Just for the record, Senator Schatz, it is Diet Mountain Dew. Mountain Dew is disgusting. Diet Mountain Dew is acceptable. I think it is two or three times the amount of caffeine that a Red Bull has. There is a reason why the conversion is…
Just for the record, Senator Schatz, it is Diet Mountain Dew. Mountain Dew is disgusting. Diet Mountain Dew is acceptable.
I think it is two or three times the amount of caffeine that a Red Bull has. There is a reason why the conversion is happening--not that I have an intimate understanding of which beverages have which amounts of caffeine.
But I am motivated to get up at this point because I think you hit on something really, really important. There are a number of different lanes that the policy we are talking about and the agenda of Russ Vought occupy, but I thought you just talked about a really important one, which is the effort to take anything left in the common space and shift it off to the private sector to become a commodity.
Much of what we are discussing today is an effort to raid services that help poor people and kids and middle-class families and just bank that money so that they can afford this giant tax cut that is going to go primarily to the very, very wealthy and the corporations.
Because Mr. Vought and the other folks who wrote Project 2025 and the other people that are populating the administration still believe in this long-discredited theory of trickle-down economics--which is that if you just give a ton of money to the very, very richest, then eventually that money will trickle its way down to everybody else. That is not how economics work. It was a fraud from the beginning. It is just intellectual window dressing for the rich and the powerful to get more rich and powerful.
But there is this other lane you were talking about, which is finding the last remaining elements of public services that we decide to do together not for profit and turn it into a source of profit. TSA is one of those targets.
So Project 2025, written in part by Russ Vought, says TSA--this is the Transportation Security Administration; this is the Agency responsible for the security at our airports--should just be outsourced to the private sector; that some private equity firm should be running security at our airports.
To a lot of Americans, that idea is frightening--the idea that we would just turn security at the airports over to an entity that is doing it only for profit. It seems like we should have a public mission at the heart of airport protection. But you were reading this letter from, it sounded like, a student who may not see what is coming for our school system. This is--I was going to talk about this later, but I will bring it up now.
This is a pretty long article on a massive play being made by private equity into education and, in particular, into elementary education. It is kind of hard to think about this--but it may be coming--and that is a private equity firm or a hedge fund or an investment firm owning your child's elementary school.
Right now, private equity investors are lining up to put money in funds because they believe they are going to have a chance to bid on your child's elementary school or to bid on your child's middle school. We are literally going to outsource the education of our kids to investment firms.
If you read this article, it is absolutely chilling because the folks who cover the private equity industry are kind of, you know, used to being unapologetic about the fact that the only thing that matters is money, right? So, if you read this article, there is not a single word in here about quality or about making sure that, you know, there aren't 50 kids in a classroom. It is just about the private equity industry realizing that ``Oh, my gosh, there is a ton of money that we can pull out of our elementary schools and our middle schools. This is a wonderful source of profit for us.''
They are not mission-oriented; they are profit-oriented.
So in addition to this agenda about stripping bare services in order to create the illusion that you are saving money so that you can pass along a tax cut to the very wealthy, this is also just a simple play to take every element of public services that haven't been commoditized and turn them into a commodity so that somebody can get rich.
I don't know. I just--I get sick at the idea of my kid's middle school becoming a source of profit. I am a capitalist. I believe this country is great because we allow people to get fabulously rich off of entrepreneurship and great ideas--but man, I just think there should be, like, a couple of things that we don't do for profit. I just think there should be a few things that we do because it is just the right thing to do, whether it is police protection or fire protection or building a road or educating our kids or protecting our airports. Like, not everything has to be for profit.
So I just wanted to pick up on this really important element of the 2025 plan and the Trump administration's agenda.
Yes.
And, to your point, when profit is the only motive, somebody loses out as in your example about, you know, a health clinic in a rural area. It is true also of education, right? I mean, it is pretty costly. It is not monetizable to have a school in a very rural area where teachers have to drive long distances; where there, you know, isn't a high volume of kids. So, if you live in a world in which the private sector gets to run our schools, then you are just going to have the haves and have-nots. You might have in-person education in the cities or in the suburbs, but those private equity firms will figure out pretty fast that it just doesn't make a lot of sense to run a bricks- and-mortar school in a rural area, and those kids will just be constantly telelearning. Those kids will just be staring at their screens all day long.
If there is any internet.
So there are places, when it comes to government and government services, for which there is a proper role for the private sector. We have long had public-private partnerships. Inside the Department of Defense, I think we have very well married together a fundamental public mission, right? We don't privatize the Army--right?--with the private sector mission. The technology for the Army gets developed a little bit faster if the private sector has a role to play; but what we have realized is that there are limits to the degree to which the private sector wants to own unprofitable services.
One of the grants that got turned off before the court injunction was issued was a grant to community health centers. Community health centers, which are not-for-profit healthcare centers that are primarily funded by the Federal Government, often exist in the places where there is not a profit motivation to run healthcare, either in rural areas or in very low-income areas of cities. They run on very, very thin profit--excuse me--on very thin margins at all. They don't make profit. They are on very thin margins. So when they miss one payment from the Federal Government, they are talking about immediately laying off workers.
Listen, if not for lawyers who brought lawsuits, if not for judges who issued injunctions, we would be in a different kind of crisis today. So we are talking about public outrage at an executive action--that was midwived, in part, by the nominee--that only existed for about a day before it was enjoined, before it was stayed. But if that Executive order had actually been fully implemented, there literally would be, today, rural health clinics that would be shut down. There would be hundreds of thousands of children who would not be in preschool tomorrow morning. There would be a national catastrophe. Whether or not these billionaires don't need many government services unless their houses catch on fire and even though they don't understand that people actually rely on government-funded services sometimes, this would have been an absolute nightmare and disaster.
(Mr. SHEEHY assumed the Chair.)
So we need to remember that while we feel like we are in a constitutional crisis right now, that crisis would be fundamentally different if not for the court's stepping in at this moment.
Let me just raise another issue because I think you started by talking about the assumption that the young men in these cubicles made when they were writing Project 2025, when they were implementing these orders. I mean, there is this wild assumption about people who do public jobs. The contempt that this administration, these billionaires, and the authors of Project 2025 have for public employees is just extraordinary.
Who are public employees? OK, you can envision somebody sitting in a cubicle at a desk in Washington, DC, pushing papers. That is a public employee. But so are teachers, so are police officers, and so are firefighters.
Here is what Russ Vought said about the Federal workforce, he said:
When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want
to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the
villains. We want to put them in trauma.
He is talking about researchers at NIH who are trying to cure cancer. He is talking about people who are trying to just get special education funds to our schools to make sure that our kids get a fair shot at learning. He is talking about the people at NOAA who are just showing up to work every day, trying to make sure we are prepared for natural disasters.
The contempt they have for people that get up every day and don't go to work for a bank or a hedge fund or private equity company but instead go to work because they just want to make the world better or their community better or their country better is absolutely extraordinary. It is as if these folks have never actually spent any time with a teacher or a firefighter or an NIH researcher.
``We want to put them in trauma.'' What CEO says that about their workers?
Their board of directors would get rid of them.
Yes.
And they dressed that up for, like, 2 days, suggesting that they were reviewing USAID for efficiencies. For 1 day, they said they were folding it into the State Department because it would be more efficiently run inside the State Department. That was never the plan.
I mean, I would just sort of have to call out the fabrication. The plan clearly from the start was to eliminate USAID, and they willfully pretended for a handful of days that the agenda was efficiency when the agenda was, in fact, the wholesale elimination of the Agency. The stated on-the-record reason for the elimination of the Agency is bananas--bananas. They are calling USAID a ``criminal organization.'' I mean, it is extraordinary.
I was on a radio program the other day, and the interviewer wanted to talk to me about the constitutional crisis and whether legally the President can dismantle USAID. The answer is no, he cannot. But the interviewer was like: You know, they say it is a criminal organization, and let's just set that aside for a minute.
I was like: No, no, wait a second. Don't let them get away with the idea that USAID has to be shuttered because it is a criminal organization.
Apparently, the conclusion that they have come to--the allegation that they are making is that because many of the USAID employees in their free time may support Democratic candidates for office, that it is a criminal enterprise, because you are apparently not allowed to have any political views.
There are certainly many other Agencies and Departments and public functions in which the majority of employees support Republicans. Public services are staffed by people who have a variety of views.
But the rationale on its face for getting rid of the Agency is just absolutely--
--is absolutely absurd, that there are too many Democrats.
So I guess we are going to shut down any Agencies that have 50 percent plus 1 Democratic affiliation, and we are going to hold on to Agencies in which the employees are 50 percent plus 1 Republican.
It shouldn't matter. I don't care whether a Republican or a Democrat is
teaching my kid. I don't care whether a Republican or Democrat is staffing the domestic violence shelter or putting out the fire at my neighbor's home. And most Americans don't care.
But this war that has been waged--I mean, that is what ``woke'' means, right? ``Woke'' really just means that a service is being provided by somebody who has views or a lifestyle that I don't agree with.
We have never approached public service like that. We have decided as a country that we are going to have these people called civil servants who get up every day to serve the country no matter what their background is, their ethnicity, their race, or their political views, or their religion; that their reason for getting up in the morning and going to work is to just serve everybody--to serve everybody.
We are now retreating to this world in which, no, the only legitimate people to work for the Federal Government are people who share the political views of the President.
The purge is happening in so many different ways.
All sorts of integration.
The kids say they can't use the word ``female.''
No, no, no. That is DEI.
You can't say female; you can't say gender.
I have the list here. It is absolutely patently absurd, right? Do you remember, OK, so that is an element of DEI, but there is another element of DEI.
So when that tragic plane crash happened, within hours, Donald Trump was hustling to organize a press conference for one purpose and one purpose only, to blame the crash on DEI.
Now, what did he mean in that context? It is crystal clear what he meant. He meant that if you employ women or Black people or Latinos or Asian Americans, the country is maybe in jeopardy, maybe, maybe the country is not safe if White men aren't in charge.
And so sometimes, DEI means the consultancy that legitimately some people think has gone a little bit overblown. And sometimes, it means we just can't discuss the differences that we actually have with each other, but sometimes, it just means real old-fashioned misogyny and discrimination and prejudice, right? It stands for a lot of things, most of which are pretty sick and creepy and outdated.
I don't think they know jumping the shark.
It is pretty normal attrition.
And all the Federal employees who have been furloughed from the USAID employees to all the folks who are doing DEI to the FBI agents, they are still getting paid right now, right?
So for the last week, all those USAID employees were sent home, they were doing nothing to protect America, and they were still getting paychecks.
It is almost like the agenda isn't efficiency.
It is like if you read about all the people who were going to quit anyway, but quit and got a payout and the people who are at home locked out of their e-mail but still getting paid, it is almost like there is a different agenda.
And listen, you are right that the agenda is to terrorize public employees, they have made it absolutely clear, to try to keep them silenced and to try to make everybody decide that there is a different line of work that would be better for them.
But you know what, I know the folks that work at Prudence Crandall domestic violence shelter, and they didn't go into that line of work because it is lucrative, right? They didn't go into that line of work because it is an easy job. And when they get home every night at 5, it is just really easy to unplug. That is like the hardest work in the world to show up every day and work in a domestic violence shelter, dealing with women, mostly, at the worst moment in their entire life, having just fled a home in which they were regularly abused, often to the brink of death, by their spouse or their boyfriend.
And so, yes, they are scared today because they got told a week ago that their funds were being cut off. And that domestic violence shelter in New Britain, CT, it can't run for more than a week or so without Federal dollars.
Guess what? Our domestic violence shelters in America do not make any profits. They do not make a profit.
News flash: Your taxpayer dollars actually do pay for domestic violence shelters. We need to actually fund that publicly because that is not something that you can make a big profit on.
The women who are fleeing violence don't show up at the door with a check to pay for the shelter that they need for a couple days. Those people are scared. They are feeling harassed. They don't know whether the doors will remain open, but they are not going home. They are not going home because they have decided to live their life in a way devoted to a mission--to a mission.
And so this is a moment to just say thank you, frankly, to all of the folks who work, either for not-for-profits that rely on government funding, who are public employees doing the good work, who are staying on the job.
I don't begrudge anybody who decides that, listen, I am better off if I just go do something else amidst this harassment campaign, but I am thankful, on behalf of abused women in Connecticut, that there are people who are deciding to stay on the job, despite the fact that they are getting threatened and harassed by the Trump administration and, in particular, the nominee that we are discussing today.
And, listen, you had Trump's first term as evidence, right? Obviously, President Trump says a lot of things that he has no intent of doing. News flash: We aren't going to invade and occupy Gaza. But he says a lot of things
I would say 98, 99 percent of Americans are a no on that.
In his first term, he said a lot of things that he never even tried to do. He said a lot of reckless things that he never actually followed up on.
And during the campaign, he said many things that sounded a little crazy to folks. He said: I am going to be a dictator on day one. He said the No. 1 enemy of the people are Democrats, and I am going to use the military to take care of the enemy within, which he referenced as his political opposition.
And I think many Americans said: Do you know what? I heard him say a lot of stuff like that in his first term. He is not going to really do it.
So you are right. After the election--we had an election; he won. And people assumed that things were going to be different. There was going to be a little bit more topsy-turvy. Maybe this country needed to be shaken up a little bit. But they actually didn't believe he was going to act like a dictator. They actually didn't believe he was going to violate the Constitution so brazenly in the first month. They didn't believe he was going to shut down funding for preschools and for medical research.
Right.
Because it was too hard, as he explained, to try to pick out the really violent ones from the nonviolent ones.
Later tonight, I am going to read through some of the very easily accessible stories of the really violent protestors. It wasn't that hard to just pick out a handful of people who literally beat police officers over the head with poles, that stuck Tasers into the necks of police officers until they had a heart attack. Like, it wasn't hard to identify those people and say: You know what? Those people should stay in jail. Those people should complete their term.
The American public didn't think that he was really going to absolve everyone who invaded the Capitol and beat the hell out of police officers that day.
And so the reason that it has taken a minute for the people to rise up--and, by the way, we have seen big crowds in DC, but, you know, that doesn't really mean much if there is nobody out there in the American public. Today, there were pretty big rallies in all 50 States. This weekend, there are going to be many more.
It is because people, even many who voted for him--but many who didn't and just wanted to sort of respect the choice of the electorate--are now realizing that this is so much more dystopian than the first term was and a crisis that is going to immediately impact them in a real way. It is not somebody else's problem. It now seems to be my problem when a billionaire has access to my Social Security, Medicare, and tax refund data. That sounds like something that actually potentially hurts me.
It often doesn't go well.
But here is the difference, though, getting back to the nominee, right? Russ Vought is a serious person with the ability to execute on plans.
And so his plan, which is to destroy elements of the Federal Government and State governments and the nonprofit sector that help regular people; his plan to try to intimidate and harass Federal workers; his plan to try to make folks who work in government pass a loyalty test to the administration; his plan to destroy access to reproductive healthcare--I mean, all of that is being put into place as we speak.
So, you know, what makes this moment so dangerous is that they kind of learned their lessons. They wanted to do a lot of these things in the first term, but it all kind of snuck up on them really fast. They had 4 years to put into place a plan called Project 2025 so that they could, starting on day one, destroy services for the middle class and poor people, root out of government anybody that doesn't swear a loyalty test, and endorse violence in a way that hopefully suppresses political dissent.
That is not working right now, and I don't think it will work. But Russ Vought is dangerous because he has got radical ideas, and he actually has the means to implement them.
So one of the things that is confusing for everybody, including us, about this moment is that it is not clear whether there is consistency or inconsistency.
So you may be right that they are going to try to just destroy FEMA writ large and erase from existence the ability for our country to come together in a patriotic way to try to help out our neighbors when a natural disaster hits.
But it can't be coincidental that they launched the idea to destroy FEMA in California, when a very blue State was responding to a terrible disaster, right? That doesn't seem coincidental.
It doesn't, also, seem coincidental that the first big infrastructure project that the President came out and said that he would be defunding was also in California, while an equally big city-to-city, high-speed infrastructure project in Florida is on no one's radar screen. And so this may be a consistent nationwide assault on public services, but it also may be--or in addition may be--simply a grift in order to provide services and grants in States that are loyal to the President--meaning they voted for him--and to deny services to States that are not loyal.
We have not, historically, cared at all whether a natural disaster hit a State that sends Democrats or Republicans to the U.S. Senate. We have sometimes had fights over how much money and when we are going to authorize disaster assistance, but we have never fought over whether a blue State or a red State should get it if the other party is in charge of the U.S. Senate. All of a sudden, that seems very relevant. That seems very relevant.
And part of the reason why the Constitution does not allow the President to have power over spending decisions is because that leads to a fundamental potential for corruption.
But what Trump says, whether or not he ends up implementing it, sets the agenda for his party. So what is the Speaker talking about and what are many of our colleagues talking about with respect to aid to California? Yes, they are very worried about setting a precedent in which a State doesn't get aid if they are of the opposite party of the party in charge, but they know that they have to be loyal to the basic premise of the President. And so they are talking about conditions; that California is going to have to change its laws to, I would assume, more align itself with Republican priorities in order for it to get money, which would be a perversion of Federal law and precedent and very dangerous.
Right.
That is right.
As happened in 2017.
Brian, thank you very much for your work in organizing this effort and always great to be with you on the floor today. I will not hold it against you if you go take an actual nap and get some rest. You exerted a lot of effort to make sure we were all here united-- Democrats on the floor, raising the alarm.
I am going to try to go through the case as to why I do think this is a red-alert moment; the reason I was so glad to jump in and join you this evening and why I volunteered for the 2 to 5 shift tonight. I am very grateful for Senator Welch. We had a gap from 5 to 6, and I hear I may not have to go the full 4 hours.
But I certainly have 2 hours of material here because I think something really, really dangerous is happening to this country right now; something that is worthy of an overnight session on the floor of the U.S. Senate; something that every American needs to be talking about.
I first want to just go through all of the events and developments of the last 2 weeks that matter because Senator Schatz was referring to a phenomena that I think is important. Donald Trump and Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon and other people who advise him are pretty unapologetic about this strategy. They call it ``flooding the zone.'' The idea is they are going to make so much news, they are going to make so many outrageous statements every day, that it becomes really hard for Americans to understand what is real and what is not real, what is important and what is not important.
I am not saying that the President's comments last night on Gaza won't have deep impacts; they will. I can guarantee you that Hamas and Hezbollah and other terrorist groups in the Middle East, right now, are using the President's comments to recruit. The idea that the United States is coming to Gaza to invade, occupy, cleanse, and level Gaza-- that is bulletin-board recruiting material for terrorist groups.
Our country is less safe today than it was yesterday because that is easy recruitment material for the groups that we are fighting. It keeps them alive at a moment when they were on the run. It separates us from our allies, because despite what President Trump said last night that everybody agrees with the plan, that was not true. Not true. Nobody agrees with that plan.
Benyamin Netanyahu doesn't want America coming in invading and occupying Gaza. No Middle Eastern leader wants that. The President said it; it is not true. He says many things that are not true. It makes Americans look like a laughingstock around the world because everybody knows we are not invading Gaza. So when the President announces that he has come up with a brilliant plan that everybody supports and every world leader knows he is not telling the truth and he is never going to do it, it undermines American credibility and reputation around the world.
I am not suggesting that the President's absurd statements last night about Gaza don't hurt America; they do. But he is not going to do it. He won't get support from Congress to do it, and nobody in the American public wants him to do it.
I can't get into the President's brain, but I suspect it was part of this strategy, this articulated purposeful strategy to try to confuse people about what is real and what is not real. I don't think it was coincidental that the President was making this outrageous, outlandish statement about Gaza last night on the first day that you really felt like the American people had figured out the game. The people turning out to protest were big--bigger than they had been since the election. All of a sudden the President comes up with a new plan to invade and occupy Gaza.
I think one of the exercises that I want to go through in my time today is just to tell you the pieces of the agenda--an agenda set by Russ Vought--that matter; that are the most dangerous; that are the ones that you should pay attention to.
I wouldn't spend a lot of time worrying about the drama over the Panama Canal or Greenland, just like I wouldn't worry too much about the President's statements on Gaza.
But here is what I would worry about. I am clearly going to cover ground that has been covered here today. But I just want to lay it out because I have more time to do it than anybody else, so I will be a little more thoughtful and comprehensive about it.
At the top of my list is the President's decision to seize control of Federal spending. So this was his Executive order from a few days ago that suspended all Federal spending. For that day, everything seemed to be turned off. Even the Medicaid program was not open for reimbursement. Head Start programs were not getting money. No State in the country could access dollars for different projects that they run. Not-for-profits weren't receiving funding.
Now, the order was for 90 days, but if you believe that, I have some bridges to sell you. Even if it was for 90 days, that is patently illegal. That is patently illegal. The Founding Fathers spent a lot of time wrestling with a foundational question: How to preserve democracy in America and prevent what, up until that point, had been an inexorable retreat to despotism in countries that had tried to engage in some kind of self-determination. The Founding Fathers thought relentlessly about the kind of tools that would be available to a President that could allow him to take control and rule as a king or as a monarch.
Now, some of the things they spent a lot of time thinking about feel, today, a little anachronistic. The Founding Fathers, for instance, were really focused on not giving the President a standing army. Now, we have moved beyond that belief that a standing army is a threat to our liberty, but that was one of the things the Founding Fathers worried greatly about. They didn't necessarily write that protection into the Constitution, but they thought a lot about it.
The protection they did write into the Constitution was the protection to reserve spending power for the branch of government most directly connected to the people. That is Congress--the branch that gets elected every 2 years, the branch that has different factions, different geographies represented. They wanted the spending power to be invested in the most democratic body so as to make sure that the compromise on spending ended up benefiting the whole country--every geography but also every political affiliation. So they said: Congress has the power to spend. Congress has the power to decide how money is spent.
So, for 240 years, courts and the Supreme Court have broadly recognized that a President cannot decide by himself what money to spend and what money not to spend. A President also cannot decide for himself to apply new conditions to spending beyond what the democratically elected Congress selected.
The reason for that--the reason why that power is vested in Congress--is primarily a check on despotism because if a President has the ability to unilaterally decide how to spend money, then, of course, the natural temptation will be to only spend money in a way that benefits and preserves and advances your political power. Spend money on people who support you, and deny money to people who don't support you in order to pressure more people to support you.
I wasn't here for Senator Kim's speech, but it sounded like he laid out the corollary that still exists, unfortunately, in some closed political systems in this country wherein you have party machines that give out favors and money and privilege based upon loyalty. OK. We decided, in this country, the President is not going to get to do that because it is inherently subject to fraud and abuse and corruption.
As we have talked about--as Senator Schatz and I talked about--this President has been pretty unapologetic and Russ Vought has been pretty unapologetic in their insistence that, yes, in fact, people who are loyal to the President should be treated differently.
It isn't as if we don't understand what the President is trying to do by capturing Federal spending power. He is criticizing projects in Democratic States. He is saying: We may not fund disasters in Democratic States. They are targeting Agencies that they believe are populated by people with different political affiliations than the President's. They are firing FBI agents who engaged in any kind of law enforcement action against Republicans.
Maybe this conversation would be a little bit less frantic--the moment would feel a little bit less urgent--if you thought the President was seizing control of Federal spending for some halfway legitimate reason, but, in fact, it looks as if President Trump is trying to seize control of Federal spending for the exact reason that worried the Founding Fathers so much that they were explicit in the Constitution: No, the President cannot seize control of Federal spending. It will lead to fraud, corruption, and ultimately the erosion and perhaps destruction of our democracy.
The Founding Fathers worried every single day about writing a document that prevented a slide to despotism. You can laugh that off as hyperbole. You can say: Democrats are crying wolf. Of course, America is always going to be a democracy.
Every democracy dies. It does. Every democracy has an expiration date just like every civilization has an expiration date. There is an end, and there is a series of events that leads to that end. Maybe this isn't it, but, boy, when you package the list that I will give you together, it looks suspiciously like the roadmaps that caused other democracies to fall, and it looks suspiciously like the set of things that our Founding Fathers were clear about protecting against.
The second thing that matters is the President's decision to shutter certain Departments. It has started with USAID, and we spent some time talking tonight about what has happened at USAID. It is absolutely extraordinary. This is the nonpartisan Agency that fights for the United States abroad.
Our military leaders--I suspect most of whom are Republicans; I don't really care--are fond of saying: If you get rid of USAID, if you were ever to stop paying for foreign aid, you would have to double the number of bullets you buy us.
Our military leaders consistently, consistently make the case for USAID because USAID is a partner with our military in preventing chaos and instability that ultimately lead to war and threats to U.S. troops.
The Army and the Navy and the Air Force--they chase Chinese influence. They try to protect us from Russia. But so does USAID. China's power in the world is not just military power. Every nation's power is multifaceted. China, frankly, gets more influence in the world through its nonmilitary tools than it gets through its military tools. China doesn't have the number of military partnerships that the United States does. In fact, it has very few. Its partnerships are information partnerships, technology partnerships, economic development partnerships. Those are the kinds of tools that USAID has. So when USAID just vanishes from the playing field, China wins; Russia wins; nonstate terrorist groups win.
One of the things USAID was doing in Lebanon was running a bunch of programming, trying to depress Hezbollah's influence and trying to help stand up a government that was independent and free of terrorist influence.
What was USAID doing in Mexico? It was trying to build up the capability of law enforcement so the drug gangs that send fentanyl to the United States didn't control areas of Mexico which allow them, without interruption or harassment, to be able to send fatal drugs like fentanyl to the United States.
So there are things our military can do to advance U.S. power, but they can't do everything, so USAID was doing those other things. Now that they are off the playing field, America is fundamentally weaker. That is the merit-based case for why it is a disaster for the United States and a gift to China and Russia and terrorist groups that USAID has disappeared.
But there is a clear legal and constitutional case. USAID is an Agency established by statute. We passed a law establishing USAID. We pass a budget every year funding not just USAID but specific accounts in USAID. A President of the United States cannot by fiat eliminate a statutorily authorized Agency. That is what a monarch does. And you are already hearing that the Elon Musk crowd that so happily got rid of USAID is now talking about ``USAID'' as a verb. They are going to ``USAID'' the Department of Labor. They are going to ``USAID'' the Department of Education. They can't eliminate those Departments from the statutes, but they could just send everybody home. That would be illegal, but they could just send everybody home.
What a disaster it would be if the people who make sure that our factories are safe and that workers aren't abused by greedy corporations all of a sudden don't show up to work. That is great for the companies and the corporations, but that is terrible for workers.
Pay attention to this effort to shut down Agencies because these Agencies, while certainly you can have a conversation about making them more efficient, provide essential services.
The Department of Education provides essential services. Two-thirds of our schools run on funds from the Department of Education. Disabled kids are protected because of laws administered by the Department of Education. The Department of Labor protects workers to make sure they don't get run over and abused by companies. USAID protects America all over the world. There is a cost to Americans' pocketbooks, to the quality of life, to the defense of America when these Agencies get shuttered, so you should pay attention to that.
The third thing that you should pay attention to is the corruption that is happening inside the Department of the Treasury as we speak.
The Department of the Treasury pays the bills of this country, and those bills range from contracts we have with companies and not-for- profits to, you know, your tax refund or your Social Security check or your Medicare benefit. That is really sensitive stuff, so we historically have had totally nonpolitical people running that payment system.
Congress decides how that money is spent and what the level of your benefit is, but a bunch of civil servants--people who are not loyal to Democrats or Republicans, who just want to make the payments--run that system.
What really caused this public tempest in the last few days was the disclosure that Elon Musk--a billionaire with all sorts of interests when it comes to the Federal Government; he became a billionaire based off of Federal policy and Federal contracts--has been given access to the Treasury's payment system, not just him but a bunch of kids who work for him. So a bunch of twenty-somethings fresh out of college, with absolutely no expertise in payment systems, have gotten access to these payment systems. They are apparently inside these payment systems right now, fiddling around with them. They broke one payment system as soon as they got access to it in the Medicaid system.
Now, I will be honest with you, we don't know why they want access to the payment systems. We don't know what they are doing inside the payment systems. But there aren't a lot of benign possibilities. Are they getting ready to turn off payments to individuals and entities that they don't like? Are they just sort of looking under the hood so that they can get your tax information or get the tax information about Elon Musk's competitors? I mean, this is unheard of. This is a private sector individual--an individual who actually cannot get a security clearance because he is deemed to be a security risk--who is inside the most sensitive part of the Department of the Treasury, with access to every single American's personal data. That is a corruption. That is a perversion of norms and rules, and it matters. That matters. You should pay attention to it.
The fourth thing that matters is the darkness that is descending over the Federal Government. A few hours--maybe it was a day, 2 days--after President Trump was inaugurated, he fired I believe every single inspector general.
What is an inspector general? An inspector general, again, is an independent, nonpartisan individual who has got an office and staff that work for them that sit inside each of our Agencies. Our Federal Agencies are big. They are. They spend billions of dollars. They do really good work, but there is always the chance for fraud and abuse. So we historically--Congress historically has authorized a little bit of money inside of every Department to have a watchdog. We call them inspectors general because they are inspecting how taxpayer dollars are being spent and make sure that the dollars are being spent in accordance with the law.
The inspectors general normally have the power to intervene when something has gone wrong, at the very least, the power to issue a report to tell the public and Congress: Hey, guys, you know, the money was supposed to be spent on trying to fight wildfires, and instead, it is being spent on something else. Those inspectors general are gone.
Donald Trump didn't get rid of them because he thought they were doing a bad job and he wanted to replace them with somebody else; he just got rid of them illegally. You can't do that. You have to, at the very least, give notice to Congress.
At the same time, they have begun issuing what we call gag orders to Federal employees. The most notorious one happened at USAID. As the purge started beginning at USAID when they started to, first, just sending all the supervisors home, when they suspended all USAID programming all around the world, a corresponding order went out to employees saying: Do not talk to anybody about what is happening.
Now, I can understand being sensitive about rank-and-file employees talking to the press. But they didn't just say the press. They said don't talk to Members of Congress. Don't talk to elected Members of Congress who are in charge of spending the taxpayers' money. Don't even talk to them about the purge that is happening.
That all sounds a little suspicious, right? That is a little worrying when, with intention, all the watchdogs are fired; with intention, an order goes out to employees: Shut your mouth. Don't say anything.
That probably doesn't mean that good legal stuff is happening inside these Departments. That probably doesn't mean that this administration is really focused on rooting out fraud and corruption and tackling inefficiency. When you get rid of the watchdogs, that normally means that you are preparing to engage in some pretty bad stuff. Pay attention to the fact that the watchdogs are no longer there.
The fifth thing that matters--and I wrote it on my list here as the fifth thing, but it probably matters the most, and I will spend some time later talking more about this--is the legitimization of political violence in this country.
There is something special about force. The thing that matters most to us in life is the physical safety of ourselves and our kids and our family. I talk about this a lot because I do a lot of work on gun violence. And I try to explain to people that this is the issue that matters the most to people, the physical safety of their family.
I mean, you would give up anything in life to defend your family from physical harm. You would give up your house. You would give up your savings. You might even give up your life to protect the life of somebody that you love.
Physical harm is really, really scary. And because physical harm is so traumatic, the threat of physical harm is impactful. It makes people do things and change behaviors if they think there is a chance that they are going to be hurt. Every single person knows this because, at some point in your life, you were threatened with physical harm.
And, yes, maybe once or twice, or maybe for some people more often than once or twice, you stood up to that bully or you fought back. But for most people, there are plenty of other times in which you just changed your behavior. If the bully was on this street, you went the other block. I stood up to bullies a handful of times in my life, but I also changed my route home a bunch of times as well.
There can be no place for physical violence in politics, there just can't, because it does change behavior. When somebody is subject to the threat of physical violence, you are no longer making a decision based on what is best for the country or for your constituents. You are instead making a decision based on what keeps you physically safe and what keeps your family physically safe.
Democracies do not exist when the party in power, when the individual in power, gets to use the threat of physical violence as a tool to try to influence behavior. That is, by definition, not a democracy.
I am pretty confident none of my colleagues really thought that Donald Trump was going to pardon every single January 6 protester, but he did. But he did.
I will just tell you, subsequent to that decision, the threats of violence to my office--and I suspect the same is true for Democrats-- have risen. Republicans have been subject to threats of violence before. They will continue to be. But this is different because Donald Trump has not immunized violence writ large, neither has he immunized political violence writ large. What Donald Trump did by pardoning all the January 6 protesters is say: If you commit violence in my name against people who are trying to stop me from advancing my power, it is cool. It is cool.
What were the police officers doing? They were defending the Capitol from an attack that was designed to keep Donald Trump in power. Those people were storming the Capitol because they believed that the election had been stolen from Donald Trump. They were coming here to install him in power permanently.
The police officers who were defending the Capitol, they weren't political. They weren't Democrats. They were engaged in an effort to try to stop the seizure of power by Donald Trump's supporters. And when every single one of those rioters got pardoned, the message was clear: If you commit violence against people who are trying to stop Donald Trump's political agenda, it is cool. Do it. There will be no consequence.
So it is not shocking that threats of violence have increased to me and my Democratic colleagues because, right now, we are trying to frustrate or stymie President Trump's political agenda. And Donald Trump has said: If you beat the hell out of people who are trying to stop my political agenda, I will let you off the hook. The legitimatization of political violence, the endorsement of political violence, that matters.
The final thing that has happened over the course of the last 2 weeks--really, it has been happening since the election--that matters is the effort by Donald Trump to try to co-opt and control the media.
Obviously, the Founding Fathers thought a lot about the independence of the free press. They knew that one of the bulwarks against despotism was a free and independent press. So even though they didn't get around to it until a little bit later, in the Bill of Rights, they guaranteed the freedom of the press.
As we have watched other democracies fall in the last 240 years all around the world, as we have watched countries like Hungary slide away from
democracy, a key facet of that slide, that purposeful slide, engineered by a would-be autocrat, is the seizure and control of information.
It is obvious why you would want to do that because, if you can control information, then you can make sure that the dominant narrative is your spin and you can suppress any criticism.
Already, one of the Nation's biggest information platforms, Twitter, is effectively an organ of the White House. Donald Trump announced that he wanted to take a 50-percent ownership stake--using taxpayer dollars--in TikTok, maybe the most influential of platforms today.
He has apparently cut deals with the owners of other platforms. Most notably, the CEO of Facebook, right after the election, came down to Mar-a-Lago, and Trump openly bragged that Facebook had decided to do what he wanted, which was to stop fact-checking all of the lies that get put online by Trump's supporters.
Trump said: Yeah, he probably did that because I threatened him. He was probably worried that I was going to do something to hurt him.
Maybe not coincidental is the fact that there is an FTC lawsuit pending against Facebook. We will see what happens with that lawsuit. But would it be surprising that that lawsuit disappears after the owner of Facebook said: Yeah, Mr. President, I will do what you want. I will take down my fact-checking to make sure that your misinformation--and all misinformation, frankly, because the misinformation doesn't only come from the right--misinformation gets to exist freely online platform.
So pay attention to the hard work that Donald Trump is engaged in to try to control, to the best he can, the information infrastructure in this country.
I mean, it wasn't a coincidence that not every billionaire was sitting up there on the dais with Trump during the inauguration. It was primarily the billionaires who control information companies. Facebook is an information company. Apple is an information company. Amazon is an information company. They have other business lines as well, but they are controlling huge amounts of information in this country. It is not a coincidence that those are the companies that Donald Trump is trying to gain the most influence over.
Those are the five things that I have identified as the things that should matter: the seizing of control of Federal spending; the illegal shutdowns of Departments--and, by the way, I mentioned USAID. But, as I said, Labor and Education seems next on the chopping block--the infiltration of Treasury's payment system by Elon Musk, a private sector individual who can't get a security clearance; the firing of the IGs and the gag orders, shedding darkness on our Agencies; the legitimization of political violence, the endorsement of political violence; and the attempts to put the President in a position to control the flow of information in this country.
Why this matters tonight is that Russ Vought is going to occupy a space at the nerve center of all of those policies.
That is what OMB is. The Office of Management and Budget is essentially the government's nerve center. It is the place where all the Departments of the Federal Government and all the accounts and all the policies, they all connect.
In many ways, the Director of OMB is the most powerful person in government, often one of the least well-known. The job tends to exist behind the scenes. But OMB is the place where all the pipes connect, where all the regulations and policies and Executive orders have to be vetted, the place where all the Department heads have to get a sign-off before moving forward with policies.
So none of this can happen or will happen--the seizure of Federal spending, the shuttering of the Departments, the infiltration of the Treasury payment system, the firing of the IGs, the legitimization of political violence, or the influence of information platforms--without the Director of OMB being in charge.
By the way, it isn't coincidence that that comprehensive document that Trump swore he had nothing to do with--Project 2025--was authored in part by Russ Vought. Russ Vought was one of the primary authors, one of the primary organizers, of Project 2025, which was this document that explained exactly how you would do many of these things to push American democracy toward autocracy. It isn't a coincidence that one of the authors--one of the primary authors of the Project 2025 document is now the nominee to run the Agency that perhaps has more influence than any other Agency in the Federal Government: the Office of Management and Budget.
OK. So having talked about the things that matter versus the things that don't matter, I want to talk about the why and I want to talk about how all of the six developments that matter fit together because this isn't a random set of priorities, events, or developments. All those things that I mentioned serve two major purposes, and this is what I want to spend the remaining time that I have on.
The first goal is to enact a massive, massive transfer of both money and power from poor people and the middle class to the corporations and the billionaires and the millionaires.
Senator Schatz and I talked about this long-discredited economic theory called trickle-down economics in which, if you just cut taxes for the very, very wealthy, the economic elites, the masters of the economic universe, eventually all that money will spill down to everybody else. That was a fraud as a theory. It was a fraud. It was essentially made up in order for rich people to just pretend like there was some intellectual underpinning to their greed.
When people get really, really wealthy, they tend to just want to get more and more wealthy. For many people, being a billionaire is not good enough; you have to have $2 billion and $3 billion. So they came up with this idea that ``If you just continue to give us money, it will eventually find its way down to everybody else.''
But everybody knows that that is not how it has worked because people in this country in the middle of the economy are miserable--they are miserable--because they are working harder and harder, and they are not getting anything back in return.
Wages have gone up a little bit, especially over the last 4 years, but they are not keeping pace with prices; they have not for decades. Even though this country is becoming much more productive--every worker is way more productive than they were 10, 20, 30 years ago, in part because of technology--the gains from that productivity are not accruing to workers; they are accruing to the owner class, to the capital class.
So there is this separation happening in this country whereby everybody in the middle is just kind of like treading water, and then you have this set of superelites--people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, the people who were on that inauguration platform--that have more money than they know what to do with, and very little of it is actually ending up trickling down. They are hoarding much of the money that they are collecting.
So this theory has never ever worked, but greed is powerful. It is powerful. So that crowd, that economic elite crowd--there aren't any poor people walking around Mar-a-Lago. Everybody that Trump hangs out with at Mar-a-Lago--those are really, really rich people--really, really rich people. Trump is not playing golf with, you know, his cleaner. The people that Trump is talking to are people who are immensely wealthy, and they see a real opportunity. It is not just good enough to have low taxes; they want them lower. They also want the ability to squeeze as much as they can out of the Federal Treasury for themselves.
So what Project 2025 is all about and what the Trump agenda is all about is, first and foremost, about a massive transfer of wealth and power from the middle of America to a very handful of elites. I want to try to walk you through that for a second.
The first thing they are doing is trying to set up another round of massive tax cuts for the billionaires and for the corporations. They are going to try to get money other ways, but the most important thing to them is for their taxes to be much lower; for the corporate taxes to be low or nonexistent; for them to be able to pass along all
their wealth, without any taxation, to their kids so that you have these permanent billionaire families where nobody ever has to work, and the money just gets handed down from generation to generation; for regulations to be gutted so that they can abuse the environment or workers in a way to pile up more money. They are going to do that in this bill that will be considered later in the year through a process called reconciliation.
Now, when Republicans did this bill in 2017, they made no attempt to try to pay for it. It was almost all borrowed money, and it was one of the reasons the piece of legislation was really unpopular. People hated that tax cut because, fully enacted, that tax cut would have sent about 80 percent of the benefit to the very, very wealthy, but it also was just all put on the American credit card.
There was again this argument that, A, if we cut taxes for the wealthy, it will trickle down to everybody else and it will result in a magical increase in tax revenue because of all the economic activity caused by the tax cut, and that magical economic activity and the tax revenue from it will pay for the fact that we are now collecting less in taxes from the very, very wealthy.
That didn't happen. It just didn't happen. We lost a ton of revenue because the rich and the corporations were paying much less. The economic activity that they predicted did not happen, and the deficit grew. The deficit grew. It was a massive explosion in our deficit. No President up until Donald Trump had added more to our deficit than he did during those 4 years.
So this time, knowing that that tax cut was really unpopular--for a lot of reasons but not the least of which the fact that it wasn't paid for; it was all borrowed--Republicans are trying to create the illusion that they are serious about savings. So part of what is happening with the cuts at USAID--the evisceration, the elimination of USAID--and the next round of cuts at the Department of Education or the Department of Labor is about gutting a series of programs or at least creating the illusion of cuts that then create a pretext that ``Hey, we have saved a lot of money. We have cut a lot of government services. We can afford that massive tax cut for the rich and for the corporations.''
Now, as I talked about with Senator Schatz, a lot of those cuts are illusory. All those USAID employees that have been sent home, they are still getting paid. I mean, it is insane. We have thousands of Federal employees right now who are home or are about to be recalled, many of whom have lost access to their email, so they can't even work from home, that are getting paid to do nothing. So some of these cuts are illusory. They don't exist. It looks like you are saving money, but you are not really saving money.
But eventually, if you do shutter the Department of Education and you do shutter the Department of Labor and you keep USAID illegally closed, then, yeah, some savings will appear. But where do they come from? They come from a retreat of American power. They come from our decision to stop contesting the rise of China. They come because we have decided to hand Ukraine to the Russians. They come from our decision to stop fighting terrorists.
If you close the Department of Education, you will get some savings, but it will only be because we have abandoned children with disabilities, we have stopped trying to fight bias and discrimination in our schools, and we are no longer helping kids afford college.
If you destroy the Department of Labor, yeah, you will get some savings that you can apply to the billionaire tax cut, but it is because you have shut down OSHA, which makes sure that our factories and our workplaces are safe; it is because you are no longer helping workers collectively bargain so that they can get better wages and better benefits.
USAID protects this country. The Department of Education and the Department of Labor help regular people. It is easy for the billionaire class to say: Let's shut down the Department of Education. All their kids go to private schools. They don't need the Department of Education. And even if their kids are discriminated against, they can hire fancy teams of lawyers.
So some of the savings are illusory, some of them are fake, but many of the savings, if you shut down USAID and the Department of Labor and the Department of Education, they are real, but those savings are gleaned by hurting real people.
Shutting down schools or withdrawing from a fight for civil rights and protections for kids with disabilities or stopping trying to protect workers from harm done to them by corporations or a retreat from the world, a decision to just pack up and let China own the world--there is a cost to all of that, and the cost is borne not by the wealthy and the billionaires but by regular people.
(Mrs. MOODY assumed the Chair.)
Military leaders say routinely--I will say this again; I mentioned it earlier--that if you eliminate USAID, if you stop soft power, right, you have to buy us twice as many bullets, because they know that USAID helps keep really dangerous places--places that matter to the United States, like the Middle East--stable. And if you stop focusing on stability in parts of the world that matter to the United States, conflict breaks out, and the United States often gets dragged into that conflict. When the United States gets dragged into that conflict, it is not the billionaires' kids that are fighting. By and large--we all know this--the people that sign up for our military are middle-class families, are often poor families.
So the billionaires and the corporations won't have much to lose if the evisceration of USAID leads to American troops being sent into conflict around the world. It will be regular folks--the nonbillionaire class--that will get impacted by that when their kids are sent overseas, when their kids don't come home.
So this attack on Agencies, this illegal shuttering of Departments, it is all in service of trying to make it seem as if there are savings happening so that we can afford that tax cut for the very, very wealthy.
But then there is this other thing that is happening. Again, we don't know what it is yet, but, man, it looks really worried.
So why is Elon Musk inside the Department of the Treasury? Why has Donald Trump given him access to this incredibly sensitive payment system?
I am going to admit to you: We don't know yet. It just is unprecedented. And you saw the long-time Treasury employee. I mean, this is a nonpolitical guy. This is just a guy who shows up to work every day trying to make sure that you get your Medicare benefits and you get your refund check. He left. He left because he had never seen anything like this. He had never seen a billionaire with a political agenda come in and take control of this payment system.
And so what is the agenda there? I don't know. But could it be in the same service as the elimination of USAID and the potential elimination of other Departments? Could it be that they want to take control of the payment system so that they can strip benefits--admittedly expensive benefits--for the middle class so they can afford their tax cut? If you have control of the payment system and you don't care about the law and you don't care about the Constitution, you can decide to reduce payments or shut down payments.
For a day, they stopped paying Medicaid claims. So it is not like this is beyond them. For a day, they shut down the Medicaid system.
If Elon Musk has control of the Treasury payment system and there is a need to save some big money so that you can claim that you passed along the big tax cuts to the billionaires and the corporations and you didn't increase the deficit, then maybe those Social Security benefits get turned off for a day. Maybe those Medicare benefits get turned off for a day.
I don't know what the hell he is doing inside that payment system. And you can say: Well, you shouldn't believe the worst, or you shouldn't hypothesize. You shouldn't guess. But we haven't been given a good explanation for something that looks like a fundamental perversion of precedent and the law.
Remember, Elon Musk can't get a security clearance. He can't. But apparently, he can have access to all of our most sensitive information and data. And maybe it is in service of trying to rearrange payments to save money for that tax cut.
I mean, it is stunning the number of programs that he has access to: Social Security and Medicare benefits, salaries for all Federal personnel, payments to government contractors and grant recipients, tax refunds. The system holds a lot of sensitive information, including Social Security numbers--all of our Social Security numbers, all of our names, all of our addresses, much of our private banking information, much of our private tax information.
News broke today that Musk now has access to even more. He didn't just get access to the Treasury payment system, but now, he has access to CMS's payment system. CMS runs Medicare and Medicaid. So now, Elon Musk has access to all of the payment and contracting systems that run Medicare and Medicaid--literally has control of hundreds of billions of dollars in payments to healthcare providers. They got access to that payment system.
Today, they also showed up at the Atlanta headquarters of the CDC. They met with Labor Department leaders to begin the process of getting access to those payment systems as well. Why is this happening? Why is this happening?
Well, it could be that they are trying to save money so that they can afford the billionaires' tax cut, but it also may be so that they can direct payments to the companies and the individuals that have pledged support to Donald Trump and they can deny payment to people who have not pledged loyalty.
And, again, I understand that that sounds a little fanciful, but just look at what is happening right now at the White House. The President is saying he is going to shut down a high-speed rail system in California, while saying nothing about a high-speed rail system in Florida. He is proposing eliminating FEMA because there was a series of devastating, deadly wildfires in California, but he wasn't--and Republicans weren't talking about eliminating FEMA when there were disasters in Republican States. It seems as if there is a pretty unapologetic preference for political friends.
And if Elon Musk has control over the payment system, then why should we assume that he wouldn't use that control to turn on money to people he likes or maybe even entities that he is affiliated with and turn off money to entities that he is not affiliated with or to his competitors. That is why you don't allow a billionaire, that is why you don't allow somebody with massive financial interests, to be in charge of the Treasury's payment system. That is bananas. We don't do that because it opens up the opportunity for fundamental corruption.
But if you understand one of the key reasons for all of these early actions to be a transfer of power and wealth away from regular people to the billionaire class, then it makes sense, because you can either use your control of that payment system to bank money that you can use to cut your own taxes or you can just use control of that payment system to pay people that are affiliated with you or help your business and deny money to your competitors.
This is where the firing of the IGs matters because, if we had inspectors general in these Departments, then we would actually be able to have a view as to whether the access to these information systems are being used for corrupt purposes.
Here is the list of the inspectors general: the inspector general at the State Department, the inspector general at the Department of Energy, the inspector general at the Interior Department, the inspector general at the Defense Department, the inspector general at the Department of Veterans Affairs, the inspector general at the Department of Transportation, the inspector general at the Environmental Protection Agency, the inspector general at the Small Business Administration, the inspector general over Social Security, the inspector general at the Department of Labor, the inspector general at the Department of Health and Human Services, the inspector general of the Department of Agriculture, and the inspector general at the Department of Housing and Urban and Development.
All of those watchdogs are gone, and they are being replaced with no one--because the complaint wasn't that these inspectors general weren't good enough watchdogs of the Federal taxpayer dollars. The complaint was that they were watchdogs. The complaint was that somebody was looking and watching. All of these inspectors general were fired and replaced with no one for the purpose of darkness descending.
Elon Musk got access today to the entire Medicare and Medicaid payment system. Why? We do not know, but it is certainly plausible to believe that there are nefarious purposes afoot, that his access to that system is part of a design to harm our democracy or enhance his economic interests, but we will have a really hard time figuring it out because the inspector general at the Department of Health and Human Services, coincidentally, was fired days before Elon Musk was given unprecedented access.
An unaccountable, unelected billionaire with tons of business interests inside this government was given access to the most sensitive payment systems in our government. It is not a coincidence. I was being facetious. It was not a coincidence that all the inspectors general were fired right before Elon Musk got access to these payment systems.
The intent is darkness. And if your intent is to steal from the American people, if your intent is to use that access to be able to divert money from legal purposes to illegal purposes, if your intent is to transfer resources that are supposed to be due to the taxpayer instead to the millionaire, billionaire, and corporate class, then you can't have sunlight. You can't have pesky inspectors general because the public would hate that if they knew it was happening.
There are thousands of people showing up to riots, but there would be hundreds of thousands showing up to protests. But there would be hundreds of thousands of people showing to protests if they knew, through the reports of these inspectors general, that there was thievery happening. We don't know what is happening because darkness has descended upon these Agencies.
The other part of this plan related to the shutdown of these Departments and the infiltration of these Departments by people like Elon Musk is that another way for the billionaires to get richer, beyond cutting services, influencing the economy by giving themselves payments and denying payments to their competitors, is to just privatize more and more of the Federal Government so that they get to take it--to privatize more and more State and local services, so they get to take it.
Project 2025, written by Russ Vought, amongst others, is very clear about that intention. They sort of look at the remaining parts of the Federal Government--in our government writ large, that are still done just for the common good, not done for profit. And they say: To hell with that. We want every public service to be a source of profit.
Now, I think that is a disaster. I think there is an important public-private sector partnership in a lot of parts of our government. I think it actually does work pretty well, for instance, the Department of Defense, to have the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, to have our military servicemembers be a public service, right? We don't have a mercenary army, right? Our Army is run by the government, by generals, by officers who work for the government.
But they are supplied with equipment that comes out of the private sector because, in the private sector, you are maybe going to get some more innovation than you would in the public sector. I think that is a very legitimate public-private partnership.
Same with healthcare, I don't like how much of our healthcare system has gone to the for-profit sector, but I understand that it is important to have a profit motive, for instance, in drug discovery, that private companies probably push a little bit harder to commercialize a breakthrough therapy than might a government laboratory.
So I think there are plenty of places in government where public- private partnerships work. There are plenty of places in government where maybe it should all be in the private sector, and we just flow money from the public sector to the private sector.
But I don't think that works for law enforcement. I don't think that that works for protection services. I don't think that works for our public schools. I do not want a private equity
firm to own my kids' public school. I don't want the motivation of the administrators of my kids' elementary school to be sucking as much profit out of the school as possible. I want my kids' school to be a place where they only care about quality and performance.
And does that mean that there might be a little redundancy built in? Does that mean there might be a little inefficiency built in? Yeah, but I just want the mission to be doing good for my kids.
But that is not how Russ Vought sees it. That is not how the Trump administration sees it. They see every existing remaining public service, from the security at our airports to the administration of our schools, as a lost opportunity for the rich to get even richer.
I referenced this article earlier, but I will do it again. This is from the publication called ``Buyout Insider.'' It is a pretty long article entitled ``Back to school''--cute little heading--``Back to School: Investors are bullish again on education.''
``Private equity's appetite for the sector is strong'' is the subheadline. While a lot of this article is, admittedly, about private equity's interest in ed tech, the technology that surrounds schools and is used by teachers, it also talks about private equity's interest in just buying schools--buying and running schools.
It talks about some of the schools that are already being bought and run by private equity. Remember Betsy DeVos, the first Secretary of Education during Trump's first term? She ran for-profit schools, schools where the goal every day was not to educate kids but to make money for Betsy DeVos and her family.
So part of the agenda here is not just to pass along a tax cut to the billionaires and the millionaires and the corporations, but also to ship big parts of our public service infrastructure into the private sector.
I am a capitalist. We are all capitalists here. I believe in the genius of the private sector. I just do think there are some things that we should just do for the common good. There are some things that shouldn't be about how much money can I make. Billionaires and the corporations, the private equity firms, they are doing fine. They don't need our schools. They don't need our schools.
Frankly, there is plenty of evidence to show that when they get their hands on fundamental public services, they do it worse. For instance, if you look at nursing homes that are owned by private equity firms versus nursing homes that are not-for-profit, the not-for-profit homes are better quality homes--are better quality homes. Less people die in nursing homes owned by not-for-profit organizations than die in nursing homes that are owned by private equity. Why? Because private equity exists not to keep patients alive--I am not saying the owners of these companies aren't moral human beings. I am not saying they are indifferent to life. But their bottom line is: How much money do we make? How much money do we make?
There are certain sectors of public life--like the end of life, like my kids' education, like whether I am safe at the airport--that I just don't want profit to be the motivating factor. So it is important to understand the why. The effort to shutter these Agencies is, in part, an effort to send their services into the private sector.
The agenda at the Department of Education is not just to destroy the bureaucracy at the Department, it is also to outsource the education of our kids to the private sector. They want to destroy these Agencies so, in part, they can move the services into the for-profit realm so that the billionaires and the millionaires and the corporations can get even richer. I think it is important to understand that element.
There is another piece of this story, specifically, the story about USAID that is relevant to this effort to transfer power into the hands of the elites. You have to ask: Why was USAID first? Why was there such a fervor to shut down USAID?
I don't know the answer. But what I know is we traditionally don't allow people like Elon Musk to be this involved in foreign policy because they are conflicted. I understand that is probably the reason why Elon Musk can't get a security clearance because he has these massive business interests outside the United States--in particular, in China.
So you have to ask yourself: Why is USAID being shuttered? Why does Elon Musk care so much about USAID? And I hate that we are searching for explanations, but the explanation that we have been given on the record is a lie. It is not true.
What Elon Musk and others have said is that they had to shut down USAID because it is a criminal organization. I mean, there is not a single U.S. Senator--even the U.S. Senators who don't like the fact that we spend money addressing famine overseas--who thinks USAID is a criminal organization. That is ridiculous. It is not true. Nobody who has spent a day looking at USAID thinks it is a criminal organization.
This is just normal public service, committed people who show up to work every day trying to solve problems for America abroad. We just have to accept that their on-the-record explanation that they are shutting down USAID because it is a criminal organization is not true. It is not true.
So we have to search for what the answer is. Who benefits most by USAID shutting down? I would argue it is China. China's influence in the world is primarily nonmilitary. China has a big growing military. We have to worry about that.
But China doesn't have military partnerships with countries like the United States does. China has economic development partnerships, technology partnerships, mineral resource extraction partnerships, pork ownership, and administration partnerships. China's influence in the world right now is primarily nonmilitary. They don't do as much relief aid as we do, but they do a lot of it as well. They do help countries invest in public health infrastructure. They do show up and help with disasters. That is how they get influence.
The defining contest in the world right now is between the United States and China for who is going to control the piping of the international economy. When I say ``piping,'' I mean the navigation of the seas, the information infrastructure, the AI data sets, the flow of critical minerals that are so key to making all the technologies, the chips, et cetera, for the future.
China is trying to buy up that piping. And they do that by creating relationships with governments overseas based upon their nonmilitary relationship, the economic development partnerships, the investments that they make. USAID competes with China when it comes to those nonmilitary investments so that China won't command that competition over who controls the economic piping of the world. So when USAID disappears, China cheers.
They are cheering because now they have the run of the place. They are able to gain more influence when the United States is withdrawn. I say that because Elon Musk has a lot on the line with China.
Here is a recent article describing the extent of Elon Musk's business relationships in China:
Mr. Musk has a lot on the line [in China]. His best-known
company, the electric vehicle maker Tesla, makes half its
cars in China. Tesla sells more cars in China than anywhere
except the United States, and his local competition is
getting stronger. Chinese regulators have not yet allowed
Tesla to offer its latest assisted-driving and self-driving
car technology, while allowing Chinese automakers to race
ahead with similar systems.
Many of Mr. Musk's other companies, including his ventures
in solar energy and large batteries, face formidable
competition from Chinese businesses. Some of his businesses
might benefit from a decoupling of Chinese and American
economies.
It goes on to explain all the different ways in which Elon Musk has real interests in China and real reason to curry favor with the Chinese Government. We can't know for certain whether there is a connection between Elon Musk's ferocity in eliminating USAID, a daily thorn in the side of China, and his business interests, but we certainly haven't seen any more credible explanation.
And we got more evidence today of how Elon Musk's business interests seem to be dictating American foreign policy. One of the places that decisions get made about the rules of the world--rules that matter to the United States and U.S. companies--is the G20, the 20 biggest economies. We are there every
year because we want a seat at the table when the rules of the global economy are set because, if we are not there, the rules are going to disadvantage America, disadvantage our interests, and disadvantage our companies.
Well, the Secretary of State today announced that we would be boycotting the G20 this year. Why? Because we just don't like the place that it is being held. Guess where that place is? South Africa. And guess what Elon Musk has been doing over the course of the last several months and years--running a PR campaign against the government of South Africa for a host of reasons, but one of them is that the South African Government refused to sign a contract with Starlink. He is very mad that the South African Government refuses to sign a contract with him on Starlink because, whether he likes it or not, the South African Government has certain rules about diversity and inclusion and equality that he can't meet.
And so what did Secretary Rubio announce today? We will not be attending the G20 in South Africa because we don't like their rules on diversity, equity, and inclusion. The very rules that are preventing Elon Musk from getting a contract in South Africa are now the reasons why the United States is not showing up at the G20.
I am not a conspiracy theorist, but, man, this seems a little weird that our foreign policy seems to be impacted by the billionaire's interests, the billionaire that has such close connection to the policy of this administration.
One of the other ways that American policy and American law can be perverted to serve the billionaires and the corporations is if there is an integration between the interests of the billionaires and American foreign policy. It is just something we have to have our eyes wide open to.
And the last thing I want to talk about is just what is coming with this reconciliation bill because it could be that what is happening inside Treasury or what is happening in USAID is largely an effort to create savings--or the illusion of savings--to be able to afford this big tax cut for billionaires and millionaires.
But there is also a plan that is put down on paper by a Congressman in the House who is very influential in budget circles that lists out a series of cuts that they intend to carry out or want to have on the table in order to afford that big tax cut for billionaires and millionaires.
On that list is $479 billion of cuts to Medicare, $2.3 trillion worth of cuts for Medicaid. Medicare insures all seniors in this country. Medicaid insures seniors and pays for many senior services, but also pays for many services for the poorest families and kids in this country. And 40 percent of births in this country are paid for in part by Medicaid--$2.3 trillion. I understand nobody understands how much money that is. But that is a lot of freaking money. That is a lot of really hurt people if you cut $2.3 trillion out of the Medicaid system. And $151 billion in cuts to the Affordable Care Act--that means kicking people off of their insurance; $347 billion of cuts to things like TANF, which is assistance for the very, very poor kids in this country, food programs that keep kids and families alive who can't afford food.
I mean, this is a draconian list of cuts--Medicare, Medicaid, Affordable Care Act, food programs, emergency assistance programs.
None of these programs that are laid out in the Arrington memo--this is Representative Arrington. None of the programs laid out in Representative Arrington's memo impact billionaires in a meaningful way or millionaires in a meaningful way. There is not a cut here that impacts a corporation in a meaningful way. Every single cut listed in his memo--Medicare, Medicaid, food programs, TANF, the Affordable Care Act--impacts middle-class people, poor people, regular people. It is just like USAID benefits regular people, making sure that their sons and daughters don't have to go off and fight a war. It is just like the Department of Labor and the Department of Education protect regular people.
Are you seeing the story here?
This agenda is about stealing money from the middle class and poor people and rerouting it to the billionaires, the millionaires, and corporations.
Every part of this story--the shuttering of these Agencies, the removal of the IGs, the infiltration of the payment system, the requisition of American foreign policy by the billionaires, the reconciliation bill--is all in service of the same thing: taking power and money from people in the middle and delivering it to the very, very wealthy.
For what? What else does Elon Musk need? What more does somebody who makes $500 million need? Why do they need another giant tax cut? Why do they need to run our schools or the TSA--just to be able to pad their pockets?
I mean, I don't begrudge anybody for making money in this country. That is the genius of America, that you get to get rich if you have a good idea and you work hard. But I don't support the wholesale, rapid transfer of money and resources from folks in need in the middle class to folks who are already rich and don't need any more help.
All we are talking about here is just a realtime shift--cutting Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, shutting down Agencies that help normal people, corrupting our foreign policy--in order to deliver more money to people who are already billionaires? Nobody wants that.
So let me talk about the second goal here that I think is actually, in some ways, much more urgent.
The second goal is to try to either suppress or shutter public dissent because they know what they are doing is really unpopular-- cutting Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act in order to finance tax cuts for the wealthy. That is not popular. That is very, very unpopular. Repealing the Affordable Care Act was and still is really unpopular.
So how do you get away with that? How do you stay in power and win elections if you do things that are really unpopular?
Well, you rig the rules. You rig the rules. The before and after moment is January 6, 2021. I am still flabbergasted by the fact that the majority of Republicans between the House and the Senate endorsed the idea that Donald Trump should still be President of the United States after he lost the election. That was the majority's position for Republicans in Congress--that Donald Trump had lost the election. No. They said he really won the election. They claimed there was fraud. Obviously, there was not fraud. Obviously, there is no evidence that he won the election. He lost it by a landslide. He lost it by a landslide. It wasn't like a million votes--it wasn't like 1,000 votes. He lost the election by a landslide.
But the Republicans said: No, I don't care that he lost the election. I want President Trump to stay in power.
In many ways, it is the most dangerous day in American politics since the end of the Civil War because it was an admission by one major political party that they care more about power and keeping power permanently than they care about observing the will of the people. The people elected Joe Biden. The majority of Republicans here said: I don't care. I want Donald Trump to stay in power, and I am willing to do whatever it takes, including endorsing and condoning violence, in order to keep Donald Trump in power.
That effort to try to destroy public dissent--to try to eradicate democracy as we know it so as to keep Republicans and the Trump family in power permanently--has not disappeared, and I think it is important to talk about that.
So, as I mentioned before, the most significant thing that has happened in many ways in the last 2 weeks--something that was supported by this incoming Director of OMB--is the endorsement of political violence in the pardoning of the January 6 protesters. It is unforgivable what happened. It is unforgivable because the people who assaulted the Capitol that day engaged in unspeakable violence.
You know these stories: the rioters who came here with metal poles and beat police officers over the head; the rioter who dragged a Capitol Police officer by the neck into the crowd and held him down while his fellow rioters stomped on the Capitol Police officer's body; the rioter who posted the night before, ``The revolution is coming. There will be blood''; the scaffolding that was erected outside the Capitol in the chance of hanging Mike Pence; the rioter who went to the scaffolding after
beating up police officers--after beating up police officers--and posted on social media, ``Too bad there are no Democrats here''; the police officers who died afterward; the police officer who had a heart attack after being tased repeatedly by one protester; the rioter who walked around the Capitol with zip ties, apparently looking for any Democrat to be able to seize, to kidnap, to torture.
I was here inside this Chamber. For my Republican colleagues who remember that day as a day of wayward tourists, none of my Republican colleagues stayed here to welcome the tourists when they were beating down those doors. The Republicans ran just like the Democrats ran.
I covered this before; so I won't belabor it. But Russ Vought is really dangerous, in part because he has been part of this effort to endorse political violence. And I don't know that we ever repair our Nation from that transition away from a universal belief that only peaceful protest is acceptable in this country to the world today in which, as long as you are engaged in political violence on behalf of the President, you can get away with it.
I mentioned this before, as well, but the other component of this attempt to seize power and hold power permanently for Republicans and the Trump family is this attempt to try to control information.
It is wild to me that this major information platform Twitter is now essentially being run out of the White House. It is amazing to me that President Trump is proposing to spend taxpayer dollars to take a 50- percent ownership stake in TikTok. It is amazing to me that people like Mark Zuckerberg are making deals with the President in which apparently the company will get some favorable treatment from the administration in exchange for Facebook's stopping patrolling false content being posted by everybody but including supporters of the President's.
The bullying of the media, the deals that seem to be being cut, you know, are not unfamiliar to those of us who study the ways that democracies die, and democracies vanish often because the information systems get co-opted or controlled by the regime.
We are not all the way there yet today.
I admit, even though Twitter is run by an ally of the President's, I still post on Twitter, and there are still people who see my criticisms of the President and Elon Musk. But all it takes is one tweak of those algorithms, and, all of a sudden, content that opposes the President is depressed, and content that spreads his narrative is accelerated. And it just isn't a coincidence that all the CEOs who were on stage at the inauguration--or the majority of the CEOs who were on stage at the inauguration--run information companies.
Again, I have covered this before, but another way in which they oppress dissent is just by stopping information from ever getting out to the public. So the effort to fire the inspectors general, the effort to place gag orders on people who work at these Agencies--that is just an effort to try to hide the bad behavior, to hide the potential fraud so that folks who are organizing out there to oppose the President's agenda never get access to the information.
Second to the endorsement of political violence in, I think, the order of urgency for us to talk about is the seizure of government funding.
I talked about the seizure of government funding in the context of how it allows for corruption and how it allows for somebody like Elon Musk to send money to people he likes and to deny money to people he doesn't like; how it allows them to unilaterally violate the laws that we have passed to hold back funding so that they can bank dollars to afford a tax cut or a tax cut for a set of individuals or a corporation.
It also suppresses political dissent and speech, and we saw this happen in realtime. When those grants were all shut down, we had a hard time during that day to get information from grant recipients because they were afraid that, if they went public, the grant would never be turned back on, and that fear has not completely dissipated. It is very hard to get information from grant recipients even when their money has been turned back on because, again, they fear, if they collaborate with Democrats, they will be a target to have their dollars turned back off.
Again, this is exactly why the Founding Fathers said a unitary executive--a single executive--cannot and should not be in charge of who gets money and who doesn't because they can use that money to reward friends and to punish enemies.
So we are still trying to understand the full scope of the President's compliance or violation with the court orders, but it seems clear to us that there is an agenda here to protest money when it goes to places that don't align with the President's political priorities and let money go through when it goes to places that are lined up with the President's political priorities. I mentioned the most obvious example of that being the President's threat to shut down a high-speed rail grant to California but his disinterest in that grant when it is going to another State that supports him, like Florida.
The last very, very worrying development is what is happening inside our Justice Department right now. There is a rolling purge that is happening right now. You are watching the FBI squeeze out anyone who was affiliated with the prosecution of the January 6 rioters. You are watching the firing of anybody who was associated with law enforcement actions against the President.
So the message is clear: If you are in law enforcement and you go after Republicans or you go after Donald Trump's political interests, you are not going to have a job. That would be worrying in and of itself.
But there is something else that is happening, and that is early threats of law enforcement against opponents of the President. The new acting U.S. attorney in Washington, DC, sent a really interesting letter directly to Elon Musk. Again, Elon Musk is a private citizen. He can't pass a security clearance. But Ed Martin, the acting U.S. attorney for Washington, DC, sent a letter saying: It was good to work with the DOGE team this weekend. We must keep all our American Government employees safe. We must protect the American people's property. I recognize that some of the staff at DOGE have been targeted publicly.
That is true. DOGE is apparently a public Agency. If you are working for DOGE, you have accountability to the American public. It is true that we are having a public conversation about DOGE, about Elon Musk, and about the people who work for him.
He said: At this time, I ask that you utilize me and my staff to assist in protecting the DOGE's work and the DOGE's workers. Let me assure you of this: We will pursue any legal action against anyone who impedes your work and threatens your people.
Let me read that again. Let me assure you of this: We will pursue any and all legal action against anyone who impedes your work and threatens your people.
That is extraordinary. The political opposition in this country is allowed to try to impede the work of the majority party. We are allowed to publicly criticize the work of the majority ruling party. We are allowed to protest outside of buildings. We are allowed to name individual government officials and criticize them for the actions that they have taken. But this letter from the U.S. attorney says: Be assured, we will pursue legal action against anyone who impedes your work or threatens your people.
Online, there are many critics of Elon Musk. The other night, one of these MAGA trolls targeted a critic of Elon Musk, and he tagged Ed Martin, the U.S. attorney, in his tweet.
He said: I found one right here, EagleEdMartin. Lots of stuff in his Bluesky account as well. I would look into him if I were you. He was threatening to hurt Elon Musk. Very unstable figure.
This is a pretty mainstream critic of Donald Trump and Elon Musk. He is not threatening to hurt anybody, but he is a pretty regular critic of Elon Musk.
That critic responds to this troll, and then guess who comes up posting. The U.S. attorney for Washington, DC.
He responds to this MAGA troll: Thank you for the information. Noted.
That is extraordinary. That is law enforcement, with the power of arrest and imprisonment, posting on a thread that includes a very loud, visible critic
of the President and Elon Musk, that he is watching him--he is watching him--coming on the heels of a letter that says: Let me assure you, we will pursue any and all legal action against anyone who impedes your work or threatens your people.
Even if this critic doesn't end up getting arrested, because there is no claim that there is anything he has done, as far as I have seen, that would ever rise to the level of an arrestable offense--he is just a critic of Elon Musk and Donald Trump--even if he never gets arrested, the chilling effect of a U.S. attorney telling critics online that ``I am watching you'' is authoritarian stuff, and it has impact because this particular individual is not going to stop criticizing.
But plenty of other people, faced with a vague threat of Federal investigation for their criticism of DOGE, will stop doing it, and I wouldn't blame them for it. If I get threatened with imprisonment because I criticize the President, I won't stop. This particular activist will not stop. But it would be reasonable for many Americans, if they were trolled by a U.S. attorney on their Twitter feed, being told ``I am watching you''--it would be as logical for them to just stop criticizing as it would be for the recipient of Federal grants to stop criticizing the President because they worry that if they do, their funding will be shut off, as it might be for any ordinary American, knowing now that Elon Musk has the ability to control whether they get a tax refund or not.
Democracies don't die in an instance. There isn't this minute when dissent has been crushed so badly that we don't have fair contests in this country. It is a slow-rolling death.
Why Russ Vought, to me, is so dangerous is that he helped write the document that is the foundation of all of this attack on democracy that is happening. Put it all together: information platforms; agreeing to the terms laid down by the President because they fear retribution by the President; political violence being endorsed and mainstreamed; people being told that if you engage in violence to support the President's power, you won't be held accountable; the message being sent inside law enforcement that you will lose your job if you pursue any law enforcement action against allies of the President; and the message being sent to critics that you will be subject potentially to arrest, at the very least to harassment, if you impede the work of the administration.
Some people will not stand out. Faced with potential political violence, faced with the cutoff of funds to their State or their agency or their organization, faced with the potential action from an unhinged prosecutor, some people will not be silent.
In Hungary today, there are still people who show up for protests but never enough to topple the regime because lots of other people just stay home because they don't want to get on the wrong side of the government because the government decides where the money goes and where it doesn't go and because they don't want to be subject to an arrest warrant.
We are not there yet. We aren't. We aren't. But we have never had a series of developments like we have had over the last 2 weeks that pose such a significant threat to our democracy and to democratic norms.
The reason we are on the floor tonight, the reason you feel this urgency from our side of the aisle and from the American public, is that we used to think we were in this together, Republicans and Democrats. Yes, we have always had a difference on this philosophy of where wealth and power should accumulate. I think Republicans broadly have believed in this idea of trickle-down. They have not believed as much as we have in supporting the middle class with programs like Medicare and Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act.
That is a legitimate political disagreement. If that is what is going on, then the country will survive, but if there is a seizure of spending power by the President, if the President gets to decide by himself which Agencies exist and which don't, well, our democracy doesn't recover from that because what goes around comes around. Today, it is a Republican President seizing spending power. A Democratic President will do it as well. And then all of a sudden, the people aren't in charge; one person is in charge.
I thought we all were in that exercise together--the defense of the Constitution, the defense of Congress's rightful prerogative to decide how money is spent on behalf of our constituents. What Donald Trump is doing is putting Congress out of business.
I think I heard Senator Schatz saying something like this as I walked in: I don't know why you work so hard to get a job like this if you are just going to outsource all of your power to one man.
It is not easy to become a U.S. Senator. Most people spend their entire career fighting to get this job. You have to do kind of ugly, distasteful things, like sitting in a room raising money for hours on end, in order to become a U.S. Senator. You have to give up all your weekends. You spend less time with your family. Why go through all of that if you are comfortable with not being in charge of spending, with endorsing the violation of the Constitution and the enshrinement of spending power in the hands of one person? There is really nothing left to do here. There is a lot less to do here if we don't decide how the taxpayer dollars are spent.
But even more worrying to me is that it seems like we are getting out of the bipartisan business of caring about democratic norms.
I am heartbroken--heartbroken--that a lot of people I like and respect on the Republican side didn't stand up to the President when he pardoned the guys who entered this building and beat police officers over the head with poles. I am even more heartbroken that many of my Republican colleagues endorsed it.
I don't understand why my Republican colleagues don't see the ways in which this seizure of power could be used for corruption, could be used so that the executive branch gets to shower favor on individuals and entities that are loyal to the administration while punishing individuals and entities that are not loyal to the administration.
I am heartbroken that my Republican colleagues don't have a problem with what is happening at the DOJ and the FBI. If you are an FBI agent and you investigated the people who attacked the Capitol, you shouldn't lose your job. We should all be outraged over that, not just because they were doing their job but also because they were investigating a legitimately illegal action. Come on. We can't agree that the storming of the Capitol and the destruction of the Capitol and the attacks on police officers are out of bounds?
Political violence is a real thing. We have had colleagues on both sides of the aisle who have been irreparably injured by would-be assassins, from Steve Scalise to Gabby Giffords. I am just telling you, the temperature rose in this country when all of those rioters were let off the hook.
So this is really important, that we raise the alarm as to what is happening in this country. You need to pay attention to the things that matter. You need to understand the story. That story is about the wholesale transfer of power and wealth from average people to the billionaires and the millionaires. That story is about the destruction of democratic norms in a way that may be irreversible if not abated in the next few weeks or months.
Russ Vought is the architect of those plans to erode our democracy and to transfer wealth to the very powerful. He does not deserve to be the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, and I am very glad and proud of my colleagues for being on the floor all night to raise these concerns.
I yield the floor.