An original concurrent resolution setting forth the congressional budget for the United States Government for fiscal year 2025 and setting forth the appropriate budgetary levels for fiscal years 2026 through 2034.

Mr. President, we need to be focused on solving problems. I think most of us here get that. No matter who the President is, our constituents expect us to work for them. They expect us to fight for them, and they expect us to do the hard work of passing laws to make their lives better.

People don't send us here to make their lives worse, but that is exactly what Trump and Musk are doing. They are looking at our most pressing problems and making them worse. This budget proposal will only add fuel to that fire.

Right now, even as egg prices hit an alltime high, Trump and Musk have done nothing to lower prices. They have done nothing to address the housing crisis or help families get quality, affordable childcare or address other issues I hear about from folks all the time. Instead, they are slashing programs that help our families make ends meet. They are gutting an Agency that saves working people money and protects them from scams and starting trade wars that will impose what is effectively a Trump sales tax entirely on the backs of American workers.

As China works to strengthen its global leadership, Trump and Musk have ceded the ground almost entirely, illegally cutting off investments we make to continue our country's leadership and help our allies.

At the most precarious moment for the Middle East in decades, Trump is casually proposing to ethnically cleanse Gaza so that Trump and his family can build waterfront property there.

When it comes to helping our allies in Ukraine secure a just peace, Trump is giving away countless concessions to Putin--out of the gate-- calling our ally a ``dictator'' and meeting with Russia without inviting Ukraine.

When it comes to the bird flu, Trump and Musk are firing the very workers who are responsible for tracking the disease and keeping it from spreading further; and now, suddenly, they are desperately trying to hire them back.

As Texas deals with a serious measles outbreak, Trump's Secretary can't even confirm the obvious and tell parents the vaccine doesn't cause autism, which, to be clear, it does not.

And almost unbelievably--just weeks after the deadliest commercial plane crash in the United States in over two decades--Trump and Musk are firing FAA workers who make sure flying is safe. Who does that help?

Now Trump is letting Musk run wild by inappropriately accessing and rifling through sensitive SSA and Treasury files, with the IRS being next--your data. How does that make sense?

But while President Trump is busy making problems worse and trampling our laws and quoting dictators, what are we doing here in the Senate? Are we holding President Trump accountable? Are we holding his ``co- President,'' Elon Musk--the richest man in the world who has billions of dollars in conflicts of interest--accountable? Are we putting a stop to the catastrophic cuts and reckless firings that are hurting people and our communities and setting our country back decades?

It seems to me that would be a good use of time. After all, I have even heard some Republicans admit that cutting things like medical research and firing people like our VA workers are bad ideas. So you would think, maybe, we could work together from that common ground, but, instead, Republicans are throwing all their effort behind a partisan plan to slash and burn programs that help our families and raise costs for everyday Americans and shovel billions of dollars to help people who already have billions of dollars.

Meanwhile, I would like to recommend to my colleagues that we are less than a month away from a deadline to pass bills to fund our government, and as we approach that deadline, the entire world is watching as President Trump and Elon Musk shut the government down bit by bit--whatever parts Elon doesn't like. Trump and Musk are already showing thousands of our essential workers the door despite the fact they have no clue what those workers do or why their jobs matter. They are just turning off the lights and hoping for the best.

I am hearing so much alarm on this from back home--from fired workers and from the people who depend on them. Trump and his ``co-President'' are shuttering entire Agencies. They are locking workers out of their devices and out of their buildings and demanding the work of the American people come to a screeching halt--again, for no good reason.

Let me really drive home just how damaging and extreme these firings are because we are not talking about some routine changing of the guard or some thoughtful or strategic plan to make government more efficient. Trump and Musk are just taking a wrecking ball to the U.S. Government. They don't care what they smash up. They don't care whom they hurt, and they don't seem to have any idea just how painful this is for American families. We are talking about tens of thousands of people--and counting--being pushed out the door without any plan and without any justification beyond Trump and Elon just wanting to slash and cut with reckless abandon.

This has nothing to do with making government more efficient; it is about breaking it beyond repair. Fundamentally, this is not about cutting waste or curbing fraud. Instead, this is about putting the Federal workforce into trauma. That is how OMB Director Russell Vought callously put it. So they are mass firing hard-working women and men-- many of them veterans--whose only mistake was serving our country, serving our communities, and believing they wouldn't get stabbed in the back by a wannabe dictator and the richest man in the world.

In setting aside the fact that many were illegally fired and without real cause, it is not just the workers who are suffering because of this. These cuts undermine essential services for the American people right down to some of the most basic functions of government.

Trump and Musk are firing people who help Americans find quality, affordable health insurance; people who help small businesses get a loan; people who help communities and families get back on their feet after a disaster; and people who help Americans get their tax refunds.

They are firing people who help our economy stay competitive--from firings that undermine energy projects and thousands of good new jobs to firings that undermine innovation and technology, to firings that are hurting our farmers and undermining agricultural research.

They are laying off national park rangers, which will mean longer wait times, dirtier bathrooms, delayed emergency responses, and closed parks. They fired Forest Service workers who are crucial to preventing wildfires.

Again, I have to emphasize they are firing FAA workers, for crying out loud, including personnel who work on radar and landing and other critical infrastructure that help our aircraft navigate safely. They are firing these people and pretending it is no big deal, all just weeks after, by the way, the deadliest crash our Nation has seen in decades. Trump and Elon might not fly commercial, but the rest of us do.

In the Pacific Northwest, the Bonneville Power Administration is losing hundreds of highly skilled workers, and that includes everyone from electricians, engineers, dispatchers, line workers, cybersecurity experts, and many more. These are literally the people who keep the lights on, and now they are being fired on a whim because Trump and Elon Musk do not have a clue about what they do and why it is important. And do you know what? They don't care. They don't even seem to understand, actually, that these positions are funded by ratepayers--by all of us who live in the Northwest. They are not from Federal funding.

Trump and Musk have even fired over 1,000 VA workers, including people who are doing lifesaving research for our veterans: research to prevent veteran suicide; to build life-changing prosthetics; and to address opioid addiction and more. These layoffs will mean longer wait times for veterans to see their healthcare providers. It could mean ongoing clinical trials coming to a sudden stop. It means delays in getting your disability claim approved because Trump and Musk went ahead and fired clinicians and claims raters even while, today, the current backlog of disability claims is over 250,000. That is not just a betrayal of these public workers; it is a betrayal of our women and men who have served us in uniform. It is also worth noting that many of the workers being fired are veterans themselves. Trump is firing veterans.

And let's not forget the thousands of NIH researchers who are having their research thrown into jeopardy and the patients who are watching President Trump carelessly toss their best hope for a cure into the shredder--or CMS experts. They are working on improving maternal health outcomes so fewer pregnant women die in this country.

Medical research layoffs aren't the only ones putting American lives at risk because Trump and Musk are firing public health workers who respond to disease outbreaks: cybersecurity experts who protect our critical infrastructure, sensitive systems, and our data; scientists who make sure our water and our air are clean and that we are ready for extreme weather; workers who help our communities prepare for, respond to, and recover from disasters, not to mention members of law enforcement who help stop violent criminals, and, of course, our nuclear engineers.

Seriously, people who manage our nuclear weapons stockpile are being fired by the hundreds with no real strategy, and we know there is no strategy because then Trump and Musk frantically turned around and rehired many of them. We also know they haven't learned their lesson because they just did the exact same thing to our workers who are responding to bird flu--reckless layoffs followed by: Wait. No. Come back.

That is not a plan. That is not a plan. To callously fire people who help us stay ahead of deadly diseases and to maintain a safe, secure, and reliable nuclear weapons stockpile--that is the height of dangerous incompetence.

Nuclear cleanup work has been hit as well. I have been fighting to get more resources for the Hanford cleanup in Washington State for years. It is already understaffed, and now Trump is actively making things worse. I have heard directly--directly--from workers at Hanford who have been laid off even after some were recognized just this past year for their outstanding work.

And, by the way, that underscores another reality of these firings: They have absolutely nothing to do with merit. In fact, they are targeting new employees, including people who were recently promoted. So now these workers are getting fired from their newly earned jobs-- literally pushing out some of our best performers and our most committed workers.

One more thing. They are even illegally firing the government watchdogs who provide accountability and prevent fraud. If Trump and Musk were really committed to tackling waste, fraud, and abuse, would they fire the very people serving in nonpartisan roles and whose very jobs are to uncover and reduce waste, fraud, and abuse? If they were really interested in transparency, would they have torn down websites where the public can find information about Agencies' spending and policy?

The list of pointless, actively dangerous firings goes on and on. It grows by the day as does the followup alarm being caused by it. My phones have been ringing off the hook, and I know I am not the only one. Again, these sweeping layoffs do not address fraud or waste. They are totally arbitrary, pushing out high performers and the promising next generation of our Federal workforce, which won't be easily replaced, not to mention the hiring freeze prevents them from even trying.

And here is the thing that is so important to remember: These are people who have families. They work hard. They love their country. They are not being sent packing because they have done anything wrong or because their work is not important. They are being pushed out simply because Trump and Musk are trying to break the government, trying to make it not work for the people who need it. It is wrong, and if this doesn't stop now, it will be catastrophic.

The scale and scope of Trump and Elon's purge will set our country back decades. It is not like you can fire anyone and say: Oh, wait--my bad--and hire them back with the snap of a finger. If you are a VA medical researcher, working for less than you could make in the private sector, and you are fired by a billionaire who decides your research on cancer and burn pit exposure isn't worth the investment, would you want to come back, especially with the chaos and sheer incompetence of this administration?

The Federal Government is not Twitter. You can't just fire everyone and break things and hope for the best. People's lives are at stake. Elon Musk has no clue what nuclear safety engineers do at Hanford. He doesn't care that the Social Security Administration is already understaffed, and pushing more of those Federal workers out the door will make life harder for our seniors.

This effort to push out and arbitrarily fire Federal workers is going to break something worse than it already has, and it is going to break it irreparably. When that happens, the blame will fall squarely on Trump and Musk and the Republicans.

And it is not just people being fired that is a serious problem. There are also still--still today--funds frozen without rhyme or reason or legal authority for Trump to do that. So I am not only worried about the fast-approaching funding deadline in March, I am worried about the de facto government shutdown that is happening right now. As we speak, Trump and Musk are still illegally blocking hundreds of billions of dollars in funding we all secured for the people we represent back home, putting good-paying jobs on the chopping block, creating incredible uncertainty for businesses, stalling funds for our infrastructure and energy projects, and a lot more.

As another week of Trump's illegally funding blockade has come and gone, still, reports are coming in from across my State and across the country of the chaos and cuts this is causing, and yet little to nothing has been done by this administration to restore investments in people in red and blue States that they are counting on.

Republicans here in Congress continue to sit by idly while our communities are robbed of hundreds of billions of dollars in bipartisan spending. Meanwhile, it is our workers, it is our families, it is our businesses that are feeling this consequence. With each day that passes, the uncertain fate of these investments takes a toll of its own: ever-growing anxiety for workers whose jobs are in jeopardy, for farmers who are eyeing the calendar and waiting on resources that they are owed, for business owners worried a ripped-up contract might put them under.

I have heard USDA grants have been cut off to rural businesses and farmers in my home State of Washington, and it is putting those hard- working Americans in dire straits.

A small laundromat ordered new machines, but now Trump is stiffing them on funds they need to make that payment.

A wheat farmer installed solar panels under a Federal program, but Trump is going to leave them holding the bag.

A greenhouse has completed its end of the bargain to install upgrades. Trump has stopped the Federal Government from doing the part it promised.

And there are so many other Federal investments on hold as well: Forest Service funding to reduce wildfire risks and restore ecosystems, EPA funding for clean water infrastructure and cleanup work on our Superfund sites, HUD and Department of Energy investments to bring down folks' energy costs and create new, good-paying jobs, funding for our roads and bridges and transit and flood mapping and fisheries--so many other things.

Medical research has also been completely upended at research institutions across our country, throwing lifesaving research, clinical trials, and patients into uncertainty.

Meanwhile, they have not only illegally blocked our foreign assistance and shuttered USAID programs that

bolster our global leadership and make the world safer for Americans, they are now illegally dismantling the Department of Education. They have already bulldozed the independent research arm of the Department of Education. They are taking a wrecking ball to ongoing evidence-based research and basic collection data we need for accountability to improve student outcomes at our K through 12 schools and colleges.

And among the many contracts Trump canceled with his Executive orders was funding for a program that helps students with disabilities transition from high school to work and work to improve adoption of evidence-based literacy practices in Washington State.

These billionaires have no idea what programs they are cutting. Given the chaos of all these efforts--from Trump's sweeping, radical, and illegal Executive orders to Elon Musk jumping from Agency to Agency and doing seemingly whatever he pleases and whatever is good for his business--it is getting hard to even keep track of all the funding that is being illegally blocked. Even stuff they say is not blocked or say has been unblocked is still frozen.

But one thing that is clear: This is hurting our families, hurting our communities, and it needs to stop.

Remember, Musk is the richest man on Earth, with deep business ties to China and a direct line to Putin. Republicans have chosen to stand by and twiddle their thumbs as he unilaterally, clandestinely, and illegally cuts our constituents off from the Federal investments they are owed and badly in need of. We have zero insight or oversight of what conflicts of interest Musk has, as he chokes off government funding left and right and as he hands over our sensitive financial data and systems to patently unqualified individuals with no accountability.

This multibillionaire is operating completely in the dark, hoping his lies are loud enough to drown out any calls for truth or transparency.

You can agree or disagree about Federal spending. Goodness knows, we have a lot of debates on it here. But it is a complete lie to try and say this is all fraud, waste, or conspiracy.

As a longtime appropriator, I can tell you, we debate these bills publicly. We post the details out in the open. We pass them in a bipartisan way. Republicans overwhelmingly supported the individual bills we put together in committee last year--many unanimously.

Spending is not a ``conspiracy'' just because Elon Musk doesn't know how to read USAspending.gov. A program is not waste just because it doesn't help the richest man in the world. It is not fraud just because he doesn't like it. A law is not illegal just because he disagrees with it.

This guy just does not know what he is talking about, and it is, frankly, embarrassing. He doesn't know how to count.

The DOGE website says it is slashing $55 billion, but it only lists $16.6 billion, and half of that is a typo. They took $8 million, with an M, as in ``Musk can't count'' and counted it as $8 billion, with a B, as in ``BS.'' That is not saving money; it is poor reading comprehension.

Speaking of reading comprehension, I don't think Elon fully grasps what the concepts of transparency and accountability mean.

When he tweeted out the names of government employees months ago--and again this month, even--that was accountability. But when reporters name people gaining illegal access to Treasury's payment system, that is a crime?

Elon Musk gets to look at all of our most sensitive data, but no one gets to look at what he is actually doing? That cannot be the standard. It is not ``maximally transparent'' for Elon Musk to decide for himself what he shares publicly about his actions. It is maximally concerning, especially given that there are many obvious conflicts of interest but Elon has not recused himself from a single decision.

How is it not a conflict when the owner of SpaceX is gutting NASA while taxpayer funds to his company keep flowing?

How is it not blatant corruption when the owner of Tesla is freezing grants and loans that benefit his competitors?

How are we supposed to just trust him when he is probing Agencies that have done--or are doing right now--investigations into his businesses?

Trump fired the Ag inspector general who was investigating Elon's company Neuralink and then fired the FDA officials who were reviewing it. He fired the EPA inspector general and Transportation inspector general as they were looking at Tesla. He fired the Labor inspector general, as the Department has several investigations into Musk's companies. And Trump fired the Defense inspector general who was looking at SpaceX and, notably, Musk's connection to Putin.

And it is not just Musk who is concerning. He has brought on an army of walking redflags to pry into our government's most sensitive data.

How are Americans supposed to feel knowing someone who was previously fired for leaking sensitive information from their employer is digging through their most private financial data?

How are Americans supposed to feel knowing someone who engaged with prominent White supremacists and misogynists online is helping to shut down USAID?

How are they supposed to feel knowing someone who tweeted explicitly racist statements, someone who said they were ``racist before it was cool'' was given control over incredibly important Treasury payments?

What sort of vetting, if any, is going on here? Are they trying to pick the least qualified, most concerning people?

Hey, Elon, you were supposed to filter out redflags, not select for them.

The American people deserve transparency. If Elon Musk really has nothing to hide, then he should leave his safe place on X and at Trump rallies and come before us at a congressional hearing to be held accountable to the public.

What they are doing here is not just illegal; it is devastating for working people in every ZIP code in America, red and blue States alike.

Right now, we need to be speaking out with a unified voice to ensure that when Congress passes a bill, the law is followed. And we need to focus on negotiating serious funding bills on a bipartisan basis ahead of the fast-approaching March 14 deadline. That is exactly what I am trying to do right now, and a long-term CR should not be acceptable for anyone here.

As I have reminded my colleagues many times now, there is a world of difference between a short-term CR that gives us additional time for good-faith negotiations on full-year funding bills and a long-term CR that would not only create major shortfalls for critical programs but would also hand vast power over spending decisions to an administration that absolutely cannot and should not be trusted.

Passing a clean, full-year CR would, first of all, create major shortfalls and fail to adjust for new realities on the ground; it could mean that instead of babies getting fed through WIC, moms are getting put on a waitlist for the first time in that program's history, and instead of families getting rental assistance, they get cut off.

A clean, full-year CR means veterans are not able to get the care they need and the benefits they have earned in a timely way, and it means our military falling behind, from forcing cuts across DOD to pausing promotions, station changes, and other really essential functions.

It also means losing opportunities to provide resources for new challenges and to provide a check on Trump policies, including ones it is clear Members on both sides of this aisle have issues with.

And on that note, I want to emphasize--because this is really critical--unlike a short-term CR, a clean, full-year CR means hundreds of specific funding directives from Congress fall away, effectively creating slush funds for this administration to adjust spending priorities and potentially eliminate longstanding programs as they see fit. That is a nonstarter.

With a full-year CR, Congress would be turning over our power of the purse to a President who has already shown he couldn't care less about the separation of powers.

A year-long CR would be a green light for President Trump, Elon Musk, and Russell Vought to redirect funding to their own pet projects and slash and

burn and zero out the programs we have supported from Congress that our families count on. Maybe they siphon money away from public schools. Maybe they slash Federal work study grants and financial aid. Maybe they zero out money for national parks or monuments they think are too woke. What would that even mean?

Maybe they scrap all our oversight of immigration courts or end family reunification or dismantle the guardrails for detaining immigrants--something we are already seeing, by the way, with the use of Guantanamo Bay.

They could cut funding to eliminate HIV, address maternal mortality, or increase vaccination rates. They could turn our constituents' priorities into slush funds. Clean energy investments could become a payday for fossil fuels. Money meant to stop fentanyl and opioids could fuel private prison operations and mass deportations.

Congress must detail its spending priorities and direct President Trump to implement these programs faithfully by passing appropriations bills, just as it does every year. There is truly no telling just how far they would go in bending our Federal budget from what our constituents need to whatever Trump and Musk want.

If you don't think things could get worse, you are wrong. A clean, yearlong CR is, frankly, an unacceptable outcome. We cannot tell our constituents that instead of using our authority to check a President, we give him the keys to the kingdom. We cannot say: Instead of fighting to get you the resources you need, we will let a billionaire have more say in where your tax dollar goes instead.

So we need Republicans to get serious about these bipartisan funding bills. And we have got to know that once those bills become law, Trump will actually follow them. We cannot just reach an agreement, pass a bill, and then stand by while President Trump rips our laws in half.

There is a serious bipartisan path forward for our country, but it is one where Congress works together to avoid a shutdown, stops the de facto shutdown that is already happening, and reasserts its authority to protect the funding our communities need. But, unfortunately, that is a far cry from the path Republicans are going down with this pro- billionaire, anti-middle class budget resolution that is on the floor.

Let's be very clear: Republicans' budget resolution doesn't just accept; it actually doubles down on what Trump and Musk are doing.

And it is not about balancing the budget--we all know that--because they don't plan to reverse one of the biggest drivers of the debt: Republican tax cuts. Despite all of the bogeymen Republicans like to point to as driving the national debt, the reality is that the single biggest driver of our national debt since 2001 has been Republican tax cuts. The Trump and Bush tax cuts have cost our Nation over $10 trillion and counting.

And you will never guess what our colleagues on the other side of the aisle are focused on right now. Nothing to lower the cost of eggs. It is actually more Republican tax cuts.

And, no, they will not be paid for, and, yes, they will blow up the national debt. While Elon Musk hacks and chops his way through the government in the name of meager ``savings'' and Republicans are cheering him on, they are all hoping that we will ignore the elephant they brought into the room, even as this budget is a roadmap for painful cuts to programs families count on each and every day--all so they can give billionaires more tax cuts.

Republicans are going down this partisan path because they know Democrats are not going to join them in throwing Medicaid, nutrition assistance, and veterans benefits into the woodchuck so they can throw more tax cuts at billionaires and the biggest corporations.

Make no mistake, this budget resolution is the DOGE resolution, as it assumes a staggering amount of $1 trillion in unspecified cuts in 2025 alone and $9 trillion over 10 years. Where do we think those kinds of dramatic cuts are going to come from? It is going to come out of SNAP benefits that keep our kids from going hungry. It is going to come out of our public schools and community health centers. It is going to come out of lifesaving medical research.

It will mean costs going up--up--for everyday Americans. It means childcare costs going up when families lose access to Head Start and other quality, affordable options. It means heating and cooling costs going up when families get cut off from LIHEAP. It means rent going up as assistance programs get slashed. It means your healthcare costs go up as community health centers and family planning providers are forced to close their doors. It means grocery costs going up as programs like SNAP and WIC are gutted, not to mention what happens when you cut support for farmers and for ag research.

And make no mistake, if you are cutting that deeply, that painfully, you are going to start cutting things like veterans' disability and education benefits. You are going to start cutting Medicare and Medicaid, which, for the information of all Senators, 30 million children rely on.

There is just no other way to make those numbers work, especially when we know that this is just step one in their plan. And step two is tax breaks for billionaires and massive corporations.

So, first, they are handing Elon Musk a chain saw to cut programs that families rely on, with no accountability. Then they are rewarding him with enormous tax breaks, and that is completely unacceptable. We should not be taking kids out of childcare to give billionaires a tax break. We should not be taking food off the family table to put more fuel in private jets.

I grew up in a family that knew what it was like to fall on hard times. My dad, who was a veteran, got too sick to work. He had multiple sclerosis. My mom kept us afloat with my dad's VA benefits and food stamps and a new job that she got thanks to a Federal workforce program.

It wasn't easy. Mom always said they crawled--crawled--to Social Security and Medicare, but she worked hard, and our government was there for them when those hard times came. I know there are families struggling right now just like my family struggled then. I hear from them every day in the letters we get here in Washington, DC, and in the conversations I have back home in Washington State.

They work hard. They play by the rules. They deserve, at the very least, the same opportunity my parents had when I was growing up. And I am not going to stand by silently while Republicans try to sell that opportunity away to pay for even more tax breaks for billionaires.

I get why that sounds like a good idea to billionaires like Donald Trump. I get why it is a sweet deal for Elon Musk, the richest man in the world. It is great for them because they are not the ones footing the bill. The bill for these tax breaks--the cost of these cuts--is going to be paid by folks like my mom and dad.

Everyday Americans will pay for billionaire tax breaks with their healthcare. They will pay for billionaire tax breaks with abandoned medical research. They will pay for billionaire tax breaks with shuttered family farms and small businesses.

And Republicans can try and spin a fairytale about how this will pay for itself, how this will work out for everyone, and how nothing anyone cares about will be affected. But the reality is going to show through pretty darn quick and pretty darn painfully because spin is not going to put food on the table. It will not pay the rent. It won't fix the roads. It won't lower prices. It won't lower interest rates, and it won't put money in families' dwindling bank accounts.

When it comes to the job we are all sent here to do, helping people and solving problems, families need real solutions, not tax breaks for billionaires and talking points for everyone who loses out.

Mr. President, I urge all of my colleagues: Hit the brakes--and not just on this devastating partisan budget resolution. Hit the brakes on what President Trump and Elon Musk are doing right now. Let's, instead, come together and work on serious bipartisan bills to fund the government. Let's get investments that are sorely needed out to the folks we represent. Let's pass legislation that gives folks a hand instead of this Republican plan that gives billionaires a handout.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, I call up my amendment No. 878 and ask that it be reported by number.

Madam President, my amendment does two things.

First of all, it strikes the reconciliation instructions. Secondly, it creates a reserve fund to implement a bipartisan, multiyear agreement to provide $171 billion in discretionary funding for both defense and nondefense.

Democrats do agree we need more resources to invest in our national security and address the challenges at the border and counter China, but we cannot leave the rest of the budget in the dust while we do that. So let's deliver investments to do both and make sure we also support our veterans, agriculture, disaster response, biomedical research, FAA, childcare, and more.

These are all big challenges. Democrats stand ready to work with our colleagues, as we have in the past, including through our bipartisan efforts on the Appropriations Committee. But that can only happen if the Republicans are willing to work with us, and working with us means actually working with us, not telling us to accept Elon Musk's cutting $1 trillion in fiscal year 2025 to our priorities, which is assumed in this Republican plan, and, at the same time, spending $342 billion on their own priorities. It also means not sitting on your hands--

--while Elon and Trump rip up our bipartisan laws. I urge my colleagues--

I urge my colleagues to support this amendment.

Madam President, I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, I call up my amendment No. 880 and ask that it be reported by number.

Mr. President, the news is coming so hard and fast these days that it is hard to sort it all out. Every day seems to be something new that captures our attention, our concern, our interest.

What I would like to do today is to try to put some of it in perspective as to what is going on in our governing of this country. I don't believe what I am going to be talking about today is partisan. It should not be partisan because what I am really talking about is competent government and constitutional government--really, two categories: competent government and constitutional government. That should not be a controversial issue. Neither of those is something we should be arguing about. It is what we have a responsibility to carry through in terms of our jobs here in the U.S. Senate. So, of the two categories I want to talk about, my headings are ``thoughtless'' and ``dangerous.''

First, I want to talk about ``thoughtless.''

The hiring freeze. A hiring freeze can be an effective tool if it is used thoughtfully and systematically, but to do it across the board, without a process for exceptions that is built into it, you end up with all kinds of unintended and negative consequences with firefighters, parks, losses elsewhere by attrition. There should be a systematic exemption process. Now it is haphazard and random.

Park seasonal employees first were under the hiring freeze; now they are

not. It is sort of like: Oh. Oh, never mind. We are going to be OK with park seasonal employees.

VA frontline health workers were first subject to the hiring freeze. Then people said: Oh. Well, we didn't mean doctors and nurses, so that is OK. You can hire them.

My point is, it is not a rational process. It is ready, fire, aim. Literally, ready, fire, aim is what we are talking about, and people aren't doing this in a thoughtful and systematic way.

By the way, the difference between frontline deliverers of care at the VA and the people who answer the phones who are categorized as bureaucrats--I don't think there is a stark difference there. If you are a veteran and are seeking care and an appointment at a VA health facility and nobody answers the phone, that is a denial of benefits. That is a denial of benefits just as if they had closed the door in your face. That is what we are talking about--weakening the systems that are serving our public.

So the hiring freeze: It is possible to do a hiring freeze. When I was the Governor of Maine, I instituted a hiring freeze, but we did it in a systematic and thoughtful way. We had a process for dealing with exemptions and without destroying the morale and throwing the entire operation of government into chaos.

By the way, why do we have the government? To serve the people. To serve the people.

So let's talk about the next step--the firings. The famous ``Fork in the Road'' letter is a perfect example of a thoughtless way to approach a problem.

The letter went to everybody. The letter wasn't selective. It went to everybody--all civilians in the CIA, in the National Security Agency, in the Defense Department, and also, of course, to all the other civilian Agencies, but it wasn't targeted in any way. It was, ``If you want to leave Federal service, we will pay you through September,'' but it hit everybody. Again, it is not a rational or thoughtful way to trim the Federal workforce.

You should be talking about, Where are we over? Do we have too many people? Do we have overstock in terms of public servants, and where do we need more, for example. Instead, it went to everybody. By definition, that is not a rational process. Let me just put this in perspective by the way.

In the ``Fork in the Road'' letter, the estimate, as of today, is that 75,000 people have taken that option and left. I suppose the people who are behind this thing think that that is a good victory. The dollars saved to the Treasury from those 75,000 people represent one- tenth of 1 percent of the Federal budget. So the people who are saying that we are cutting the budget; we are cutting; we are saving; we are saving the taxpayers' money, it is one-tenth of 1 percent. Given the chaos and the uncertainty and the deletion of services to our American people, I would argue that is not worth it--one-tenth of 1 percent. Everyone got these letters. People are being fired now in the CIA, the FBI, the VA.

On this letter, what if only the best people take the option to leave? Then you will have really shot yourself in the foot. You will have encouraged people who were going to retire anyway or who could get a better job in the private sector. So it is almost--it is an anti- intelligent way to handle this.

Then you have got situations like at the Department of Energy. In the first weekend, they fired 350 people in the National Nuclear Security Administration. Of the people who handle nuclear materials and are responsible for our nuclear stockpile, they fired almost--I think it was--something like 20 percent of the personnel. Then, 3 or 4 days later, they realized: Uh-oh. That was a mistake. So now they are trying to bring these people back.

The point I am making is, a good, solid, thoughtful process wouldn't have made a mistake like that. They would have realized from the outset that these are jobs that we aren't going to be firing, that we aren't going to be eliminating. It seems to be based on some kind of quota. I don't know what it is.

OK. So now we are seeing everybody is being fired who is on probation, probationary people--people who have worked for the government for less than a year or two. OK. Again, that is arbitrary. Being on probation doesn't mean you are an effective employee or you are not an effective employee. You could be one of the best employees in the whole Federal Government, and you have just come on, and yet you are going to be fired. It has nothing to do with the productivity or skill of the worker. It has nothing to do with the importance of the position. It has nothing to do with the effectiveness of the Agency in question that is serving the people of Maine. If you are probationary, you are gone.

Here is another thing about probation: It turns out, in the Federal Government, if you are promoted, you are on probation in the new position. You may have worked for the Department for 5 or 10 years. You are promoted. You are on probation. You are fired. Even though you have 5 or 10 years of experience--you are capable; you are doing a good job--there was no effort that I can see. People did get these ridiculous letters saying: Your performance has not been adequate. There was no basis for those letters. It was arbitrary--arbitrary.

Remember, I said my categories are ``thoughtless'' and ``dangerous.'' This is thoughtless: probation.

Oh, by the way, about 30 percent of the Federal workforce are veterans. Now, we don't know the exact figures. That is one of the problems. We have no transparency about what is going on here and who is actually being let go and who isn't, but a reasonable extrapolation is 30 percent of the people being fired are veterans--people who put their lives on the line for this country. Then they went into public service, and they are being fired. That is outrageous.

Again, was no one thinking about this? A thousand were fired at the VA just a couple of days ago.

We learned that people supporting the VA crisis line were fired. What genius thought that was a good idea?

Last Friday, immigration judges were fired. We are talking about immigration and the border and the control of immigration, and we are firing immigration judges? What possible sense does that make?

Here is one: We have had, I think, three serious aircraft incidents in the last month, and they just fired, I think, 300 people at the FAA--great--including people who are in the business of maintaining the systems that keep our airplanes safe. In the wake of 3 serious airplane crashes, including 1 here in Washington that killed 67 people, we are firing people at the FAA? Give me a break. What kind of sense does that make? What kind of service is that to the people of the United States?

Here is one that is not life or death, but it is the National Park Service. A thousand people were fired last weekend at the National Park Service. I suspect they were probationary. That means, OK, they had only been there a year or two, but that doesn't mean they weren't in jobs that weren't important. The headline in this morning's paper: ``Chaos at the National Parks.'' The lines are twice as long as they normally are, and if there is chaos at the National Parks in February, Lord knows what it is going to be in June or July in Yosemite and at the Grand Canyon and in Acadia, which is in my State of Maine.

Here is a beauty: Some of these people who are being fired are the people who collect fees at the park. So, to save a buck, we are going to lose 5 bucks from fees not being collected. Genius. Come on. Five percent of the workforce at the National Park Service is being fired.

I can tell you I am the cochair of the National Park Subcommittee of the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. We need more people at the national parks, not less. We have had a staffing shortage going back a half a dozen or 10 years, where visitation is way up, and staff is flat or declining. Now it is really declining. This is a direct, hands-on experience for the American people.

Gettysburg: They have been laying off people at the battlefield. Last night, apparently, something called the Presidential Management Fellows Program--a training program that is decades old that brings talented people into the Federal Government--was eliminated. No explanation. No rationale. Eliminated.

OK. That is the thoughtless part. And let me give you a little personal experience. When I was elected Governor of Maine, we had a serious budget deficit. We were in the middle of a recession. So we went through a process very similar to the impetus for what is going on now. We looked at the entire workforce of the State of Maine, but we did it in a thoughtful and transparent way. We developed a task force that included private citizens, legislators, and members of the administration, and we took 8 months--8 months, not 8 weeks--and we looked at the entire structure of the State of Maine government and reduced our workforce by about 10 percent--a significant reduction, but we did it in a thoughtful way and in a way that made sense in terms of the ongoing service to the people of Maine.

So it can be done, and I am not unsympathetic with the idea of making things more efficient and even possibly downsizing the government where it is called for and where additional people aren't necessary. So I am not here to say we shouldn't be looking for efficiency and saying everything in the Federal Government is perfect. I don't believe that for a minute. But I think, if we are going to take on this exercise, it ought to be done in a sensible way by people who know what they are doing.

That brings me to DOGE. I don't know what they are doing. Nobody does. I don't know who these 25-year-olds are that are in the IRS, rummaging around in the IRS IT system or--we learned in the last couple of days--Social Security. What are they doing? Who are they? What are their qualifications? Do they have security clearances? Do they have conflicts of interest?

All of the rules that are designed to protect us from people making arbitrary decisions that aren't accountable--you talk about bureaucrats being unaccountable; these are the ultimate unaccountable people. We don't know what their relationship is to the Federal Government, what authority they have, under what law are they operating. It is pretty clear from mistakes like firing 350 people at the Nuclear Security Agency--it is pretty clear they don't know what they are doing, and they are firing people whom we need. OK. That is the thoughtless part, and it is inexcusable.

That is just pure efficiency of government, of doing the right thing, and it can be done, but these people aren't doing it.

The second part of what is going on is the dangerous part, and this is where I call upon my colleagues on the other side of the aisle who are standing by and watching the structure of our government be attacked with no response--elimination of entire congressionally created Agencies.

USAID was established by statute, and over a weekend, these people fired everybody, closed the Agency, took the name off the door, and threw the rest of the world into chaos where these people were working on important projects all over the world that were part of our outreach to the world.

And, you know what, as soon as we went out of business at AID, China is right in the market. It is like walking away from engagement with the world. It couldn't be a more self-defeating piece of work.

By the way, it is a tiny part of the Federal budget.

James Mattis famously said when he was a general: If you cut the foreign aid budget, you are going to have to buy me more bullets.

Foreign aid is part of the national security of this country, and to demolish this Agency without any input from Congress, without any relationship to the Foreign Affairs Committee or anybody else up here in Congress, is grossly unconstitutional. It is grossly unconstitutional.

Here is the problem: This isn't just a battle between the Senate and the House and the President and they are fighting about powers. No. The reason the Framers designed our Constitution the way they did was that they were afraid of concentrated power. They had just fought a brutal 8-year war with a King. They didn't want a King. They wanted a constitutional republic where power was divided between the Congress and the President and the courts.

We are collapsing that structure. And the structure wasn't there for fun. It wasn't there because, hey, we are just going to design this complicated system. It was there to protect our freedom because the people who wrote our Constitution understood human nature, and they understood a very important thousand-year-old principle: Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

So the whole idea was to divide power. To the extent we allow this assault on our Constitution, this collapsing and excessive power being granted to the Executive to ignore the laws passed by Congress--and, by the way, appropriations bills are laws passed by Congress, which the administration is also ignoring by freezing funding for programs authorized and funded by Congress. To the extent we do that, we are not only making a mistake now, but we are altering the essential structure of our Constitution that is there for a reason, that is there to protect our freedom.

The people who are cheering this on, I fear, in a reasonably short period of time, are going to say: Where did this go? How did this happen? How did we make our President into a monarch? How did this happen?

How it happened is we gave it up.

James Madison thought we would fight for our power--but no. Right now, we are just sitting back and watching it happen.

Article II of the Constitution--the President said: Oh, article II gives me a lot of power.

No, it doesn't. It makes the President Commander in Chief; that is true. But here is the key sentence in article II of the Constitution, which defines a President's power. The key sentence is not the power of the President. The responsibility of the President is to ``take care that the laws be faithfully executed''--not write the laws, not deny the laws, not ignore the laws, not pick which laws he or she likes. To ``take care that the laws be faithfully executed''--that is the responsibility of the President. Right now, those laws are being ignored.

Impoundment. Impoundment. The President is trying to say: Congress appropriated this money with an appropriation bill signed by the President, but I am not going to spend it because I don't like it. I don't like that purpose, whatever it is.

I am sorry. It is absolutely straight-up unconstitutional, and it is illegal. President Nixon tried to do that in 1973, and the Congress virtually unanimously passed the Impoundment Control Act, which said: No, Presidents can't do that; they can't ignore the will of Congress because article I of the Constitution gives the Congress the power of the purse.

We are giving it away this week. We are standing by and watching it, watching the essential power of this body evaporate--not evaporate-- migrate down the street to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The power was divided for a reason.

There is some criticism now in the press saying people are talking about a constitutional crisis; they are crying wolf. No. This is a constitutional crisis. It is the most serious assault on our Constitution in the history of this country. It is the most serious assault on the very structure of our Constitution, which is designed to protect our freedoms and our liberty, in the history of this country.

It is a constitutional crisis, and I will tell you what makes it worse: The President and the Vice President are already hinting that they are not going to obey decisions of the courts.

Many of my friends in this body say: Well, you know, it would be hard. We don't want to buck the President and everything. We are going to let the courts take care of this.

No. 1, that is a copout. It is our responsibility to protect the Constitution. That is what we swear to when we enter this body. But to stand back and say: Oh, we are going to watch all this happen, and the courts are going to take care of it--that is an abdication of our responsibility.

By the way, if you look at history, yes, it is true Presidents have gained power. In my reading of history, usually it wasn't because Presidents usurped power but because the Congress abdicated it. We haven't declared war, for example, since 1942, and yet that is a clear responsibility of Congress. And we sure have been in some scrapes since 1942. We have abdicated that power. And we are now in the process of abdicating the power to control the appropriations process.

I mentioned about DOGE: no authority, no accountability, no transparency. We literally don't know what they are doing. We can't find out what they are doing.

Then, just this week, the destruction of the independent Agencies created by Congress. They were created as independent Agencies for a reason--because they didn't want them to be dominated by the vicissitudes of politics.

The President gets to appoint members of the board, and they are very carefully balanced--not firing someone at the National Labor Relations Board so there is no quorum so they can't act. That is a direct violation of congressionally established policy.

These independent Agencies were created for a reason.

Oh, I forgot to mention the illegal firing of inspectors general. The Senator from Iowa is a champion of inspectors general. In the first few days, something like 18 inspectors general were fired, completely contrary to the law. The law is the Congress must be given 30 days' notice of the firing of an inspector general and reasons therefor. Not done. Not a peep.

What is it going to take for us to wake up--when I say ``us,'' I mean this entire body--to wake up to what is going on here? Is it going to be too late? Is it going to be when the President has accreted all this power and the Congress is an afterthought? What is it going to take? The offenses keep piling up.

As I said, leaving it to the courts, No. 1, is a copout. No. 2, when the Vice President said something--I can't remember exactly what he said--but why should we--the courts should not have the power to do this. And, of course, the President, over the weekend, famously quoted Napoleon: When you are saving your country, you don't have to obey any law.

Wow. A President of the United States quoting Napoleon about not having to obey the law.

So I intended to talk about Ukraine, but Senator Tillis and Senator Shaheen did it so articulately, I think I will let that pass except to say that it is shameful that we have suddenly pivoted from the support of a democracy that was grossly and illegally invaded--from the support of that country to the support of a murderous dictator.

I heard something about Zelenskyy is a dictator. The only dictator in this game is Vladimir Putin. He is the dictator. And to argue that somehow Ukraine started the war--what universe is somebody in that would say something like that?

Again, I won't pursue, but I can tell you, Putin is happy, Xi Jinping is happy, Iran is happy, and North Korea is happy. They love what is going on, to see us retreating from the world, whether it is AID or Ukraine. They love to see us retreating from the world, looking weak and looking unreliable.

Finally, on this point, we seem to be systematically alienating our allies. I have been on Armed Services now for 12 years, and I have learned that the key asymmetric advantage that this country has in the world is allies. China has customers; we have allies. Well, we are giving that away. If I wasn't on the floor of the U.S. Senate, I would use a slightly different term. But we are giving away our asymmetric advantage in the world by what looks like systematically alienating our allies, whether it is threats of tariffs or speeches in Europe telling them what their problems are, basically saying we are going to abandon Europe.

What a great idea: Abandon Europe at a time when there is a murderous dictator who has his eyes on the Baltics, on Poland, and who has said he would like to reestablish the Soviet empire. The worst possible geopolitical thing that we could do would be to abandon Ukraine.

So this is a constitutional crisis, and we have to respond to it. And I am just waiting for this whole body to stand up and say: No, no. We don't do it this way. We don't do it this way. We do things constitutionally.

Yes, it is more cumbersome. It is slower. That is what the Framers intended. They didn't intend to have an efficient dictatorship, and that is what we are headed for. This is a very dangerous moment. We have to wake up, protect this institution, but much more importantly, protect the people of the United States of America.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I call up my amendment No. 198 and ask that it be reported by number.

This afternoon I was on the floor. I was privileged to attend to the remarks of the distinguished chair of the Finance Committee where he characterized the upcoming tax bill that will be before us shortly. He characterized it as principally benefiting the middle class and working class and denied that it would be especially or in any way beneficial to the superwealthy in our country.

Well, I have always subscribed to Ronald Reagan's motto: Trust but verify. I am simply asking to verify what the chairman of the Finance Committee said this afternoon. My amendment would just say: no reduction in tax liability to someone making more than $500 million. There are about 400 families in America, and $500

million seems to me a number that would justify not having a tax reduction. That is all the amendment does--no tax reduction and liability for those making more than $500 million.

I urge a ``yes'' vote to verify what we were told on the floor this afternoon.

Mr. President, things are not as they appear to be, and in Washington, that is not unusual. In fact, that may be the norm--that in Washington, things are often not what they appear to be.

If you follow the news, you have been seeing reports of Elon Musk and DOGE and getting rid of waste and fraud and abuse by the billions, if not trillions, of dollars. And yet, we are meeting here today, though, because Congress, namely the Senate, wants to increase Federal spending.

So on the one hand, you have Elon Musk and DOGE, and the Democrats complaining to high heavens, ``They are cutting too much; they are cutting too much,'' and Senate Republicans are coming forward today to pass a budget to allow them to raise Federal spending. What gives?

Are Republicans for getting rid of waste, fraud, and abuse and reducing the deficit, balancing the budget, as the President says? Or are they really for increasing spending $340 billion?

The budget that we will vote on will allow increased spending in the military by $150 billion; increased spending for the border, $175 billion; $20 billion for the Coast Guard. That adds up to about $340 billion.

Well, if we were fiscally prudent, if we were fiscally conservative, why wouldn't we take the savings from Elon Musk and DOGE and move it over here and help with the border? Why would we be doing a brandnew bill to increase spending by $340 billion?

That is because the Senate is acting as it always has. The Senate hasn't gotten the message. President Trump came to town--a new way of thinking. They are shuttering the Agencies. They are shutting people down. They are buying things like $2 million spent in Guatemala for sex changes, $2 million spent in Brazil for girl-centric climate change, $4.8 million spent in Ukraine for social media influencers.

While you are at it, we spent--not we, but the people who voted for this. I voted against all of this. But the Members of the Senate who voted for this spent several hundred thousand dollars sending designers in Ukraine to the fashion show in Paris.

It goes on and on: thousands of dollars for a trans opera in Colombia, more thousands of dollars for a trans comic book in Peru, hundreds of thousands of dollars spent studying rats to see if lonely rats use more cocaine than well-socialized rats. Guess what. Lonely rats love the cocaine. They spent hundreds of thousands of dollars of your money on this craziness.

Why not take that crazy spending that DOGE and Elon Musk are finding and move it over to secure the border? Instead, fiscal conservatives are faced with a bill they are putting forward to just simply increase the spending.

I am all for moving it around. I am all for saving it from the craziness and pushing it over into something more valuable. There is a procedure for doing this. It is a special procedure. It doesn't require any Democrat vote. It can happen through simple majority, and it has a fancy name. It is called rescission. So all the administration would have to do is bundle together several million dollars of savings--which it appears they are finding--bundle it together in one bill, send it back to us, and by simple majority, without any help from the Democrats, Republicans can cut spending.

Instead, things aren't what they appear to be. You see all this great work being done to cut spending, to cut waste, fraud, and abuse, and then you see the Senate acting--we are going to vote all night long to set up a bill to increase spending by $340 billion.

There is a true philosophical debate within the Republican Party--and really within both parties--about what the biggest threats to our country are. Are the greatest threats to America from within or from without?

I would argue that they are from within. I don't lie awake at night fearing foreign invasion, that invaders are coming to our shores any moment. It doesn't mean we shouldn't be prepared, that we shouldn't defend ourselves. But it does mean that we don't have to have unlimited spending on our military.

Look, many of my family served. Soldiers have to be paid. We should take care of them. But, at the same time, we shouldn't be everywhere around the world, all the time.

We spent close to $300 billion in Ukraine. We have got soldiers all over Africa. We have got soldiers in Syria. We have got soldiers everywhere.

We don't need to be doing that.

If you want to put our military's money and spending in perspective, we spend more than the next nine countries combined. It is not that we are spending too little. We are spending a lot. But if you decide that you want more money for the military, take it from the climate change-- the girl-centric climate change in Brazil. Quit spending your money overseas.

Over the years, we have given Egypt nearly $60 billion. Who runs Egypt? A general, where there are no elections, kind of like Ukraine, where there is a president, but he doesn't have to run for reelection because he has canceled the elections.

Why in the world would we be giving money hand over fist to dictators and people who don't stand for election? In Egypt, we gave it to one family, the Mubarak family. When he was finally ousted from power, he had $20 billion on him.

Well, it actually wasn't on him. A lot of it was in Swiss banks and all over the place, but he was worth 20 billion. That is nothing. Each of his kids was worth another 5 billion. So he basically was able to steal 30 billion of the 60 billion that American taxpayers sent to Egypt.

That is foreign aid. That is the story of your foreign aid. It is that you have been being ripped off decade after decade.

But while Elon Musk and DOGE are doing their job working overtime until late at night, finding us those savings for foreign aid, send them back. We spent 40 billion in foreign aid. You could send 30 billion back and America would be safer and stronger, and you could put the 30 billion toward either the military or to the border--your choice.

There is money like that that can be saved and moved around, but it is going to have to come back. Ultimately, all the talk of the savings is ephemeral. It isn't real until Congress has the courage to vote on it. It has to be certified by a vote.

If Congress doesn't vote, it sort of wishes and washes around in the ether and may or may not wind up being savings. Ultimately, Congress is going to have to do their job.

But what we are doing today to vote on the budget is not doing our job. What we are doing today, which will be a Republican-led effort-- minus me--will be an effort to tee up a bill to increase Federal spending.

I would say, let's take the savings that we are finding, move that over to any accounts, do it through a vote of Congress, do it through a simple majority. It can actually be done even without the budgetary process.

A rescission package can be sent back without even going through the whole budget problem. What we are faced with, though, is come the end of the year--we are halfway through the year, so we are voting on a budget today that is really somewhat of a fiction because the year is already half over. We know what is being spent. We know that in the end, we are going to spend a little over $7 trillion this year. The problem is, we are going to bring in about $5 trillion, and we are going to spend about $7 trillion. We are $2 trillion short.

They are getting ready within weeks to add a couple hundred billion dollars for California. It is appropriate to have sympathy for people in their plight, but it is not good for the country simply to borrow money to send it to anyone. If we are going to help people in need, we should be taking that money from the taxes that come in. We shouldn't be borrowing it from China and sending it to California. No matter how noble the purpose is, we should be spending what comes in. We should not be borrowing a penny.

But come the end of the year, we are going to be over $2 trillion in increased debt for 1 year. What is our total? Our total is going to be over $37 trillion, maybe $38 trillion by the end of the year. Interest? The largest item in our budget is now interest--about $1 trillion in interest every year. One estimate is that over the next 10 years, it will be like $14 trillion in interest.

Now, interest doesn't buy anything. Interest isn't feeding anybody. Interest

isn't putting out fires in California. Interest is simply wasted because of the profligate ways of both parties.

People voted for a change. They said: We are going to get a change. They like what Donald Trump is doing. They like what DOGE is doing. They like what Elon is doing. Yet here we are. The Republicans are acting like the Democrats. They are going to vote to increase spending by $342 billion. It is all going to be borrowed.

Now, some will say: We are going to cut spending to equalize the money we are going to spend here. But none of that is listed in the budget.

Now, the House has a budget. The House Republicans have passed a different budget, and in their budget, they list $1.5 trillion worth of savings. They have to get to this. They cannot do their special simple majority vote, the reconciliation vote, unless they find $1.5 trillion.

In the Senate bill, there is $4 billion. Now, they will say, ``That is just a floor; we are going to find more than that,'' but all they would promise was the 4. In the House, they realized that is not really believable, that is not really comforting, so the House said: No, we are doing $1.5 trillion.

So as this debate unfolds over the next 10, 12, 15 hours--we will be here for a long time. You know, get your popcorn. Turn your C-SPAN on. But as this unfolds, I will offer an amendment, and my amendment will say, let's alter the budget to not only say we are going to increase spending by $340 billion, my amendment will say we should cut spending to pay for it by $1.5 trillion.

Ideally, we would do this simply by bringing a rescission package of the savings that Elon and DOGE are finding, but it would work this way as well to at least show that we are serious about this. I have seen this happen again and again, and I know how the story is going to turn out. I know that come September, which is the end of our fiscal year, we are about halfway through it. As we get to the end of the fiscal year, Republicans are going to be going: Uh-oh, I have to go home and explain to people that the deficit is $2.2 trillion--one of the worst years ever. I have to explain to people ``Republicans are in charge; we are taking care of it now'' when it looks like the problem is getting worse.

We have to immediately start cutting spending. Every Republican needs to be voting to cut spending. There is a way to do it. It is called a rescission package.

If you continue to borrow, though, if you think ``I am going to be nice to everyone and give everyone money,'' you can do it, but the borrowing is going to crowd out everything, because we have made many, many promises. We have promised people Medicare. We promised people Medicaid. We promised people Social Security. We promised people food stamps. Well, guess what, that equals all of our tax revenue. Those four promises--Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, Social Security--that equals all of our tax revenue. We don't even vote on those programs.

The programs that we vote on--that is the budget, that is military and nonmilitary--are a third of the spending. It is all borrowed now. Essentially, our debt equals our budget. Everything we vote to spend in the budget is borrowed. So things are out of whack. You can't help everyone and be everything to everybody.

A way to look at this is, let's say you make $25,000 a year, and all of your money goes to your rent and your food and taking care of your family. You have nothing left over. You are working poor. You walk by somebody on the side of the street, and they are homeless, and you feel sorry for them. Would you immediately go to a bank and borrow $1,000 and give it to a homeless person? No, you wouldn't, because that would make no sense whatsoever.

That is what we are doing. We look around the world, and we see homeless people. We look around the world, and we see hungry people. So we just simply go to China, the bank, and we borrow money from China and then we send it to Africa. Well, you know what, if you send your own money, it is charity. If you send your own money, it is noble. If you send somebody else's money or you borrow the money and you make the country go further in debt and you put us more in peril, that is not charity. That is what is destroying our country. That is what is eating us up from the inside out. The greatest threat to America is from within, not from without.

What happens when the currency unravels? What happens when the value of the dollar doesn't lose 5 percent in a year but loses 5 percent in a week? That is what happens in the end stages of a currency being destroyed. People say it will never happen to America. Can't happen in America. We are the strongest dollar. We are the reserve currency of the world. Can't happen here.

It can and has happened to great nations. It has happened to great civilizations that have lost their currency, that have destroyed their currency. Does it always unravel gradually enough that you can fix it? No. Sometimes it unravels in the space of weeks.

When the German money lost its value in the early 1920s after the first war, in September, it took like 100 marks to buy a loaf of bread. Two weeks later, mid-September, it was 1,000 marks. At the end of September, it was 1 million. In the middle of October, it was 10 million.

The currency, if you look at the currency and what it would buy in a 2-month period, was completely destroyed in a 2-month period. The pictures from the history books will show people putting the German mark into wheelbarrows and wheeling it up to fires to burn for warmth. It was worth more as fuel than it was to buy things. The workers were demanding that they be paid more than once a day because you had to go out and get your pay at noon and spend it then because it was worth half as much by the end of the day. That is what it looks like when a country destroys its currency.

How do you destroy your currency? How does inflation occur? If you watch television, you see that these people are either dishonest or would fail basic economics. They are like: Well, inflation is transitory, and, you know, we are not sure where it is from, but maybe it could be--oh, greedy people owning grocery stores causes inflation.

No. Inflation is an economic fact that comes from borrowing money, and the Federal Reserve prints up money to buy the borrowed money.

Treasury--when we get behind on our payments, we spend more than comes in, so we have to borrow money. The Fed buys our Treasury bills. Well, the Fed doesn't have any money; the Fed creates that money. That is what inflation is. And so much of it gets passed on to government.

Everybody knows that in the last 3 or 4 years--and part of the election was over the inflation of the Biden administration. Prices were up about 20 percent over 3 or 4 years. But in order to keep up with that, we built in inflation protection to most of our government programs. So Social Security has cost-of-living increases. So they keep up with inflation or try to keep up with inflation, but as they do, the programs just get larger and larger and larger, and we get more and more behind the eight ball. That is what is happening.

But it is coming to a head. Social Security runs out of money in 2033. When it runs out of money, everybody gets 20 to 25 percent less in Social Security. What do you think is going to happen in our country when the poorest among us who live only on Social Security--when they lose the value of their check, they lose 25 percent of their check? What do you think is going to happen in this country? And nobody is preparing them for it. Nobody is doing anything to reform Social Security, reform Medicare, reform Medicaid.

You know, people are just petrified of everything. What is so horrible and so hard to say about people who are able-bodied ought to work? I think everyone should work. I think everyone who is able-bodied should work not as punishment but as reward. We should have a work requirement on every check that goes out. Everybody should work. I mean, it is how you get your self-esteem. You can't give people self- esteem. You can't say: Here, Johnny, here is a trophy. We know you can't spell or add, but here is a trophy for being a mathlete.

No, you have to earn your self-esteem. You earn it through work.

Just adding work to Medicaid and saying: You want free health insurance from the government--adding a work requirement saves $100 billion. Having the States pay more for Medicaid. Why

do I want the States to pay for more Medicaid? Because they don't have a printing press. Why are the decisions of this body so awful? Because there is a printing press.

I had a conversation with one of my Democratic colleagues, and I said: We have to make a choice. You have to decide whether you want to help the poor in our country or help the poor in Ukraine or help whoever you are paying in Ukraine.

He said: We shouldn't have to make a choice.

It is like, you do have to make a choice. The fact that you think you don't have to make a choice is why we are $36 trillion in the hole. You have to make choices. Which comes first--Ukraine or America? You can't do both because we don't have enough money. We only have enough taxes coming in to pay for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and food stamps. Everything else is borrowed.

So maybe able-bodied people need to go back to work. Maybe there needs to be a work requirement. Maybe, for goodness' sake, food stamps shouldn't buy sugared drinks, chips, Ding Dongs, and Twinkies. Could we not reform our system such that we try to cure the obesity plague in our country by cutting back what the government buys as far as food?

But today, the opposite will happen. Things aren't what they appear to be. Things are never, in Congress, really what they seem to be. We will pass a bill ostensibly by the conservative majority, but the purpose of this bill is to spend $340 billion in new spending.

Instead, what we should be doing is taking the savings from the waste, fraud, and abuse that DOGE and Elon are finding--we should take those savings and use it to spend for things that people think are of higher priority, such as the border and/or the military.

But I will oppose this budget because I am not for spending more money. I will oppose this budget because I want to have nothing to do with a $2.2 trillion deficit. At the end of the year, those who vote for this budget and those who vote for the new spending will have to explain to people at home: How about that $2.2 trillion deficit? How did that happen under a Republican watch?

Until someone is brave enough to say no, it is going to go on and on, and there is a danger that if we don't stop it, we are going to destroy the country.

So I will offer an amendment later on to cut spending, to actually put teeth into this budget resolution, to cut real spending, to balance our budget, and to do and complete the promises that the President had in the campaign.

I yield the floor.

I call up my amendment No. 999 and ask that it be reported by number.

Mr. President, the budget bill before us instructs the Senate to find $342 billion in new spending. The budget bill, as written, is a spending bill. My amendment would add language to cut spending. The cuts would

total $1.5 trillion. These cuts mirror the cuts from the House budget resolution that has been passed.

This year, the deficit will exceed $2 trillion. It is a fiscal imperative that Congress begin to cut spending.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. President, I urge my colleagues to oppose this amendment. This amendment is unnecessary. We already have laws on the books to protect people's information.

The most recent cases I can remember of leaking information like this involved an IRS contractor who illegally leaked the tax returns of President Trump, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos to the delight of many on the other side of the aisle.

That person, fortunately, though, is now in jail, which proves the point that we already have laws in place to take care of this. This amendment is a thinly veiled attempt to prevent DOGE from doing the constructive job of finding waste. This is an amendment that says it is OK to spend $2 million in Guatemala on sex change surgery. This is an amendment that says it is OK, look the other way, transgender comic books in Peru are great. This is an amendment that says it is OK to do trans operas in Colombia. This is an amendment that attacks people who are looking to save our money and spend it on legitimate diplomacy, not crazy, looney, leftwing ideas. And I am done.

Mr. President, I appreciate the opportunity to speak.

I returned from Ukraine earlier this week, where I saw both the suffering that the Ukrainian people have endured over the past 3 years at Putin's hand and the courage they have forged to save their country and their children--the suburban town of Bucha, where Russian troops tortured and massacred hundreds of civilians in the first day of Putin's unprovoked invasion; the shattered children's hospital Putin's missiles nearly destroyed; apartment buildings in central Kyiv struck by Putin's drones; and lawyers searching for the thousands of Ukrainian children who have been kidnapped from their parents by Russian soldiers.

By most estimates, at least 40,000 Ukrainian troops have been killed in battle and another 380,000 have been wounded since Putin's invasion. A draft of the general population in that country means that war has scarred nearly every neighborhood in this massive country. In cemeteries all across Ukraine, fresh graves piled with dirt and flowers testify to their sacrifice. At least 12,000 civilians have been killed.

Amid this torment, the Ukrainian people continue to send troops to the front in the dead of winter and to mobilize to keep their businesses and their homes and their kids in school. They did not ask for Putin's thuggish invasion.

From the very beginning, our intelligence Agencies have told us something that Putin never has understood--that the Ukrainian people will never submit to him; that if every weapon were denied them, they would fight with sticks and stones and their bare hands to protect their country from any invading tyrant but especially from Vladimir Putin of Russia.

Fortunately for Ukraine and for the rest of the free world, they have not had to fight this invasion with their bare hands. The American people have steadfastly supported them. We have sent $66 billion in military aid and $51 billion in nonmilitary aid. That is a lot of money, but it represents just 0.52 percent of our GPD. Unlike the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, not a single American soldier has been sent to fight.

Our European allies have stepped up as well. Together, they have actually committed more than the United States. But their sums represent a much larger percentage of their economy--which makes sense because they are closer to the danger that Russia poses. At the same time, even farther allies, like Australia and Japan, continue to support Ukraine as well.

Our allies and our partners know the stakes of this war. They know that supporting Ukraine means standing with people that are willing to fight for the country they love. They know that rolling over to Putin will embolden other dictators around the world, especially Xi Jinping of China.

The rest of us may not need this reminder, but the people sitting at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue apparently do since they seem to be the only ones in the free world who do not understand the stakes of this war.

Over the last few days, President Trump has chosen the side of tyranny of Putin, of Xi, and profoundly undermined our national security. Like someone reading Russian Twitter bots, he deliberately and falsely accused Ukraine of starting the war. He called Zelenskyy-- the freedom fighter who is leading the fight in Ukraine--a dictator.

Mr. President, he invited Russia to rejoin the G7, a group of the world's most powerful democracies that has met regularly since the 1970s and which threw out Russia after Putin invaded Ukraine in 2014.

Before negotiations have even started, President Trump's Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, took Ukraine's potential NATO membership off the table. And just this week, the Trump administration held talks with Russia in Saudi Arabia without the decency of even inviting Ukraine to the table. It pains me to say it, but our old colleague Secretary of State Marco Rubio even suggested that the United States should lift sanctions on and bolster economic collaboration with Russia while Russia shells civilians in Ukraine.

Some of our Republican colleagues believe that it doesn't matter what President Trump says, only what he does; that it doesn't matter when he says that he is going to send American troops to Gaza or seize the Panama Canal or falsely accuses Ukraine of starting this war. But a President's words matter more than most, and President Trump's harmful words and policies will only embolden Putin. They will further convince Putin that he is winning, that time is on his side, and that he has no reason to accept a peace deal that is anything less than overwhelmingly favorable to his maximalist desire.

In literally every one of his comments on Ukraine, President Trump has undermined our national security. Every time he opens his mouth, he weakens our bargaining position and makes the world more dangerous.

We all want this war to end. On that, the President and I agree. But for the sake of Ukraine and the sake of the free world, it must only end with a just and enduring peace.

While the United States and our allies and Ukraine work together to establish the terms of the peace and get ready to negotiate with Putin, the Ukrainians are going to have to keep fighting throughout this winter season--this freezing winter--where the civilian population is just doing everything they can to keep their houses and their businesses and their schools warm and livable. The Ukrainian soldiers are not asking to be relieved of this terrible burden. They are embracing it because they know that any cease-fire without meaningful security guarantees will allow Putin to rebuild his weakened army and attack again and again and again.

Obviously--obviously--everyone in this Chamber knows that any meaningful negotiation has to include Ukraine. Doing anything else, as the Trump administration just did in Saudi Arabia, would be an insult to the memory of every soldier who has laid down their life in this war.

I cannot claim to know Donald Trump well. It is obvious that I deeply regret his election, but I don't blame him for winning the election. He beat my party, the Democratic Party, badly in two elections. He even found a way to get elected after he was the first President in American history to take away a fundamental civil right from the American people--a woman's right to choose. He still got elected again. That is extraordinary, and it is a testament, I am sorry to say, to the Democratic Party's weaknesses and to his own skills and talents, particularly in this era.

I don't doubt that his experience as a reality TV star taught him things that helped him get elected. I am much less certain, however, that his checkered commercial real estate background prepared him to negotiate a hotel deal with Vladimir Putin, much less a deal that concerns the fate of the free world.

Donald Trump is not the only person with private sector experience in our

government. I can tell you from my experience from working in Denver, when someone is having a negotiation who has deal fever, you can see it. You can smell it when they are so desperate for a deal on any terms. The people who I negotiated with in Denver had a lot more discipline than that. We told each other that we would never agree to any deal that hadn't cratered at least three times, because that was the only way you could tell whether you were getting the best deal. If you didn't have the guts to walk away, you were never going to get the best deal that you could.

I have never seen a worse case of deal fever than Donald Trump's approach to the coming negotiation with Vladimir Putin. Never in my life have I seen it, and it has never been more important. I doubt the world has seen such an ill-conceived pursuit of negotiation since the infamous 1938 Munich Agreement in which the UK and France and Italy allowed Nazi Germany to annex part of Czechoslovakia. The damage he is doing is not only that we will get a worse deal; it is that we will undermine Ukraine's position on the frontlines. Without security guarantees from the United States and from Europe, Putin will only bide his time, regroup, and invade again.

After the fictions that President Trump has spewed about who started this war, not to mention the chorus of defeatism from his Vice President, his Secretary of Defense, and the Director of National Intelligence, does anyone--does anybody--including Putin and Xi Jinping, doubt what would happen if Putin invaded again? This is less the ``Art of the Deal,'' I am afraid, than it is the ``art of defeat.'' After all of these years, after all of these battles, it would be truly pathetic for the United States, the world's most powerful country, to accept a fever-induced deal with Russia, like the Munich Agreement.

Look it up--not, perhaps, on Twitter but in your much more reliable 10th grade Western civ textbook. After that deal, Hitler did not stop at Czechoslovakia but continued his war on Europe. Left unchecked, Putin will do the same thing, as Putin's propagandists have told us repeatedly.

To make matters worse, anyone concerned about Beijing's potential takeover of Taiwan knows that there will be no better test of how the free world will respond to Xi's potential invasion than how we respond to Putin. Come to think of it, if China does invade Taiwan, how would we evaluate the leadership capacity of an American President who claimed that it was Taiwan who had invaded China, not the other way around? That is the level of duplicity that we are seeing from Donald Trump right now.

So why the deal fever? That is a good question. President Trump's aspiration for a Nobel Peace Prize is well known. He can hang it next to his gold-plated faucets and his first editions of the ``Art of the Deal.'' But if he heard from people in this Chamber, even he might think twice if he understood that walking down this path of appeasement makes him more likely to be remembered like Neville Chamberlain.

Negotiations can end this war in a just manner only if Ukraine can negotiate them from a place of strength.

The American people have been incredibly generous in our support of Ukraine, but, even so, this war has cost us less than 0.6 percent of our GDP while allowing us to send Ukraine old weapons when we invest in our own cutting-edge replacements, permitting us to learn from Ukraine's extraordinary innovation on the frontlines and its world- class use of new warfighting technologies, such as drones, and boosting our economy without costing a single American soldier's life.

We and our European allies have to continue surging military assistance to Ukraine, not forever but so Ukraine is best positioned to make this deal not just for Ukraine but for us and for free countries all over the world. Contrary to what many people believed at the outset of this war and what President Trump apparently believes today, Putin's invasion of Ukraine has been costly to him--very costly to him. Three years of the Ukrainian peoples' tenacity and courage have degraded the Russian military. As we speak, Russia is losing twice the number of soldiers every month as Putin's war continues. In total, Putin has squandered more than $200 billion and suffered a staggering 700,000 in casualties at the hands of Ukrainian patriots. It is three times the number of soldiers Russia lost in Afghanistan--a country famously regarded as the graveyard of empires.

We didn't ask for this war, neither did Ukraine, but Putin is in a weaker position to threaten Europe today than when he first swung his iron fist at the Ukrainian people. The last thing we should do now is weaken our negotiating position when we and Europe have so much at stake--when the world has so much at stake.

Putin believes he can beat Ukraine not because he thinks Ukrainians are weak but because he thinks we are weak, and he thinks President Trump is a pushover and a sucker. At the beginning of his invasion of Ukraine, Putin, who was surrounded as tyrants are and as dictators are by yes-men who are scared to tell them the truth about their own weaknesses and, in this case, Russia's weaknesses, made three fundamental miscalculations going into the war.

One was about the strength of his own army. He had invested billions of dollars planning for the invasion, but much of it was siphoned off because of Russia's endemic corruption.

The second miscalculation was about the Ukrainian people's patriotism and willingness to fight to the death. No matter how President Trump tries to undermine this sacrifice, the honor roll of history will forever--will forever--record Ukraine's courage.

Putin's third miscalculation was that the world would roll over and allow him to invade his peaceful neighbor. Unlike the other two mistakes, he had evidence for the final point. After all, when he began his invasion in 2014 by lawlessly sending his ``little green men'' to occupy Crimea, which is part of Ukraine, the world did nothing. The United States did nothing. He thought the world would do nothing when he invaded again.

It turned out, unlike Putin, we actually learned from our mistake. The free world has stood up to Putin this time around. We have supplied arms and other support while the Ukrainian people have died on the frontline of their country and for the West. Their cemeteries are bulging with fresh graves. They have earned the free world's support.

But even more important to us and our allies, we have protected our national security and affirmed our commitment to the post-World War II rules-based international order. How this ends will determine whether that order persists and whether the United States continues to provide the leadership our parents and grandparents supplied since World War II. World War II was another war started by a tyrant, but it was ended by the world's democracies.

Many Americans inside this Chamber and outside understand the stakes. They know, as Ronald Reagan proclaimed 40 years ago, in advancing freedom, Americans carry a special burden: a belief in the dignity of man and that freedom is America's core and that we should never deny it nor forsake it. This is what we risk today by withdrawing our support of Ukraine. We will abandon both the Ukrainian people and the core of what America stands for, and we cannot do it.

This is personal for me and so many of us. My mom was born a Jew in Warsaw in 1938. She and her parents and an aunt were the only ones who survived the Holocaust. The Nazis killed everyone else in her family. Authoritarian aggression left an indelible mark on my family and countless other families in Ukraine and Poland in the 1930s and 1940s, where Stalin and Hitler killed together 16 million human beings. These victims of fascism died, believing that they were invisible to the rest of the world, forgotten people in unforgettable years.

The lesson I learned from my mom is that the United States can never let that happen again by trying to appease a dictator the way that Chamberlain did. That is not apocryphal, or a made-up story. I had dinner last night with my mom. She is 86 years old. She can't believe that she has lived long enough--I am happy that she has, but she can't believe that she has lived long enough to see another tyrant's invasion of their peaceful, democratic European neighbor. But she hasn't

lived long enough to forget her generation's searing lessons. She knows the eternal truth--that the greatest enemy of fascism is man.

Even if President Trump continues to ignore reality, my mother and millions of Americans who make up the ``greatest generation'' understand the United States has a special responsibility.

It has always been far too easy for some in high office to ignore their moral responsibility to people sacrificing their lives a continent away on behalf of our shared values and interests. History occasionally records their names--like Chamberlain's--in blood.

It is particularly easy today to play to self-defeating isolationist tendencies in the daily headlines, to make rash comments that are foolish and unpatriotic and that Russian trolls spread like wildfire across social media platforms. It is far too easy to do the wrong thing. It always has been.

It is a lot harder, but necessary, for the living to stand for freedom and democracy and those willing to give the last measure of themselves for those eternal values. At this moment, the United States is the only country who can lead the free world against these dictators, against these tyrants.

The Americans who serve in this Chamber must fulfill our responsibility to the American people and demand the President fulfill his patriotic responsibility in the days ahead. Everything now is in our hands. The moment demands that the United States of America lead-- for the sake of the Ukrainian people, for our own national security, and for democracy around the world. Our failure will not just be damaging; it will be devastating.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I call up my amendment No. 540 and ask that it be reported by number.

Mr. President, this amendment reinstates the thousands of fired National Park Service, Forest Service, Fish and Wildlife Service, and Bureau of Land Management employees.

Our public lands are the crown jewel of America. With drought, wildfire, and record visitation, our public lands are facing more pressures than ever before. Now is not the time to fire dedicated public servants who perform wildfire mitigation, manage visitors, clear trails, permit grazing and mining and oil and gas operations.

Fewer boots on the ground means more wildfire risk and less access to our public lands and puts enormous burden on communities across the country, from Alaska to North Carolina, to Maine.

Do I have any time left?

I urge my opponents to vote for this amendment.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

I yield back my second.

Vote on Amendment No. 540

Mr. President, the American people are being robbed in broad daylight. Big Oil is cashing in on their billion-dollar deal with Donald Trump from his campaign; the $1 billion to help Trump win. And in return, he will rig the rules of the game in line with the pockets of the oil, gas, and coal industry 10 times over.

So let's call Trump's energy agenda what it really is: Oil above all, not all of the above. Trump's billionaire friends promised to raise tens of millions of dollars; and, in return, he promised he would deliver policies that

will force working families to pay more, inhale more toxic air, and reduce their kids' chances for a healthier future.

Especially as the climate crisis continues to turbocharge extreme weather--costing billions in damages, sky-high energy bills--we know that working families don't have any more to give to the oil, gas, and coal industries.

Gas prices are up. Electricity bills are up. Home heating costs are up. And yet Donald Trump is going after the programs, the Agencies, and the workers that help keep our air and water clean and create jobs.

Meanwhile, Big Oil is raking in record profits, more than $172 billion in profits in 2023 alone. This administration isn't governing, it is groveling to Big Oil and Big Gas and Big Coal and the entire fossil fuel industry. Every dollar that goes into a billionaire's pocket is a dollar taken out of a working family's budget--money that should go toward food, rent, and education.

It is robbery in broad daylight from working families to create tax breaks for billionaires, and the Trump administration is trying to carry out their single biggest heist right now: attempting to illegally seize $20 billion from the congressionally authorized climate bank. As we speak, they are trying to loot the climate bank.

This bank, formally called the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, is based on my national climate bank legislation with Chris Van Hollen, and it is already at work for you, leveraging private dollars to cut energy bills for families and small businesses, improve resiliency against climate change-fueled disasters, and create local economic opportunity.

Trump and Musk are trying to get their hands on this money--your money--through whatever means necessary, even if that meant forcing Denise Cheung, head of the criminal division of the DC U.S. Attorney's Office, to say that there had been a crime committed in the climate bank, which then would allow Trump to reclaim all the money in the climate bank.

What did Denise Cheung say? She said she could not find a crime. They said: You are going to find a crime. She said she could not find a crime in the climate bank, and so she had to resign. She had to resign from being the head of the Criminal Division in the U.S. Attorney's Office right here in Washington, DC, because she refused to follow the orders of her supervisor who is getting instructions from the White House because that was the only way they could fulfill the promise to oil, gas, and coal to kill the climate bank.

They wanted to freeze that money in the absence of any crimes, any wrongdoing, which--surprise--just happened this week. Just happened. Their goal is to take money away from families, take money from clean energy, take money from disadvantaged communities and give it to the fossil fuel companies and special interests.

So, yes, they want to raid Medicaid; they want to raid education programs; they want to raid veterans' benefits. But also, for the oil, gas, and coal industry, they have got to kill the tax breaks for wind and solar; they have got to gut the climate bank, which is revolutionizing the way in which we generate energy electricity in this country.

That is not powerful leadership; it is political plunder. And working families are paying the price. Trump's farce of an energy emergency declaration creates a financial emergency for the American people. Instead of taking steps to lower energy costs for families, the Trump administration is actively driving up your energy costs by pushing for our energy, American energy, to get shipped overseas for higher profits and tying our energy market to the volatility of the global energy marketplace.

From late 2021 through 2022, surging exports of our energy from the United States, liquified natural gas cost Americans $111 billion in higher energy prices for natural gas customers here in the United States--consumers, homeowners, businesses. Why? Because Big Oil and Big Gas want to export our energy out of our country, send it overseas because they get a bigger price on the open seas. That is what it is all about.

In a recent study, the Department of Energy found that it is extremely likely LNG exports will lead to more sticker shock for Americans, an average increase of over $120 per year still coming-- again while oil executives, natural gas executives cash in on even bigger paydays. What is the Trump plan? Turn consumers in America upside down and shake money out of their pockets for profits for the oil and gas industry.

What happens? Prices go higher for consumers here. That is how they make their money. They are doing it hand in glove with the Trump administration. This is not an energy emergency. This is a Trump energy tax on the American people, an energy tax, which, to be clear, is only growing in severity as Trump cuts off funding for clean energy projects, fires hardworking government employees, imposes tariffs--all of which will make electricity even more expensive for American businesses, for American consumers.

It is a deliberate strategy to make sure working families stay dependent on a damaging fuel source that makes a handful of billionaires richer and richer and richer by the day. But make no mistake, they are not attacking us, because they are winning.

The fossil fuel industry is backing Donald Trump because they know they are losing. They are losing, despite Trump's attempts to kill the green revolution. The clean energy boom is happening all across our country.

The fossil fuel industry is terrified because they know that wind and solar are the future.

Last year, get this number, are you ready? This is why they are petrified. This is why they are scared, 90 percent of all new electricity generation capacity brought online in the United States was renewable--10 percent natural gas, 90 percent renewable last year.

Why do they have to kill the tax breaks? Why do they have to kill the climate bank? You do 90 percent renewables every year for the next 10 years, then it drives right at the heart of the business model of the natural gas and coal and oil industries in our country.

That is why they need to loot the climate bank. That is why they need to kill the tax breaks for wind and solar, all-electric vehicles in our country. Onshore wind. Onshore wind and solar power were the cheapest megawatts on the grid last year, 2024, from construction to operation.

And the Big Oil bosses know that if given the choice, Americans will pick the cheapest, cleanest energy source every single time. So they are killing your choice. They are not letting you pick which energy source you want.

Nearly 80 percent of clean energy investments from the Inflation Reduction Act, also known as the biggest climate bill in world history, but 80 percent of the energy investments have gone to Republican districts, creating hundreds of thousands of new jobs just in 2\1/2\ years.

Think about that. Trump is actively working to destroy economic growth and jobs in the very places that got him elected. Eighty percent of the jobs are in red States. Think about that. But that is the payback to the oil, gas, and coal industry for raising the money for him last year. We are talking about electricians installing solar panels, construction workers building wind turbines, engineers designing the next generation of battery storage. All of these are good-paying, family-sustaining jobs that are helping to build America's future. And yet--and yet--Trump and his enablers want to tear it all down just to keep their fossil fuel cronies happy, just to keep the greenhouse gas emitters happy, just to make sure there is no competition.

They don't believe in competition. This should be Darwinian paranoia- inducing competition. What oil, gas, and coal has extracted from this administration is killing the competition. It is killing them in the marketplace.

Adam Smith was spinning in his grave thinking about this cut. He had a big smile on his face last year, Adam Smith. The market is finally working. We finally have incentives for the competition. But that had to be killed. That had to be killed.

And if that wasn't enough, Trump is attacking the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Agency that warns and helps protect us against hurricanes and floods and wildfires.

Why? Because it gets in the way of his fossil fuel allies' ability to pollute and to profit without consequence. Just last year, get this number, disasters supercharged by climate change

cost the United States more than $500 billion. Hurricanes Milton and Helene, they cost $300 billion--billion--in damage. The fires in L.A., $200 billion. Three incidents, $500 billion worth of damage. Three. That is all. Half of the defense budget of the United States.

What are they doing? They are taking down the defense in the future against superstorms. They are going to take it down. They are going to ravage homeowners, businesses across our country. Insurance rates are going to skyrocket. It is going to have a devastating impact upon our country. We are not even through the month of February, and already in Los Angeles and other places, we can see the storms; we can see the floods; we can see the damage.

So this is absolutely unbelievable what is happening. Families forced from their homes. Businesses wiped out. Entire communities devastated. And instead of preparing for the future, Trump is making sure it gets worse. Imagine, standing in the wreckage of a hurricane-ravaged neighborhood, with nothing but rubble left of your home, and knowing that your President, right now, is actively choosing to make future disasters worse and firing the workers that would help you rebuild. That is the cruelty of his administration.

It has become a wholly owned subsidiary of the oil, gas, and coal industry, giving them a permission slip to wreak havoc on every other American. At every turn, this administration is picking fossil fuel billionaires over working people, and they aren't even hiding it.

Since April of last year after Trump sat down with the Big Oil executives and asked for a billion-dollar campaign check, these executives' wealth has ballooned by more than $40 billion in 1 year, $40 billion more in the wealth of those individuals, while families across the country wonder how they will pay their heating bills.

Trump's fossil fuel donors are making a fortune. And let's not forget the bigger picture. Our global standing is on the line. While we stall and we let the fossil fuel industry dictate our energy policy, China is surging ahead. China is saying: Thank you, Trump administration. Thank you for letting us take over the renewable energy industry.

They are investing in clean energy, in electric vehicles, in battery storage--in all the industries that will define the 21st century economy. And what is Trump doing? Kneecapping our ability to compete. He is locking us into outdated, expensive, and polluting energy systems, while the rest of the world moves forward without us. You can't be an isolationist when it comes to climate change; it is global warming.

This isn't just about energy policy. This is about what kind of country we want to be. Will we be the leader or the laggard? Do we want to be a country that builds, innovates, and transforms, or do we want to be a country that clings to the past and knowingly raises costs on American families that pollute the air we breathe in order to line the pockets of the ultrawealthy? The choice is ours.

Trump and his fossil fuel friends want you to believe that you don't have a choice; that you have to accept higher prices, dirtier air, polluted water, and an onslaught of hurricanes and fires brought on by a worsening climate crisis that the President of the United States, Donald Trump, denies even exists, calling it a Chinese hoax. It is no hoax. Three events, $500 billion worth of damage, and I am not even mentioning all the other damage last year and early this year, but there were.

People want lower bills, not higher profits for Exxon. Our communities deserve good-paying jobs, not another handout to Chevron. It is not drill, baby, drill. It is plug in, baby, plug in. That is what this generation of young people want: plug into the electric revolution, plug into the nonpolluting future.

We have a choice. We can fight for lower costs, good jobs, and a livable future. We can invest in the industries of tomorrow instead of getting locked into the polluting past. We can stop exporting American fossil fuels abroad and driving up our own prices for our own consumers here in America. We can ban fossil fuel executives and lobbyists from being able to use our energy-related Agencies for their own personal pocketbooks or, as I call for in my ``BIG OIL from the Cabinet Act,'' they can't work; they can't work for the Energy Department. They can't be inside taking over the agenda. We can strengthen the low-income heating and cooling relief program so that the poorest Americans don't have to put so much of their paycheck toward heating and cooling.

We can safeguard energy efficiency standards for appliances so that people pay less on their bills. We can do that. We can remove the tax loopholes that prevent the oil and gas companies from paying their fair share.

We are talking about tax breaks for oil companies that have been on the books for 100 years. They call creating a climate bank socialism. What do you call 100 years of tax breaks for the oil, gas, and coal industry? That is socialism. That is allowing for a noncompetitive marketplace.

So the new technologies, the clean technologies, solar and wind, electric battery technologies, they can't be deployed. We can remove those tax breaks. That is what we should be debating here.

But at a minimum, we can't take away the competition. They are monopolists. They are all oligopolists. That is all it is. They want to stifle new technology. They don't have any new ideas, except making themselves rich.

If Republicans are here tonight looking for revenue to pay for the things that they want to pay for, let's start with ending those tax breaks now and having oil companies finally pay their fair share.

Ultimately, we can stand up to the corporate greed that is bleeding working families dry and demand a future where energy policy serves the people, not just the powerful. And that is exactly what we are going to do because the clean energy revolution isn't just coming; it is already here. And it is scaring the living daylights out of the oil, gas, and coal industry. They are petrified.

It is happening in red States, 80 percent, and blue States. It is lowering costs, creating jobs, making communities stronger. No amount of corruption, no amount of grift, no amount of fossil fuel money is going to stop it, and we are not going to back down. And we will not allow the Trump administration to sell out the American people, especially young people. We are not going to allow their future to get sold out. We are not going to surrender the way the oil, gas, and coal industry wants us to surrender because this is not about the highest bidder who can loot the programs like the National Climate Bank to pay for their billionaire tax breaks.

We will fight for the workers building America's clean energy future. We will fight for all families, ensuring they have lower energy bills, cleaner air. And we will fight for a livable future, not just for ourselves but for all coming children and grandchildren right now.

This is not just a political fight; it is a moral fight. This is about justice. This is about fairness. This is about the very future of our country. We cannot back down now. This is the time. This is the place. We must wage this battle on behalf of the coming generations or else the devastation will become catastrophically unimaginable.

So let's have this fight this year about our future. I think that is the least we owe to the young people in our country.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I call up my amendment No. 911 and ask that it be reported by number.

Mr. President, funding for Alzheimer's research at the NIH is essential. Nearly 7 million Americans are living with Alzheimer's right now, and if nothing changes, 15 million Americans--15 million baby boomers--will have Alzheimer's by 2050 with a cost of $1 trillion a year to our healthcare system.

We need to tackle this challenge head-on by increasing funding for NIH research for Alzheimer's. Trump and DOGE have already cut and slowed down NIH research, interfering with our ability to cure this disease. This is a ``Make America Sick'' agenda. A ``no'' on this amendment means taking away hope from millions of Americans with Alzheimer's and their families. After the Bush billionaire tax cut in 2001, the NIH budget was cut in spending power by 20 percent over the next 5 years.

We must guarantee that Alzheimer's research is protected. I urge an aye vote.