Protect America's Workforce Act

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the quorum call be rescinded.

Madam President, I rise today to pass my legislation, the Bycatch Reduction Act, which is the most comprehensive trawl bycatch reduction legislation ever to come before the U.S. Senate, ever to come before the Congress.

And we have made good progress on this bill. We have been working on it for, heck, in some ways many years. I am going to talk about this.

We had a great vote in the Commerce Committee last week, and I see my good friend Senator Markey from Massachusetts, whom I have worked on a number of fisheries issues with--being a Massachusetts Senator and an Alaska Senator--is on the floor today. So I am hoping he is going to actually speak in support of this bill and pass it with me.

This bill has already passed all the Republicans in the Senate, who have approved it.

So this is really important for my constituents. For generations, Alaskans have depended on our oceans, our rivers, and our abundant fish resources that sustain all of us, especially salmon. From subsistence harvesters in our

Native villages to commercial fishermen in our coastal communities to recreational fishermen across our State, Alaskans depend on healthy fisheries.

For Alaska Native communities, our fish, especially salmon, are deeply connected to culture, tradition, heritage, and a way of life that reaches back thousands of years. Our salmon provide food, food security, jobs, culture. They support families and entire communities, and they are a source of deep spiritual connection.

My wife Julie's family had a fish camp on the Yukon River for generations--generations. My daughters have all been raised in the summers on that river--every summer, my wife, my family, my in-laws, my daughters, a deep spiritual connection.

Yet Alaska's salmon runs, in particular, are facing enormous challenges. Our fisheries, in general, are facing enormous challenges. We have seen and continue to see huge fluctuations in salmon, crab, halibut, and other species that Alaskans depend on.

We know the ocean is changing. It is an issue Senator Markey has raised a lot. We have ocean acidification issues. We know these conditions will continue to change.

We also know that fishing activity, particularly bycatch, and contact between fishing gear, trawl gear, and sensitive sea floor habitats affect the health and productivity of marine ecosystem.

So what are we going to do about this?

For years, Alaskans across our State, everywhere--coastal communities, interior communities, villages--have been asking for action. Fishery managers have asked for more data to make informed decisions. Subsistence harvesters have asked for greater transparency. Communities have asked for greater accountability. And fishermen have asked for the tools and technology they need to reduce trawl bycatch. It is a huge issue in my State.

I have talked about this bill on the Senate floor a lot. This was an issue--a bill inspired by my wife Julie, as I have already mentioned her--it was part of my Alaska Salmon Task Force Act.

What does this focus on? It is focused on bringing the best minds together--a bill that I got over the goal line, passed into law in 2022--to say: What is going on with our salmon runs? Why do we have really strong salmon runs in places like Bristol Bay, with their sockeye runs, and very weak king salmon runs on the Yukon River and the Kuskokwim River?

So what we did in this bill is we brought the best minds in Alaska-- State, Federal, Tribal, indigenous, university, fishermen, community members--to come together and say: What is happening? Why is it happening? And what is the pathway to get to what every Alaskan wants: stronger healthy salmon runs on all our rivers, across all species?

So we did this. Alaskans coming together--this body coming together-- produced this very important report, the Alaska Salmon Task Force Act. NOAA Fisheries helped. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game helped. But, most importantly, we set up task forces with regard to Tribal members on the Yukon, on the Kuskokwim to make sure we had their input. This was Alaskans coming together. It is not easy to get consensus--not easy to get consensus on issues such as fisheries and salmon--but we did that. And this laid out several different recommendations on moving forward to get to the goal we all want--a roadmap back to strong, healthy salmon runs.

This is an issue I have been working on for years, and one of the recommendations was to reduce trawl bycatch. There are other recommendations that we are working on--ocean acidification and many others--but this was a big one. So we worked on this bill, again, with dozens and dozens of Alaskans. This legislation honors the call for action that so many Alaskans have made and our Alaska Salmon Task Force Act has as well.

The Bycatch Reduction Act is designed to do that, and it has a robust toolkit with several clear objectives.

First, it establishes for the North Pacific Fishery Management Council standards and monitoring requirements and action and timelines to take action to reduce trawl gear contact with the sea floor and protect important marine habitats. Essentially, it requires proven tools, such as mandating certain technologies like salmon excluders on trawl vessels, to, again, reduce salmon bycatch.

It invests in science and technology to continue to work on better understanding ocean conditions.

It creates new gear testing facilities.

It reauthorizes NOAA's Bycatch Reduction Engineering Program that I have been focused on during my whole time here in the Senate.

It reconstitutes the Alaska Salmon Research Task Force, with Alaskans and our indigenous experts with Tribal and traditional knowledge, as a bycatch task force overseeing NOAA's activities as they relate to trawl bycatch. Alaskans overseeing NOAA is very important for our stakeholders.

This legislation also strengthens transparency and accountability for trawling on the North Pacific Fishery Council.

It requires NOAA to make observer coverage requirements and bycatch information more accessible to the public and easier to understand.

It expands opportunities for Alaskans, fishermen, and other stakeholders to participate in the council process.

It raises the issue and starts looking again at the issue of conflicts of interest on the council.

These provisions are not ideas that came out of a Washington, DC, office; they came from Alaskans.

As I mentioned, this bill--the most comprehensive bycatch-reduction bill ever--builds on the work that hundreds of Alaskans did on our salmon task force to get to the goal we all want: stronger, healthier salmon runs across our State, across rivers, across species, especially given that we are seeing the devastating declines in salmon on the Yukon River and across the western interior of Alaska that have led to fishery closures, subsistence shortages, and families not being able to fish.

As I mentioned, my wife's family keeps a fish camp on the Yukon River. We have watched those smokehouses, including ours, sit idle for years. It is heartbreaking. It is really heartbreaking to witness these families, their culture, the people who live along our great rivers not being able to put up fish every year, and they have been doing so for thousands of years.

So this is an important first step. It is because of the task force and hundreds of conversations with Alaskans for years now that we need to take action.

The Bycatch Reduction Act puts the recommendations here into action. Again, we had a very strong vote last week in the Commerce Committee. I think every Senator but four voted for my bill. I explained it, and we saw how important it was because the bill uses science, technology, innovation, accountability, and action to help support reducing trawl bycatch and strengthen subsistence traditions, sport fishing in Alaska.

It is about giving fishermen the tools to reduce bycatch, and it protects fisheries and fish stocks that depend on them. It is about making sure Alaskans have access to the data and transparency they need to participate meaningfully in the management of our fisheries, and it safeguards the long-term sustainability, particularly of our salmon, that so many Alaskans depend on.

I want to thank the countless Alaskans who have been working with me and my team for years now on these issues. We have sought and fought to reduce bycatch in many, many other ways, but this bill is a really, really important step. So I am hopeful that my colleagues are going to now pass it with me, and we will move it over to the House and get it passed and signed into law.

Madam President, notwithstanding rule XXII, I ask unanimous consent that the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee be discharged from further consideration of S. 4938 and that the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration; further, that the Sullivan substitute, which is at the desk, be agreed to; that the bill, as amended, be considered read a third time and passed; and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Madam President, I am disappointed in my good friend Senator Markey of Massachusetts. He and I have worked on, actually, a lot of fisheries issues together. He is right; Massachusetts and the State of Alaska have important fisheries interests. This one, fortunately, doesn't impact Massachusetts at all; it is solely confined to the North Pacific area. So I am a little disappointed that he is not moving forward.

I want to thank all of my Republican colleagues who cleared my Bycatch Reduction Act, and we are going to keep working on it. I certainly will continue working on it with Senator Markey. Like I said, we have worked together on a number of fisheries issues over the years, and we are going to continue to work on hitting the bycatch issue with a multifaceted approach, as we have already done.

One of the things we have gotten done here in the Senate, in both the Biden and Trump administrations, is to dramatically ban the importation of all Russian trawl-caught fish and now Chinese trawl-caught fish. That really helps with regard to the bycatch issue. We have been very focused on increasing the annual appropriations for the Bycatch Reduction Engineering Program that I have led on a number of times. I have even defended in court our Alaska halibut fishermen against Seattle-based Amendment 80 trawlers in a lawsuit and won that case with them.

We are going to continue this work, building on the work from the legislation we passed for the roadmap to get back stronger salmon runs in Alaska and stronger fisheries with regard to salmon runs across species, across rivers, across the States, but this bill is a really important part of that, so I will continue to work this.

If the Senator from Massachusetts and his staff have edits and amendments, I don't think it is going to impact Massachusetts at all, to be honest, but we will work with them because we are very focused. My constituents are very focused to finally see action on trawl-bycatch reduction, and this bill is the bill with action and timelines, and we are going to get it over the goal line. We are going to get it over the goal line.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, over the past few weeks, familiar scenes have been playing out in Colorado and all across the country. Families are buying new books and backpacks, picking up school supplies, and taking their children to the pediatrician for their annual checkup.

For decades, back-to-school season did not prompt anxiety or confusion--except for maybe the kids like me that didn't do their summer reading. Parents could rely on the recommendations from their pediatricians, and the questions they did have were answered by professionals.

But that peace of mind is being undermined by the current administration--including by the President of the United States and the Secretary of Health and Human Services, who have worked tirelessly to undermine decades of settled science around routine vaccinations that have kept kids safe in this country and around the world for years.

The consequences of that broken trust are showing up in our emergency rooms and in our classrooms. Parents are increasingly concerned that their kids will go to school and come back with a serious disease.

Right now, our Nation is living through the most severe measles outbreak in over 35 years. Measles is not a mild childhood inconvenience; it is one of the most contagious viruses on Earth, capable of causing high fevers, brain swelling, long-term disability, and death.

In Colorado, we have already confirmed 25 cases this year, including 7 hospitalizations. Of these cases, 22 people were unvaccinated. Of the 25 who have measles in Colorado today, 22 were unvaccinated. That is the most we have had in over 30 years. You have to go back to 1995 to find an outbreak in my State that is even close to what we are seeing today. We are going backward when it comes to public health in the richest country in the world, and families in Colorado and all across this country are suffering the consequences.

But what is taking place in Colorado is especially tragic because Colorado's experience is one of the reasons that the United States has a two-dose vaccine recommendation today.

Back in 1988, an outbreak of 84 measles cases swept through Fort Lewis College in Durango. It caught public health officials completely by surprise because nearly every student on that campus had already received a measles shot. Under the guidance at that time,

one dose was supposed to be enough, so CDC researchers--not people playing politics--CDC researchers went to Durango to figure out what exactly had gone wrong, to learn from this surprising outcome. There, they discovered something that continues to inform our vaccine policy even today: While the virus infected students who had only received a single shot, not a single student who had had two doses got sick.

That campus in Durango became the proving ground for today's recommendation on measles. Based directly on what they saw at Fort Lewis and similar outbreaks at that time, the CDC updated its guidelines in 1989 to establish the two-dose MMR schedule recommended for every schoolchild in America today.

This updated recommendation paved the way for measles to be officially eliminated across the United States in the year 2000. That was a quarter of a century ago, when, following the science, this country eliminated measles; and for 30 years after that, routine vaccine recommendations have kept children safe and in the classroom.

Back then, faced with a public health emergency, we did what you would expect: We followed the evidence, updated our practices, and successfully prevented another outbreak of that scale or severity going forward. We learned from each other.

Today, we are taking the opposite approach. Instead of defending the settled science that saved millions of lives, President Trump and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., have spent months waging a campaign to promote skepticism, stoke fear, and amplify outright lies.

Look at what has happened in just the last few weeks. In August, President Trump signed an Executive order on childhood vaccines that overrides decades of settled scientific consensus. It encourages States to abandon school entry requirements. It recommends reducing the number of routine vaccines protecting our kids. And it calls for breaking up longstanding combination shots like the measles, mumps, and rubella-- MMR--vaccine into separate single-disease doses spread over multiple doctor visits. That recommendation ignores the basic, undeniable fact, which is that separate single-disease shots for measles, mumps, and rubella do not even exist in the U.S. market today. They are so obsolete, and we were following the science, such that those single shots that the President and the HHS Secretary are calling for don't even exist today.

And it ignores the evidence that we have from countries that have already tried to separate the dose and then reverted back because it didn't work. In the 1990s, Japan moved away from the combination MMR shot and attempted to separate the vaccines. The result was predictable. It was immediate and disastrous. They saw vaccination rates plummet and measles outbreaks surged. And, earlier this year, Japan officially abandoned the experiment--as we will, undoubtedly--and returned to the combined MMR vaccine.

We don't need to repeat another nation's mistake when the safety and lives of American children are on the line. And telling parents to ask for shots that don't exist today only plunges families into further chaos. It forces parents to schedule endless appointments, take time off work, and pay multiple copays for vaccines that used to be delivered safely in a single visit.

As everybody in this place knows, before I came to the Senate, I was the superintendent of schools in Denver. This was such a happy time every year, when people were coming back, bringing their kids back to school. And the last thing that they wanted to worry about was getting a free vaccine for their children or whether they should have that vaccine at all.

In those days, not that long ago, there was nobody worrying about a President or an HHS Secretary peddling misinformation that would lead to the biggest outbreak in measles that we have had in 30 years.

Things are hard enough as it is for families in Colorado and all across this country right now. We don't need to make matters worse by intentionally misleading them about what is safe and making it harder for them to get a free vaccine at the pharmacy down the street.

And, by the way, I know my colleagues here well enough to understand something that I don't think the administration understands. It is not good enough just to get your kid vaccinated. The other kids in the school need to be vaccinated. The other kids in the classroom need to be vaccinated for vaccines to work. And, until this administration, that wasn't controversial because we could see what the science told us.

And for families in rural Colorado, where healthcare access is already stretched thin and local hospitals are already in danger of going bankrupt because of the razor-thin margins, this burden that they are creating is almost unbearable.

And to make matters worse, the other week, the President told the American people that the MMR vaccine--a safe, lifesaving shot given to hundreds of millions of children over four decades--the President called it ``quite lethal''--``quite lethal.'' They had to send out Dr. Oz to clean up the record after that--the Director of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid. They had to send him out on live television to contradict the President of the United States, who said that this routine vaccine that we have relied upon to save millions of lives was ``quite lethal.''

Meanwhile, Secretary Kennedy spent last week serving as the keynote speaker for an anti-vax convention. In the middle of the worst measles surge our country has seen in 35 years, the Nation's top health official stood in front of a crowd of anti-science activists and reassured them that they have ``a strong and steadfast friend in the White House.''

I wish I could tell families trying to get their kids back to school that they have a steadfast friend in the White House, that they have somebody who is trying to make their life easier, not harder; to make it easier to bring up a kid, not harder.

When the leadership of HHS spends its time amplifying conspiracy theories, they are not making communities safer; they are driving down immunization rates, leaving our schools vulnerable, and putting the lives of Colorado's children directly in harm's way.

Today, Colorado has the sixth lowest measles vaccination rate in the nation for kindergartners. Only 87.7 percent of Colorado kindergartners have received both doses of their MMR vaccine, and that is well below the 95 percent threshold for herd immunity. In fact, 57 out of Colorado's 64 counties now fail to meet that basic safety line.

My message to Colorado parents from this floor tonight is simple: Vaccines are safe, they are effective, and they remain our strongest defense against diseases like measles.

And when we allow misinformation to drive down vaccination rates, we aren't just failing to meet an important public health indicator; we are failing moms in Aurora and in Pueblo and in Durango. We are failing pediatricians like Dr. Stinar in Grand Junction, who are fighting on the frontlines of this disease; and we are failing vulnerable children across Colorado who have no choice in the matter.

Parents, pediatricians, and families across Colorado should be able to expect more from their government. They deserve certainty. They deserve clear communication. They deserve to know that their public health system is designed to keep them safe, rather than to pursue another political agenda that has nothing to do with their education or their health.

I think we should be having a debate in this country about the state of healthcare in the United States of America and about the ways in which we failed this generation and the next generation in providing a system that actually delivers better healthcare at a reasonable price and mental health care at a reasonable price, instead of plunging people into further misery or into bankruptcy.

I wish we were having that debate on the Senate floor, but we can't begin to have that until the basic facts about science and medicine are taken seriously by this administration. The President should start by rescinding his Executive order today on childhood vaccines. He should fire Secretary Kennedy, as I have long called for. But until that happens--and I don't think it is going to happen in the foreseeable future. Until that happens, we are

going to be stuck fighting battles against a disease that we functionally eliminated 30 years ago. Kids and families in Colorado and all across this country deserve so much better than that.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I am here with another unanimous consent request, and I appreciate the Senator from Florida, Senator Scott, for being here to participate in this exchange.

I keep coming here to try to reinforce the obvious, scientifically clear point that climate change is real, that that is a simple scientific fact.

The way this has gone is that I came to the floor earlier this year and asked my colleagues to agree on that simple scientific fact: Climate change is real and, frankly, our fossil fuel emissions are causing it.

Well, I guess it is no surprise, but my Republican colleagues would not agree to that fact. So I have returned to the floor, time and again, in hopes that my Republican colleagues could agree to some of the simpler truths contained within that truth. Each time faced with well-documented truths about sea level rise or wide-ranging climate economic fallout, Republicans have objected.

Well, climate change isn't stopping or slowing down, and I won't either. So today's simple truth is that climate change is making wildfires more frequent, more intense, and more destructive. My question is, can we not all agree on that?

Here is some background. This chart from the National Interagency Fire Center shows that average U.S. acreage burned annually by wildfires has almost tripled in the last three decades, and the upward drift of the chart is pretty obvious.

The science proving that climate change makes wildfires worse is both clear and straightforward, and it has been well-known for decades. It is not new.

In fact, wildfires are part of a climate upheaval that Big Oil itself predicted. Shell, for instance, in a 1989 confidential planning document, warned that if fossil fuels were not brought under control, ``there would be more violent weather--more storms, more droughts, more deluges. Mean sea level would rise at least 30 cm. Agricultural patterns would be most dramatically

changed. . . . Boundaries would count for little--overwhelmed by the numbers. Conflicts would abound. Civilization could prove a fragile thing.''

That is what Big Oil said about climate change effects from their product back in 1989: ``Civilization could prove a fragile thing.''

This is the underlying temperature increase that is driving the droughts that Shell predicted nearly 40 years ago. So, first, we know that fossil fuel emissions--climate change--is increasing global temperatures. You can't read it. This goes back to 1860. This is a pretty longtime chart in this instance. This is now.

So how does it work? What does that heat do to drive wildfires? Well, warmer air draws more moisture out of the soil, out of plants, out of bodies of water. There is a scientific name for this. NOAA calls the phenomenon evaporative demand or sometimes atmospheric thirst.

But you don't have to use scientific language to understand it. You just watch a puddle dry up on a hot day. That is what you are seeing. NASA, NOAA, and the Forest Service call drought conditions like these fire weather--fire weather.

According to NASA's website on wildfires and climate change, ``human- caused climate change [is] the main cause for increasing fire weather in the American West.''

Now, it is about a quarter of 6 this evening when I read that quote from NASA's website. You might want to start the shot clock on how long it takes for the fossil fuel goons to get in there and change the website.

Climate change makes droughts last longer. The Forest Service reports that what was once a 4-month fire season now lasts 6 to 8 months. So there are more opportunities for any spark to start a dangerous blaze.

And climate changes make drought conditions worse; that is, drier; that is, with more flammable material. So those fires that do start in that longer season are more likely to become severe.

In January of 2025, a collection of wildfires in the Los Angeles metro area burned through over 15,000 homes and businesses, killed more than two dozen people, and poisoned the air with toxic pollution.

Mr. President, 2026 is already on track for one of the worst wildfire seasons on record. August wildfires in Spokane, WA, caused over $1 billion in damage and destroyed over 800 people's homes. In July, wildfire smoke blanketed much of the country and degraded air quality for tens of millions of people.

Researchers have found that the number of people in the United States who experience at least one extreme smoke day per year is up 27 times in the last decade. So if you used to have one extreme smoke day in your life, now you have 27 in the same period of time.

Every county in the continental United States experiences degraded air quality from wildfire smoke at least 16 times every year, and the cost of that is real. Air pollution from wildfire smoke makes people sicker and causes deaths.

Scientists have known for decades--decades--that climate change is making wildfires worse. More recently, the data has gotten more precise. We can now connect climate change to specific individual events.

In the case of the L.A. fires, scientists from the World Weather Attribution and Imperial College London found that climate change made the weather conditions that drove these fires 35 percent more likely.

This kind of analysis is called climate attribution. The National Academies recently released a comprehensive report on the current capabilities of climate attribution, including on wildfires. To no one's surprise, the fossil fuel industry and its allies are already out to discredit this work.

In the face of tens of thousands of Americans losing their homes to wildfires, millions more facing skyrocketing insurance premiums as wildfire risk becomes either unavailable or unaffordable, and the risk of crashing home values--because when you can't insure your home, guess what. You can't get a mortgage on your home.

And if you are the kind of person who bought your home with a mortgage and needs somebody with a mortgage to buy it from you when it is time to sell, that crashes the value of your home. It destroys its worth.

Well, in the face of those facts, the traditional response of the fossil fuel industry is to try and hide the truth, but there is truth, and the truth is climate change is making wildfires more frequent, more intense, and more destructive. And I really hope that we are able to agree on that.

Mr. President, so notwithstanding rule XXII, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs be discharged and the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of S. Res. 559; further, that the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, and the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. President, I am looking forward to the day when the Senator from Florida and I can be working together on these issues.

As he knows very well, the University of Florida teaches the science of climate change. They have courses like Managing for a Changing Climate, Climate Change and Health, Climate Change Science and Solutions, Oceans and Global Climate Change, and many, many others.

And it would be great if the science that the University of Florida teaches were also respected and reflected here on the Senate floor. It is more than just the University of Florida getting it right.

This also lands in Florida in big ways because while wildfire may not be an issue in the good Senator's State, flooding sure is. And that same cascade of risk that I talked about--starting with climate risk, hitting insurance security, moving into mortgage availability, clobbering property values, and then leading to recession--is well underway in Florida.

Some have called it the great climate insurance collapse, and in that very difficult situation, Florida is first and worst into that danger. Climate risk first; insurance collapse, second; mortgage market suffering, third--all of those things are happening.

Indeed, the chief economist from Freddie Mac, who is not a green guy--he is a finance and mortgage guy--warned there was a coastal property values crash coming.

And as we go through those different stages from climate risk to insurance to mortgages to property values, unfortunately, Florida led the country last year in lost property values, which is at least, in part, I think a function of this risk and how it is hammering Florida homeowners.

So you don't really get away from this kind of a general risk. The insurance industry is not lying to everybody. They are not leaving customers who pay their premiums because they don't like the customer. They are leaving customers who pay their premiums because the property is no longer insurable.

And what we are seeing here across the United States is massive predictions in insurance rate increase, and Florida is really at the epicenter of that. This dark band is a 200-percent to 300-percent increase, and you see it all along the Florida coast. They are running at about $14,000 already in insurance costs for homes in Florida. Double that--not double it, add 200 percent and add 300 percent. That is actually tripling and quadrupling. You can see how that begins to hammer the home's value.

And here, you see a similar problem. This isn't just a cost problem; this is a nonrenewal problem. It is going to end up costing you more money once you are nonrenewed--absolutely. But you also have to go through the immediate hassle and worry and anxiety of finding out how the heck you are going to insure your home once your insurance company has nonrenewed you.

And you can see the focus of nonrenewal is along these coastal areas, very heavily in Florida, and then in some of these wildfire areas that we talked about out in California.

So this continues to come at us. It is focused on certain geographic areas more than others, but no place more than Florida.

So I look forward to working with the good Senator from Florida on finding solutions before the bottom falls out of his insurance, mortgage, and real estate markets.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to H.R. 2550. Americans pay several hundred billion dollars in taxes each year to fund the salaries and benefits of more than 2 million Federal civilian employees. These workers are paid to carry out the critical mission and functions of the Federal Government, but the more than 340 million Americans who foot the bill do not directly manage Federal executive branch employees. They elect a President to do that.

The President directs the workforce of the executive branch so he can fulfill his constitutional duty to ensure the laws of the land are faithfully executed.

When President Trump ran for office last year, he told the American public that if--if elected, he would return Federal employees to their offices, reform the bureaucracy, and restore much-needed accountability to the workforce. The American people chose to elect him to do just that.

Even before President Trump took office, Federal collective bargaining legal authorities were weaponized to sabotage what Americans had voted for. On their way out the door, lameduck Biden administration officials signed collective bargaining agreements with Federal employee union bosses specifically designed to tie the hands of incoming President Trump.

In January, at our very first hearing this Congress, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform heard testimony from President Biden's Social Security Commissioner, Martin O'Malley. He cut a deal with union bosses after the November election and just before leaving the agency to run for chair of the Democratic National Committee.

The deal locked in telework levels for tens of thousands of Social Security Administration employees for the entirety of the incoming Trump administration. To be clear, this was done specifically to Trump- proof the workforce and to force the incoming President to continue the failed management policies the public had just voted to end.

We must ask: Are we going to uphold the President's constitutional role as head of the executive branch?

Can he truly lead if he is held hostage by union deals to which he never

agreed and were intended to undermine his authority?

Should an elected President be unable to bring tax-funded Federal employees back to work for his entire 4-year term?

The American people do not think so.

That is why the House Committee on Oversight and Reform adopted legislation that would allow the President to manage the workforce without being bound by last-minute union agreements designed to undermine him. That legislation, the Preserving Presidential Management Authority Act, sponsored by Representative Cloud of Texas, is the bill we should be debating here today.

It is important to remember that public-sector unions are fundamentally different from their private-sector counterparts. In fact, none other than Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a major champion of private-sector unions, believed that public-sector unions made no sense. FDR wrote: ``The process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service.''

Why is that? In the private sector, unions represent workers and sit across the bargaining table from representatives of businessowners. However, Federal unions are not negotiating with a profit-seeking corporation. They are negotiating with the public's elected representatives.

As FDR put it in the case of the public sector, the employer is the whole people. Federal unions, in other words, seek concessions not from private owners but from the taxpayers themselves.

Since Federal salaries and benefits are determined by laws, which also establish basic civil service protections for employees, what exactly do Federal unions bargain over? They bargain over conditions of employment like telework.

Unions also seek contract provisions that limit management's ability to hold employees accountable through disciplinary procedures or performance management processes.

I urge my colleagues to buck Federal union bosses. Put Americans first and oppose the so-called Protect America's Workforce Act.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

General Leave

Mr. Speaker, I yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Cloud).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Biggs).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Gill).

Mr. Speaker, I yield an additional 1 minute to the gentleman.

Mr. Speaker, that was a long minute for the leader of the Democratic Party to advocate for more work-from-home policies for our Federal employees.

I think the American people have spoken loud and clear. They support our Federal employees, like the Republican Party, but we expect them to show up for work, not get paid to be home and not be accessible by phone or by computer or by email.

That is what we heard from the leader of the Democratic Party.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, she mentioned healthcare, and the healthcare system that she is talking about that she says has failed is ObamaCare, what they voted for and they created. I just find it ironic.

I hope every taxpayer in America who gets up in the morning, drives to work, works hard, and pays their taxes is listening to this debate because there is a difference here.

What the President is trying to do is make government more efficient. The argument I am hearing here, and I think the people who work hard and pay taxes are hearing, there is not a single government agency that is at any time inefficient. Every single Federal employee is at 100 percent efficiency and doesn't need to be held accountable. They can work from home and do whatever they want.

We support the Federal workforce. We want to make the Federal workforce hardier. We want the taxpayers to get their money's worth out of the hard-earned taxes that they send to Washington.

What this legislation is doing and the goal is to try to hinder the President's ability to get the backs of the American taxpayer and ensure that every government agency is efficient and every Federal employee is working hard, just like the taxpayers who work hard and pay taxes and send their tax dollars here to Congress for us to appropriate.

I think that is an important part of the discussion that needs to be mentioned on the floor. I hope that a lot of people in America, working hard, frustrated with Washington are watching this debate. I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, the President has been fighting back against the deals that public sector unions have negotiated for themselves at the expense of the American taxpayer by invoking an existing legal authority.

H.R. 2550 directly threatens that progress by overturning the President's executive order that exercises one of the few tools available to him under the law to more effectively manage the Federal workforce.

Now, it is no secret that accountability problems in the Federal workforce are legendary. It takes a Herculean effort to fire a poorly performing Federal worker or one who is engaged in misconduct.

Collective bargaining agreements often create procedural hurdles to firing such employees, above and beyond steps required in law and regulation.

For example, unions can bring removals before private arbitrators instead of appealing to the Merit Systems Protection Board.

The Trump administration is exercising its electoral mandate to address this problem.

For instance, the President has embarked on an ambitious overhaul of the performance management system and is pursuing more streamlined disciplinary procedures.

The reality is that preexisting union agreements the President never signed onto can subvert these efforts. They provide barriers to accountability beyond basic employee protections that exist in law. Perhaps the most inappropriate aspect of Federal collective bargaining agreements come from provisions governing the use of official time, which is when Federal employees are paid by taxpayers to do union business.

Indeed, many Federal employees spend all their time doing union business. More than 3 million Federal employee work hours were spent doing union business time in 2024 alone, according to the OPM report.

The cost to American taxpayers in salary and benefits was more than $200 million. There was an additional $31 million cost for related expenses, primarily the provision of Federal meeting space. The only reason we know this is that the Trump administration collected and reported this 2024 data.

House Oversight Committee Republicans have attempted to legislate annual public reporting on the use and abuse of official time. However, Democrats have consistently opposed even this ounce of accountability.

They have another opportunity to change their ways by supporting the current version of this legislation H.R. 5749, the Official Time Reporting Act. However, if my colleagues on the other side of the aisle are not interested in supporting legislative reforms to bring accountability to the Federal workforce and public sector unions, they should at the very least not roll back existing progress made under this administration.

I, therefore, call on my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to stand with the American taxpayer by supporting the administration's efforts to bring accountability to the executive branch's workforce and oppose H.R. 2550.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, $43.6 billion and counting--that is the Pentagon's estimate for how much it has spent on this illegal war in Iran. Now, that is a lot of money. In fact, it is so much money that if every American family gave $500, you still wouldn't have enough to pay for this war--the missiles, the munitions, the warships. Over $43 billion of taxpayer money with no discernible benefit--wasted.

But I don't want to talk about what $43 billion includes. Today, I want to talk about what that number doesn't include. Wars aren't measured just in dollars and cents; they are measured in

lives lost, whether Americans feel safer at home, better off. And by all these accounts, the costs are enormous.

Take the 19 brave servicemembers whose deaths have been disclosed by the Pentagon. That is 19 families who have lost someone irreplaceable. In just a few weeks, children are going to trick-or-treat without their parent. A few weeks later, parents and families will gather for Thanksgiving with an empty seat at the table.

``I will never recover from this,'' one widow wrote on social media.

What is even more heartbreaking is that we don't know exactly how many servicemembers have died in the Middle East amid this war. Reports say that the Pentagon is not being transparent with Congress or the American people. What we know is that every one of those lives lost deserves our gratitude, and every one of those families deserves an accurate accounting of this war's human cost.

Since February, more than 800 servicemembers have been wounded in the Middle East. Some went days without receiving adequate hospital care. Many face life-altering injuries. Tens of thousands of their fellow servicemembers are still deployed, fighting a war that this administration still refuses to call a war. Back at home, their loved ones are left worrying and wondering whether their loved ones will get home for the holidays. You are not going to find any of those costs in the $43 billion pricetag.

There has also been a staggering cost in America's loss to national security. Since June, the war has consumed between one-half and two- thirds of our key missile defense interceptors. Even with increased production rates, it will take at least 5 years to rebuild those stockpiles. Every interceptor we fire in Iran is one that we don't have protecting this country in the future.

Iranian strikes have damaged or destroyed hundreds of buildings and structures on U.S. bases, along with our relationships with the allies and partners who agreed to host them as a bulwark against the aggressions of Iran. That premise has been turned on its head.

At the same time, we have shown Iran that it can seize control of one of the world's most critical waterways and literally bring global trade to a stop, bring it to its knees. A quarter of the world's oil and a third of the world's fertilizer trade used to flow through the Strait of Hormuz. No longer. We have given our adversaries a roadmap and even a test drive for holding the global economy hostage, which the Houthis have already exploited in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait.

America's adversaries are celebrating our distraction, this futility, and the mounting costs. Every dollar we spend on Iran is a dollar we are not spending modernizing our military to protect against the threat of an ascendant China. Every warship that is deployed to the Arabian Sea is one fewer warship that is available to protect the South China Sea. But you are not going to find those costs in the $43 billion pricetag either.

And then there is the cost, well, to you, the American people. You are paying for this war every day when you fill up your tank, when you buy groceries, when you pay your rent. Before the war, the national average for diesel was $3.72 per gallon. This week, it is over $6.50 per gallon for diesel. That is nearly a 75-percent increase. That means that a small farmer using 1,000 gallons of diesel during a harvest is paying roughly $2,800 more just to do the same work as before the war. Even Republicans have said it: This is ``killing farmers' income''-- that that is what this war is doing: ``killing farmers' income.''

The war is also impacting Americans' grocery bills. Between July of 2025 and July of 2026, fresh vegetable prices increased over 6 percent, beef rose over 9 percent, and tomatoes are up over 13 percent. You shouldn't have to be a millionaire to drive to the grocery store and feed your family.

Few have felt the financial cost of this war more than prospective home buyers. Before the Iran war, the average 30-year mortgage rate was hovering right around 6 percent--still too high for many families. Today, it is above 7 percent. For the average Colorado home buyer, that difference adds up fast. That is a mortgage that is $280 more every month, almost $4,000 a year, and over $100,000 over the course of a 30- year mortgage. That is real money that could go to childcare, to a child's college savings, or just their lifetime savings. For many, it means buying a home just doesn't make financial sense right now, even if you have been saving up for years. You won't see those tradeoffs reflected in the Pentagon's $43 billion pricetag for this war.

Let me ask, finally, what is the cost of this war on our democracy? James Madison once wrote to his friend Thomas Jefferson that ``the Executive is the branch of power most interested in war, and most prone to it.'' That is why the Founders gave Congress the power to declare war--not the President, not the Supreme Court; Congress. Yet, so far, not a single Senator has introduced a legislative measure to formally declare war on Iran.

The Presiding Officer may have noticed that up until now, I haven't mentioned President Trump. That is not because the President bears no responsibility for this war. He certainly does. President Trump unilaterally made the decision to enter this costly--for most people, unwarranted--war. But the decision about whether it continues does rest with Congress.

To my colleagues, Republicans and Democrats, who are wrestling with this issue, just ask yourself, is this war making the lives of your constituents any better? That isn't a partisan question; it is a question every Senator has an obligation to ask and a responsibility to get the response for. Because whether the President is a Republican or a Democrat, Congress cannot surrender its constitutional power simply because the President belongs to our party.

We all, each and every Senator--we all took an oath to defend the Constitution, not a President. We all took an oath to serve the American people, not a party.

President Trump made the decision to enter this war, but whether this war continues is now a decision for all of us.

What is the true cost of this war and the cost of allowing it to continue? Well, this week, the Senate is going to get another chance to decide.

I urge, as I have been--I urge all of my colleagues to join me in voting to end this war now and for good.

I yield the floor.