of the people of this country asked
and expected.
So, colleagues and those who are listening, we are here today because
what is happening with this nomination of Russell Vought, this
confirmation that we are going to be taking up at some point, later
today, kind of masked in this innocuous OMB, is actually one of the
biggest power grabs that I think we have ever seen in the history of
our country--a massive power grab by the executive to seize power that
rightly, as described in the Constitution, belongs to Congress, because
what Mr. Vought and Donald Trump and Elon Musk have proposed is that,
with Russell Vought leading the Office of Management and Budget, they
can just pretty much ignore what Congress has said we should do with
the Federal budget.
So I want to just spend a little bit of time talking about what that
means and talking about what it means for you if you are here on the
east coast or if you are in the Midwest, where my family is, or in the
Southwest, where my father is, or any place in this country. What does
that mean to you as you are getting up this morning? Because

[[Page S724]]

we have seen--we don't have to hypothesize what this means with Russell
Vought leading the OMB, with Elon Musk running rampant throughout the
Federal Government, what this nomination means and why we need to
oppose it. Because we can see it--it is right there in front of our
eyes because they have already started to implement their plans, the
plans that are laid out in Project 2025.
I say this to my colleague from Oregon, I was just looking at the
latest news just to give us an idea of what this really means. Here is
a quote from a lawyer in the Washington Post. This is part of a
Washington Post story that posted this morning. This is not some
radical, progressive lawyer who said this. This is Ty Cobb, who served
in the first Trump administration. He says what is going on here today
with this vote nomination, especially with Elon Musk, he says:

It's a naked power grab consistent with what Trump's
advisers have persuaded him to do, which is to flood the zone
with as much unconstitutional activity as possible, with the
hope that they get away with some or all of it.

Now, this is Ty Cobb, who has served as White House lawyer during
Trump's first term.
I offer that up as sort of a preamble to my remarks because I think
it shows that even Republican lawyers can identify that what is
happening here with the Trump administration and with this nomination
of Russell Vought is a naked power grab, to seize power from the
representatives elected by the people of this country and Congress and
to concentrate it in the White House in the hands of Elon Musk and
Russell Vought in order for them just to run rampant over our
constitutional system.
As I said, you don't have to just believe me when you hear what I am
telling you because we can see them already start this process.
Last week, in the Trump administration, we could see that they hurt
real people in my State, in the State of Oregon, in the State of
Florida, by creating this unprecedented chaos in Federal Agencies and
programs, all based on the blueprint of Project 2025. And Russell
Vought, whose nomination the Senate is considering today, is the
architect of that blueprint.
I think you could see that his ideas are dangerous; they are
unconstitutional; and they are already causing real harm to people.
In just the 2 weeks since President Trump has been in office--I guess
it is 2\1/2\ weeks at this point--what he has done is he has attempted
to freeze Federal funding that was authorized and appropriated by
Congress. That is our job.
Whether this freeze right now--whether it is still frozen, whether it
has been enjoined or temporarily blocked by the courts, whether the
administration has turned on the funding spigots in some places and not
in others, as my colleague from Oregon has said, it has created massive
confusion.
I know in Minnesota, some people say the money is coming again, as it
should be, constitutionally. Others are saying it isn't. None of that
really matters in this moment, as we consider this nomination, because
I do believe, as Ty Cobb said, that the chaos is the point--creating
the chaos is the point. Hurting people right now, that is the impact of
that.
So what we are doing is we are seeing what Russell Vought's extreme
and dangerous ideas mean and how far they are willing to take this.
Think about this for a minute. In Minnesota, my home State, where a
Federal funding freeze is truly life or death, the administration's
list of programs that they have frozen or want to freeze covers most
basic needs for a lot of people: food, shelter, medicine, and safe
drinking water.
I have heard from thousands of Minnesotans who are terrified about
what this means. The Senate phone lines, the phone lines into my
office, over this last week--and I suspect that this has been the case
for many of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle--have been
overwhelmed by people calling in and basically saying: What is
happening here? How could this be happening? I am worried that I am not
going to get my Social Security check. I am worried that the
organization that I run to provide domestic shelter for women who are
the victims of domestic violence is going to have to shut down. I am
worried that the services that we provide to people who are resettling
in Minnesota--often, this is done by faith organizations in my home
State--I am worried that we are not going to be able to do those
things.
Our phone lines have been overwhelmed with stories like that.
I would have to say, colleagues, there is just a level of outrage and
just furiousness that I haven't seen for a long time because people can
see that this is having an impact.
People call my office who voted for Vice President Harris. People
call my office who voted for Donald Trump. But I am not seeing here a
distinction. What I am seeing is even people who voted for President
Trump are saying: This is not what I voted for. This is not the vision
that I had for my country. This is not the campaign that I voted for to
lower the cost of groceries--or, you know, even many of the things that
I completely disagree with with the President.

This is actually having an impact on real families and people and
hurting them. And where is this going to lead from here?
I think the scope of the Trump and Vought Project 2025 and the
funding freeze that it has inspired is so broad that I don't think
there is a single person in this country who wouldn't be impacted in
some way, either directly or indirectly, and I don't think it will be
good for anyone.
I also just detect, colleagues--from the calls that I am getting in,
it is easy to see--easy to see from all the calls coming into my office
that Americans are feeling a lot less safe and a lot less secure than
they did last Monday before this all unfolded, before this funding
freeze that was described and is now being implemented--was described
by Project 2025 and Russell Vought and now is being implemented, is
happening. People do not feel as safe today. And they know the reason
why is that this freeze has put our most fundamental and essential
services in limbo.
In Minnesota, cities have been notified that their Federal funds to
help pay law enforcement salaries are subject to the freeze. To give
you an idea of what impact this has, counterterrorism coordination
programs, programs to combat human and sex and drug trafficking, and
programs to fight child sex trafficking have all been covered by this--
it is really a funding cut, to be honest. It is like suddenly you had
the money, and now you don't have the money anymore to do these things.
That feels like a cut if you are looking at your organization and what
you are trying to accomplish.
So what does that mean if you are the victim of a violent crime? The
Federal program that helps you to recover from that, to get
restitution--those services have been frozen. If you are the survivor
of sexual violence or domestic violence, you don't have the same access
to a safe place to be. You are less safe because of Russell Vought and
Donald Trump and Elon Musk. This should be worrying to every single one
of us Americans, whether or not you are in that specific situation or
whether you just have some compassion and care for folks that are in
that terrible situation.
Vought and Trump's funding freeze has also endangered, as I said, the
survivors of domestic and sexual violence. Without these services,
which are supported by Federal tax dollars, survivors will have no
place to go. Domestic violence shelters truly save lives, and any delay
or freeze in Federal grant funding means that those services--provided,
for example, by Alexandra House or the Southern Valley Alliance in
Minnesota--will have huge impacts. The survivors who count on those
places to go--sometimes with their children--to be safe will be much,
much less safe.
Colleagues, I have heard from one domestic violence organization in
Minnesota which gets 70 percent of their funding from Federal grants.
Think about that organization. Even a short delay in reimbursements
will mean that they have to lay off their counselors and other folks
that work there and stop services. These are not organizations that
have millions of dollars in their bank account; they live hand to
mouth. They are providing services as they are able to get the funds to
do it.
If we allow Russell Vought and Donald Trump and Elon Musk to continue

[[Page S725]]

this, it is not just these organizations that suffer; it is the
individuals that count on them. I think--I know that many folks would
find themselves in life-threatening situations as a result.
I can see from what is happening in Minnesota that the freeze is also
creating serious strain on our healthcare system. Even if you don't use
a community health center yourself, the freeze of their funding could
make it harder for you to get access to timely care.
Throughout the country, there is an incredible network of community
health centers that provide primary care to moms and children. Many of
these facilities are providing not only physical healthcare but mental
health care, which I think we all know is lifesaving.
People count on this network of community health centers to get their
basic care. That might be you or it might be somebody who lives in your
community or it might be--you never may know somebody who goes there.
But here is why this affects you if you are waking up in Minneapolis or
New Mexico, where my dad is, or Oregon, where Senator Wyden is from, or
New Jersey, where Senator Booker is from. If folks don't have those
community health centers to go to, where are they going to go when they
get sick? The funding freeze is not going to freeze sickness. A funding
freeze is not going to freeze injury. It only freezes the places where
people who are experiencing those things can go to get help. So what
are they going to do instead? They are going to go to emergency rooms.
Right now in Minnesota, emergency rooms are packed full of people who
have the flu, who have RSV, who have norovirus.
Community health centers are a source of huge relief to emergency
rooms because it creates a place for people to go who need urgent care.
If they are not there, what is going to happen is that those
individuals are going to do the only thing they can do, which is to
flood emergency rooms.
So if you get your primary health insurance through Medicaid, for
example--just remember, colleagues, that is about 45 percent of all
moms who are delivering babies; it is maybe roughly 40 percent of all
children in this country who get their health insurance through
Medicaid. If you can't go to one of those community health centers,
then you are going to end up in the ER.
In Minnesota, there are 170,000 people who could lose, with these
funding freezes, their access to healthcare. That means 170,000 people
who are going to end up in emergency rooms, and that is going to affect
all of us. That is going to affect the health and safety of all of us.
It is going to put huge stress on hospitals and be, again, another
example of how Russell Vought and Donald Trump and Elon Musk are
actually, in their actions, right now, today, making all of us less
safe, less secure.
Last Tuesday, I heard from community health centers that were
preparing to furlough workers by the end of the day as these funding
freezes were sifting through the news and getting to them directly.
I think it is important to understand that, yes, the courts did issue
sort of a short-term reprieve or rescission to stop that, but those
organizations are still trying to decide in real time what they can do
and how they can move forward.
This morning, I was listening on the radio to organizations that said
they had to furlough people when those freezes came into place and even
when they were temporarily lifted. Now they are in the process of
trying to figure out how to bring those people back, and every minute
that goes by, that is wasted energy and effort and time.

I think about my Republican colleagues who say that they want to see
efficiency, that they want to see government run like a business. Yet
these kinds of just outrageous, unpredictable, chaotic funding freezes
and then unfrozen and back and forth are the epitome of inefficiency.
And who bears the price of that? Who bears the price of this Russell
Vought strategy to try to do this big power grab away from Congress and
not following the laws that Congress passed? The organizations that are
serving Minnesotans and Americans are paying the price, and ultimately
Americans are paying the price for that every single day. Every minute
that goes by in which the threat of rescinded or withheld funding is
still out there, there are real consequences for people.
Across the country, we are facing a very real health threat, public
health threat, when it comes to avian flu. This is another example of
how Russell Vought and Donald Trump and Elon Musk are, in real time,
hurting the health and safety of Minnesotans and Americans.
In Minnesota, farmers and producers understand the impacts of avian
flu better than anyone else. Minnesota is the largest Turkey producer
in the State. We also have large dairy herds, big food processing
facilities. It is very important to our economy, important to tens and
tens of thousands of jobs and billions of dollars of economic activity
in Minnesota.
Right now, Minnesota farmers and producers are grappling with the
avian influenza. Last year, the bird flu jumped from poultry to
livestock, and then it jumped from livestock to humans. So this is
something we have to pay a lot of attention to. It is something that
could be extremely concerning. This is something that the Federal
Government has to take seriously to prevent a real crisis--an economic
crisis and a public health crisis.
By the way, colleagues, if you are wondering why the price of eggs
has gone up so much in the last month or so, several months or so, this
is why. It is because over 100 million birds have been culled from
flocks all across the country because of avian influenza. Yet what has
Russell Vought done? What would Russell Vought do? What has Donald
Trump done? What is Elon Musk doing to address this problem? Well, the
programs that support my State's and your States' public health
infrastructure, those programs were included in this freeze.
On top of that, the communications blackout that also happened in the
very early days of the Trump administration as part of this Russell
Vought-Project 2025 agenda--there was a communications blackout from
all Federal health Agencies, which also applies, by the way, to their
communications with Congress. All of the work that was happening--
nonpartisan work, nonpolitical work, all of that work that was
happening--communications about this really concerning public health
threat of avian influenza, that was all stopped.
Now what I am hearing reports of from my friends and colleagues back
home in Minnesota is that they are seeing this public health data,
which is very important to fighting the avian flu--some of that data
has been removed from government websites. It is like they are trying
to erase it. Who knows why this is. Maybe there was some mention of the
word ``inclusion'' in what was in those public health reports, and so
they got scrubbed. Who knows. Who knows why that is. But that is
another example, colleagues, of how this sort of strategy of Russell
Vought and Project 2025 and Donald Trump is hurting our health,
because, I can tell you, we would all be better off if we had access to
that public health data so that we could understand what was going on
and what is happening.
We are supposed to be doing surveillance on the avian flu so that we
know where it is going, what other flocks it might be infecting,
whether we are seeing additional jumps to humans, what humans are
infected. Yet Russell Vought's plans are putting all of us at risk. He
is making all of us less safe in this circumstance.
I know my colleague from New Jersey is going to be ready to speak in
just a few minutes, and so I will just touch on maybe one or two other
examples of what is happening in Minnesota as a result of the Project
2025 plan, Donald Trump's plans, and why opposing Russell Vought's
nomination is so important.
Minnesota is in the far north part of this country, as many of you
know. It can get cold in Minnesota, and yesterday it got down to minus
12 degrees in International Falls. We are in the dead of winter in
Minnesota.
There is a great effort that we have long had--often has had
bipartisan support--which helps keep the heat on for low-income
families when it gets really cold outside. The idea, which is so
obvious to me, is that if it is in the wintertime and you are having
trouble paying your heating bill, you ought to be able

[[Page S726]]

to get a bridge, working with your utility, so that the heat doesn't
get turned off, so that your kids aren't cold in the dead of winter, so
that you can stay in your home rather than moving to a shelter, so that
you are able to have a safe place to call home.
This program is called LIHEAP. I won't tell you what the acronyms are
because I never remember the acronyms myself. But it is a very
important way to make sure that people can stay in their homes and can
stay warm when it gets really cold outside in places like International
Falls in Minnesota. Yet this program, LIHEAP, was subject to the
funding freeze that was put into place a couple of weeks ago by Donald
Trump, part of Russell Vought's Project 2025 plan.
I will close with this. This funding freeze also has put Minnesotans
at risk of going hungry. Food is already expensive. I was talking about
the price of eggs and the avian flu and the dangers to our public
safety with the funding freeze getting at putting out public health
information. But what about bringing down the price of groceries,
which, I think, if you voted for Donald Trump, that might have been
what was in your mind as you decided you were going to vote for him.
Well, in this country today, more than 47 million people experience
hunger. They don't always know where their next meal is going to come
from. They are not sure how they are going to be able to feed their
children dinner as well as breakfast. One in five children live in
families where that is their circumstance.
And some of the most, you know--the people that we care about the
most, seniors, children, folks that are working hard and working in
low-income--have low-wage jobs, so they depend on Federal nutrition
assistance to meet their basic needs. And, of course, these programs
don't just provide food, they are a real lifeline for families as they
are working to get ahead, to work their way up, to get to where they
want to be.
A great example of this is Meals on Wheels, which is about making
sure that seniors have a warm meal, but it also is about more than
that. It is about social connection and dealing with issues of
loneliness and isolation, which so sadly afflicts so many of our elders
in our country.
And this is something that works really well; it has been in place
for a long time. It is not a red issue or a blue issue; it is not a
rural issue or an urban issue. It is something that makes a huge, huge
difference.
And so what is happening, Colleagues, is that every community in this
country has members who need help, have people who need help feeding
their families, and Russell Vought is working to take that help away.
So I started out by talking about how people in this country are
waking up in the morning and wondering why they should care about who
runs the Office of Management and Budget, the somewhat innocuous-
sounding Agency which oversees Federal Agency performance and
administers the Federal budget.
And I hope that in these comments, I have laid out just a few of the
ways that this nomination of Russell Vought could have a clear impact
on your life, on your safety, on your security, because his extreme
agenda is anathema to how we should be running this country, and it is
anathema to the basic belief that this country is founded on, the basic
structure that we have, which is that Congress, the elected
representatives of the people of this country, make decisions about how
we are going to spend your precious tax dollars. And then it is the job
of the office of OMB to make sure that those intentions are followed
through in the Federal Government.
And what Russell Vought wants to do is to turn that on its head. He
says: I don't care what Congress said. I don't care what your
representatives voted for in Congress. I am going to do it my way.
And that is the most blatant power grab counter to your interests
that I have ever seen.
And this is why, Colleagues, it is so important that we oppose the
nomination of Russell Vought.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Jersey.
Mr. BOOKER. I am grateful not only that you recognized me, but with
the respect which you said the State of New Jersey. I know that you
love my State. Many of my State residents are moving to Florida, so you
are a very Jerseyified State yourself, so thank you very much for
recognizing me.
I want to say to my incredible colleague Tina Smith, the incredible
stance that you just made, the facts you laid plain, the reality she
has exposed, it is so important.
The exercise going on this floor for the last 24 hours has been
extraordinary and unusual. And one of the reasons why leader after
leader came to the Senate floor was to show that this is not usual
times. These are not usual times.
It is extraordinary to me that all through the night at the 2:00
hour, the 3 a.m. hour, the 4 a.m. hour, the 5 a.m. hour, Senator after
Senator came down here to speak up, to talk about the unusual things
that are going on in America and, in truth, the things that we believe
unequivocally are violative of not just our democratic norms, but
violative of the separation of powers.
Now, much of this is taken up in the courts already. You have State
attorneys general suing right now because powers that were given to
Congress are being taken by the Executive.
We know in the United States of America that we do not have a king.
We are not an authoritarian government. And the debates of our Founding
Fathers were central to this point that we should have three branches
of government, coequal branches, with clearly laid out--in article I,
article II, article III, clearly laid out rules and responsibilities,
obligations under the Constitution.
Now, this whole process, one could say, we are doing one of our
article I obligations to advise and consent on the President over his
nominations to key positions like OMB. But this is so much more than
that.
This is not just us advising and giving consent; it is standing up
for what was the bipartisan norms of our Nation. In fact, it was the
democratic norms of our Nation from the very beginning that Congress
has certain roles. And I often say, we are the article I branch of
government. The article II branch of government has their roles.
But our role, perhaps very importantly, is the power of the purse.
Spending decisions, spending priorities, spending allocations are made
in this body. And the people have a say in that through our elections.
Every 2 years, a third of this body is up. Every 2 years, all of the
House of Representatives are up, and the people elect people to carry
out the Constitution. We swear an oath--I have done it a number of
times now--to protect and defend the Constitution.
And so why are we doing this unusual thing of talking all through the
night about a nominee for something that many Americans don't know much
about--the Office of Management and Budget?
That is because what has been going on in the first three weeks of
the Trump administration is a reckless violation of our separation of
powers.
This body has differences, but there is one thing I know my
colleagues and I agree on is that the powers assigned to Congress by
the Constitution are sacrosanct, and we cannot allow a President to
step over their powers and begin to do things that are more akin to
dictatorships or authoritarian governments.
We have seen that erosion of democracy from Europe to Africa, where
executives elected begin to try to take powers away from the other
branches of government.
Let me give you a specific example. Agencies within the Federal
Government are set up by Congress, funded by Congress, given directives
and a mission by Congress, and then Congress provides oversight for
those Agencies and how the Executive is conducting those congressional
mandates.
What we saw over the last week or so was a direct assault on a
bipartisan congressional intent: USAID, the United States Agency for
International Development.
The President of the United States decided that he didn't want that
Agency to exist. Without any thought, without any strategy, without any
understanding of the Agency's vital functions, the President of the
United

[[Page S727]]

States took an Agency funded in a bipartisan manner where colleagues of
mine--I serve on the Foreign Relations Committee--know so much of the
work done on both sides of the aisle to support the critical mission of
USAID. They attacked it and tried to dismantle and stop it.
Suddenly, the workers we have around the globe--so everything
freezes. They were told to stop what they were doing. They were denied
access to their e-mails, to critical files. Many of them were put into
volatile situations because a lot of our great USAID government
officials work in unstable environments; and, suddenly, their cell
phones are not working, and they can't access their e-mail.
Resources that we allocated in a bipartisan way that were being spent
for critical missions of the United States were so abruptly frozen that
food aid, perishables, were left sitting on docks, medicines were
stopped in their tracks--many of them that are perishable as well.
You want to talk about government waste? Food that could keep people
alive, medicines that can keep people alive were left, basically, to
spoil.
And this all ripples. Most people don't know this. There are 50,000
private sector jobs here in the United States, people who contract with
the government, that are connected to this Agency USAID, created by
Congress in a bipartisan fashion, year after year funded in a
bipartisan agreement, bicameral. The President of the United States--by
fiat, the President of the United States decides we are going to kill
this Agency, stop it in its tracks. That is a violation of the
separation of powers. Plain and simple.
Congress created the Agency. If the President wants to get rid of it,
he should come to Congress. This Presidential action didn't show Donald
Trump's strength; it showed his weakness, because a strong President
makes his case to the American people, makes his case to Congress, lays
out a vision, lays out a strategy, comes before Congress and proposes
the legislation to do what they are saying. But, no, not this
President.
Instead of following our constitutional dictates, instead of doing
what a strong leader would have done, instead of doing what FDR did
when he did sweeping things in the government, he came to Congress to
fight to pass the laws to support his agenda.
LBJ, Ronald Reagan, strong Presidents who have a vision for this
country that might be a little revolutionary, that might create great
changes--they respect our Constitution. And they come to Congress with
their vision to pass the laws necessary to support that vision.
I have watched it over my lifetime. I haven't always agreed with what
the Presidents did, from Bush to Reagan, didn't agree with all their
decisions, but they showed strength. They came to Congress and got
Congress to pass laws to execute their bold vision.
I think a lot of bad decisions were made that way, but it went
through Congress. Congress had a vote on the Iraq War. Congress had a
vote on the authorization to use military force. Congress had a vote on
welfare reform. Congress voted on Bill Clinton's vision for public
safety to put 100,000 police officers on the street. Congress voted for
the war on drugs. These are things I might not have always agreed with,
but strong Presidents come before Congress, in alignment with the
Constitution, with a respect for the separation of powers, abiding by
the law, strong Presidents stand in the well of the House of
Representatives and give a vision for this country.
As it says in my faith: Without vision, the people will perish. God
bless the visionary Presidents we have had. John F. Kennedy pointing to
the skies and saying, ``We will go to the moon.''
And then what did he do? He came to Congress with a vision to
increase funding for science, math, for STEM education. What did he do?
He came to Congress with a vision for making NASA something that would
be the envy of the world. What did he do? He inspired a nation with a
vision that was so compelling Democrats and Republicans joined together
and followed him. What does this President do? What does Donald Trump--
who is no Reagan, who is no JFK--what does he do? In the dark of night,
he sends in unelected individuals to access computer systems in a way
that is so violative of the privacy of Americans and without
congressional approval, without a legal basis. They go in and upend
Agency after Agency after Agency. And for USAID, they shut it down.

That is not a visionary Presidency. That is reckless, undercover
vandalism, illegal action, and the hurting of Americans.
And so why--why--has Senator after Senator come down here to speak
up? Why? Because to treat this as normal would be to normalize these
constitutional violations. And to allow someone like Vought, who has
been saying over and over again: I don't respect the Constitution. I
don't respect the courts. I don't respect the rule of law. We are going
to take over.
If you don't believe me, listen to what Vought says in his own words.
He believes that Congress should do what it wants to do. We knew that
Vought published this memo and basically said: I have no regard for the
Federal law or for Congress's power of the purse.
In 2018, Vought was instrumental in the Trump administration's
attempt--they weren't successful; attempt--to use the Impoundment
Control Act to withhold appropriated funds beyond their period of
availability. This was a backdoor way to try to go around the law. This
idea of impoundment is a theory that a President--despite Congress in a
bipartisan, bicameral way passing a funding bill--this is the idea that
the President of the United States, despite all of that, can just say:
Nah, forget Congress. Forget the will of the people. Forget the
people's representatives. Forget the U.S. Senate. I decide what we
spend as a country.
And so he tried this attempt, but the attempt was determined by our
processes to be illegal.
The GAO, the Government Accountability Office, said: You can't do
that.
But Vought kept pushing to employ the same strategy the following
year, to try to freeze foreign aid--this is 2018; the past is prologue,
folks--and in doing so, he wanted to do it again, ignoring the 2018 GAO
legal decision.
And in response to a 2020 prehearing question--this is how flagrantly
defiant Vought is--in a response to a 2020 prehearing question, Vought
wrote this: I will not abide by the 2018 decision, claiming it was
wrongly decided.
Think about this. He is in the administrative branch and deciding
that a legal decision was wrongly decided. So perhaps Vought not only
wants to do the job of Congress, but now he wants to do the job of the
article III branch of government and the courts as well.
What does that sound like? Does that sound like a patriot to our
democratic traditions? No.
Does that sound like somebody who is willing to follow the rule of
law? No.
Does that sound like somebody who is in the spirit of 1776--the
spirit of compromise, the spirit of patriotism, the spirit of adherence
to the democratic ideals of the United States of America? No.
It sounds like someone that believes that they have the power to act
in an authoritarian manner and declare themselves the executive, the
legislature, and the courts.
It is a deliberate misreading. And the GAO, in its earlier decision,
previously signaled that the consequence of an unenacted rescission
proposal should be the full prudent obligation of budget authority. In
other words, I am king.
In his response following his nomination hearing, on GAO's legal
decision, writing in a response to our Homeland Security Committee, he
said: I do not agree with the GAO's report. OMB did not violate the
IPA, as I set forth in my January 19, 2020, letter to John Yarmuth,
chairman of the House Committee on the Budget. In other words, he is
still standing strong during his confirmation hearing that he is doing
the right thing. He stands by his defiance. He stands by this violation
of the separation of powers.
And here is what a former employee who worked at USDA wrote about how
dangerous this position is: For 30 years, across both Republican and
Democratic administrations--decades of constitutional norms, decades of
bipartisan commitment. This is what this employee said: I argue Russ
Vought is the most dangerous person in the Trump administration, even
over Trump, given his ideological bent and belief. He believes that the
President does not spend congressional appropriations.

[[Page S728]]

This, this USDA official said, defines a dictator.
We can't normalize this. And this is what I know, being here for over
a decade now. If this was being done by the Barack Obama
administration, there would be hair on fire on the other side of the
aisle. Every Member, every Republican, would look like me as a bald
man; they would have no more hair.
If Barack Obama decided to ignore the dictates of Congress, to say:
Your funding decisions have no hold on my actions. I am going to ignore
congressional mandate. I am going to ignore congressional rules--my
Republican colleagues would be apoplectic.
If he decided with foreign policy that, hey, there is this thing
called the Hyde amendment; I am going to ignore it--if Barack Obama did
that, not one of them would normalize it or excuse it or look the other
way.
It is that complicity that bothers me. We are at a constitutional
crossroads here. We do have someone in power now who is showing
weakness.
It is a weakness that other authoritarians in democratic nations have
tried to do: I am not going to work through the system as designed by
that nation's founders. I am not going to work in adherence to the
spirit of the Constitution. I am going to do as much as I possibly can
to take power for myself, to violate norms, to violate the
Constitution, to indeed violate the law, and then challenge you to stop
me.

And the question is: Who will speak up? Silence is complicity.
And there might be some people who are just sitting and saying: Oh,
this is politics as usual. Oh, this is right-left fighting. Oh, this is
not really that important. What does this have to do with me? Well, let
me lay it plain, giving you one example of what has happened.
Stopping USAID's work without any plan or strategy has now endangered
every American because there are things we get to go to bed at night
and not have to think about because we have a government full of
officials, scientists, hard-working people who, every day, make it
their life mission to focus on things so that we, the people, do not
have to think about them.
Think about that for a second. We know it in our own towns and
communities. We have firefighters. We have police officers that stand
on the frontline. They stand in the breech to protect us, to get
dangerous things and conditions and people off the streets so that we
are safe and we don't have to think about it every night.
(Mr. MARSHALL assumed the Chair.)
Well, that goes for USAID too. They are a national security
organization. How do I know that? I am a spiritualist. I really am. I
believe there are universal spiritual principles. One of them was
spoken by this great American, one of the few people who is not a
President of the United States whose statue sits under the dome. He was
a spiritualist. He was, in fact, a person of faith. He was a minister.
And he spoke to us about a scientific truth using spiritual language.
It was in this great body of work called ``Letters from a Birmingham
Jail.'' And if he only knew that his words would resound in history,
these spiritual words would speak to a scientific truth.
He said this: ``We are all caught in an inescapable network of
mutuality''--that we are tied in a common garment of destiny, that
``injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.''
Powerful words, right? But what do they have to do with science,
Cory? What do they have to do with our present political crisis, our
present constitutional crisis? What do they have to do with that?
Well, here is what they have to do with that. You see, in the wisdom
of this body, as I have worked in a bipartisan way on the Foreign
Relations Committee, we fund the USAID to do things to protect us. But
we are not doing them at home. USAID officials are around the globe.
And one of the reasons why we, in the wisdom of Congress that this
President is trying to violate--one of the things that we know, because
we have got engineers in this place, we have got doctors in this place,
we have got dedicated public servants in this place, we have got a few
big, bald nerds like me in this place--what we know is that the USAID
does work that is vital to keep Americans who are sleeping at night
safe.
Let me be specific. Right now in Uganda, there is an Ebola outbreak
in the capital. Ebola is a vicious disease that is highly infectious. I
remember this because back under the Presidency of Barack Obama, it was
dominating the headlines. I saw one of the most courageous things done,
that Chris Coons here flew to Africa to support the efforts that the
United States of America through USAID was doing to stop Ebola in its
tracks in Africa so it didn't visit us here.
But because of the global interconnected transportation systems, it
was getting closer and closer to threatening American lives.
This was a crisis that dominated the headlines during the Obama
administration. And who was then there to fight the spread of Ebola, to
arrest it in that African nation? Who was it? USAID, American
people. Who was in Uganda right now up until the Trump administration
stopped their work? Who was there? Americans working for USAID. In the
midst of a nasty, horrific infection, they were like our first
responders, they were like our soldiers because they understand that
spiritual truth that King spoke: ``Injustice anywhere is a threat to
justice everywhere.'' An infectious disease anywhere is a threat to
public health everywhere.

What was the administration's plans to deal with global infectious
outbreaks? Did they come to Congress and put forth a vision? No. What
was the administration's strategy to stop the growing threat of global
pandemics and global threats? Did they share that plan with Congress?
No. What was this administration going to do? Well, they didn't seem to
care. There wasn't one hearing about this. There wasn't one
conversation. There wasn't a consultation with Congress where leaders
from the HELP Committee or leaders from the Foreign Relations Committee
were invited to the White House to discuss their strategy in making
sure that the vital functions of this Agency are preserved.
They were pursuing a radical, ideological agenda, ignoring the truth
of science and the power of the spiritual truth that America's
interests and national security demand Americans--be they soldiers or
scientists--sometimes standing away from our country in Africa, in
Asia, in Europe, protecting us from infectious diseases that are so
nightmarish that--most Americans would be happy to continue to send
taxpayer dollars to stop Ebola in Africa so that someone doesn't get on
a plane not knowing they are infected and come to visit our country and
begin an outbreak of disastrous proportions.
But here is something that USAID has been working on that is
terrifying to me--truly is, and I have been talking about it for a long
time in Congress--we are beginning to see bugs around this planet that
are resistant to antibiotics. I talked about this in my work because I
think we are these overusers of antibiotics.
Almost 50 percent of our antibiotics will be used prophylactically--
not because we are treating diseases but because of the way we raise
animals in America. We have to inject them over and over again to try
to stop them from getting sick and end up with these horrible things
where farmers have to cull their whole herd of pigs or chickens because
of some kind of outbreak.
This threat of antibiotic-resistant diseases--well, thousands of
American die of them all the time.
So here is a particularly infectious, nasty disease. It is called
tuberculosis. Right now--I shouldn't say that because Trump has stopped
it, but there were some of the best scientists in the world that
happened to be ours, Americans, working for USAID on the frontlines of
treatment-resistant tuberculosis, not just Ebola, in Uganda. USAID
workers were trying to figure out what kind of treatments and regimes
could be put into place to stop the spread of resistant tuberculosis
because of the virulently viral nature of that awful disease.
How irresponsible for a President whose No. 1 responsibility is to
protect Americans to tear down the Agency, stop the Agency workers--cut
off their cell phones, cut off their emails, cut off their access to
files, leave them not even knowing how they would get

[[Page S729]]

home--on the frontlines of an infectious disease that they are trying
to stop so it does not show up in America.
This is not just a violation of our Constitution. This is not just a
violation of separation of powers. This is not just a violation of the
law. This is a violation of common sense. This is a violation of
pragmatism. This is a violation of a sacred oath to protect the
American people.
I heard, folks--you did as well--the promises that were being made to
America in the campaign of this President: I will keep you safe. I will
drive down your costs.
Well, in 3 weeks in office, we are less safe to infectious diseases
than we were under the past two Presidents. Biden and Trump 1 didn't
tear down USAID infectious disease work. Obama, Republicans and
Democrats--I have worked with many of my colleagues across the aisle on
making sure that we are funding the important global work to fight
infectious diseases. Heck, I passed bipartisan legislation to stop wet
markets, which is one of the places that these zoonotic diseases can
lead to human beings.

I saw momentum after COVID that we should be working together to stop
infectious diseases that might start in China, in Africa, in Europe
from coming to America. There seemed to be a bipartisan commitment to
that idea in Congress, and it is one of the reasons why, with past
Presidents, we have funded USAID to do this vital work with some of the
best scientists on the globe who are willing to put their lives at
risk, to step into an Ebola outbreak, a tuberculosis outbreak, an avian
flu outbreak, and say ``I will do what I can to protect my country,''
like firefighters do and soldiers do and police officers do.
They are great Americans, but what happened to them? What happened to
these great Americans risking their lives to stop infectious diseases?
The President of the United States, in an act of cowardice, did not
come to Congress to give a vision for how we would protect our Nation
from infectious diseases, how we would do the vital work of USAID--no.
In the cover of night, countermanding our laws, violating the
Constitution, and an affront to the wisdom on both sides of the aisle,
he just went ahead and did it. He just went ahead and did it.
The world is a complex and dangerous place. As much as government
workers are being maligned and attacked and vilified and beat upon,
most Americans take for granted what these patriotic Americans do every
day. You shop in your supermarket and don't think about ``Does this
food have some disease or worm in it?'' because these government
workers at USAID are inspecting that food and are making it safe.
A lot of government workers got flashed on the TV with our first
major aviation accident in 16 years. Well, I get on planes a lot, and I
have gone and talked to air traffic controllers. I fought for them and
their contracts because I know that during those 16 years, no accident
happened. You had incredible government workers working very hard,
pouring their hearts out in one of the most stressful jobs, to keep us
safe. So when I jump on a plane, I don't think about the air traffic
around me. I know that I am on an aviation system that is safer than me
getting in my car because of government workers.
We, in a bipartisan way--and this is what I am saying--there is so
much goodness on both sides of the aisle. We have government workers
that are doing suicide prevention work for our veterans, when we were
seeing veteran after veteran die day after day after day. There are
government workers, some of them I met, that make it their mission to
be there for veterans that come home with invisible wounds.
I am going to make a statement that may sound braggadocios or
hyperbolic, but it is actually true. In this body, there are former
Governors, there are former county executives, and there are former
mayors. None of them, when they were an executive, cut government more
than I did.
I cut the size of Newark, New Jersey's government by 25 percent.
Think about that--cutting a governmental body by a quarter. I did it.
It was painful, it was hard, and it was difficult. It was during the
great recession, and I had no choice.
But I had a city council. There were rules in the way I did it. There
were civil service protections which I abided by.
Oh, but not this President.
We actually used what people called buyouts. We offered packages to
people. But all of this we did in accordance to the laws of our State
and my city in conjunction with our legislative body. We presented a
vision for Newark, put a plan forward that, hey, these departments may
be losing personnel, but we are going to make them more efficient.
To this day, I remember some of the data. We had like half the
inspectors but did almost twice as many inspections because we had a
thoughtful plan that we executed in consultation and coordination with
our legislative branch.
I am the first person to tell you, as the No. 1 government-cutter in
this place, that there are a lot of ways to cut waste. Just the
procurement process alone in the Department of Defense is still being
done in ways that are antiquated, that are being corrupted by people
that leave the Pentagon and go work for the big contracting agents--a
circle that is corrupting. There are ways to create more transparency
on that. There are ways to bring new technology on that. There are so
many ways to improve that system.
How do I know this? Because the first person to tell me this out at
his ranch in Arizona was the former Secretary of the Navy, in a late-
night conversation where I just sat there and learned at the foot of
some wise men, was John McCain. He went on and on and on about the
corruption in our U.S. military that is undermining our fighting
forces. He said we could be spending less and have higher capabilities
if we only started to root out the wasteful spending and the corruption
in that institution.
We should be doing this in a bipartisan way. There are so many things
that many of us see that don't make sense. And there is a process we
could follow to do it.
A President that is a strong President would come to Washington,
would come to Congress, would give a bold address like Kennedy did when
he said we were going to go to the Moon; like LBJ did when he said we
are going to be a great society; like Ronald Reagan did when he said it
was going to be morning in America again. This is my vision. This is my
plan. I am bringing it to Congress, and we are going to get it done.
But, no, this President didn't come here to push our government to a
higher level, to inspire and engage, to be thoughtful about how we were
going to be safer, stronger, and more prosperous--no. He brought in an
unelected billionaire that everybody in this body knows is so
conflicted, a guy who has so many government contracts, a guy whose net
worth has been deeply affected by this government. He brought him in,
and he and his agents have gone into systems that, to me, violate
privacy.
They have no transparency of what they are doing until we wake up in
the middle of the night or wake up the next day and find out that the
people on the frontlines fighting against infectious diseases that
threaten the United States--they are gone, cut off.
We just saw this last week when Donald Trump froze funding to
everything--from veterans to first responders. He froze funding for
daycare that had everybody in the station--I had calls from mayors who
were Republicans, Democrats, Independents who couldn't access certain
key portals; that had acted in contracting, relying upon a government
stream of money; that had made plans and hiring decisions that suddenly
were cut off in a lurch.
The powerful thing about that is the outrage across America took this
President, who was violating the law, violating bipartisan spending
decisions, violating the separation of powers--the fact that Americans
from all over this country spoke up and spoke out stopped him in his
tracks because that is how you deal with injustice. You don't normalize
it. You call it out. And God bless America. This man who thought he was
going to bully and steamroll and cut critical streams of funding all
across this country was stopped in his tracks.
Now, he said: Oh, I am just pulling back temporarily because I am
going to come back at this.

[[Page S730]]

But the sigh of relief.
I have met with prosecutors this week. I have met with police
officers this week. I have met with people who voted for him, voted
against him, and didn't vote in my State, and all of them said that
that was an outrageous move. Thank God we stopped him. Well, how did we
stop him? By speaking up, by not normalizing this, by not thinking this
is just politics as usual.
So that is what this all-night speak-out has been about. It is about
raising voices. It is about not being silent. It is about the gifts of
this democracy: the right to protest, the right to petition your
government, the freedom of speech. You see, we believe in this
democracy--that the power of the people is greater than the people in
power. We believe in this democracy in that every voice matters.
Donald Trump is creating chaos, confusion. People like Vought have
said on the record they don't care about constitutional norms, that
they don't care about legal proceedings and the outcomes because that
is wrongly decided. ``I have decided that that is not binding on me.''
Vought doesn't believe that we make spending decisions, that it is the
President of the United States--despite the budget that was negotiated
and passed by two Chambers in a bipartisan way--that the President can
then decide ``I don't like this. Congress decided a spending priority.
I don't care. I am not spending that money.'' That is Vought.
So some people say: Well, they have the votes. Cory, can't you count?
Well, I know I am here because I stand on the shoulders of my
ancestors, like all of us do. We are all the beneficiaries of the
struggles and the sacrifices that came before us. We are all the
beneficiaries of moments in American history where democracy was in the
balance, and the majority of our people chose the right way.
We are all here because in the Depression, when a general of the
United States was calling for a military takeover, people stood up and
spoke out.
We are all here because, during World War II but before America
joined and there was a Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden full to the
rafters, more Americans here said that we were going to resist fascist
impulses.
We are all here because, on the left, there was a Senator named Huey
Long, who said: Oh, the people should take over the Capitol. They are
going to storm the Capitol, and I am going to be with the people.
Well, the people weren't listening to that extremist at the time.
We are all here because, moment after moment in American history,
when democracy was at a crossroads, when our Constitution was at a
crossroads, people of good faith stood up.
I remember one of the earliest women Senators that stood up against
McCarthyism right here on the floor, criticizing someone of her own
party--a profile in courage. I was taught a lot about that courage. In
a chapter many people may not remember, there is a little panel to it
right there. If you are in the Galleries and walk out, there is a panel
to this wonderful moment in American history when we were at a
crossroads.
It was the election of 1876 between Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel
Tilden. It was hotly contested. You see, in that, one person--Tilden--
won the popular vote, but Hayes seemed to have won the electoral
college. Now, the Democrat, Tilden--there was a lot of controversy
because this was post-Reconstruction--excuse me--post-Civil War, and
the South had lots of African Americans participating, and this left a
bit of a constitutional crisis and what became the Compromise of 1877.
Hayes was declared the winner, but the compromise that was made was
that the Republican, Hayes, would win and be the President as he was in
exchange for what the Democrats wanted, which was to pull Federal
troops out of the South who were protecting African Americans. An
outcome of an election not just upended Reconstruction and upended the
progress that was being made, but it upended something that was
incredible, which was, I am the fourth Black person ever elected to the
U.S. Senate, but during the Reconstruction era, the first one
appointed--there were two.
Black folks, from the end of the Civil War until about 1901, when the
last African American, Congressman White, left this place because of
the fall of Reconstruction--because as soon as Federal troops were
pulled out, reigns of terror began in the South. All kinds of laws were
being passed to stop Blacks from voting because, in America, voting is
power. Black elected officials were being beaten. Black judges were
being pulled out in the streets--whipped. The Klan rose. Lynching in
America--hundreds and hundreds of African Americans were being lynched
with regularity who were standing up for their power. There were
massacres going on to cut down Black political power.
Here we had had an election, and the results in terms of our
constitutional norms--the power to vote, the idea that we secure the
rule of law and protect citizens--all of that was being upended in
flames and terror and violence and lynching in the South that took an
early wave of Black participation in Congress. And the last one,
Congressman White, in 1901, gave a phoenix speech. He knew it would be
the last time. He predicted that Blacks would disappear from Congress
but that, one day, they would rise like a phoenix.
Now, interestingly, in his State, a Black person didn't come from
North Carolina's congressional delegation. That was 1901. Not until
1992 was another African American elected from North Carolina.
His prediction was right: Blacks would disappear because of the
terror in the South, but because of the power of the civil rights
movement, Blacks and Whites and Asians and Latinos--it was a rainbow
coalition of people--would not be silent amongst tyranny and amongst
violence and oppression. American citizens from all backgrounds, all
religions, all races, bound together and were not silent. They spoke
up.
One of my great heroes in this time--I have seen her spirit today. I
had seen her spirit yesterday at a rally. I had seen her spirit across
this country of people who know they can't necessarily stop, right now,
what is going on but are saying: I am going to speak up anyway. This
person was named Ida B. Wells.
Now, Ida B. Wells was a journalist in the South, and she was
documenting the lynching of African Americans, documenting the
injustices being done, documenting how the abuses of political power
and electoral power were being used in a fascist way to stop the people
from being heard. And the lynchings--the gruesome lynchings, which she
was documenting and putting out there as her pamphlets were becoming
nationally known, so upset people that her offices were attacked and
ransacked. She had to flee for her life because Ida B. Wells was not
being silent. She was telling the truth. She was letting folks know
what was happening.
I think about her courage, to know that what you are doing and what
you are saying against an authoritarian-style leadership can endanger
your life, and yet you still tell the truth; how you are getting
threats that you, too, will be lynched if you don't stop, but you keep
telling the truth--the ugly truth. You put the stories out there again
and again and again. Ida B. Wells could not be stopped.
There were all of these common lies that were being said about the
lynchings: Oh, these were African Americans who did horrible things.
These were African Americans who were guilty of crimes. These were
African Americans who raped. They should have been lynched. They should
have been killed.
Ida B. Wells would write detailed stories about the injustices that
were even being upheld in courts of law, but she told the truth that so
shocked the consciousness of our country that she, in many ways--may
have been a journalist, but she was a farmer--every day relentlessly
sowing seeds of truth that would one day reap a harvest of
consciousness in our country, where good folks--Black folks and White
folks and people of all backgrounds--would finally say: Enough is
enough.
Congress here tried to pass antilynching bills way back around the
time that Ida B. Wells was trying to show this horrific crime, and this
body failed over 100 times over the course of a century--failed to make
lynching a violation of Federal law. I am really proud that I got to
lead the legislation in a bipartisan manner to finally correct this
injustice; to finally bring full

[[Page S731]]

circle some of the work that Ida B. Wells--this truth-teller--was
doing.
I bring up Ida B. Wells today because it is my concluding message--
this defiant refusal in the face of injustice, this strength of
character in the face of powerful people--Governors of States, a
President of the United States, and others--making decisions on the
Federal level that wreaked utter havoc for millions of Americans when
you didn't have the numbers, when you didn't have the votes, but what
you had was the truth: to not let things happen, not just to be a
bystander but to be an upsetter. This was what Ida B. Wells did.
We study American history with an obligation to let it be not just
our past, but we study American history to let it be our calling in the
present so that we can try, as humble as we are, to live up to those
who came before us; that but for them, our entire way of being would
have collapsed.
Ida B. Wells said this:

The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon
them.

Let me repeat. Ida B. Wells--this documenter of savage injustices,
this truthteller about lynchings in America, this sower of seeds of
truth that, generations later, even in this body, we honor her by
passing anti-lynching legislation after a century of trying--Ida B.
Wells said the first thing we must do ``to right wrongs is to turn the
light of truth upon them.''
For all those people in America right now, whether you are a worker
in Uganda who can't even access your emails or you are an American who
wants to stop Ebola; whether you are a worker here in the United States
who has spent your entire professional life working to protect
Americans from threats to our food or our air quality; whether you are
someone who is just seeing what is going on in America right now, and
you are afraid; whether you are someone who is worried that Vought will
come in and upend educational funding that your disabled child relies
upon every day; whether you are an American who is struggling right now
and had hoped for promises that your cost of living would get better
but are now seeing that, indeed, whether it is a tax on streams of
revenue for middle-class families or the police in my community; or
whether it is threats of tariffs with our neighbors that directly
affected your small business that is barely staying afloat--whatever
the challenge is, whatever the fear is, what I want to tell you right
now is don't normalize a President who is violating the separation of
powers. Don't normalize a President who is violating civil service
laws. Don't normalize a President who is ignoring the dictates of
Congress in establishing Agencies.
This is the time to summon the spirit of Ida B. Wells and ``to turn
the light of truth upon what is going on'' because you may be
witnessing defeats, but the democracy is not defeated. You may say what
is going on is wrong, but that does not stop the power of right.
As the great poet said:

You may write me down in history with your bitter, twisted
lies. You may trod me in the very dirt, but still like dust
I'll rise.

This mighty Nation stands on the shoulders of truthtellers, of
defiant, dedicated patriots of grit and gumption. It is we the people.
No matter if you are a billionaire or a President, if you are a
teacher, if you are a cop, if you are a plumber, this Nation says that
our voices matter.
In the words of that Negro spiritual, as we have tried to do here all
through the night, I hope everyone in America understands that this is
the time for us to ``lift every voice.''
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Mullin). The Senator from Colorado.
Mr. HICKENLOOPER. Mr. President, I would like, first, to recognize
the great Senator from New Jersey, Senator Cory Booker. It is never
easy or fair to speak after him.
But I take the floor today to urge my colleagues to vote no on
President Trump's nominee for the Office of Management and Budget,
Russell Vought.
Some remember Mr. Vought from when he served as the head of the same
Agency during President Trump's first term. He is one of the very few
repeat appointments--clearly, a reflection of his loyalty.
You may also know him for his leadership, his authoring of Project
2025--that far-right agenda that the President, during the campaign,
swore up and down he had no idea about.
I would leave it at that, although, I think he understood many
discussions, perhaps, outlined in the framework.
Project 2025 would gut our longstanding and globally admired
framework of checks and balances. It would gut them. It would ensure
civil servants will be hired and fired on the basis of political
loyalty--something that this country has struggled for many decades to
get rid of.
It would truly weaponize our system of justice--again, something that
almost everyone works toward keeping nonpartisan.
It lays out in detail the plan to dramatically change our American
system of government, perhaps for a very long time. It is truly not a
question of if anymore. The plan and the people putting it in place are
disregarding laws and norms dating back to the Constitution.
They are throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. This
means firing or pushing out vast swaths of the Federal workforce of
civil servants. These are career civil servants, many of whom have
devoted their lives to keeping our government running--from processing
Social Security checks; keeping our weather systems afloat; or helping
to stop waste, fraud, and abuse.
Some would say our Federal workers don't do anything. But they are
honest, hard-working Americans.
Project 2025 is just getting started. If confirmed, Mr. Vought and
Project 2025 could have devastating consequences for Colorado.
Deep in Project 2025 are plans to heavily restrict access to
contraceptives and abortion medication, denying women and families the
freedom to make their own reproductive decisions; plans to make
healthcare more expensive by repealing policies that empower Medicare
to negotiate prescription drug prices and drive down the cost for
healthcare seniors; plans to make Colorado less resilient to these
increasing frequent disasters caused by extreme weather.
They are already reinstating cruel immigration policies and
threatening to come after the LGBTQ community.
At a time when grocery prices are rising on everything from eggs to
meat, Project 2025 is going to make life harder for Colorado farmers
and ranchers and more risky.
Project 2025 would cut safety nets for our ag producers when they
have a bad season. It includes plans to gut essential crop insurance.
Project 2025 even wants government to get involved in the specific
techniques our ranchers use to farm.
Our Colorado farmers know their land better than anyone else. Hanging
small farmers out to dry does nothing to lower grocery prices for
Americans.
We have been hearing in our offices from producers across the State
who are very concerned about what this Project 2025 means to them. We
have over 38,000 farm operations in Colorado. Some harvest wheat. Some
raise meat or poultry. Some specialize in dairy. All of them support
our rural communities and play an essential role in feeding families
really all across the country.
We don't have to speculate about what Mr. Vought would do to the
Office of Management and Budget. He has really laid it all out in
Project 2025. He wrote Project 2025, to a large extent, himself.
One of his finest contributions is a section championing the
executive branch's ability to overreach and ``impound funds.''
Let's not mince words. This is, by all historic measures, blatantly
unconstitutional. Congress alone has the authority to decide how
government spends its money.
This isn't an opinion. It says explicitly in article I, section 9,
clause 7:

No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in
Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.

``Made by Law,'' designated by Congress.
Again, in article I, section 8, clause 1:

The Congress shall have the Power To lay and collect Taxes,
Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for
the common Defense of general Welfare of the United States.

We got a taste of how Mr. Vought would attempt to execute something
like this last week. In a truly chaotic,

[[Page S732]]

late-night, 2-page memo, the Trump administration halted all Federal
grants and loans. We are talking about hundreds of millions of
dollars--Federal spending for a staggering number of programs, programs
that provide America's healthcare, food, nutrition, housing, childcare,
and so much else.
The memo stemmed from an Executive order calling on Federal Agencies
to review and eliminate spending on ``woke'' ideologies or the ``Green
New Deal''--both things that aren't clearly defined and don't, in any
specific way, exist.
In this rush to create chaos and a jumbled policy, the implementers
didn't bother to specify which programs would continue and which
programs would end.
Our office and our staff were immediately flooded with calls--
hundreds and thousands of calls. We heard from folks in every corner of
Colorado--big cities, small towns--asking: What does this mean for them
and their families? There was real fear, real worry, and for good
reason.
The Trump administration tried to walk back the original memo to
clarify that the freeze wouldn't affect individual payments like Social
Security or food stamp benefits, but that didn't clear up too much. It
certainly didn't help that the White House Press Secretary couldn't
answer specific questions, like pertaining to critical government
programs like Medicaid, whether they were going to be affected.
Frustrating as it is--and I get how frustrating it is--there are
reasons why the government moves slowly.
All of this, if implemented as requested, would have had a
devastating impact on Colorado, a devastating impact.
The Federal programs and funds make up roughly 25 percent of our
State's effort to build transportation and infrastructure and provide
needed services for the most needy in our State.
Head Start, a truly vital service for over 9,000 low-income kids in
Colorado, would be forced to shutter its operations that provide these
low-income kids of all communities with the early childhood education,
health, and nutrition that they need. Even as we speak, there are
reports that Head Start providers around the Nation are not able to
access funds.
If implemented, it would cut off 83,000 low-income Colorado families
from the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which helps heat
their homes in a cold winter. These are folks, in many cases, who are
unable to pay their heating bill or wouldn't be able to heat their
homes without this assistance.
Our public safety and law enforcement would be weakened. The pause
would strip funding that helps our local agencies prevent terrorism,
helps them crack down on drug trafficking and prevent crimes and
provide services for those who have been victimized by crime.

Colorado has one of the largest veteran populations in the country--
something we are very proud of--but this funding would cut resources
for those vets. It would cut resources for community-based suicide
prevention efforts, organizations that provide care for veterans
experiencing homelessness, and services for veterans living with
disabilities, many of them taken in the defense of our Nation. It is
hard to be cruel to those who have given their country so much.
Before entering public service, I was in the restaurant business. At
our brewpub in downtown Denver, we would cook, pack, and donate meals
every year to Meals on Wheels to feed seniors throughout the Metro
Denver area. I have seen firsthand the difference this makes, the
relief it provides to seniors who need it. Many of them don't leave the
house and are so grateful to have someone come that they can talk to as
they get their meal.
But the Federal funding freeze left Meals on Wheels in Colorado and
all across the country unsure of how and whether they would be able to
continue serving meals. Over 25,000 Coloradoan seniors every day rely
on Meals on Wheels to access food. Why would we leave our seniors
hungry and unsure when their next hot lunch is going to come?
Our office also heard directly from a Colorado rural health
organization about how this Federal funding freeze would have life-or-
death effects on Coloradoans in 47 rural counties. When we are in towns
like Cortez or Hugo or Julesburg, we hear all the time about how our
rural hospitals, clinics, and community health centers are already
strained by workforce shortages and by rising costs. These medical
providers are on the frontlines in dealing with our Nation's mental
health and opioid crisis, and we are cutting their ability to provide
these services?
These folks in rural Colorado and in suburbs around every city in
Colorado are watching their friends, family, and neighbors struggle
with mental health issues that rose up after the pandemic. This funding
freeze wouldn't just strip funding from these programs; it would force
our critical rural hospitals to lay off staff or turn away patients at
a time when they need it most. We should be fighting to increase access
to quality, affordable healthcare no matter where people live, not take
it away.
The Federal funding freeze has already been blocked by the courts
several times because it is blatantly illegal. It makes no sense. But
make no mistake, Mr. Vought and the Trump administration will keep
poking and prodding our courts and our Constitution until they get
their way.
All of these actions serve a sinister purpose: to completely
transform our government into one that gives enormous--enormous--tax
cuts, largely directed at those who don't need them and--in many cases
in Colorado--don't want them and puts working-class Americans out to
pasture.
The Federal funding freeze is just one of many chaotic actions Mr.
Vought and the administration are pushing. We see Project 2025 come
into clarity in this administration's illegal attempts to dismantle
Agencies without congressional approval or their attempts to access
Americans' sensitive data.
Look, I am all for cutting government waste. If you want to seriously
look at how we spend money and where we can cut actual fraud, waste,
and abuse, I am game. A more efficient government will help us all. But
that is not what is happening.
I have worked as hard as I could to find ways to work across the
aisle. That is not going to change. When I was mayor of Denver, when I
was Governor of Colorado, we balanced the budget every year, and we
worked hard to try to streamline government processes, just like every
mayor and every Governor in this country. You can't just shove working
families under the bus or violate the law to do it.
We will fight these attempts in the courts, on the floor of the
Senate--like now--and everywhere else we can to defend Colorado and the
Constitution. It is time to use every tool at our disposal to disrupt
what Mr. Vought and his Project 2025 are trying to do.
We have supported these lawsuits, we have opposed Executive actions,
and we have voted against nominees. But if we need to hold the Senate
floor, like we are doing now, vote all night, disrupt business as
usual, we will do that too.
I will oppose every nominee that poses a genuine threat to
Coloradoans. It is why I am here on the floor and will vote no on Mr.
Vought today. Coloradoans sent us to Washington to solve problems, not
to create more.
Project 2025 is a brutal plan to wreak havoc on our Nation and really
change the way our government operates, the way our democracy
functions.
I hope people all over the State emulate that old movie ``Net Worth''
and they can shout out on every corner ``I am mad as hell, and I am not
going to stand for it.'' Let's hope they get so loud that they can't be
drowned out.
Mr. President, I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Nevada.
Ms. ROSEN. Mr. President, Nevadans sent me to the Senate to stand up
and fight for hard-working families throughout our State, and that is
exactly why I am here today: to sound the alarm about Russell Vought's
nomination to lead the Trump administration's Office of Management and
Budget. They oversee virtually every Agency and the entire Federal
budget.
Mr. Vought would be a disaster if he is put in this role again.
Russell Vought is an extremist, will betray working families--betray
your family--and there is simply no other way to put it. After all, he
was the main architect behind the Project 2025 agenda. You might have
heard of it, but for those who don't know, Project 2025 is Russell
Vought's far-right playbook for

[[Page S733]]

seizing full control of the Federal Government. I want to repeat that.
He wrote the playbook to seize full control over the Federal
Government--our government, your government.
It is filled with extreme ideas that would hurt families like yours,
ideas like putting essential government programs like Medicare,
Medicaid, and Social Security on the chopping block. And he is going to
give handouts to billionaires and big corporations on the backs of
America's middle class--on your backs.
Seeing how much power this administration has already given to
unelected--unelected--billionaire CEOs, it is not hard to imagine what
is coming next. Don't just look at Mr. Vought's ideas; take a moment to
look at his actions.
When he oversaw Trump's budgets during the first administration,
Russell Vought spearheaded efforts to--well, he wanted to try to do
this: cut Medicare by more than $500 billion, cut Medicaid by just over
$750 billion, and cut Social Security by close to $80 billion. That is
your Medicare, your Medicaid, your Social Security on the chopping
block. Think about that.
These programs are a lifeline to so many Americans, and they can mean
the difference between a person's financial well-being or their
financial ruin. And these aren't abstract numbers. These folks are our
neighbors; they are our family; they are our friends. That is who we
are talking about here. These are not some numbers in a budget; they
are people--people we love.
So you have to ask yourself this: How is this helping you? How is
this helping the ones you love? How is this helping any of us? It is
not. It is not. Instead of reforming and bolstering these programs to
help real people--to help you--Mr. Vought wants to give more tax breaks
to billionaires, the ultrawealthy, while telling working families,
hard-working families, to figure things out for themselves. Families
who get up every day and work hard, good community members, they want
you to figure it out for yourself.
Under his plans, the richest people in this country would get
hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in tax breaks, while regular
working Americans would get next to nothing by comparison--next to
nothing. And that is who Russell Vought is, and that is what he stands
for.
Disturbingly, Mr. Vought has made it abundantly clear he does not
care about violating our Federal law or the Constitution to see his
terrible mission through. Russell Vought does not care about our
Constitution or the law. Just look at the wave of threats to illegally
fire career civil servants, many of whom are veterans, by the way--
people who just want to make a difference in other people's lives.
It is all outlined in Mr. Vought's Project 2025, which aims to put as
much power as possible in the hands of President Trump and his
unelected billionaire buddies. Russell Vought--well, he thinks the
rules don't apply to him. In fact, he seems eager to abuse whatever
power he gets. It is dangerous. It is undemocratic. It is un-American.
It is not how we govern.
This isn't a plan for responsible leadership, Mr. President; it is a
recipe for disaster, one that we are seeing play out in real time. Just
look at the recent Federal funding freeze that Trump's administration
put in place. It has caused chaos. It has caused confusion all across
the country. It is reckless. It is cruel. It is illegal. These actions
virtually froze all Federal grants and loans and have jeopardized key
programs that many Nevadans depend on every single day--key programs
for our families, our children, our seniors, our first responders, our
veterans. The list goes on and on. All of them have been impacted by
Donald Trump's Federal funding freeze, and hundreds of Nevadans have
called my office to share how it could negatively impact their lives
and the lives of those they care about most.
The decisions that OMB makes can determine whether a child in Las
Vegas can get a hot breakfast at school or if a senior citizen in Reno
will get meals delivered to their home because they are homebound. This
Agency can decide on whether our first responders--those who run in
when tragedy is happening, when we are running out, to protect us--our
heroic firefighters and police, can get the equipment they need to save
lives and keep themselves safe while doing that. OMB can decide whether
our communities have access to clean, safe water.
Now we are being asked to vote on handing over the keys to our
Nation's budget to Russell Vought, the driving force behind the freeze,
a man who has focused almost his entire career on slashing programs
that real people--real people, you and everyone that you know--rely
on--you and everyone you know and love rely on every single day.
I urge my colleagues who are considering a vote for this nomination
to think about what working people in this country are going through at
this moment.
I urge my colleagues to think about the moms and the dads who come
home from a hard day at work. They have dinner with their family. They
put their kids to bed, and then instead of relaxing in front of the TV,
they sit at the kitchen table and they worry. And they are worried sick
about how they are going to pay the bills, how they are going to keep a
roof over their head, how they are going to keep putting food on the
table.
They are going back and forth trying to figure out what essentials
they can live without just to make ends meet. At the same time, the
billionaires that Russell Vought is looking out for, they don't
understand the struggle, I can bet you that.
I am going to say here, let's ask those billionaires last time they
went grocery shopping and worried about the price of eggs or milk. I
bet they don't have an answer for that. That is who Mr. Vought fights
for. And these struggles that real families are going through, they are
tough choices that far, far too many working families face every single
day.
And these are the people who will be hurt most by Russell Vought's
extreme--extreme--agenda. And we know that right now, these same
families are feeling the squeeze of rising costs. It is everywhere--the
grocery store to the gas pump. And with the added price spikes from
President Trump's reckless tariff threats, it is going to get even
harder to afford food, pay off an energy bill, or make rent. Let
alone--let alone--buy a home.
And so it is no wonder people are so frustrated with the way things
are; it shouldn't have to be this way.
We should be looking for opportunities to help make their lives
better, to make things, well, a little easier. At a time when Americans
are already paying an arm and a leg for essentials, when they
desperately need the support of critical government programs that make
such a meaningful difference, why on earth would we confirm someone who
will just make their lives harder? Why on earth would we do this?
So make no mistake, if Russell Vought is allowed to head up the OMB,
Vought will work to make sure the ultrawealthy get more, while
struggling families get even less than they have now. This is who
Russell Vought is, and this is what he will do--what he will do to you.
Nevadans are hurting, and they are looking to Congress for help. If
Vought is given the power to shape our Federal budget, we risk seeing
critical programs slashed, leaving our seniors, working people,
families facing higher costs, fewer services, and with less financial
security.
And this isn't just an ideological difference, it is a real threat to
millions of people's well-being, to the very core of what is most
important to them: their families. And the stakes couldn't be higher.
And so I urge my colleagues in the Senate to reject this reckless
nomination for the sake of all of our families.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Hampshire.
Ms. HASSAN. Mr. President, I rise today to join my colleagues in
expressing my opposition to the President's nominee for the Director of
the Office of Management and Budget, Mr. Russell Vought, and to join
the millions of Americans who have been gravely alarmed by the
President's order to cut off already appropriated Federal funds for
communities all across the country, a move which has been a
longstanding priority for Mr. Vought.
I can think of few people more dangerous and deeply unsuited for the
role of director of the Office of Management

[[Page S734]]

and Budget, or OMB, than Mr. Vought. It is not simply that Mr. Vought's
proposals will devastate communities across our country--though, if
enacted, they certainly will. It is not simply that Mr. Vought's values
are deeply out of step with the majority of Americans--though, they
are.
And it is not simply that Mr. Vought has demonstrated a complete lack
of regard for the notion of government by consent of the governed--
though, time and again, he has done just that. It is because in the
President's order to cut all funding for all Federal grants, a passion
project straight from the pages of Mr. Vought, the President's reckless
and illegal actions have already thrown communities into chaos, and
they have hurt the American people.
Any nomination for a senior post in an administration is, to a
degree, an act of faith. We never fully know the manner in which
someone will perform their duties until they are in the post. But with
Mr. Vought, the situation is different. Not only do we have a clearer
picture of how Mr. Vought would approach the job from his last time
that he held this post, not only do we have a blueprint from the
proposed budget developed by Mr. Vought at his think tank, we need only
to look at the events of the last week to see how Mr. Vought would
handle his office.
Mr. Vought was the architect of President Trump's order to cut all
Federal grants to communities in every corner of the country, including
in New Hampshire. This order rightly and deeply alarmed constituents
across our land, who have appropriately inundated their Senators' and
Governors' offices with calls expressing their opposition to the
President's reckless, thoughtless, and uninformed action.
The President, through his order, interrupted cash flow to critical
services and left police departments unsure if they were being
defunded. He left fire departments wondering if they would get the
grants that they depend on to modernize their equipment and hire more
firefighters.
He left rural hospitals in turmoil as they tried to plan for the
months ahead. He left the staffs of homeless shelters who provide care
for veterans uncertain that they would have the resources that they
need to be a port in the storm for America's heroes.
And he left addiction treatment centers without any indication of
when the next grant might come, grants that are used to keep our kids
and communities safe from the deadly dangers of fentanyl. It was chaos.
And it remains chaos. While court orders have brought a temporary
pause to the President's funding cutoff, there is no certainty about
what will happen next. And in some cases, cash flow is still irregular,
leaving everyone from daycare providers to landlords wondering whether
or not they will be able to continue to operate.
And so the American people wait in the dark, prisoners to the
President and Mr. Vought's political gains. Mr. Vought has had
experience managing the Office of Management and Budget. One would
think that he would appreciate that any organization with a budget--a
police department, a small business, a hospital--needs to have a
reliable idea of what funds are going to be available if they are going
to make any plans for the future.
They cannot depend on the whims of a President's tweet or on the
last-minute salvation of a court order. If a small business is going to
add a second location or hire more staff, it can't do it if it has to
worry about critical grant money being impounded.
If a fire department wants to modernize its operation, it needs to
know if the grant that it is planning to apply for and is supposed to
be available in a few months, a grant that has already been approved
and signed into law, will exist. If it doesn't, the department's new
engine is no longer a reality.
But perhaps Mr. Vought does not understand how to maintain a budget
because, of course, during his time as director of the OMB, he helped
blow up the budget deficit and never turned in a surplus--an
extravagance that most Americans cannot afford.
And make no mistake, this is not an academic discussion; behind every
one of these budget lines are people, people who will be hurt if the
President and Mr. Vought get their way and cut all Federal grants--
grants that are indispensable to Americans for a wide range of critical
activities and indispensable to our way of life.

They are critical to the firefighter who relies on these grants to
have the best equipment while keeping our homes safe from smoke and
flame; to the police officer walking the beat who deserves to be
supported and not defunded; to the teenager struggling with addiction
who is finally on the road to recovery but may fall back into despair
if the addiction treatment center closes because the President and Mr.
Vought decided that political games are more important than serving the
people and saving lives.
In short, this chaos, this flurry of orders and memos and
counterorders and Washington doublespeak, this playing with the lives
of the American people, this is not leadership, and it is no way to
govern a country, much less the greatest country on earth.
We have seen Mr. Vought in action. It has already been a chaotic two
weeks since the President ordered this self-inflicted catastrophe.
We cannot afford our police departments, our fire departments, our
veterans, our children--we can't afford a chaotic and lawless 4 years
under Mr. Vought.
Now, what is particularly astonishing about the President and Mr.
Vought's reckless order to cut off Federal funding is that it portrays
how deeply out of touch they are with the American people, how woefully
they have misread our country in this moment. Our country, of course,
has partisan divisions, but I have found that often on a more
fundamental level, the majority of Americans--not the loud, but the
many--want most of the same things. They want costs to come down. They
want their rent and groceries to be more affordable. They want to get
the care that they need from their doctors without worrying about going
into debt.
If they have children, they want what all parents want for their
kids: They want their kids to be given the chance to follow their
dreams. They want to know that they will get to and from school safely
each and every day. They want their streets free from the dangers of
fentanyl and other drugs.
And from their leaders, the American people want leadership and
results. And they know a good idea can be red or blue. Lower costs,
safer streets, and a more hopeful future--that is what most people
want.
If the President and Mr. Vought thought it was worthwhile to listen
to the American people, then they would know this, because in our great
country, there is no great clamor from people asking for a President to
seize authority--authority that belongs to Congress--to cut off funds
to fire departments, police departments, hospitals, and addiction
centers.
The American people want more money in their pockets. They aren't
asking the President to seize power to choke off funds to their
communities. The American people didn't ask for this. The American
people don't want this. The American people do not deserve this.
The President's reckless and extreme order makes one wonder who the
President and Mr. Vought believe they are working for. Perhaps, Mr.
Vought can show me, tell us all, where this great majority of Americans
who want a President to have unilateral power to take away fire
department grants, defund police departments, or end special education
programs, where that majority is.
How is America better off with a fire department unable to buy a new
engine? How are we better off with more Americans struggling with
addiction, unable to get on the road to recovery? Who does it serve
when a veteran is forced to sleep on a snowy street because the shelter
he used to stay in closed after a funding freeze? And why should the
architect of such a plan ever be in a position of authority?
But let's say for a moment that the President and Mr. Vought don't
get their way and this funding cutoff is permanently blocked, the fact
that one of the administration's first acts was to draft this order
shows just how deeply out of step they are with most Americans.
This order should never have been given and tells us everything about
the President and Mr. Vought's priorities. How does the President's
order do anything to actually lower prices, to make

[[Page S735]]

rent cheaper? What family is better off because of the President's
attempted power grab? Who has been made more prosperous, more safe, or
more healthy by this action? The President and Mr. Vought's order
serves no cause but the advance of the President's personal political
power.

Now, I continue to stand ready to get to work with anyone, including
the President, to work on a bipartisan basis to deliver on the
priorities of the American people and bring down costs. But the
President and Mr. Vought's actions--to put aside efforts to bring
relief to American families and instead seize power, to cut off funds
to every community in the country--demonstrate that they are, at the
present time, unconcerned with what the American people actually want.
Mr. Vought's lack of regard or respect for what the American people
want is, unfortunately, not a surprise. Throughout his time in public
service, and even in these confirmation proceeding, Mr. Vought has
demonstrated a thinly veiled disdain for the principles of self-
government--principles which have served America well since we declared
our independence.
To my Republican colleagues who are hopeful that the President will
restore some or all of the funds that were cut off by this order, I
would remind you that the grant money was never the President's to cut,
freeze, or restore. It doesn't belong to him or to Mr. Vought. It
belongs to the American people.
Congress makes laws and appropriates funds, not the President. At
stake is not a legal technicality. At stake is our very notion of self-
government, a notion that Mr. Vought appears to disdain.
The right of Congress, the first of the three branches of government
provided for in the Constitution, to make laws and appropriate funds
was made clear first in our Constitution and then in the Impoundment
Control Act of 1974. Administrations from both parties understood and
respected this law.
But Mr. Vought does not. Mr. Vought has said that he disagrees with
this law. In his hearings, he refused to commit to follow the law, and
has since become the architect of a brazen attack on this very law, the
attack launched by the President's order to cut off all Federal grants.
The laws of the United States are not meant to be enjoyed a la carte.
It is not Mr. Vought or the President's prerogative to choose which
laws to follow, any more than it is their prerogative to choose which
Federal grants to cut off after the grants have already been
appropriated by law.
But this is simply who Mr. Vought is--not a trusted guardian of
taxpayers' funds but a man who believes that both he and the President
do not answer to the people.
In the past, Mr. Vought has refused to allow for proper oversight. He
has refused to cooperate with inspectors general, the people's
watchdogs against corruption. He repeated the lie that the 2020
Presidential election was rigged and supported the President's attempt
to overturn the will of the people, a will that was reflected in our
free and fair elections.
At the start of the confirmation process, Mr. Vought suggested that
the President does not even need the advice and consent of this body,
and instead he could just abuse of the power of recess appointments to
fill out his Cabinet.
So Mr. Vought has placed us in a remarkable position. He is asking us
to vote for him in a confirmation process that he does not even believe
needs to exist. He is asking for the support of the people's
representatives, while maintaining that he shouldn't even have to
answer to the people in the first place.
It is also ironic that we are considering Mr. Vought's nomination
because it was 5 years ago this week that this body debated President
Trump's attempt to illegally impound funds that were intended for
Ukraine, an impoundment attempt that was supported and directed by Mr.
Vought. Five years ago, Mr. Vought helped the President cut off legally
appropriated funds to America's allies. And 5 years later--5 years
later--Mr. Vought has helped the President cut off legally appropriated
funds to the American people.
Five years later, it is clear the failure to hold the President and
Mr. Vought to account didn't mark the last time that some people in
this body surrendered their principles to appease Donald Trump. It was
not the end of the indignities that this body would be asked to
tolerate; it was barely the beginning. It only encouraged more.
That is, of course, the danger of lawlessness. That is the danger of
the winding road toward authoritarianism. Once one act of lawlessness
is tolerated, it becomes easier to tolerate another, until we arrive to
where we are today, where pointing out illegality from our public
officials sometimes seems like little more than an afterthought.
It should not be too much to ask, it should not be too much to
expect, that those who have the privilege to help lead the world's
greatest democracy follow the laws of our land and respect the consent
of the governed.
We know what Mr. Vought has done during the President's term. We know
that he was the architect of the President's order to seize the power
to cut off Federal funds. And we know that, if given the chance, the
budget that he would help author would be the most extreme put forward
by any administration in our lifetimes and would be devastating for our
country.
Through his think tank, Mr. Vought laid out his priorities in what
was a proposed budget in 2023 for a potential Trump administration. And
now, the President has nominated him to manage the Office of Management
and Budget.
In his budget, Mr. Vought would gut Medicaid by over $2 trillion. He
would undo much of the progress States like New Hampshire have made
since we expanded Medicaid. He would kick families off of Medicaid,
families who are already feeling the pain of high costs and struggling
to make ends meet. More people would become sick because they couldn't
afford preventive care and be forced to make impossible choices once
they fall ill.
These cuts would be especially devastating for families who have
children with disabilities, families who rely on Medicaid dollars to
get the best support for their children so that the children can thrive
and have all the opportunities that any parent wants for their kids,
and so the parents can go to work and build a family and a future.
It is not clear precisely when, for Mr. Vought, a child with a
disability getting the support that they need became less important
than paying for a tax break for a billionaire. But it is not just
Medicaid. Mr. Vought's budget would end tax credits through the
Affordable Care Act that have helped millions of Americans afford
lifesaving care.
His budget would cut back Pell grants and make it harder for families
to afford higher education.
His budget would defund much of the FBI, including ending many of the
FBI's invaluable counterterrorism efforts.
Mr. Vought's budget would also eviscerate the Department of Homeland
Security's cyber security defenses. He is perhaps one of the first
people from either party who in today's age thinks we should be
spending less on cyber security and not more.
Make no mistake, American families would be hurt by Mr. Vought's
budget. America would be less safe with Mr. Vought's budget.
But few provisions in his budget--his proposed budget--are as
outrageous as his cuts to veterans' benefits. Mr. Vought has proposed
slashing benefits for veterans by tens of billions of dollars. He has
proposed narrowing the number of veterans who are even eligible for
certain health benefits.
He even proposed banning funding for women's reproductive care for
women veterans. These heroes have defended our freedoms abroad, but Mr.
Vought would endeavor to deny their freedoms here at home.
We will never fully repay the debt that we owe to those who have
served. Indeed, we cannot. But we need to try each and every day. We
should be working day in and day out to do more for those who serve,
but, instead, Mr. Vought is looking for ways to slash care and benefits
for veterans and their families.
It is not clear to me what more veterans would need to do, what
further sacrifices they would need to make, for Mr. Vought to agree to
not take away the benefits and care that they have earned through their
courage and valor.

[[Page S736]]

Let me be clear. There are few things in my mind more deeply un-
American than to try to fund the extreme political agenda of a budget
by taking money out of the pockets of America's best and bravest.
There has been a quality of make-believe surrounding the debate over
Mr. Vought's confirmation. Some of Mr. Vought's defenders have
dismissed concerns regarding his proposed budget as alarmist. They
assure us that this budget will never be passed. They dismiss our
concerns regarding his past statements supporting an expansion of
authoritarian power as hyperbolic. They insist that his words do not
indicate how he will actually act in his role. They dismiss our
arguments regarding his record while at the helm of OMB as rehashing
ancient history, and some of my colleagues even dismiss our concerns
about the President and Mr. Vought's order to cut off Federal funds as
sensationalist and dramatic. They assure us that the court stopped the
order and that the President will hopefully restore these funds soon
enough.
And maybe, on that last point, they are right. Maybe the courts will
fully stop the President's order to cut off these funds. Maybe the
President and Mr. Vought will be thwarted by the laws that they seek to
circumvent.
But I submit that the President and his nominees should be judged by
what they want to do, not simply by what they are able to get away
with.
So what kind of America does Mr. Vought want? What would he do if
everything that he has proposed in his first term, in his writings, in
his hearings, in his budget, and in the President's order to cut off
all funds were able to come to pass?
Russell Vought's America is an America where Medicaid has ended as we
know it, where more people get sick and fewer people get care, where
police departments and fire departments are defunded in the service of
political games, where our efforts to fight addiction and get fentanyl
off our streets are gutted, and where more people slip from the road of
recovery into spirals of despair.
(Mr. SHEEHY assumed the Chair.)
It is an America where the FBI's counterterrorism program is
scrapped, and our country is less safe, where cyber criminals from
China and Russia are given free rein to gain a leg up. It is an America
where families with children with autism are left to fend for
themselves, where we even break faith with veterans and take away care
that they earned through unimaginable sacrifice. It is an America where
even our heroes become dispensable.
It is an America where Presidents decide which laws to obey and
disobey, which funds appropriated by Congress to permit and which to
take away, where the people's watchdogs can be fired, and the people's
representatives ignored.
We would be an America governed not of, by, and for the people, but
of, by, and for a President.
I don't know with certainty what the future holds, what the courts
will permit and what they will block. But I know that, in this moment,
the question before us is whether or not we should confirm to high
office a man who has clear disdain for self-government.
Self-government--government of, by, and for the people--it is not
simply a patriotic turn of phrase. It is what makes America different.
Being a part of this self-government experiment is why all of us are
even here serving in this body in the first place.
My dad, a World War II veteran, would always remind me that freedom
and democracy are history's exception; they are not the rule. In Iran
or in Putin's Russia, there is no debate over impoundment. In
autocracies, what the autocrat decrees is law, but in America, we set
out to do something different. We created a system of checks and
balances. We declared that power was derived from consent of the
government. Unlike virtually every nation before us, we did not put our
trust in kings or oligarchs. No. Instead, in the words of Lincoln, we
dared to ask:

Why should there not be a patient confidence in the
ultimate justice of the people? Is there any better or equal
hope in the world?

We believed these words once, and most Americans believe these words
still. And we believe that even our greatest leaders need to be checked
by the people and their elected representatives.
To my Republican colleagues who support the President and who are
considering supporting Mr. Vought and who dismiss his words and actions
about the need to seize greater Executive power, I remind you that
history has shown us that when a leader gains a power, they are
inclined to use it, and they certainly are not inclined to give it
back. The power of the purse is a power that belongs to Congress and
the people. My colleagues need to decide if they are willing to
surrender that power on their watch.
To my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, even if you imagine
that you may agree with the ways in which the President would use his
power to ignore Congress and impound Federal funds today, you certainly
may disagree with the ways this illegal power is abused tomorrow. You
may open the door for further abuses down the road. You may find that a
future President of a different party or persuasion is inclined to use
this power in ways that leave you deeply alarmed but unable to stop.
That is the danger of surrendering the rule of law to expand
Executive power. History has shown that the end result is never more
freedom because, to borrow a phrase, those who would seek power by
riding the back of the tiger surely end up consumed by it.
I suspect that my Republican colleagues will vote to confirm Mr.
Vought, although they shouldn't. I voted for many of the President's
nominees, and I believe that the President and our country would be
better served by people who encourage his better impulses rather than
enable his worse ones, who understand that no leader is above the law,
and who respect our system of government of, by, and for the people.
In the end, to confirm Mr. Vought is to confirm him in spite of his
record, his words, and his promises.
So, no, I am not alarmed by Mr. Vought because he is not a member of
my party. I am alarmed by Mr. Vought because, unlike some of my
Republican colleagues, I respect Mr. Vought's intelligence enough to
take his words seriously. So when Mr. Vought shows his disdain for
self-government, I will take him at his word, and so should this body.
In the end, Mr. Vought, while seeking office in our government, is
wrong about a fairly fundamental thing. He is wrong about democracy in
America. The people's representatives are not a nuisance to be
circumvented. The people's laws are not an obstacle to be surmounted.
The people's funds are not a political weapon to be seized. Nor are the
people's wills, wants, and, yes, votes idle noise to be discarded or
ignored. No. In this country, in this great democracy of ours, the will
of the people represents nothing less than a hope without better or
equal in this world.
Mr. President, I can keep speaking about the damage that Russell
Vought would do as leader of the Office of Management and Budget. I
will also appeal to my colleagues here to let me know if any more of
them intend to speak.
Mr. Vought's nomination to lead the Office of Management and Budget
is one we should all reject, not because we disagree with his policies
but because he fundamentally disagrees with our form of government. He
fundamentally disrespects this body--the body created along with the
House of Representatives by article I of the U.S. Constitution. He
fundamentally believes that his judgment is better than the people's.
I would also add that Mr. Vought's beliefs are some of the most
extreme that I have heard expressed or watched implemented in my
lifetime.
I yield the floor.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The assistant bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. COONS. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for
the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. COONS. Mr. President, I rise today to join my colleagues in
speaking against Russell Vought, who has been nominated to run the most
powerful and important Federal organization you never heard of, the
Office of Management and Budget, or OMB.
Russell Vought has as much business running OMB as I do being a hair

[[Page S737]]

model for Pantene. Russell Vought has as much business being near the
Federal Government again and running the central plays that make the
Federal Government work as I have standing behind center for the Eagles
this Sunday running plays in the Super Bowl.
Vought had this position before, and it was a disaster. President
Trump is supposed to be hiring on merit, have the very best people, the
world's best people working for him. Why is he bringing back this
complete failure for such a critical position?
Last time he was OMB Director, he rolled back critical regulations
that keep Americans safe. He illegally withheld funds already
appropriated by Congress. Sound familiar?
As bad as he was in the first term, he is already off to a much worse
start in the second term as the shadow Director before he is even
confirmed. His fingerprints have been all over the last 2 weeks of
chaos and dysfunction.
He was the principal architect of Project 2025--a deep, thorough,
detailed proposal for what it was that the Heritage Foundation and
Heritage Action wanted to do if Trump were reelected; a policy
blueprint so extreme that on the campaign trail, President Trump
pretended he had never heard of it: Who is that? Who is this? No idea
what Project 2025 is, who wrote it, or what it would do.
Russell Vought has demonized the folks who help run our Federal
Government--the people who keep the VA running; the folks who deliver
Social Security checks; the men and women, many of whom live in
Delaware, who help keep us safe through air traffic control systems;
who predict our weather through NOAA; who help Federal funds flow to
school districts and daycares and senior centers.
I know the average American thinks of the Federal workforce as
Federal bureaucrats who don't do much for them, but if you get into the
details of their actual public service, the reach and scope and impact
of what they do is remarkable--as we learned in Delaware just last week
when they tried to shut it all down; but more on that in a moment.
Russell Vought has demonized these civil servants--he has called them
villains who need to be in trauma--and he wants to radically augment
Presidential authority. We are in the middle of a huge power grab by
President Trump and his administration. He doesn't know or care whether
or not the constitutional appropriations powers of Congress ought to be
upheld. Not to get all ``Schoolhouse Rock!'' on you for a moment, but
the core power of this body of Congress is the power of the purse--to
decide how to spend the money that we collect from the American people
to invest in your safety and security.
If you vote for Russell Vought to run OMB and you happen to be an
appropriator, as I am, or one of the Members of this body who votes for
appropriations every year, you are consigning yourself to irrelevance.
You are voting to no longer be relevant to the future of our country,
to our place in the world, and how the money we sign off on gets spent.
He has got a lot of bad ideas. I could spend a lot of time on the bad
ideas of Russell Vought. Russell Vought has been nominated to run OMB,
but I wouldn't trust him to run a Wawa.
His ideas include redirecting all disaster assistance to the States.
Well, the point of having FEMA, which is the Federal Emergency
Management Agency, is when a State gets overwhelmed by a hurricane, a
wildfire, a tornado, when a natural disaster is so massive that it
overcomes a State's ability to manage the disaster response, we elevate
it to a Federal disaster response. That is the point. But he thinks we
ought to pull all that back down to the States. Guess what States
aren't going to get taken care of.
One of his core ideas in Project 2025 is to take a chain saw to the
deep state--by freezing Federal assistance, by impounding Federal
spending, and destroying Congress's power of the purse. He is the
architect of the Executive orders issued by President Trump on his
frenetic first days that produced a Federal spending freeze.
And the results, folks, have been catastrophic: widespread chaos,
uncertainty for the nonprofits that provide so much support, whether it
is counteracting fentanyl misuse, supporting Head Start, daycares,
childcare, monitoring the weather to make sure that folks know when a
tornado is coming or when there is a wildfire or a hurricane,
supporting State and local law enforcement and our volunteer fire
companies. These are all grantees.
To be clear, when President Trump signed an Executive order freezing
all Federal grants for the domestic United States, these are all
examples of the dozens and dozens of organizations that called me,
called my office, called my Governor, and said: What does this mean for
us?
Organizations were locked out of the Federal funding portals where
they go to get their Federal funding. The Medicaid system went down. A
fifth of all people in my State are on Medicaid, and it provides
critical public health support for the opioid pandemic.
If President Trump's promise was to bring prices down and keep
Americans safe, he has failed on both counts, and what he did with this
nationwide Federal freezing ban--dreamed up by Russell Vought--failed
to keep us safe.
When FEMA grants went down, when they froze the grants to State and
local law enforcement, Russell Vought and President Trump were
literally defunding the police.
Let's take a second and look at that again. Lots of my colleagues--I
was here on the floor. Lots of my colleagues on the other side of the
aisle gave speech after speech about how terrible it would be to ever
put at risk law enforcement--Federal, State, local--by defunding the
police.
President Trump did two things in his first week that made clear they
don't mean this at all. One was pardoning hundreds of individuals who
stormed into this Chamber and assaulted Capitol Police officers,
pardoning people who assaulted police officers.
The second was freezing all domestic Federal grants with no exception
for State and local law enforcement. I am the cochair of the Law
Enforcement Caucus. I was responsible for the second largest police
department in Delaware. I know what it means to have Federal grants
come through what is called the Byrne-JAG grant program. I know what it
means to have Federal grants for bulletproof vests. I know what it
means to have Federal grants come through the COPS Hiring Program. For
State and local law enforcement, this was a moment of ``Hang on a
minute. What?'' when those grants were frozen.
There are other ways that Federal grants help our country be safe. It
promotes research that keeps us healthier. We just survived a pandemic,
made worse by President Trump's mishandling of it, but let's not
relitigate that now.
Research hospitals in my State got notification from the NIH and the
CDC that their research projects were frozen and were now under review.
The National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention distribute billions of dollars in grants. There are
teams of folks doing research on the ground, in hospitals, in academia,
in medical practices. All of them got notices that these were being
frozen.
Domestic violence shelters. Part of my role in my decade in county
government was helping advocate for law enforcement and our paramedics
and community-based nonprofits that respond to incidents of domestic
violence. It was to be as supportive as possible to make sure the
victims were not retraumatized by a second, third, and fourth
interview; to protect the security and sanctity of the shelters they
went to; and to protect, in particular, children who had been abused.

The idea that in order to slash government spending by wasteful
Federal bureaucrats, notice would go out to all of the nonprofit
shelters and organizations in my State and around the country that keep
people safe from domestic violence--how was this a good idea? This was
Russell Vought's idea. I wouldn't trust Russell Vought to run a 5K, let
alone to run the Federal Government, let alone to run the process by
which we distribute funds to the things that keep us safe and healthy
and prosperous. Whether it is hospitals, domestic violence shelters,
daycares, senior centers, the things that were impacted by the abrupt
taking of a chain saw to our Federal system defies description.

[[Page S738]]

But Russell Vought didn't stop with freezing Federal funds. Bluntly,
the disorder, the chaos, the alarm is part of the goal. Empowering
DOGE--the Department of Government Efficiency, which is neither a
Department nor is advancing government efficiency that is affiliated
with Elon Musk--has been advanced aggressively in these first 2 weeks
by giving them access to reams of data at the center for Medicare and
Medicaid at USAID--the foreign aid Agency at the National Institutes of
Health at the Department of Education.
Bluntly, the most alarming thing that has happened is access to the
entire Treasury payment system. This is part of Russell Vought's
Project 2025--to make sure that this unelected, unauthorized DOGE team
got into the most important, critical repository of people's personal
information--their tax records--and to be able to control which
disbursements of Federal funds will happen and which will not.
Before he has even been voted on in this Chamber, Russell Vought as
OMB Director, as shadow director, and as author of Project 2025 has
been to facilitate some of the most alarming violations of Americans'
privacy in our lifetimes, and this must be stopped.
For all of my colleagues on the right who screamed bloody murder
about censorship in recent years but are silent when unelected DOGE
bureaucrats can turn off your Social Security and Medicare payments if
they think you are not supportive enough, who can peer into and
malignly share details about payments you received or didn't receive,
they now have the access and control to go back and change the master
record of your tax filings.
This should be alarming to anyone who cares about privacy, security,
individual liberties. They are now threatening to destroy the U.S.
Department of Education and the Department of Labor--disfavored Federal
service Agencies--after taking a sledgehammer to our foreign aid system
by shutting down USAID. The stuff they are doing before Russell Vought
is even confirmed is breathtaking, and the consequences are real--yes--
to the government workforce but to people in my home State.
So let me take a moment and just share a few examples from Delaware
of how this chaos--how this tearing through our system with a chain
saw--has impacted the people I represent.
One Delawarean, alarmed, called in to my office and said:

I am a Department of Defense employee that received the
Office of Personnel Management notice that ``resign'' is an
option I should take as part of the ongoing purge of career
civil servants by President Trump. We are left--

He said--

with the worst possible decision to make with emotion as the
only driver since the list of exempt positions--

Those who are exempt from this drive to force folks out of service--

isn't being shared. So I have to come to work to the U.S.
Department of Defense every day, wondering if it's my last
day, if I'll be asked to resign and be later told we can't--
or to resign proactively and find out later whether the
position is actually cut, and I won't receive my severance
benefits. As a retired veteran--someone who served our Nation
for 21 years in the military and now 5 years in the civil
service--I can honestly say, I am ashamed of my government.

This mistreatment of a veteran, of a civilian employee of the
Department of Defense and trying to force them out with a scare tactic
identical to what was done at Twitter is beneath us.
I have been on this floor, in my 14 years as a Senator, where I have
heard passionate statements about the urgency of supporting our
veterans and those who support our veterans--the Department of Defense
and the VA. Yet I hear nothing from my colleagues on the other side--no
alarm or concern. From my constituents, yes. From my colleagues, no.
Here is another message I got this week from a Delawarean in my
office:

I am a Federal employee, and I am very disturbed by the
continuous string of emails we are receiving about this
cryptic deferred resignation program. I feel the information
we are receiving is a flat-out lie, and I don't understand
how the government can pay employees for 9 months and receive
the full pay and benefits if they agree to resign. I feel
this email is a lie, and I don't understand how Congress is
continuing to allow these emails--pushing us out--to be sent
to us.

These are just two of hundreds of examples. The phones in my office--
in Wilmington, in Dover, and here in Washington--have been ringing off
the hook. The number of calls to my colleagues have nearly broken the
voice mail system here in Congress. Folks are alarmed and upset either
because they have gotten these emails that they have to choose today--
literally, this is the day--whether or not to resign. They are unclear
whether it is actually funded. It is not. They are unclear whether this
was approved by Congress. It wasn't. They are unclear as to whether, if
they fail to accept this ``resign now'' offer, they will instead be
fired and lose some part of their pensions.
These are folks who have served us--as has the individual whose story
I just read--for decades. Yet where is the concern from my colleagues
for our veterans and those who maintain our Department of Defense, our
Veterans Health Administration, our intelligence Agencies, and the rest
of the important Federal services that are provided to our constituents
and our States?
Let me talk for a few minutes about the brutal impact on our global
foreign aid system of Mr. Russell Vought's Project 2025.
I am here on the floor as part of an effort by my colleagues to stand
up and speak out against what his plan is doing at home and abroad, and
I want to take a moment and talk about USAID, which is an Agency
founded by President Kennedy that does good work around the world on
our behalf--work that keeps us safe, keeps us strong, and protects the
American people.
The cuts to AID by Russell Vought and President Trump are just the
very first step in a playbook that will next move on to other
Agencies--Agencies like the Department of Education, NOAA that predicts
the weather, the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of
Agriculture, the Veterans' Administration, and the Foreign Aid
Administration. USAID is just the rehearsal. The main act is coming
very soon--in fact, likely this week or next.
President Trump promised to keep America safe, and foreign aid is a
key part of keeping us safe. It is less than 1 percent of the total
Federal budget.
In my role on the Foreign Relations Committee, I have traveled with
Members of both parties to places around the world where I have seen
how our trusted nonprofit partners--partners like Catholic Relief
Services, partners like Save the Children, partners like World Vision--
implement programs that fight disease, that counter human trafficking,
that push back on extremism, and that stabilize countries devastated by
war. All build relationships with other countries and communities to,
frankly, push back on Chinese and Russian influence, to push back on
extremism and jihadism, and to make the world safer for America and
Americans. This is not just soft power; it is smart power. And for
years, it has enjoyed bipartisan support.
USAID programs authored by Republican Presidents, like PEPFAR and the
President's Malaria Initiative, which I visited with my colleagues on
both sides of the aisle, show real results for the American people.
Right now, there is an outbreak of Ebola in Uganda. Right now, there is
an outbreak of Marburg in Tanzania. These are horrific diseases--
diseases that shred your internal systems and cause you to bleed out of
every orifice. Marburg, in recent cases, has a 90-percent fatality
rate, and there is no approved vaccine.
It is so much smarter for us to invest in local staff in these
countries in East Africa, tracking, tracing, and preventing the spread
of these diseases than shutting it all down and waiting and hoping that
it doesn't spread.
When the Ebola pandemic occurred in West Africa in 2017, 2016, I
traveled there and saw what USAID partners--partners like Samaritan's
Purse, partners like Catholic Relief Services, partners like Doctors
Without Borders--what they were doing on the ground, bravely, to push
back on this incredible, horrible pandemic.
When we cut foreign aid, we cut off our nose to spite our face. We
impose costs and loss with the suddenness, the sharpness of these
freezes, and we will not have anything left.
Some of my Republican colleagues have said: We are just trying to
trim out the woke programs. We are just trying to shrink it a little
bit, reform

[[Page S739]]

it a little bit, and most of it will survive.
That, I expected. That, I could work with. But here is how this is
supposed to work, folks: Next budget year, which is beginning now, we
have hearings. We do oversight. We look at these programs, and we
figure out how to trim them and make them more efficient and shape them
so that they match the policy objectives of the current majority and
the current President. That, I expect, but that is not what is
happening.
What is happening is that Russell Vought, the nominee to be OMB
Director, in carrying out Project 2025, which Trump claimed he knew
nothing about on the campaign trail, shut it down cold, issued an
Executive order completely shutting off funding.
Now, there have been some attempts at humanitarian waivers. Secretary
Rubio had promised his colleagues there will be waivers for things like
PEPFAR, but they are not yet working.
So when hundreds of programs around the world get what are called
stop-work orders, which means put the tools down; abandon the food
supplies on the dock; walk away from the hospital; stop pulling up
mines out of the ground in Angola--a place riven by conflict, where we
fund, through The HALO Trust, demining--stop training children how to
avoid the predation of gangs and human traffickers in Mexico; stop
trying to reduce civil conflict in the Philippines by engaging with
civil society groups; just walk away from all of this--a stop-work
order has caused our USAID workforce and their nonprofit partners
around the world to put the tools down.
Just yesterday, an order went out to bring back to the United States
the entire workforce around the world of USAID. Don't they have homes?
Don't they have families? Don't they have spouses? They do. So what
this will effectively mean is, it will force some of the most capable
and skilled people, who understand how to deliver humanitarian relief
at scale, to choose to resign, to give up a career and a life that they
have enjoyed, making a real difference for the American people, or to
comply and abruptly sell their home, pull their kids out of school, get
their spouse to quit their job, and move back to the United States.
Guess what that is. Chaos. That is taking a chain saw to Federal aid,
not a scalpel.
That is not reforming. That is not getting rid of the woke. That is
not aligning with American values and priorities. That is harming one
of the most effective, valued, long-bipartisan Agencies we have. The
damage is being done today. While we talk and debate and deliberate,
thousands of people's lives are being changed, and millions are being
cut off from lifesaving assistance, from critical development support,
and from interventions that help make us safe. Who wins? Who is
cheering?
I am here on the floor today joining my colleagues in speaking out
against the nomination of Russell Vought to run the OMB because his
Project 2025 and his plans for what to do with the Federal Government
have one clear winner: our adversaries and our opponents.
The complete shutdown of U.S. foreign aid has China and Russia
cheering. Russian state media is already celebrating that we are ceding
the field, that we are putting down our tools, that we are abandoning
our partners.
China has already come to Nepal--a country in the Himalayas, where
the United States has long been working with communities to stabilize
them after their civil war. China is saying: Oh, the Americans
abandoned you. How sad. We will come in and help you.
China has invested massively in expanding their diplomacy and their
development, their soft power, and they have won friends and influence
around the world. They are getting access to ports and airports, to
critical minerals, and to resources that we need, at our expense.
Secretary Rubio, who served as a Senator here with me for 15 years--
no one has been more fierce, more persistent, more focused on standing
up to the threat of the People's Republic of China than Senator Marco
Rubio. I don't comprehend how he can look at what is happening around
the world and say this isn't creating a huge opening for China.
So when my friends across the aisle say that this is all about
efficiency, about trimming, about reorganization, don't be fooled.
Don't believe them. Don't think that this is about a nip here and a
tuck there. This is a chain saw. They are starting with foreign aid,
and they are advancing to the Department of Education, and then they
are moving to the Veterans' Administration, and then they are taking on
programs that millions and millions of Americans rely on day in and day
out.
Last week was a rehearsal. The Executive order that froze all
domestic grants caused a huge pushback in the United States and brought
a Federal court action, an injunction. That is the reason, folks, if
you are watching, that you haven't seen daycares shut down, that you
haven't seen police and fire departments complaining, that you haven't
seen veterans' homes shuttered, that you haven't seen an immediate
impact here in the United States. It is only because a Federal court in
Rhode Island, at the insistence of my attorney general Kathy Jennings
and the attorneys general from New York and two dozen other States
filed in a Federal court and said this is illegal. Judge McConnell
looked at it and said ``You are right'' and issued an injunction. That
is the only reason this hasn't moved forward. But it has moved forward
overseas. Our foreign aid has been slashed to the bone, shut down cold.
People were called, folks shut out, and security systems infiltrated.
What they have done to USAID is a rehearsal for what they are doing
next, and it was all designed by Russell Vought, the nominee to run
OMB.
OMB is the most powerful and important Federal Agency you have never
heard of, and Russell Vought--seemingly a pleasant man, Christian
nationalist, someone who seems to be more interested in academia than
in fundamentally reshaping this government and this country--made clear
in Project 2025 that that was his goal, has made clear with his actions
last week and this week, through President Trump and his Executive
orders, what he intends to do.
It is nothing short of a stunning restructuring of the United States,
of the role of the Federal Government in the lives of Americans. And
when folks wake up--when folks wake up--to the scope and the reach of
it, they will be enraged.
The number of calls I got in my offices in Dover and in Wilmington,
DE, and here in Washington from people alarmed to hear that DOGE--the
Department of Government Efficiency--and Elon Musk and his band of
merry men had gotten into the data files that control every Federal
disbursement--the amount of alarm about that was appropriate. Wait
until they start using it to cut those payments off.
When Elon Musk said he intends to cut $2 trillion out of Federal
spending, he wasn't kidding. But, folks, there is no way to do that
without impacting veterans' benefits, Medicare and Medicaid, Social
Security, education, environmental work, and healthcare.
The Federal Government only has $1.7 trillion a year in discretionary
spending. So you can't cut $2 trillion without cutting deep into our
Department of Defense, cutting deep into our treasured and valued
programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.
You should be asking: What are they coming after, and why are they
doing it in such a forceful, determined rush?
There are rules here. There are processes here. There are ways we are
supposed to do things. This is not following those rules or those
procedures. That is why a Federal court stepped in and offered an
injunction to try to slow some of this headlong rush toward
restructuring the entire Federal Government.
But, folks, the hour is late, and the moment is pressing. We
Democrats have held this floor all night to speak out about why this is
important, to help engage, educate, and inform the American public,
those who are not yet alarmed about what has been happening and what is
going to happen.
One of my colleagues said: Wow, it is almost like they had a plan.
They did. Project 2025--massive, clear--was developed and written over
several years as President Trump planned his return, and its goals are
remarkable, transformational, aggressive, frankly, shocking--not to
reasonably reform

[[Page S740]]

things in the Federal Government that are misspent, not to look under
the hood and tinker in a few ways with the engine of the Federal
Government and say ``That is a little off. This needs a little
tuning,'' but to rip out whole systems, whole sections that had been
designed over years by bipartisan majorities to keep us safe, to keep
us strong, and to keep us healthy. This isn't a scalpel approach to
Federal Government; this is a chain saw approach.
One of the heroes of the new Trump administration is the President of
Argentina. I bet if you are watching, you have never heard of the
President of Argentina, but take a moment and look him up, President
Milei--his wild hair. He has an interesting approach to government. His
symbol is a chain saw. He campaigned across Argentina saying: If you
elect me President, I will take this chain saw to the Argentine Federal
Government. And he has. He was here in the Rotunda, cheering on
President Trump during his inauguration.
Why did this foreign head of state from South America come here, and
why was he welcomed and celebrated? Because his approach to not
trimming, not reforming, not improving but slashing the Government of
Argentina is exactly the approach that Russell Vought, if confirmed in
this body to lead OMB, will take.
You are going to wake up and discover that, by handing the keys to
DOGE of the system that controls all of our personally identifying
information and all of our Federal payments, we have handed the keys to
the architect of a program to take a chain saw to organizations,
institutions, to a workforce, and to programs that the American people
need, that keep us safe, that keep us healthy, and that keep us strong.
And folks, putting Russell Vought in charge of OMB is like giving a
toddler a crayon and a white wall and saying: Let's see what you make
of it.
You know what is going to happen. It is going to be a crazy mess. And
he has already started before this place has even confirmed him.
Russell Vought running OMB is a terrible idea, and he will run this
country into the ground. We should vote to oppose Russell Vought, to
oppose Project 2025, to push back on this chaotic and crazy attempt to
take a chain saw to the American people and our American government.