A bill to ensure the prudent obligation of budget authority, and for other purposes.

Madam President, we have a challenge--a problem--and that is the President is exercising a line-item veto, and line-item vetoes are unconstitutional because the Constitution assigns the power of the purse to Congress, not to the President of the United States.

Laws are not suggestions. The Constitution is not optional. A President is not a King. That was the Founders' vision for our democratic Republic.

But on Friday, President Trump swung a wrecking ball at the Founders' vision, at the Constitution. He and Russ Vought, the head of the Office of Management and Budget, proceeded to--in the dark of night--notify that they were canceling nearly a billion dollars in programs authorized and funded by law.

Well, let's be clear. Canceling resources for these programs is both illegal and unconstitutional--illegal because the funding is in law, passed by Congress and signed into law by the President himself, and unconstitutional because the Constitution creates a separation of powers, with the power of the purse belonging to Congress, not the President.

This has been tested a few times. In 1996, Congress tried to give the President a line-item veto, and the Supreme Court struck it down. It struck it down as unconstitutional because it violated the Constitution's separation of powers.

Yesterday, the independent, nonpartisan Government Accountability Office reaffirmed that this strategy by Trump, called a pocket rescission--a fancy name for a line-item veto--is illegal. Here is what they said. I will quote it at some length.

GAO has previously concluded that the Impoundment Control

Act does not permit the withholding of funds past their date

of expiration.

The plain language of the ICA provides that amounts

proposed for rescission must be made available for obligation

unless Congress completes action on a bill rescinding them.

The legislative history of the ICA, Supreme Court precedent,

and the overarching constitutional framework . . . compel

this conclusion.

Therefore, the rescission proposals contained in the

President's September 25, 2026, special message to Congress

do not permit the President to withhold the appropriations

beyond the end of fiscal year 2026.

And that fiscal year--we are hours away from it ending.

So, in other words, more simply put, it is Congress' job to design, authorize, and fund programs. It is the Executive's job--the President and his team's job--to implement those programs. The assignment of responsibilities is designed to ensure that we have a government that serves the people.

In a democratic republic, the people's representatives in Congress-- from every part of the country, from every walk of life--debate and negotiate and legislate so that you will have programs and spending decisions that reflect the needs of every part of the Nation. We don't just deliver programs for red States when Republicans have the majority; we don't just deliver programs for blue States when Democrats have the majority--no. All of us, working together, produce spending bills to serve people throughout this country--urban and rural, north and south, east and west, plains and coast. However you want to divide up the country, we serve everyone. So a President taking those bipartisan agreements to serve everyone and canceling out individual programs is both illegal and unconstitutional.

But in an authoritarian, strongman state it is all different. The President alone decides what gets funded and can use that power to reward allies and punish opponents. In those states, there is no separation of powers; there is one authority. Call it a King. Call it a czar. Call it an emperor or a dictator or a tyrant. Whatever you call it, it doesn't fit in a democratic republic.

We do not have a tyrant or a dictator. We do not have a King. We have

a President with responsibilities under the Constitution to implement the programs that we design, authorize, and fund here in Congress. That is how you get government by and for the people rather than by and for a billionaire or by and for an elite class or by and for a King himself.

But last year, Trump did exercise his strategy of operating as a King in a, if you will, line-item veto through this fancy term ``pocket rescission,'' canceling nearly $5 billion in programs authorized and funded by law.

That tool, called a rescission, was created under the 1974 Impoundment Control Act, and it allows the President to propose canceling a program, but it also says that cancellation does not take effect unless Congress votes to cancel the programs, and we haven't voted to cancel these programs. So, therefore, that is why it is illegal to cancel them.

Well, it is pretty straightforward. The law says that no rescission or cancellation goes into effect without Congress authorizing the cancellation by law.

Madam President, I have here what I would ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record, a statement from the chair of Appropriations, Senator Susan Collins.

Madam President, we have heard tonight from the independent Government Accounting Office that what the President did in proposing and putting forward this line-item veto is illegal. We have heard in the words of the Republican chairman of the Appropriations Committee that this is illegal. We have heard colleagues speak tonight from different directions about why it is illegal--because the Constitution makes it so. The Constitution says the power of the purse rests with Congress.

There have been undoubtedly a number of Presidents who wish they had a line-item veto. Nixon tried. He cut funds that had been passed into law, and the Supreme Court said: Nope, you can't do that. Have you read the Constitution, President Nixon? That is not just illegal; that is unconstitutional.

Then in 1996, Congress tried to actually shed its responsibility and give the President a line-item veto and say: Hey, Mr. President, we passed these bipartisan spending bills, but strike out anything you want.

The Supreme Court responded and said: No, Congress, you actually have this responsibility. You can't assign it to the Supreme Court. You can't assign it to the President. No, the Constitution places it squarely on Congress.

There is a reason for that, and that is, Congress represents the power of the people from every corner of the land coming together to craft programs and to decide how to fund them that serves this Nation. To delineate or to assign that important function representing people throughout the Nation and say ``None of that matters; the President can just kill any program he wants'' is to believe in a King.

I have news for my colleagues: There is no King in the Constitution. That is why we are here tonight.

There is also a very practical consideration. If you craft bipartisan spending bills that serve every part of the country, but then a partisan President can strike down the ones that, well, maybe are more likely represented by Senators from the other party or House Members from the other party, well, then you have undermined the whole concept of us working together to serve the whole Nation, and therefore you make it very difficult to do bipartisan bills in the future.

So that is why so many people have come to speak to this. That is why the chair of the Appropriations Committee put out such a powerful statement on it. That is certainly why I am here tonight. And that is why we have come to the floor with a bill, S. 5670, to fix this-- because the President, in exercising this line-item veto, said: I am going to do something clever. I am simply going to hold on to the funds that I am supposed to spend under the law until there is no time left in the fiscal year, in the financial year--a year that expires a couple hours from now.

So as if in legislative session and notwithstanding rule XXII, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of S. 5670, introduced earlier today; further, that the bill be considered read three times and passed and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Madam President, the Constitution matters. And what does the Constitution say?

No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in

Consequence of Appropriations made by law.

That is pretty straightforward, and yet my colleague from Wisconsin just wanted to shred the Constitution. He says: It doesn't matter. We want a President to cancel programs.

He said he wouldn't even care if it was a different President.

Imagine a different President canceling programs in his home State. Maybe that Senator would be singing a somewhat different tune.

And then we saw that debt chart. Wow, well, let's understand where that debt comes from: the war in Afghanistan, from a Republican President; the war in Iraq, from a Republican President; the Bush tax cuts--1 and 2--for the billionaires and megamillionaires, from a Republican President; the tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires under Trump 1 and 2. Those are the sources of that debt.

And so it would be a nice thing if someone would come to the floor about debt--from the other side of the aisle--and would actually own that they are the problem, that they have been pissing away our national wealth on foreign wars and giveaways to the richest and most powerful Americans, running up last year a bill that added $30 trillion to the debt over the next 30 years.

I didn't hear that in the commentary from my colleague from Wisconsin nor did I hear from him that he knows that if the interest rate is 1 percent higher than the Congressional Budget Office estimated, that $30 trillion debt that he voted for last year will be $50 trillion over the next 30 years.

And do you know what else? The estimate used for that debt was 4 percent, and right now we are paying 5 percent. So we are already 1 percent higher.

It just would be nice that those who preach fiscal responsibility would not continue to be the ones who are spending this Nation into bankruptcy. That would be nice because then we would have funds to invest in families, healthcare, and housing and education and good- paying jobs.

This century is going to belong to the nations that invest in education and infrastructure, not to the ones that give away the national Treasury to the richest Americans and say: The hell with families across this great land.

Madam President, congressional stock trading is profoundly corrupt. We in this Chamber were elected to serve the public, not our portfolio.

But what do the American people see? They see Senators and Representatives who are thinking about their portfolios when they are voting on different measures, including a whole lot of tax credits and tax deductions. They are both different elements.

If someone in this Chamber is sitting on a significant holding--let's say renewable energy stocks--they might be thinking about: I want to promote those stocks, rather than ask the question: Is this the right move for America?

What if they are sitting on fossil fuel stocks or oil stocks or maybe Wall Street stocks and they are thinking, ``I want to give a big break to the banking community on Wall Street to inflate my personal wealth''? That is just absolutely wrong. It is a massive conflict of interest.

About now, 14 years ago, Senator Sherrod Brown and I introduced the idea that we should end this stock trading, and that means buying, that means selling, and that means holding.

It has been a while to build the momentum on this, but even the President of the United States, in his last State of the Union, said we should attack this problem.

And the American people see that, while Members here are thinking about their portfolios--trying to make themselves richer, corrupting their votes on the issues before us--they are suffering.

Instead of thinking about your stock portfolio, maybe you should be thinking about the price of gas at the pump, maybe thinking about the cost of diesel and fertilizer for our farmers, maybe thinking about a war of choice--an unconstitutional war of choice--that is spending more than $1 billion a day.

Maybe we should be thinking about the fact that we have the most expensive healthcare system that delivers the least effective healthcare for a person in the developed world, and maybe we need to improve it.

Maybe we need to think about the fact that the career technical programs in other developed programs--other developed countries--are pretty good and maybe ours should be better.

Maybe we should think about the fact that college debt is a millstone around the neck of our children, when children in other countries are able to go to college debt free.

Maybe we should care about families instead of thinking about our portfolios.

The American people see Congress--the House and Senate Members--and

the President of the United States cashing in on stock trades. The President of the United States actually invested in stocks before announcing big agreements for major companies--buying Dell stock before a major announcement, buying Nvidia stock before a major announcement.

Come on. This is massively corrupt, and we should be ending it. So let's end it.

Entry-level employees and executive branch Agencies are required to recuse themselves from conflicts of interest, but Senators and Representatives think it is just fine to get rich on conflicts of interest and corrupt their representation of the public.

That is why we need the ETHICS Act, which would ban Members of Congress and their spouses, their dependents, and the President and the Vice President and their dependents from owning, trading, or holding individual stocks. If they want to invest in America, invest in a broad-based mutual fund that has establishment in all of these industries at once, like the S&P 500 fund.

Members of Congress should be banned from making new trades, and Members of Congress will have to divest their holdings or move them to mutual funds.

There is so much corruption that we need to tackle--banning crypto corruption; banning funding for Trump's gold-plated, billion-dollar boondoggle; stopping insider trading on prediction markets; implementing a binding code of ethics for the Supreme Court; outlawing the taxpayer-funded ``cash for cronies'' slush funds, like the President arranged with his $1.8 billion fund when he sued himself to award himself $1.8 billion of money; banning Members of Congress to have a longer period before they serve as lobbyists; and more.

But Congress can lead by example. Right now, let's pass the ETHICS Act.

Now, some may say: Well, wait. Isn't there this bill coming from the House?

That House bill leaves people holding the very portfolios that we have to get rid of. It preserves the conflicts of interest. That is pretty damn weak tea--keeping the corruption and legitimizing it--and, meanwhile, throwing in an extra measure on the bill that proceeds to engage in the effort to rig the November election.

Wow, well, that is certainly not a serious effort to address this corruption. But the ETHICS Act, it is that serious effort. Let's pass it. Let's ban Members of Congress from trading stocks. Let's make it clear to every American that we are here to serve the people, not our portfolios

Madam President, as if in legislative session and notwithstanding rule XXII, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of the bill at the desk, the ETHICS Act; further, that the bill be considered read three times and passed, and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Madam President, I wish my colleague had actually got a bunch of things right, but he got a bunch of things wrong.

I don't know what propaganda he was reading, from what source that wants to continue the corruption.

But he said that the bill that came earlier today said you could not hold stocks. It actually allows you to hold those individual stocks. It allows the corruption to continue. And yet, he is saying: Oh, I voted for this great bill because it bans holding of stocks. But he is wrong.

There is a reason this was done. It was to allow a vote in the House, a vote in the House that pretended to address the issue, rather than addressing the issue.

And we have had a bill virtually parallel to this bill come through committee. It has been worked on in committee. Many of these elements and nuances--great. Fine. Let's continue that conversation. But don't come to this floor and misrepresent the bill that you voted on earlier tonight as having banned the holding of stocks because it allows it.

And second, blind trusts. They are called bogus blind trusts. As one Member of this body said to me: I meet every quarter with the guy who runs my blind trust.

You want another example? Who runs a blind trust for the President of the United States? His family runs it. His son is involved in running his blind trust.

Are you kidding me? Everyone understands blind trusts are not blind. So bring a bill that doesn't have bogus blind trusts.

It has an extensive exemption for small businesses, and yet we heard a lot of conversation about small businesses.

And then voter ID. Can't we be honest about the voter ID strategy? It was written to disenfranchise--fancy word for block citizens from voting that Republicans don't want to vote.

The President put forward an Executive order that said: You have to submit your voter roll to the President's team, they will decide who votes, and send the list back to you.

And then they went and got an ethics act--not an ethics act--SAVE Act--the SAVE Act. What did the SAVE Act say? The same thing. The President gets to decide who votes. That didn't pass here. And it didn't even have a majority support here, let alone supermajority support.

So, the President did another Executive order. And under this order, the President would strike down--his team would strike down people that look suspect to them.

What are we talking about? We are talking about 64 million American women whose last names do not match their birth certificate. Your name doesn't match your birth certificate, you can't vote. And the President could strike this down right before the election, making it impossible for people to proceed to get reauthorized to vote. And they couldn't even get reauthorized to vote, reregistered to vote, using their birth certificate. Wow.

And they didn't want Native Americans to vote, so they put in a provision that said any ID that doesn't have an expiration date is excluded. Well, you know, you are not a Tribal member year by year or month by month, my friends. You are a Tribal member for life. They don't have expiration dates. They knew that, and they put it in to stop Native Americans from voting.

Why? Why do you want to stop women from voting? Because they vote more on the blue side of the aisle.

Why do they write those ID requirements to stop Tribal members from voting? Because they vote more on the ``D'' side of the aisle.

People have called this Jim Crow 2.0. What are they talking about? After the Civil War, we had a national consensus, we were going to protect people's right to vote. And in the South, you had a lot of States that had a majority of Black citizens.

To this very Chamber, 2 U.S. Senators were elected from Mississippi; 14 Members of the House were elected from the South that were Black Americans. And then reconstruction ended in a horrific deal that was struck and the result was almost a century of blocking Black Americans from voting. And that is what the President wants to do.

Not specifically Black Americans, not the same way, but any group that votes predominantly on the blue side of the aisle.

Now, we actually had a bill, and it was called the Freedom to Vote Act. It had ID in it, but it wasn't ID designed in a partisan fashion.

So I say to my good colleagues: How about you actually come forward with a version of ID that isn't designed for partisan advantage? That would honor the vision of the Constitution. That was what was in the Freedom to Vote Act.

And the President wants to attack vote-by-mail. And why is that? Vote-by-mail is the highest integrity system in the land, bar none. Why is that? Because on election day, it is easy to manipulate the election.

Here is what you do: You change the location of the precinct voting from the previous year so people go to the wrong place; you proceed to put out false information about the location; you put out the wrong date for voting; you put out text messages--and this has been done-- saying ``sorry you missed the election last week, hope you will vote next year'' when the election is actually coming up the next Tuesday; you put in machines that don't work; you put in staff members that don't work; you perceive to create 8-hour lines like they created in the urban areas of Georgia--recent history.

That manipulation can't be done in vote-by-mail. That is why the President hates vote-by-mail, because it stops the rigging of American elections on election day.

And it has this very powerful form of voter ID called a signature. The same thing we use to verify checks and so many other transactions in life. Same signature we use on our marriage certificates. Same signature we use on financial transactions. And if the signature doesn't match, it gets challenged, and a voter has a chance to cure it.

My point here is that the bill that came before this Chamber earlier today was designed to rig the November election--my colleagues know that--and it allowed the corruption in stockholding to continue.

That is why we are creating and putting forward a real bill with real ethics tonight.

Madam President.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to enter into a colloquy with my colleagues Senator Curtis and Senator Armstrong.

Mr. President, I have the privilege--I have been in the Senate for 12 years, and I have never led a codel, but I decided one last trip that I wanted to take before I left the Senate was to get back over to Ukraine to really understand what is going on, on the ground and maybe what message we should convey to our colleagues here in the Senate and to our--to the administration and to the American people.

This is the second time I went to Ukraine. We also had a very, very productive visit with the government leaders in Poland before we traveled over to Kyiv and then to Kharkiv. We were actually the first delegation since the war began that has been able to get out to Kharkiv where the fighting is only about 10 or so miles away from the city's center.

But as we were going on the trip--well, first, when you are in Kyiv, which we spent the first 24 hours, it is an amazing sight to see a country that was illegally invaded that is being bombed on a daily basis still trying to have some semblance of normalcy--and this is in Kyiv.

But then when you go to Kharkiv and you see, as you are riding out there, civilian targets: gas stations, convenience stores, schools, and buildings that have all been bombed by the indiscriminate bombing of Russia, it gives you a real sense of the devastation, the heartbreak, and all that is wrong with the decision that Vladimir Putin made to invade a sovereign nation.

And I, for one, think that the war--I agree with the people of Ukraine. That invasion started in 2014. As a matter of fact, I remember vividly when I was campaigning in 2014 how critical I was of the Obama administration; in the face of an illegal invasion, the idea was to send them blankets, not to send them the support that they needed to repel a foreign invader.

Now fast forward, they are invaded again, and they are doing the same things in the outer reaches of Ukraine that they have been doing in Crimea. They are trying to--they tell kids in Crimea in school that the leaders of Ukraine are Nazis; that they are there for the denazification of Ukraine.

I find that rich since the President of Ukraine is Jewish, but that is what Vladimir Putin is telling his folks to tell these kids in school; that they are subhuman; that the people of Ukraine are. You can't think of them as human beings; you think of them as life forms that they need to eliminate.

But later on in the colloquy, I want to talk about what we need to do. But I also want to go back to a trip that I took a couple of years ago, my first time into Kyiv, and the devastation and the stories that I witnessed in an area called Bucha.

I did a floor speech after that visit, and I really want the American people to understand what happened there in about the first month of the war shortly after they invaded that February 2022.

Vladimir Putin directly allowed mercenaries and military officers to authorize their folks on the ground to indiscriminately kill innocent civilians.

There are numerous reports of rape of a daughter, rape of a wife in the presence of the husband, then to have the husband murdered. This is not fake; this is well documented. As a matter of fact, I went to a memorial where I saw those victims' names on a wall. That is what we are dealing with in Ukraine. That was 4 years ago, and they are continuing that systematic terror of this population.

That is what we are dealing with here. We are not dealing with two adversaries or two countries that we have good relationships with and that we are trying to calm a dispute between the two. We are literally talking about, in my opinion--I will let my colleagues speak for themselves--a fight between good and evil, between communism and Western democracy, between freedom and totalitarianism. That is what we are confronted with in Ukraine.

I could go on with a number of other examples, but rather than do that now, I would like to defer to my colleague from Utah, Senator Curtis. It was his first time in Ukraine, but some insights and takeaways from you, Senator Curtis, and then we will go to Senator Armstrong

I am so glad you mentioned that. I agree. Thank you.

Thank you, Senator Armstrong and Senator Curtis.

I think what we all left with is an unambiguous view that Russia is the aggressor and Ukraine is the victim.

We all need to understand that when Russia was lying to us and saying they were just doing a training exercise and then turned it into a special military operation, our best intelligence estimates indicated to us--not publicly but in a private setting at the time--that Russia would likely have air superiority within about 3 or 4 days and total control of the ground within a week or two.

Putin has failed. He never achieved anything resembling that. He has sent tens of thousands of Russians into a meat grinder. It is so bad now that he is talking about conscription beyond the forced conscription he has now. And get this--he is forcing young Ukrainians to kill Ukrainians because they are brainwashing these young people into thinking they are subhuman.

He is not conscripting Russians yet. He is likely going to. But what he is doing is letting people out of prison and giving them U.S. dollars--$40,000 and $60,000 bonuses--to go on the battlefield. One of them was a prisoner of war. He was a sexual predator right out of prison. His family was given $60,000 to go fight. Now he has been captured, and he is going to be used to possibly trade to get a prisoner of war back to Ukraine.

Right now, 30,000 Russians are dying every month. They are being plowed down, and they are making no ground. You heard Senator Curtis talk about a snail moving more quickly. That is mathematically true. If the snail started to get to where they are on the frontline right now, they would have beaten the Russians.

So the last 10 minutes we have here before we have a UC coming up, I think, at 5:05 is to talk about what is next.

What I think is next is asking the President, encouraging the President to use to the maximum extent possible the sanctions capabilities that Congress sent to him over the past couple of weeks to put the pressure on Russia, to not be the first President who equivocates against a Russian dictator, to continue the tradition of getting an opportunity. When you can win against communism, when you can win against totalitarianism, you do everything you can to win. And guess what. It will not require a single drop of American blood on the battlefield.

All the Ukrainians want is support. All they want is intelligence. All they want is to make sure that the European nations continue to do what they are doing and the United States maybe do a little bit more, and that has as much to do with sanctions as it has to do with materiel support. I, for one, hope we can do both.

If I have time remaining, I do want to talk about what I think is a dreadful trend in the last year and a half in terms of materiel support, but I would like to hear from Senator Curtis and Senator Armstrong about what we think we need to do to help Ukrainians before they go into the winter, which is when they are most vulnerable, because I firmly believe that if they make it through this winter, Putin's days are numbered and rightly so.

Senator Curtis.

Mr. President, thanks again to my colleagues from Utah and Oklahoma.

This graphic--by the way, the gentleman putting this graphic up is my staff--my MLA--Mike Leeman. It is his birthday today. I don't know if that is allowed, to say that. I won't sing ``Happy Birthday,'' though, for the Parliamentarian's sake. But Mike Leeman is one of the ones who coordinated the trip.

You did a great job, Mike.

Mike also prepared these stats for me because I want to give you an idea of what the winter is going to look like and what the Ukrainians are up against if last year is any indication.

Between October 2525 and March of 2026, the U.N. Human Rights Monitoring Mission documented at least 423 attacks on electricity generation, transmission, and distribution facilities; 74 strikes on combined heat and powerplants.

Vladimir Putin is trying to freeze the Ukrainians to death. This is not targeting military facilities. It is targeting homes like people in the Gallery have here, hopefully, safely. It is targeting schools. It is targeting hospitals.

In Kyiv, the attacks resulted in nearly 6,000 multistory buildings not having heat. That is what happened last year. Does anybody believe that Putin is going to do anything less this year?

I could go through a long list of civilian targets, healthcare facilities, schools. Kids are meeting in subways now because they can't safely go to school.

That is the environment the Ukrainian people are living in year- round, but they have the unique threat of a harsh winter. And literally Putin's strategy of terrorism is to freeze them to death in their homes. That is what we are up against. That is what he did last year. Many people died.

What I am worried about--and what we need to do getting ready for this winter--is to change this trend. Our spending has dropped to almost nothing. Now, we are providing support and other forms beyond just the cash appropriations, but we need to do all of the above, ladies and gentlemen.

With the proper execution of the sanctions that we have authorized the President to move forward with, with the proper resourcing--and they are not asking for a lot. This speech alone gives the Ukrainian people hope. They are a pro-American country, and the Ukrainian people need to know that the Americans are behind them, that Congress is behind them. And we need this administration to take a few steps to make it very clear that they are behind them too.

And it starts with fast-tracking some of the funding that is available. I know it is complicated, but we have got to move quickly. And it also continues with the proper imposition of sanctions capabilities enabled in the bill that we passed in honor of Senator Lindsey Graham.

So over the next 93 days that I have left in Congress, I am going to do everything I can to use every lever we can to convince the administration that we have got to make it a priority. We have to move quickly.

The Ukrainian people are patient and still silently pro-American. I didn't go anywhere without having people in bombed-out facilities thanking America for what we have done there.

Well, I think in this winter America can do a little bit more and, if we do, Putin's days are numbered. That is good for democracy, and that is great for the Western World.

And that is our future--not a reemergence of the Russian Empire, not an opportunity to get success in Ukraine, move to Moldova, and try to Russify all of the free countries that the United States and the European nations liberated. That is the end goal, folks.

It doesn't stop with the occupied territory in Ukraine, unless America steps up, Europe continues to do its job, and we stop them in their tracks.

And that, by the way, is not only good for Europe, but it is good for the Russian people who are suffering under his leadership.

I am going to offer to my colleagues--we are going to be mindful of time. But if you would like to make a few closing comments, I want to thank you.

I see at least one of the staff up in the audience. It was a trek. We were on planes, trains, and automobiles, but I can't think of a more rewarding trip. I had the pleasure of traveling with you all and your staff, and I thank you.

Senator Curtis, do you want to wind up, then Senator Armstrong?

Mr. President, we appreciate the opportunity to have this discussion amongst my colleagues. Again, I thank you all for joining us and the staff that have put it together and support us, and I hope everybody will say a prayer for Ukraine.

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

Mr. President, the Federal Government has become a gold mine for fraudsters. Just last week, we saw that one health insurance marketplace had over 700,000 fraudsters and over $2 billion in fraud. In the 6 months since President Trump tapped Vice President Vance to lead the White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, Federal investigators have uncovered more than $200 billion in fraud against the American taxpayer. Think about that--hundreds of billions of dollars stolen from hard-working Americans every single year.

The fraud is egregious, and it is systemic. Consider New York City. The Vice President's task force discovered that there is more than $2 million in unemployment insurance fraud every

day--$2 million in fraud every day--in one program in one city alone. That is more than $700 million annually, all stolen from the American taxpayer. It is money that was earned through blood and sweat, through sacrifice and service. It is money that was supposed to care for the sick, to assist those with disabilities, to feed hungry kids, to help struggling families, to support our veterans. Instead, it has been stolen by lowlifes, degenerates, con artists, and organized crime.

For years, as government spending boomed, this theft from the American people was treated as a cost of doing business. Career bureaucrats shrugged, and politicians--many purposefully--looked the other way, all while fraudsters kept stealing and looting from our country.

In that environment, it isn't too surprising to learn that there was not a Division at the Department of Justice focused on investigating and prosecuting fraud against the government. President Trump saw that. Vice President Vance saw that. Attorney General Blanche saw that. And they took action. They created the National Fraud Enforcement Division within the Department of Justice to root out this fraud and hold the fraudsters responsible.

We saw this problem here in Congress as well. I launched the Senate Anti-Fraud Task Force with my colleagues to help build durable solutions to prosecute this fraud and prevent it from happening in the future.

That is why I rise here today--to take the first step in ending the rampant fraud against the American taxpayer and to enshrine the National Fraud Enforcement Division as a permanent Division within the Department of Justice.

Fraud against our country has become not only a multistate problem but a transnational criminal enterprise. To address this problem, we need a permanent National Fraud Enforcement Division that brings together prosecutors, investigators, Federal Agencies, and State and local law enforcement to attack fraud on the frontlines. The mission is simple but very, very important: Protect the American taxpayer and government against fraudsters. That mission should transcend red jersey-blue jersey party politics. Find the people stealing taxpayer dollars, and bring them to justice.

Today, right here, we can make that Division permanent. Regardless of party affiliation, every Member of this body should want taxpayer dollars to go where they are supposed to go, not into the pockets of fraudsters. It is that simple, truly. So often, we squabble over commissioning studies or we analyze a problem or host briefings to research root causes of an issue or hem and haw toward issuing a white paper, but today, on this Senate floor, we can permanently establish an enforcement Division that does three things: finds fraud, prosecutes fraud, and stops fraud.

The House passed this bill with overwhelming bipartisan support. Why? Because stopping the theft from the American taxpayer is just as important as deciding how to spend those dollars.

When I am back home in St. Louis, I often hear from the great people of the Show-Me State with similar complaints. They are sick and tired of watching criminals steal millions--billions--of dollars while their friends and families struggle to achieve and receive basic services. They are sick and tired of a government that can track down a single Venmo payment, but somebody can't find the organized fraud rings walking out the front door with an obscene amount of taxpayer dollars. These are not signs of serious governance, and at a certain point, indifference to fraud becomes complicity in it.

As chairman of the Senate Anti-Fraud Task Force, I have seen how deep the rot goes. Fraudsters exploit virtually every government program ever created. They create fake businesses. They bill for services never provided. They manufacture beneficiaries who do not exist. They exploit vulnerable people as names on the screen while diverting money into their own pockets to fund obscene purchases and lifestyles.

These people, they are sick and twisted people. They are cold and calculated. These fraudsters are running an entire criminal enterprise into empires to steal from the American people.

The purpose of government assistance is to help Americans who genuinely need it. Government assistance should not help subsidize lavish lifestyles for criminals who have learned how to manipulate a lackadaisical legislature. We need prosecutions with real authority, with serious resources, so that our government can follow the money wherever it leads and consequences--real consequences--for those who defraud our country.

If we are a serious Senate, we must be able to say with clear eyes: If you steal from the American people, we will find you, and we will prosecute you.

You may hear shortly that this division already exists. And thanks to President Trump and Vice President Vance, that is currently true. But without this bill codifying it, fraudsters will know that their paydays will soon return because a future administration could disband the division, be distracted elsewhere. There should be no reason that the U.S. Senate should object to creating a permanent division within the Department of Justice to find and investigate and prosecute fraud.

I would also like to thank Senator Moody for her work on this. Senator Moody has been fighting fraud since day one, and she has been a great partner. We served together as attorneys general, and she had a reputation for that even then.

I want to yield the floor at this point to Senator Moody.

Mr. President, the American people have paid the bill for fraud for too long. Now is the time for the fraudsters to pay.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of H.R. 9576, which was received from the House; that the bill be considered read a third time and passed and the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. President, reserving the right to object.

My bill is simple. It should be a really uncontroversial purpose codifying the National Fraud Enforcement Group. It has done remarkable work protecting American taxpayer dollars. And by the way, this wouldn't survive. This isn't just for this administration--beyond it. It would be great if a Democrat President somewhere down the road was focused on this with an existing National Fraud Enforcement Division.

But the proposed amendment deals with a completely different topic. Regardless of how you feel about the amendment, it seeks to undo the administration's new model for combating transnational organized crime, a new model that has been incredibly successful.

During the prior administration, fentanyl and other dangerous drugs poured across Joe Biden's open borders. Those drugs poisoned our communities, destroyed families, and stole the lives of Americans who should still be here with us today.

Cartel members poured across the open border as well and victimized the American people with violent crime, human trafficking, and dangerous drugs.

In Missouri, the consequences of that open border were all too real. There are empty chairs at kitchen tables, parents who buried their children, grandparents raising their grandkids.

President Trump ran on closing the border and stopping the flow of these dangerous drugs. He understood that it is our obligation to protect the homefront, protect those families, and use the resources at our disposal wisely.

To accomplish these goals, he reoriented how the Federal Government counteracts transnational organized crime, focusing on using Homeland Security task forces. That model incorporates FBI and DHS agents alongside

the more than 20 Federal Agencies and over 400 State, local, and international law enforcement agencies for coordinated operations.

The reorganization sought to go upstream and get to the source of the true problem, securing the border and stopping the cartels and other transnational criminal organizations. By focusing on the actual root of the problem through the Homeland Security Task Force model, we have seen investigators, prosecutors, intelligence analysts, and immigration enforcement working together to disrupt the cartels and the criminal networks threatening our country.

That is how we should fight crime that operates across borders, by taking the fight to them. And there is an important downstream effect of this approach: The trafficker moving fentanyl often also traffics people, launders money, and arms violent gangs.

By updating our law enforcement model to meet the reality on the ground and the realities of modern transnational criminal threats, the new Homeland Security Task Force model has achieved remarkable success. Our intelligence Agencies have reported that fentanyl crossing the border fell 55 percent after President Trump took office.

In some year-over-year statistics, drug flows have been cut by 98 percent--98 percent. And the new Homeland Security task forces have arrested thousands of criminals, including more than a thousand cartel members, hundreds of MS-13 gang members, and hundreds of Tren de Aragua members.

They have seized tons of illegal drugs, including more than 300,000 fentanyl pills, and they have taken thousands of illegal guns off the streets as well from hardened gang members and cartel members.

Law enforcement agents have worked tirelessly over the past few decades to try to stem the tide of transnational organized crime and criminal gangs. The Trump administration inherited the status quo with dedicated law enforcement agents but an organizational and operational model that wasn't working.

So the administration got to work and reorganized the operations, and the results have been promising. This proposed amendment--an amendment to a bill that seeks to codify protection for American taxpayer dollars--would disrupt this new model approach, and it tries to codify the old approach of combating transnational organized crime. That would be a return to the approach that just wasn't working.

We should instead allow the administration to continue its good work of reorienting enforcement through the Homeland Security Task Force model. Too often, people in DC confuse the survival of a program or an enforcement model with the success of its mission.

President Trump's reorganization efforts broke that mold, and it proved to be one of the most important steps we have ever taken against the cartels. This amendment is an attempt to revert to a prior model that wasn't working, and it is a distraction from our effort to codify the administration's important efforts to protect Americans' hard- earned taxpayer dollars against fraudsters. And for those reasons, I do object.

Madam President, reserving the right to object--I would like to reserve the right to object on this.

My friend came with a proposal to try to ban the sale and ownership of stocks by Members of Congress. I am pretty confident of why this came up today, because earlier today, we had a vote in this body to ban Members of Congress from owning stock--or, I am sorry, buying and selling stock on it. But it also included what the vast majority of Americans also want and that is voter ID.

It is pretty simple and straightforward. It is a very short bill. It just mandated voter ID, and it also banned Members of Congress from buying and selling stock: short bill, straightforward, easy to read, uncomplicated language.

Now, every one of my Democrat colleagues voted against that bill, and their complaint was: It is because it is going to rig elections if you require voter ID.

Well, I would like to remind this body, the Chair, that 36 of our 50 states already have voter ID; exactly what we voted on. There is only 14 States that don't, which means 72 Senators in this body already serve in a State that has voter ID. This is not a complicated, highly politicized, red versus blue issue. This is Americans that just say: Hey, we show ID to do everything. Why don't we show an ID to vote?

In fact, the vast majority of countries around the world are completely confused by Americans, that we don't show ID to be able to vote, when most countries around the world do. It is not diminishing people's right to vote. This is acknowledging the reality of where 36 States already are--red and blue--that we show voter ID. It shouldn't be an issue.

But this particular bill that is being brought today, and the response that Democrats voting against the bill earlier today, it is different. This is not just a ``can't buy and sell stocks''--which I, by the way, totally agree with. That is why I wholeheartedly voted for the bill earlier today.

This one has some additional features in it that have not been discussed here on the floor that I think we should actually put out onto the floor. This bill itself also includes requirements for the Ethics Committee--which I happen to chair--which is a bipartisan, equally represented group here in the Senate that has to evaluate all this. So I am pretty attentive to bills that actually deal with this to know: How are we going to implement this?

So this includes a requirement for small businesses and family farms and all those, that the Ethics Committee has to come and evaluate every single one of those from every Member to determine if there is going to be a conflict of interest from them owning a family farm.

So let me give you an example. If you own a family farm, you can't be on the Agriculture Committee because that becomes a conflict of interest. So the Agriculture Committee in the U.S. Senate suddenly becomes a group of people that don't know anything about ag because this bill would force them to divest from their family farm or it becomes a conflict of interest in the Senate.

I, personally, don't want everybody on the Ag Committee to not be farmers. I would like to have some farmers on the Ag Committee and some people that know something about this.

If you own a family-owned business that is not a family farm, that is just an LLC--which it is typical for most family businesses to be incorporated as an LLC--this puts an additional requirement on them on any kind of securities ownership, which is pretty common in an LLC that anyone who serves in this body that has a family business, multigenerational business, may have to divest from that to be able to come into the U.S. Senate.

That would mean Senators can't come from a small, family-owned business. That puts out a lot of Americans that suddenly wouldn't be eligible to serve in the U.S. Senate.

This bill also prohibits what is called a qualified blind trust. It is one of the most misunderstood aspects of this. A QBT--a qualified blind trust--any Senator that is here that has a stock portfolio that is larger has the ability to be able to take all of those assets, put it into a qualified blind trust, and they are prohibited by law from talking to that person that is actually doing all the investments. They can't know what is in it; they can't get updates on it; they can't have any interaction. And it is called a qualified blind trust because we actually have to qualify that.

In fact, the Ethics Committee actually engages with everyone who has a qualified blind trust and the person that is there to actually get all communications. So we literally monitor that to be able to make sure there is no interaction on that. Well, this bill would actually prohibit this.

This bill would also prohibit digital assets. Well, I understand that for investment in cryptocurrency and Bitcoin and everything else, but there is also a digital asset called stablecoins, and this body actually passed that. Stablecoins aren't an investment piece; stablecoins are just a dollar in digital form. That is all that it is.

This bill would prohibit Members of the Senate from actually having a digital dollar because it would be now considered a new investment asset, when it is not an investment asset at all.

I wish this bill would have gone through committee. There is a lot we could have discussed in committee to be able to work this through. But this

bill skipped all the committees and has had no hearing in committees to actually talk through it because there is even a section in this bill where it talks about one section where the Secretary of the Senate does the reporting, or another aspect where the Ethics Committee is doing the reporting. Some of those little pieces could be worked out in committee. That is not controversial at all; it could be worked out.

But it hasn't actually gone through committee to actually have any kind of oversight to try to figure out how to be able to perfect some of these areas.

Listen, this is not a bill that is just about ownership of stocks and buying and selling stocks. It is much larger. It gets into family farms. It gets into small businesses. It gets into stablecoin. It gets into all those different aspects on this.

This is the reason that, when we brought a stock bill earlier today, it is a short couple-of-pages bill to be able to make it very clear what it is and what it is not. It was not this 31-page very complicated bill that is actually being brought to the floor today.

So my challenge to all of my colleagues are: We should not be trading stocks. And if you have got stocks, those need to either be divested or put into some blind trust so that Americans have full trust that Members of this body are not looking at their portfolio all the time; they are actually looking at the people that live in their State and what they can do best to be able to serve them. That is where my colleague and I adamantly agree.

Where we disagree is on this text and what it does that is far beyond what is actually being advertised that it does.

So I would be very willing to be able to work with my colleague to be able to figure out how we can get this right because I think it is an incredibly important issue, but this needs more work back in the kitchen.

So with that, I object.

Madam President, I appreciate the conversation from my colleague.

I look forward to getting a chance to be able to work on the bill that is actually complete.

He asked where I got my information from that I actually listed out on this. I got it from a ``secret source,'' the 31 pages of the text of his bill. There was no outside group. I appreciate the conspiracy theory that some secret group must have manipulated it somehow and given me the information. I just read the text.

There are issues with the text. Again, we are back to--we can't have farmers on the Ag Committee and small business owners who may have to get rid of their family businesses to be able to run in the Senate. That is a problem.

As far as the accusation of the qualified blind trust and that there is someone who has said to my colleague that they talk to their qualified blind trust person every quarter, I would encourage my colleague to submit that to the Ethics Committee because that is a violation of current statute, if that is actually occurring, and it is already a violation. So, if my colleague knows of someone who is interacting with their broker and they have a qualified blind trust and they are interacting, as he claims, every month or every quarter, please let us know because that is something the bipartisan Ethics Committee would address immediately because that is already against Federal law to be able to do that.

My simple statement for today is: Listen, there is a right way to be able to do this. Let's do it. Let's go through the process. Let's actually figure out how to be able to get this done and get it done right, but this is not it. The way this bill is written has so many problems within the bill that I have to come down as the chairman of Ethics to say I would have to be the one charged to actually enforce this, and there will be major problems with this.

As far as the voting issues, I was listening with wonder on all of the issues about problems with voter ID. Apparently, my colleague believes that, if you have voter ID, you are Jim Crow 2.0; you are a racist State. Well, I am confident the folks in Rhode Island would be shocked to hear that.

I do not relent the floor. I do not relent the floor. I do not have to yield. I do not yield.

Madam President, I do not relent the floor.

This is an issue when we start talking about voter ID, and it is an accusation that comes at Republicans that all we want to do is be able to block people from voting. Rhode Island has voter ID. Delaware has voter ID. Connecticut has voter ID. Wisconsin has voter ID. Colorado has voter ID. New Hampshire has voter ID. Michigan has voter ID. I could go on and on and on. This is not a red State or a blue State issue. These are States that have said: If we are going to make sure we have secure elections, we are going to have voter ID.

Now, I happen to live in a State with a very high Tribal membership-- 7.5 percent of my State are Tribal members. We also have voter ID in my State. And do you know what? We welcome Tribal members to vote like every other Oklahoman.

We have voter ID in my State, and as shocking as this may seem, married women still vote in my State. This sudden accusation that married women will not be able to figure out how to do voter ID and get an ID I find offensive as a dad of two very smart daughters and one brilliant wife.

The issue today is not all this. Obviously, we voted on that earlier today. The issue is about this particular bill. This particular bill has problems that are solvable if we will actually get to committee and be able to work through the process, but as it is currently written, there are problems in the bill.

So I object to the bill, and I hope that we can work this out in a nonpartisan way in the days ahead to be able to resolve it.

With that, I yield the floor.

Madam President, I join my colleagues this evening to express my deep concerns. And I share your outrage, Senator Kaine, about the Trump administration's decision to recklessly take away funding for critical programs that hard-working Americans rely on to get ahead.

The President promised the American people when he was campaigning that he would lower costs, and instead he is putting services that millions of people count on at risk, including in my home State of New Hampshire.

Last Friday, the administration sent its request to cancel over $800 million in Federal funding. And because today marks the end of the fiscal year, there is not enough time for Congress to stop these funds from being eliminated.

This deliberate move, as my colleagues have said, is a pocket rescission, and it is illegal. Let me say that again. It is illegal, plain and simple.

Over the past week, I have heard from countless constituents in New Hampshire about the importance of the programs that are being cut by this pocket rescission.

This funding provides housing counseling support as Senator Murray and Senator Kaine have said. That is vital to people in New Hampshire who are trying to afford housing.

It provides vital healthcare research that saves lives and education programs. It is abundantly clear that these cuts won't bring down costs. They won't keep our neighborhoods safe, and they certainly won't make our country any stronger.

Now, it is not up to the President and unelected bureaucrats at the Office of Management and Budget to decide where the Federal funding goes. They can't cancel a program simply because they don't like it. That is what they are trying to do, but it is illegal because our Constitution grants Congress--not the executive branch--the power of the purse; Congress writes the checks and the administration is not supposed to just tear them up.

Even the GAO, the nonpartisan congressional watchdog, has concluded that this move is illegal, not to mention that several of our Republican colleagues have also acknowledged that it is illegal.

When I talk with Granite Staters, one thing I consistently hear is that the cost of housing is a pain point for families already struggling with high prices.

The average price of a house in New Hampshire now is over $550,000. Too many young families can't afford that, and with housing prices hitting those highs, too many people are being priced out of this critical part of achieving the American dream.

That is why Federal programs like the Housing Counseling Program are just so important. Housing Counseling helps families buy homes, avoid foreclosures, and secure affordable rents.

Since the program began in 2009, it has helped over 4.2 million households across the country avoid foreclosure. In New Hampshire, thousands of families have used Housing Counseling to lower their home purchase price, to reduce their debt, and to secure safe and stable housing.

For example, Jake and Lisa are a young married couple who lived in an apartment in Grafton County, which is in the northwest part of our State. Their landlord decided to sell their apartment, and Jake and Lisa needed to relocate. But because of high housing costs, they struggled to find a home that was in their price range.

They couldn't afford to use a buyer's agent, so they turned to a HUD- certified housing counselor. In one instance, their housing counselor helped them obtain a home inspection that revealed major heating and electrical issues, and without this help, they might have closed on a home that would have cost them in the long term.

Their housing counselor also helped them create a plan that allowed them to pay their debts while maximizing their savings. And just a few months ago in a happy ending, Jake and Lisa officially became homeowners. But without their housing counselor, who knows when, or even if, Jake and Lisa would have been able to achieve this milestone?

Sadly, they are not alone. Too many families are still looking for a safe and affordable place to call home. And Housing Counseling isn't the only program in jeopardy.

This administration has left $230 million in Federal rural housing funds unspent. Now, Russ Vought may not think that is a lot of money, but in New Hampshire, we think that is a lot of money. And we should be doing everything possible to help families put a roof over their head, especially in the most rural parts of our country where affordable housing options are too often few and far between.

By letting this funding expire, the administration is sending a clear message to Americans: Addressing sky-high housing prices isn't one of the priorities of the Trump administration.

Now, in addition to cutting programs that help Americans find housing they can afford, the administration has cut funds that allow students to master foreign languages and become more well-rounded scholars and to do business around the world.

I mean, the President says he wants to do business around the world. He wants the United States to be a global business hub. How can we do that if we have people who can't communicate in foreign languages? And the Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships program has made it possible for students from New Hampshire to attend universities that specialize in foreign languages and international relations.

These fellowships provide the skills for Americans to be the bridge to other countries and to understand cultures around the world and to do business around the world. Eliminating 1,900 fellowships denies young Americans, including Granite State youth, from developing the skills to serve our country, to improve international relations, and to strengthen our national and economic security.

The administration has also eliminated $28 million in funding appropriated to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. This includes cutting a grant program at Dartmouth College--Dartmouth College where we have the only medical school in New Hampshire.

The grant program is designed to improve healthcare quality and access for rural populations living in Northern New England. The program focused on improving care for kids with complex medical needs and for better coordinating that care for cancer patients.

This doesn't seem wasteful to me, but that is what the Trump administration said when they rescinded these funds.

Now, it is not just healthcare funding that was gutted as we know. OMB also canceled funding for a program that has helped Americans build safer communities since the 1960s. The Department of Justice Community Relations Service was established in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 with a mission to help States and communities address and heal from incidents of discrimination.

The idea behind this program is pretty simple. If we get people talking to each other--something that might be helpful in the Senate-- we can constructively deal with incidents like swastikas painted on synagogues or racial slurs that are used in schools, and we can foster understanding and help avoid outbreaks of violence.

I have seen very directly how this program can help. In 2022 at a middle school and high school in Dover, NH, which is next to the community where I live, tensions amongst students reached a boiling point after some students decided to write racially biased and anti- Semitic posts on social media.

The leadership of the schools reached out to CRS for help in defusing the situation, and CRS offered a program it had developed called the School-Student Problem Identification and Resolution of Issues Together, or School-SPIRIT--an appropriate name.

In this instance, the schools in Dover used School-SPIRIT to convene key school administrators, students, and community stakeholders to identify the biases and prejudices that were driving tensions and to formulate a plan to help diffuse those tensions through communicating.

All in all, this was a success story for the school and for the entire community. And yet, despite the many positive outcomes all over the country, Russ Vought all by himself decided that CRS needed to be shut down.

All of this is to say that these abrupt cuts to programs Americans rely on have only created uncertainty and frustration at a time when people are already feeling immense financial burdens. They are feeling uncertainty and anxiety about what is happening in this country. These programs matter to people in New Hampshire.

They make a difference in their lives. But the President and his cronies and this administration couldn't seem to care less. It is part of a disturbing but all-too-common pattern from this administration-- bypassing Congress, skirting legal authority, and leaving families to pay the price. And what is the administration prioritizing instead? Well, they are driving up prices. They are driving up the cost of gasoline, they are driving up the cost of groceries, they are driving up the cost of home heating oil that people in New Hampshire are going to depend on because the weather is starting to get cold, and they are doing it because of a needless and costly war in Iran.

The President is also spending Federal resources, as we have heard, for ads to promote himself and his administration. He is spending Federal resources to put his name on as many things as possible, to build a ballroom, to change the color of the Reflecting Pool, to build an arch that is going to obstruct the view of Arlington Cemetery. Americans don't see those as priorities. They are concerned about how they are going to pay for their groceries, how they are going to pay for their gasoline, how they are going to pay for childcare, and this administration is doing nothing--zero, nada, nothing--to help the American people.

So let me close with this. As a former Governor, I know how important it is to ensure that tax dollars are being spent efficiently and responsibly. But let me be clear. Taking a sledgehammer to programs Americans rely on every day isn't responsible governing.

Congressional Republicans and Democrats can stop this from happening again, and I look forward to working with my colleagues so that no administration, Republican or Democrat, tries to cut congressionally mandated investments again.

I yield the floor.