Floor Statements

Mr. President, before I make my remarks, I want to join my colleague, Republican colleague from Wyoming in a salute to our military and appreciation for all they have given to America.

It is a touching story. I know he spends so many holidays visiting with Wyoming Guard troops stationed around the world, and I didn't know he carried his father's World War II dog tags with him. That is an indication of his love and respect for his dad, and I want to join in those sentiments.

But though the military commitment that people make is a unique commitment because you say that you will risk your life for this country, there are many other commitments that can be made in public service which make this a greater Nation too.

AmeriCorps

Mr. President, for more than three decades, AmeriCorps has strengthened communities across the United States. From rebuilding homes to providing rural healthcare, tutoring kids after school, cleaning up after natural disasters, AmeriCorps supports our most underresourced communities. My Republican colleagues represent communities that benefit from AmeriCorps whose members serve in their State.

For decades, AmeriCorps has had bipartisan support, which it deserves, but last week, unfortunately, the Trump administration pulled the rug out from under these community organizations by eliminating their funding--eliminating. Organizations like the Lessie Bates Davis Neighborhood House in East St. Louis, IL, my hometown, which provides meals to members of all ages of the East St. Louis community--they were left scrambling after the President's announcement eliminating AmeriCorps.

Right after the funding cuts were announced, Reverend Gaston, the CEO, met with workers who serve as drivers for the center's Meals on Wheels program.

For many of the senior citizens in that town and around the country, Meals on Wheels is literally the only physical contact they have with the outside world. It is a moment in the day that they look forward to with great anticipation. It is more than just food.

The night before the drivers were set to deliver meals, Reverend Gaston had to tell them, ``There [is] nowhere to go.'' He added that those workers would not get paid, even though they had worked earlier in the day.

The East St. Louis community is located in a food desert, which means members like Ayshia, who takes care of her grandfather, have come to rely on the center's food pantry for healthy options like fruits and vegetables. I know; I was just there 2 weeks ago.

Last month, eight dedicated AmeriCorps members worked in the center's cafe to offer a safe place for the community to eat a hot meal. Today, because of Trump's cuts, the tables are empty.

Camille, who is Lessie Bates Davis' program director for AmeriCorps shared that she has 120 days to close out the program. After that, even she will be left without a job.

While Camille is concerned about her own future, she has also shared how overwhelming it is to tell people that

she doesn't know the path forward, especially because she is a leader in the community.

Other programs across Illinois are feeling similar impacts. Take Lukas, an AmeriCorps member who has worked at the Boys and Girls Club in Livingston, IL, providing students with a safe place to learn and play after school. He won't get paid because of the Trump cuts, but he plans to continue to volunteer unpaid because of the impact on his community without people like him. He is feeling very bad for the young kids he knows so well.

Another constituent Ann is an AmeriCorps program director at Severson Dells Nature Center in northern Illinois in Rockford. Ann shared that one alum of AmeriCorps was inspired to serve this country by joining the U.S. Coast Guard after working in his community as an AmeriCorps volunteer and member in the nature center.

To use Ann's words:

AmeriCorps members are the best of us and have collectively

served this country.

I urge my Republican colleagues to fight against this administration's senseless attempts to eliminate such small amounts of funding that have such incredible positive impact in their communities, as well as my own. Don't sit by in silence.

As if cutting funds from AmeriCorps wasn't enough, last Thursday, in the dead of the night, President Trump signed an Executive order trying to end Federal funding for National Public Radio and Public Broadcasting. As it currently stands, only 1 percent of Federal funding goes directly to NPR and PBS.

It is a marginal expense in comparison to the amount of good it does. They provide news coverage, lifesaving emergency alerts, and educational programming for our kids. While President Trump falsely claims that the public media is ``biased and partisan,'' he is wrong. Public media provides local communities with unbiased and nonpartisan news coverage, especially in rural and smalltown areas where a newsroom often is working off limited resources.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is a private, nonprofit corporation authorized by Congress since 1967. For more than 50 years, Congress has provided funding on a bipartisan basis for Public Broadcasting. By doing so, we have ensured the independence of the public media system and provided an opportunity for a longstanding public-private partnership in service to all Americans.

President Trump's attempts to silence the media he does not deem acceptable should be responded to on a bipartisan basis. We must be united to let this President know that silencing a reliable news source is unacceptable in modern America. We have come to expect this kind of censoring by dictators and fascists, but we don't expect it in the United States.

Countries like Russia and China spend billions of dollars trying to undermine our news and spread disinformation; and cuts to free, untampered public news are not the way to fight off their advances.

As soon as I learned about the proposed cuts, I spoke out on the need for Congress to respond, to save these important institutions. And what was the response of my Republican colleagues? Silence. Crickets. It is the ``Silence of the Lambs.''

My Republican colleagues cannot afford to stay silent any longer. We must work in a bipartisan manner, continue to work to stop these funding cuts and prove to the American people that we care about our local communities and everyone's access to free, unbiased broadcasting. We must continue to allow NPR and PBS to provide essential news, information, and lifesaving services to the American public. Democracy cannot survive in silence.

I yield the floor.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

I announce that the Senator from Vermont (Mr. Sanders) is necessarily absent.

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

Mr. President, I didn't agree with former President George W. Bush on a lot of things, but I have repeatedly given him credit for making the United States the world's leader in stemming the HIV-AIDS epidemic in some of the poorest parts of the world. That was 22 years ago.

The program is called the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, PEPFAR. PEPFAR and its companion effort, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, dramatically curtailed the AIDS epidemic that was ravaging many parts of the world. PEPFAR alone has saved more than 26 million lives.

Thank you, President George W. Bush.

Both of these programs provide retroviral drugs for those with AIDS, allowing them to continue to live productive lives and prevent the spread of the disease at childbirth. They have been so effective that many have forgotten just how devastating AIDS was in many parts of the world, at one point killing more than 2 million people every year and leaving 14 million orphans in sub-Saharan Africa. In some countries, life expectancy had dropped to 20 years.

A few years ago, we took a look at the nation of Malawi. PEPFAR and the Global Fund Program increased the number of Malawians living with AIDS and receiving treatment from 5 to nearly 90 percent.

Thank you, President George W. Bush.

These programs are not only the right thing to do but also highly effective examples of American soft power and, until recently, a stark contrast to what China and the other nations of the world were doing. So imagine my reaction to the Trump administration's decision at the highest level to gut this lifesaving, bipartisan program under the heartless tutelage of the President's unelected billionaire buddy, Elon Musk, the wealthiest man in the world--never elected to anything; gleefully, senselessly dancing on stage with a chain saw so he can gut programs just like President Bush's PEPFAR.

It has been estimated by experts that the gutting of USAID could jeopardize the health of more than 20 million people worldwide, including 500,000 children.

What a contrast. Republican President George W. Bush will go down in history as a caring man who symbolized what the United States means to the world: a giving, caring people who have helped so many poor people in other nations, many of whom will never visit, and put them in a position where they can survive.

The Trump administration says that no programs were actually cut, just paused. The reality is far different.

Any of us who have raised a family can remember when that baby needed a bottle and was darned determined to let you know about it, screaming and

shouting until you finally plugged that bottle in her mouth and she quieted down.

So now the Trump administration says, when it comes to feeding programs for babies and infants and children around the world, because they are screaming and they are hungry, just tell them we have decided to pause the program--pause the program. Parents laugh out loud when you consider that possibility.

Just last month, the Trump administration dismissed the few remaining public health officials overseeing programs for pregnant women with HIV in low-income countries. Don't tell me that you have dedicated public service to strengthening families and then take away this basic need so that mothers giving birth to babies don't have to worry about HIV-AIDS.

All the experts at the Centers for Disease Control, the State Department, and USAID have been terminated and are waiting for reassignment. That is the Trump record. That is what he will be remembered for in history if we go along with it.

Even with some funding restored, how will the critical work continue without professional staff to carry it out? Like so many White House policies, this is cruelty and madness and certainly not efficiency.

In upcoming funding bills and any rescissions effort, it will be up to Congress--all of us in Congress, not the Democrats, although we are in the minority, but Republicans and Democrats together--to protect and restore these critical, lifesaving programs that are both the right thing to do and the strategic thing to do.

Mr. President, on a separate topic, as I reflect on my time in public service, I have been thinking about the issues that have meant the most during my career. There are a few that stand out, including my steadfast belief that the promise of medical research funding is one of the most important. That conviction led me to join forces more than 10 years ago with a bipartisan group of Senators: myself; Senator Patty Murray, a Democrat from Washington; Senator Roy Blunt, then-Republican Senator from Missouri; and Senator Lamar Alexander, a Republican Senator from Tennessee.

Our team of four, Democrats and Republicans, came together and decided to speak up and be committed to increasing Federal funding for the National Institutes of Health. The National Institutes of Health is the premier medical research laboratory in the world.

I did my best to make sure with my friends that we fought for a 5- percent increase in growth in medical research each and every year. We did it too. A 60-percent increase to NIH's budget over the last decade--60 percent, money that is used to research and develop new ways to fight childhood cancer, ALS, Alzheimer's, you name it.

If you own a television and you ever turn it on, you can't avoid an ad for a new prescription drug. They are on all the time, with great promise, and many of them are breakthrough drugs. Did you know over 99 percent of those drugs, those new breakthrough drugs that you see on television, were developed by America's taxpayers at the National Institutes of Health. Sure, the drug companies sell them and market them, do a good job in that regard. They charge too much in most instances, but having done the basic research at the expense of American taxpayers, those drugs are available in America, as they should be.

A 60-percent increase in the NIH budget over the past decade resulted in many of those drugs being discovered and being sold to American families and bringing relief to them in ways no one imagined.

That progress and the hope it brings to patients and families is why I am absolutely dismayed to see how President Trump has dismantled medical research in America during his 100 days in office.

Was that what we were voting for last November? a cutback on medical research in America? to give up our leadership in a world of developing new cures and medicines for people who are afflicted with disease? I don't think that was the message of the last campaign at all.

President Trump has frozen funding to university labs and hospitals across the board. For example, Northwestern University in Evanston, IL, a cancer research powerhouse that earns hundreds of millions of dollars of NIH grants annually has had its accounts frozen by the NIH for the past 6 weeks.

This chart gives you an indication of what this freeze in funding means. Take a look at the numbers for funding for competitive grants and medical research: President Biden, first term President Trump, President Obama, and now down at the bottom, President Trump in his current term.

We need people to speak up in Congress, in the Senate, in the House, Democrats and Republicans. Silence is not acceptable. The amount of funding awarded in Trump's first 100 days is dramatically lower than past years, with more than $2 billion in research funding being held up so far this year. Two billion dollars isn't just lost opportunity, but it discourages researchers from staying on the job, breaks their will to continue to dedicate their lives to finding cures for things that we, in America, view as dangerous.

President Trump has canceled hundreds of NIH-supported grants and clinical trials and placed gag orders on experts, eliminated the programs that attract young people to the field, and fired nearly 2,000 NIH scientists and healthcare professionals, 2,000 researchers. Is one of those researchers working on a cure for a disease that will affect someone in your family? It is quite possible.

On Friday, the President released a preview of his budget, which proposes to slash NIH's medical research budget nearly in half, wiping out all the gains we have made in the last 10 years. That is heartbreaking. These actions are devastating to medical research across America.

We are ceding our competitiveness to China, weakening our scientific expertise as the envy in the world, and unfortunately, Americans are paying the price.

So imagine my surprise by my Republican colleagues and their reaction. What has their reaction been? Silence. Crickets. It is the ``Silence of the Lambs.''

It only took two or three Republican Senators in the past 2 years to join with Democratic Senators, including myself, to make a dramatic difference in medical research. It only takes three or four now to step up to say to the President: We are sorry. This is part of your budget we cannot go along with. We are not going to walk away from medical research. We are going to stand together on a bipartisan basis because it means so much.

I came to the floor a few weeks ago to announce that if Republican Senators won't stand up for NIH funding in their States, then I would. So today, I want to highlight what NIH means to one State, Arkansas.

Last year, Arkansas received more than $100 million in NIH funding that supported more than 1,500 jobs and generated nearly $300 million in economic activity.

Among the top-funded NIH institutions were the University of Arkansas System and Arkansas Children's Hospital in Little Rock. Arkansas Children's used NIH funding to research why kids in rural, smalltown areas were experiencing higher rates of pediatric asthma and improving their treatment options.

They also used Arkansas NIH funding to research how to limit the negative long-term impact of chemotherapy for kids with leukemia. Is that important to you? If a member of your family was afflicted by asthma or needed chemotherapy, it would be critical.

I won't speak for either Senator of Arkansas, but helping pediatric cancer survivors and asthmatic kids in small towns sure seems like something worth fighting for, and I hope the Senators from Arkansas agree with me that this is a serious mistake for President Trump to cut the funding for that kind of research.

I look forward to working with those Senators if they want a bipartisan effort to restore this medical research in Arkansas.

Last week, the Senate Appropriations Committee heard testimony from a mother whose child beat cancer, thanks to NIH-funded clinical trials and treatment. It was great testimony

by this young lady who brought her little girl with her, her 5-year-old little girl with her.

Here is what she said:

Cuts to medical research are not just numbers on a

spreadsheet--they are stolen chances, unfinished stories, and

futures left unrealized.

I plead with my Republican colleagues: Break your silence. Let us work together to ensure the chances for medical research are not stolen. These stories should not be left unfinished, and those futures should be realized. Let us protect medical research together. Medical disease doesn't care what your party is. It strikes at any and every family in America. Let's stand up for these families and their kids.

I yield the floor.

I announce that the Senator from Pennsylvania (Mr. Fetterman) and the Senator from Washington (Mrs. Murray) are necessarily absent.

I announce that the Senator from New Jersey (Mr. Booker) and the Senator from Rhode Island (Mr. Whitehouse) are necessarily absent.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

I announce that the Senator from Rhode Island (Mr. Whitehouse) is necessarily absent.

I announce that the Senator from Vermont (Mr. Sanders) and the Senator from Michigan (Ms. Slotkin) are necessarily absent.

I announce that the Senator from Rhode Island (Mr. Whitehouse) is necessarily absent.

I announce that the Senator from Rhode Island (Mr. Whitehouse) is necessarily absent.

I announce that the Senator from Rhode Island (Mr. Whitehouse) is necessarily absent.

I announce that the Senator from Rhode Island (Mr. Whitehouse) is necessarily absent.

I announce that the Senator from New Mexico (Mr. Heinrich), the Senator from Connecticut (Mr. Murphy), the Senator from Michigan (Mr. Peters), the Senator from Vermont (Mr. Sanders), the Senator from Virginia (Mr. Warner), the Senator from Vermont (Mr. Welch), and the Senator from Rhode Island (Mr. Whitehouse) are necessarily absent.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.