Cory Booker

Mr. BOOKER

Mr. BOOKER. Thank you. You have given me energy. I am sourcing my energy from you. I don't want to just cast aspersions on--and we are saying things that I just want to back up in fact. All of those letters--all of those letters from seniors--I see my dear friend from Pennsylvania is now the Presiding Officer. He missed all of the letters I read from Pennsylvania. In all of those letters, people were using the words ``Ponzi scheme.'' Where did that come from? I just want to read from ``The Joe Rogan Experience.'' I actually liked it. I enjoy listening to Joe Rogan. Elon: Social Security is the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time. Now, that is a big statement. It is the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time, Elon says. And Joe Rogan says: Why? Explain that. Elon says: Oh. So, well, people pay into Social Security, um . . . and--and the money goes out of Social Security immediately. But the obligation for Social Security is . . . uh . . . your entire retirement career. So you're . . . you're paying . . . uh . . . with your, the kind of people . . . you're paying . . . And I am reading this verbatim. You're paying . . . uh . . . with your, the kind of people . . . you're paying . . . like--like--if you look at the future obligations of Social Security, it far exceeds, uh, the--the tax revenue--uh . . . far. If you've looked at the debt, the debt clock. Rogan says: Yes. OK. There's, there's, there's-- Three ``there's.'' I am reading it verbatim-- our present-day debt, but then there's our future obligation. So when you look at the future obligation of Social Security, um, uh, the actual, uh, national debt is, like, double what--what people think it is because of the future obligations. Rogan: Uh. Elon: So, uh, basically, people are living way longer than expected. That was the evidence of a Ponzi scheme. Now, let's correct something. The reason why we have a massive debt in America--lots of people should take ownership over it. But the biggest debt creator in the last, say, 25, 30 years, is the President of the United States, the current one, in his first term, by blowing massive holes in our deficits to give tax cuts that went way disproportionately to the wealthiest Americans and corporations. And he wants to renew those tax cuts that independent budget folks are saying could add trillions of dollars to our national deficit. So if he is talking about the debt clock or whatever he is talking about, he is part of an administration--even though he is not elected and not approved by Congress and whatever, he and his President--the richest man in the world and the most powerful man in the world-- together they are driving an agenda that is going to drive this deficit much bigger. And they are going to try to pay for some of it--not all of it because it is trillions of dollars of projected debt. They are going to try to pay for some of it by cutting NIH grants, by cutting Medicaid, by cutting staff at Social Security. So, no, Social Security is not a Ponzi scheme. People paid into it. And as Andy Kim and I just talked, there are ways to preserve it, strengthen it, and make it better. It is a program that pays benefits after a lifetime of work. It has never missed a payment. It has never run out of money. It is an insurance program. But don't take my word. Here is Current Affairs magazine editor Nathan Robinson writing on March 7: ``Why Social Security Is Not a Ponzi Scheme.'' That is a great title. Old age insurance is not a scam, and it's not destined to collapse. Proponents of privatizing or eliminating Social Security are constantly telling lies about it. Here is the article: Elon Musk has called Social Security a ``Ponzi scheme,'' comparing it to a scam in which a con man must keep finding new suckers in order to disguise the financial unsustainability of his enterprise. [The] term has also been used by libertarian commentators at Reason and the Hoover Institute, who try to convince people that the program is fundamentally broken and unsustainable. Because both Social Security and Ponzi schemes take money in from new contributors which they pay to old ones, it is easy to craft a superficial resemblance between [the two]. But Social Security is not a Ponzi scheme, and it's important to understand why, because the comparison is used to generate the illusion of a Social Security ``crisis'' that can be used to justify major benefit cuts or even the elimination of the program altogether. [Under the Ponzi scheme,] the differences between old age insurance and Ponzi schemes, we can train ourselves mentally to resist the propaganda that is used to try to convince the public to support undermining one of our most important social welfare programs. Let's think about a few different cases in which money is pooled and paid out. First, let us imagine a company has a pension scheme. (I realize this may be difficult to imagine these days, but stick with me for a minute.) Workers pay 5 percent of their income. The employer pays in an amount equivalent to 15 percent of the worker's income. When the worker retires, they get a fixed benefit every year for the rest of their life, equivalent to some percentage of what their salary was. [Let's call that] Scenario A. Now let us imagine a different scenario: Five (uncommonly astute) middle schoolers create a rudimentary insurance scheme to guard against being punished by their parents. The children all go to the mall every week to play arcade games together. They each get an allowance of $10 per week, which they spend at the arcade. What they decide to do is spend $9 each week instead and put $1 per week into a fund. If one of them has their allowance taken away by their parents, the fund will pay their arcade money for the week. That way, nobody in the friend group is ever deprived of the ability to go to the arcade. We are going to call [that] Scenario B. Finally, let us imagine a scenario in which a fraudster tricks a group of old people into giving him their money. He says that if they invest their retirement money with him, he can guarantee them a 20 percent per year return, risk-free. They invest. He provides them with statements showing that their money is indeed growing at 20 percent [a] year. When they ask [him] to pull a portion of their money out so they can spend it, he disburses it. But what he [is actually] doing is spending all of their money and providing fake statements. He is able to keep paying withdrawals because he is constantly recruiting new suckers, just enough to cover what people are withdrawing. Eventually, people get suspicious, too many try to withdraw their money at once, and he flees the country. This is a Ponzi scheme, named after the Italian con [man] Charles Ponzi, who fleeced people in this way. We will call the Ponzi scheme scenario C. Notice that there are similarities and differences between [the] three scenarios. A similarity is that there is a fund that some people are paying into while others are being paid. Another similarity is that all three are potentially unstable. . . . In Scenario A (company pension), employees start living a very long time in [their] retirement, the amount of money in the pension fund might not be able to cover the promised benefits, necessitating an adjustment of the contributions from the next generation of workers. . . . Or if, in Scenario B (middle school arcade . . . insurance), one of the kids might be so unruly that his parents are suspending his allowance every other week, requiring an adjustment of the rules for payouts or contributions . . . to keep the fund sustainable. Scenario C [the] (Ponzi scheme) is the most unstable of all, because it depends on an elaborate fraud, on fake accounting that disguises the fact [that] nobody has the amount of money that they are being told they have. It . . . only last[s] until people try to actually use the money. . . . But scenarios A and B could also collapse if they are not managed well. We can see that despite the commonalities . . . there are fundamental differences between scenarios A . . . B and scenario C. The first two are legitimate ways for people to pool and distribute money, and they can work just fine . . . accomplishing their intended purpose. The third is a fraud in which people's money is being stolen. The difference is more important than the similarities. I have laboriously laid out these examples in . . . hopes that we can better understand why Social Security can be made to look like a ``Ponzi scheme'' but [it] isn't . . . one at all. ``Social Security is the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time,'' said Musk. ``People pay into Social Security, and the money goes out of Social Security immediately. But the obligation for Social Security is your entire retirement career.'' Now, it's true that in an insurance system, the incoming payments from new people might be used to fund outgoing payments to people who were already part of the [Ponzi scheme.] But that's not what makes a Ponzi scheme a Ponzi scheme. Musk, not for the first time, doesn't know what he's talking about. One of the reasons Social Security can be made to seem like a Ponzi scheme is [because] people may misunderstand how it works. People might think that Social Security saves their money over time, and then when they retire it pays ``their'' money back. That is not how it works. It's not like a savings account. The money I pay in is not saved up for me, it's paid out to today's beneficiaries. When I retire, my benefits will be paid by the money coming in from the next generation of workers. Discovering this fact can make people think [that] Social Security is [a Ponzi scheme, but it is not.] . . . . a Ponzi scheme is a fraud in which the returns are fake. There is nothing fake about Social Security. As long as enough money is in the pool to pay out the beneficiaries, the operation is sustainable, and perfectly honest. The only reason it matters that retirees do not pay for their own benefits, but depend on the payments of the next generation of workers, is that if there isn't a next generation of workers, we . . . have [got] a problem. But fortunately, there is every reason to believe that human beings will continue to exist, work, and pay Social Security taxes. Now, what Musk and others who claim Social Security is a ``scam'' or in ``crisis'' say is that in the future, there will not be enough workers [to pay] retiree[s] . . . the promised benefits. Musk says: ``If you look at the future obligations of Social Security, it far exceeds the tax revenue . . . There's our present-day debt, but then there's our future obligations . . . So, when you look at the future obligations of Social Security, the actual national debt is like double what people think it is because of future obligations. . . . Basically, people are living way longer than expected, and there are fewer babies being born, so you have [many] people who are retired and that live for a long time and get retirement payments . . . However bad the financial situation is right now for the federal government, it'll be much worse in the future.'' But while he's trying to get you to think this is a major problem or some deep fundamental flaw with . . . Social Security, it isn't. Every insurance plan has to make adjustments over time. If there are a lot of wildfires burning down houses, a company selling fire insurance might have to raise premiums. . . . The increased premiums might be small, but without them the program would go bankrupt. [This] doesn't mean, however, that we'd be justified in saying . . . fire insurance plans are a ``Ponzi scheme'' destined to go bankrupt. The adjustments needed to make Social Security sustainable in the long term are minor. Yes, people are living longer and having fewer babies. That means there ultimately has to be some kind of adjustment to either how much is being paid in, how much is being paid out, or both. Republicans want to cut benefits. Defenders of Social Security, instead, want to raise the money going into it by increasing taxes paid by the wealthy. It is so interesting that we just saw that in the dialogue with my ideas with Andy Kim. The amount of taxes that would need to be raised in order to make Social Security solvent is negligible (the Social Security Administration has estimated that ``increase in the combined payroll tax rate from 12.4 percent to 14.4 percent'' to make the program sustainable for the next 75 years). As Dean Baker and Mark Weisbrot put it in the introduction to 1999's Social Security [book entitled]: The Phony Crisis: ``The only real threat to Social Security comes not from any fiscal or demographic constraints but from the political assaults on the program by would-be `reformers.' If not for these attacks, the probability that Social Security `will not be there' when anyone who is alive today retires would be about the same as the odds that the U.S. government will not be there.'' Of course, in the 25 years since this was written, the chances that the U.S. government itself someday ``may not be there'' could conceivably have gone up. This is a funny author. Musk is certainly trying to make sure as little of it remains as possible. But the point remains. The theory behind Social Security is sound. It is not . . . like an unsustainable con, although it's also not like a savings account. It can easily be sustained indefinitely, with some minor adjustments to ensure that enough money is coming in to keep it going. (It is also the case that even the need to keep enough money flowing in is artificial. As Stephanie Kelton explains, the restrictions on Social Security's ability to pay out are created by a legal choice, not an actual financial constraint facing the U.S. government, which could keep paying benefits even when Social Security's funding ``runs out'' if it was authorized by Congress to do so.) Beware the rhetoric of those who describe it as in a ``crisis'' or being a scam. They either do not understand the fundamentals of how it works or they are deliberately trying to deceive you. (I cannot say for certain whether Musk is knowledgeable enough to understand the basics and is lying or simply cannot wrap his head around the basic way an old age insurance program works.) The author continues: As Alex Lawson of Social Security Works explained to me, the right has been trying to destroy Social Security since its inception. This is for a few reasons. First, a lot of vultures stand to benefit from privatization, just as the privatized ``Medicare Advantage'' program has enriched insurers like UnitedHealth. Second, the right, believing that individuals should be responsible for their own fates, has an ideological opposition to government social welfare programs--even if this results in a bunch of old people being poor. They see Social Security as an offensive ``Big Government'' intrusion into the free market, something that compels people to put money into a retirement program whether they want to or not. The problem is that most of the public doesn't share this hatred for the concept behind Social Security, and the program is overwhelmingly popular [on both sides of the political aisle.] Because they have failed to win the ideological argument, the right must therefore convince the public of a different argument: That the program is collapsing and doomed and can only be ``saved'' through major benefit cuts, which will be stated as the euphemism of ``raising the retirement age.'' Hence the propaganda about unsustainability and Ponzi schemes. This can be effective because if you don't know much about how Social Security works, it's easy to be convinced that there's something fishy about its payment structure or that it is heading for some dire financial apocalypse. But this is not the case. Baker and Weisbrot are right that the threats to Social Security come from those who say they are trying to ``save'' it from a crisis. We need to have a clear understanding of what is going on so that we can fight to save a program that works just fine and can easily be made to continue providing retirement benefits to every subsequent generation of Americans, ideally ensuring that nobody has to endure old age in poverty. So why are they cutting Social Security staff? Thousands of people. Again--I say this time and time again--I am standing here because this is not a usual time. I think our country is facing a growing crisis. But I am quoting so many Republicans because a lot of us who have run stuff know that you don't just fire people and then realize the mistakes you have made and beg them to come back to work. They know that you don't just fire people that do essential functions in a program before you have even done assessments of what your goals and ambitions are for Social Security. It is clear that their goal and ambition isn't to invest in customer service to improve the complaints that I have heard over the years about waits, unreturned calls, challenges at Social Security offices. That is not their ambition. We have missed a big opportunity to come together in this Nation and start to really reimagine our government that works for people, that can do big things and serve folks. Instead, we are trying to demonize people; we are trying to lie about critical programs, calling this a Ponzi scheme; make up out of thin air that somehow we are paying thousands of people that are over 150 years old, fraudulently. We are better than that. To that point, I just want to again make my facts clear. Here is an Associated Pressed fact-check from the President's speech: ``Tens of millions of dead people aren't getting Social Security checks, despite Trump and Musk claims.'' The Trump administration is falsely claiming that tens of millions of dead people over 100 years old are receiving Social Security payments. Over the past few days, President Donald Trump and billionaire adviser Elon Musk have said on social media and in press briefings that people who are 100, 200 and even 300 years old are improperly getting benefits--a ``HUGE problem,'' Musk wrote, as his Department of Government Efficiency digs into federal agencies to root out waste, fraud and abuse. It is true that improper payments have been made, including some to dead people. But the numbers thrown out by Musk and the White House are overstated and misrepresent Social Security data. Here are the facts: What has the Trump administration said about payments to centenarians? On Tuesday, Trump said at a press briefing in Florida that ``we have millions and millions of people over 100 years old'' receiving Social Security benefits. ``They're obviously fraudulent or incompetent,'' Trump said. ``If you take all of those millions of people off Social Security, all of a sudden we have a very powerful Social Security with people that are 80 and 70 and 90, but not 200 years old,'' he said. He also said that there's one person in the system listed as 360 years old. Late Monday, Musk posted a slew of posts on his social media platform X, including: ``Maybe Twilight is real and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security,'' and ``Having tens of millions of people marked in Social Security as ``ALIVE'' when they are definitely dead is a HUGE problem. Obviously. Some of these people would have been alive before America existed as a country. Think about that for a second . . . '' On Wednesday, Social Security's new acting commissioner, Lee Dudek, acknowledged recent reporting about the number of people older than age 100 who may be receiving benefits from Social Security. ``The reported data are people in our records with a Social Security number who do not have a date of death associated with their record. These individuals are not necessarily receiving benefits.'' ``I am confident that with DOGE's help and the commitment of our executive team and workforce, that Social Security will continue to deliver for the American people,'' Dudek said. How big of a problem is Social Security fraud? A July 2024 report from Social Security's inspector general states that from fiscal years 2015 through 2022, the agency paid out almost $8.6 trillion in benefits, including $71.8 billion--or less than 1%--in improper payments. Most of the erroneous payments were overpayments to living people. In addition, in early January, the U.S. Treasury clawed back more than $31 million in a variety of federal payments-- not just Social Security payments--that improperly went to dead people, a recovery that former Treasury official David Lebryk said was ``just the tip of the iceberg.'' The money was reclaimed as part of a five-month pilot program after Congress gave the Department of Treasury temporary access to the Social Security Administration's ``Full Death Master File'' for three years as part of the omnibus appropriations bill in 2021. The SSA maintains the most complete federal database of individuals who have died, and the file contains more than 142 million records, which go back to 1899, according to the Treasury. Treasury estimated in January that it would recover more than $215 million during its three-year access period, which runs from December 2023 through 2026. So are tens of millions of people over 100 years old receiving benefits? No. No. No. But the letters I read from scared people across the country show what happens when a President lies and when his unelected, biggest campaign contributor, the richest man in the world, just continue to make public statements to insinuate fear and doubt and chaos and then make announcements that they have to take back that they are going to end the call-in service, which so many seniors rely on. Then they create more fear when people see that posted government buildings that are going to be sold at auction to the private sector are actually the addresses of their Social Security offices. Why? Everywhere I am going around my State and everywhere I have gone around the country in the last few weeks and my mom and her mostly Republican senior community are all up in arms and feel this fear--or the people that we have read about who write letters about losing sleep--and it is because of the chaos, the crass cruelty, the unjustified cuts and attacks on a program that is a bedrock between security and financial ruin for so many Americans. Here is the Wall Street Journal writing about this, how Trump and Musk are undermining Social Security: Dealing With Social Security Is Heading From Bad to Worse. The agency that administers benefits is cutting staff and restricting services as part of a Department of Government Efficiency review. The Wall Street Journal writes: The federal agency that administers Social Security benefits is facing a customer-service mess. The Social Security Administration is cutting staff, restricting what recipients can do over the phone and closing some local field offices that help people in person. The number of retirees claiming benefits has risen in recent years as baby boomers age. Few federal agencies reach as far into Americans' lives as the Social Security Administration, which delivers a monthly check to some 70 million people. Many fear that the changes, part of President Trump's push to overhaul the federal government through the Department of Government Efficiency, are eroding confidence in the nearly 90-year-old program. The Wall Street Journal continues: Agency officials have acknowledged that because of a planned reduction in services over the phone, there will be longer wait and processing times. An estimated 75,000 to 85,000 additional visitors a week could show up at local field offices, according to an internal memo sent by Doris Diaz, the acting deputy commissioner for operations. (Details of the memo, which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, were reported earlier by the Washington Post.) That is likely to tax the agency's 800 number, where people typically make appointments for office visits. Already, Social Security recipients have long complained about customer service. Holly Lawrence, 64 years old, made several unsuccessful attempts to reach a human before she filed her Social Security claim online. The Washington, D.C.-based freelance journalist said she called the agency's 800 number several times starting in February. Each time, she got an automated voice that warned of a two-hour wait. Her calls were disconnected before she could leave a message or request a callback. She gave up trying to reach a customer-service agent and created an online account on the agency's website on March 3. She had to wait two weeks for an account activation code to arrive in the mail before she could submit her claim. She is now waiting for that claim to be reviewed and processed. Lawrence said she has virtually no retirement savings. ``I'm financially strapped and cannot afford to get a financial adviser. It was important to me to be able to talk to someone at Social Security,'' she said, adding that she is concerned the customer-service delays she encountered could negatively affect others ``who don't have the strength to be persistent.'' The Wall Street Journal continues: Social Security has a reputation as the ``third rail'' of American politics, a benefit to which elected officials make cuts at the risk of their own re-election. President Trump has vowed not to cut benefits. But he and DOGE's leader, Elon Musk, have made unfounded claims of widespread fraud in the program. I am going to repeat that sentence by the Wall Street Journal: [H]e and DOGE's leader, Elon Musk, have made unfounded claims of widespread fraud in the program. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said in a recent podcast interview that if Social Security checks were hypothetically delayed, it might catch those guilty of fraud because they would make ``the loudest noise screaming, yelling and complaining.'' Critics say turmoil at the agency is undermining trust in the safety-net programs. ``They're killing these programs from the inside,'' said Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, a Democrat. ``The result of which is, we don't know what they are doing to tear down the scaffolding that holds Social Security together.'' DOGE has gained access to systems containing personal information but a federal judge has temporarily blocked those efforts. On Friday, Leland Dudek, acting Social Security commissioner, threatened to shut down the agency because of the order, but later reversed course. Dudek, the acting commissioner, said the changes ``are designed to make sure the right payment is to the right person at the right time. It's a common-sense measure.'' Even before DOGE's plans went into motion, the agency's customer-service operation had been showing signs of strain. Roughly 47% of the quarter million people who call Social Security's 800-number on an average day have gotten through to a representative this year. That is down from nearly 60% in 2024. The average time to wait for a callback is over two hours. There has been a steady decline in the agency's staff, and DOGE plans to cut employment by another 12% this year. That would bring the total number of employees to about 50,000, from about 57,000 today and nearly 68,000 in 2010. ``Customer service has been going downhill for years,'' said Bill Sweeney, senior vice president at AARP. ``It's going to get worse.'' Some of the Social Security Administration's changes amount to cuts in services. The Wall Street Journal continues: Starting March 31, people who want to file for retirement, survivor or disability benefits or change their direct deposit information can no longer complete the process by phone, the agency said Tuesday. Instead they must do so online or at a field office. The agency said it is stopping phone claims as part of an effort to reduce fraud and strengthen identity-proofing procedures. The Social Security agency has estimated that improper payments represent 0.3% of total benefits. Dudek acknowledged that recent changes, including the shift away from claiming on the phone, are likely to drive up the numbers making appointments at field offices over the next 60 days. He said field employees would be trained over the next two weeks to respond to the changes. ``We're going to adjust our policy and our procedures to adapt to that volume,'' he said in a recent call with reporters. ``These changes are not intended to hurt our customers.'' Dudek said Monday in a call with advocates that the phone service policy change and quick timeline were directed by the White House, according to people familiar with the call. Directed by the White House. Kathleen Romig, director of Social Security and disability policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, says it isn't clear why the agency chose to discontinue identity verification over the phone, while allowing it online and in person. She and other advocates say that by discontinuing the phone option, the agency is creating hurdles for those who lack internet service or live far from a field office. The agency has also largely stopped serving walk-in customers in field offices, said Maria Freese, senior legislative representative at the nonprofit National Committee to Preserve Social Security & Medicare. Most wanting in-person service must book appointments on the 800- number. In February, 45% of people who scheduled a phone or in- person appointment to file a claim got one within 28 days. DOGE plans to close nearly 50 of the agency's approximately 1,200 field offices, according to Social Security Works, although a spokeswoman for the nonprofit said some of the offices on the list ``don't seem to exist.'' Frank Bisgnano, chairman and CEO of Fiserv, Inc, has been picked by Trump to serve as [Social Security's] commissioner and will appear before the Senate Finance Committee on Tuesday. I mean, this is the Wall Street Journal pointing out utter incompetence, utter incompetence. And they are rolling back, trying to catch up, but they don't seem to care, and the way they are going about this they are hurting seniors. They are undermining the security of the program. The title of the Wall Street Journal's article is the best, it is taking services, Social Security services are now going from bad to worse, under this leadership, who promised they were going to serve people. I see the Senator standing, and I will yield for a question while retaining the floor, if he has one.

Mr. BOOKER. Again, rural communities are really taking a hit. If I can give disability rights testimonials: Gutting the Department of Education will be devastating for students with disabilities. Right now, the Department of Education--the Individuals with Disabilities Act guarantees more than 7 million students in America the right to a free, appropriate public education. It ensures that--it provides services like speech therapies, counseling, and personalized learning plans. Without Federal oversight, these protections could disappear; schools could delay evaluations, cut corners, or deny support altogether for parents. Consider Kathryn, a resident of Westwood, NJ, right by Harrington Park, where I grew up. Kathryn has 7-year-old twin boys who receive special services. They currently attend an out-of-school-district specialized program but are very much a part of the Westwood Regional School District and may even one day transition back into the school. In her words: The Department of Education plays a critical role in enforcing the IDEA and ensuring that students with disabilities receive the accommodations and support they need to succeed. Without this oversight, many students risk losing essential services, widening existing gaps and disparities, and they will face greater barriers to academic success and reaching their highest potential. This is not a partisan issue; it is a matter of assuring that all students, regardless of ability, have equal access to education. Her story is one of thousands of parents, educators, and advocates across the country who are standing up for children's rights to an equitable education. Kathryn's family is for her boys, and every child deserves a fair shot at success. Their fight for inclusive education is essential. Here is Ashley from Wayne, NJ, who knows firsthand how important the Department of Education's funding is. Her daughter, who is legally blind, relies on Bookshare--an online learning tool--that provides successful materials to students with print disabilities at no cost to schools or families. Without it, her daughter would be left behind. As Ashley put it: This is a service she absolutely needs in order to access information that regularly sighted people do not even have to think about. Cutting programs like this isn't just irresponsible; it would be cruel. Kimberly from Dumont, NJ, the mother of twin boys with nonverbal level 3 autism: They attend an amazing school in Nutley because of IDEA. Without it, their future would be uncertain. In her own words, she says: It was not long ago that kids like them would have had to have been institutionalized. Now they are able to have a beautiful life and go to school. I am terrified of the future if IDEA is eliminated. I am begging you. Please consider families like mine. Kimberly, I see you. Michelle from New Jersey shares this fear. Her daughter, who has neurofibromatosis, who is 1--excuse me--and has apraxia, depends on in- class support to succeed. She knows firsthand how essential the Department of Education is in protecting students with disabilities. These are her words: Gutting, weakening, and ultimately closing the Department of Education is disastrous and dangerous for the disabled students who depend upon it. She reminds us that education is a civil right and that laws like the IDEA and section 504 ensure that students with disabilities receive the support they need to succeed. Alana from my State is deeply concerned about her 20-year-old son, who depends on the protections of section 504 to have a fair shot at the future. Her 10-year-old child with autism relies on these protections every single day. She is asking for help because, as she put it, ``Section 504 and its rules are very important to the disability community. We need your help to save it.'' Roger, who is a grandfather from New Jersey, is also pleading for action. His granddaughter has relied on a 504 plan since the seventh grade and will continue to need it as she applies to college. He raises the essential question: Which programs are directly helping students? The answer is clear: Laws like IDEA, IEP, and section 504. They are not luxuries; they are lifelines. Again, this is not about politics, and, as we see from various writings, people from both sides of the aisle are worried and concerned. I ask unanimous consent that this article from one of the publications in my State--``What happens to special education programs in New Jersey if Trump shuts down the Department of Education?'' by Gene Myers--be printed in the Record.

Mr. BOOKER. I want to say something about student loans too. The Department of Education is also responsible for operating the $1.6 trillion Federal student loan program, which benefits 42.7 million borrowers in America, and it allows students to access higher education--something that is shown unequivocally to strengthen our economy. This administration plans to move student loan funding to the Small Business Administration--a plan that even some of my Republican colleagues in Congress have expressed serious concerns about. Here is an article: ``Republicans hesitant to stand behind Trump's plan for student loans.'' Although SBA . . . managed a wealth of COVID relief programs, it normally runs a much smaller operation than [the] student debt [program]. President . . . Trump has yet to win over his own party with his push to ``immediately'' transfer the Education Department's massive student loan operation to another agency slated for deep staff cuts. Trump was expected to propose moving the agency's $1.6 trillion portfolio to the Treasury Department--a concept long-discussed on Capitol Hill and suggested in Project 2025, The Heritage Foundation's conservative policy blueprint. Instead, the president announced this month that the [SBA] would get it, surprising many lawmakers and conservatives who track the issue. Although the SBA, which provides financial support to companies for disaster relief, training and other needs, managed a wealth of COVID relief programs, it normally runs a much smaller operation than student debt. It is also slated to lose 43 percent of its staff. Now . . . Republicans are worried about the size of the debt and the staffing needed to manage the complex system of servicers, borrowers, and loan applications. And with about 43 million borrowers--and a record number of them starting to fall behind on their payments since the pandemic-era hiatus ended in 2023--transferring this work may be one of the most challenging hurdles for unwinding the agency President Trump has pledged to close. ``A lot of us were thinking it would go to Treasury. We are talking about the huge nature of student loans,'' House Education and Workforce Chair Tim Walberg said in an interview. ``They have much larger staffing capabilities right now than the SBA, but the president may have something specific in mind that I'm not aware of.'' Early legislation from Senator Mike Rounds . . . aimed at dismantling the Education Department also recommended the Treasury Department for the job. And at a recent House Rules Committee meeting, Walberg suggested that moving the portfolio to the SBA--which likely requires an act of Congress to complete--might not be ``permanent.'' Some Republican lawmakers have been hesitant to say the move is official. Neither the Education Department's Federal Aid office, which manages the loan program, nor SBA have provided a timeline or detailed plans to move the portfolio. But Education Department officials skeptical of Trump's SBA plan met the week after his announcement to discuss if the Treasury Department should manage this massive portfolio instead of the SBA, according to a person granted anonymity to discuss the matter. Some conservatives are concerned about the SBA's lack of experience with colleges and universities and the time crunch its staff will be under to learn the complex student loan system. The plan to move the portfolio ``sounds rushed, it sounds like no one has been briefed on it, and it is not clear what the purpose is,'' said Jason Delisle, who served on the Education Department's review group on Trump's presidential transition team. FSA largely works with direct loans, meaning that instead of a bank lending the money, the Education Department disburses the funds directly to the institution in the student's name. Colleges and universities, however, aren't on the hook if the loan isn't repaid--the borrower is. SBA only started working with direct loans at a massive scale in the aftermath of the pandemic. ``They're laying off 43 percent of the SBA staff at the same time [SBA is] being handed a $1.6 trillion portfolio that is three times the size of what they have,'' said Michael Negron, who worked on small business and student loans for the National Economic Council during the Biden administration. The administration has not clearly stated whether FSA workers who have expertise on the student debt system would be transferred to the SBA, which is a concern for Negron. That doesn't mean it's impossible. SBA could be a good fit, he said, but the conditions need to be right. ``There is a world where this could work,'' he said optimistically. He is now a fellow at Groundwork Collaborative, a leftwing think tank. The White House did not acknowledge questions about how it would transfer. ``President Trump is doing everything he can within his executive authority to dismantle the Department of Education and return education back to the states while safeguarding critical functions for students and families,'' press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. The President has always said Congress has a role to play in this effort, and we expect him to help the President deliver. You know, that sounds like a President who doesn't care about Congress, who cares about what he is trying to do. He hasn't approached this in an intelligent way, making grand statements and opinions without considering the Department you are transferring loans to might actually be incapable, with a severely diminished staff, of doing the job. Here is an incredible article by Fareed Zakaria about what is really going on and how it affects the United States, especially relative to other nations: There is no area in which the United States' global dominance is more total than higher education. With about 4 percent of the world's population and 25 percent of its gross domestic product, America has 72 percent of the world's 25 top universities by one ranking and 64 percent by another. But this crucial U.S. competitive advantage is being undermined by the Trump administration's war on colleges. Hat tip to the New York Times's Michelle Goldberg for raising this issue as well. ``We have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country. . . . The professors are the enemy,'' said JD Vance during a speech to the National Conservatism Conference in 2021. The administration has put those words into action. The most dramatic assault has been financial: a freezing or massive reduction in research grants and loans from the federal government. Some of these efforts are under court review, but the cumulative impact could be billions of dollars in cuts to basic research, much of it disrupting ongoing projects and programs. High quality research in the United States has emerged in a unique ecosystem. The federal government provides much of the funding through prominent institutions such as the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. Private foundations and companies account for most of the rest. Professors at universities, both public and private, use these funds to conduct the research. No other country has a system that works as well. What is at risk now is what Holden Thorp, the editor in chief of the Science family of journals, calls, ``the social contract that the federal government and institutions have had to enable the scientific research enterprise in America in the last 80 years.'' That is what is at risk. Take Duke University, which ranked No. 11 in total grants received from NIH last year. Of its $1.33 billion research budget, $863 million came from Washington, according to the [AP]. That includes funds for critical research projects on cancer and other diseases but also support[s] . . . more than 630 PhD students at the medical school. If the cuts go through, those projects and students will have to be pared back substantially. Just on Thursday, Johns Hopkins . . . announced huge layoffs, saying it would let go of more than 2,000 employees after losing $800 million in federal grants. One crucial mechanism to cut funding is through a massive reduction in the overhead, or indirect, costs that universities get reimbursed for by the federal government. Overhead often makes up 40 percent or 50 percent of a grant, but last month, NIH ordered that it be capped at 15 percent. [That] sounds more rational than it is. Universities divide their costs on science grants into research costs (the salaries of the professors and graduate students) and overhead (the costs of the buildings, labs, energy and utilities and administrative staff). When you are building a complex lab to conduct experiments, the structure and equipment is often far more costly than the salaries and stipends of the researchers. Michigan State University has declared that these cuts could make it stop construction of a $330 million research building for cancer, cardiovascular disease and neuroscience studies. Government funding plays a unique role [in America]. It often supports basic research, the kind that companies have less incentive to do, and its results cannot be hoarded by any one company but rather are provided free to the entire scientific and technological community so that all can use it to experiment and innovate. It is an American system that has reaped billions and billions of dollars in rewards to our economy. The mapping of the human genome cost less than $3 billion and took 13 years. Because it was government-funded, one of its key requirements was that the research should be made publicly available for all within 24 hours of being generated. The other assault on the universities is a strange new attack on free speech. Fareed writes: It began from a principled critique that bureaucracies, universities and elites had all become too woke. But the government's response to this problem has been Orwellian, searching through these institutions for any mentions of the words ``diversity'' or ``identity'' or ``inclusion'' and then shutting down those programs without any review. Worse, it now punishes universities for having on their campuses people who might espouse certain views on topics like Israel and Palestine--and now is punishing the protesters themselves. I have long argued that universities have a huge problem: They have far too little intellectual and ideological diversity-- which is the most important kind of diversity on a campus. But the way you fix that is not to restrict radical left-wing speech but to add voices and views from other parts of the spectrum. The answer to censorship by the left is not censorship by the right. The fury with which the Trump administration has turned on academia resembles nothing so much as the early days of the Cultural Revolution, when an increasingly paranoid Mao Zedong smashed China's established universities, a madness that took generations [in China] to remedy. Meanwhile, in Beijing last week, the Chinese government announced its intention to massively increase its funding for research and technology so that it could lead the world in science in the 21st century. So, as America appears to be copying the worst aspects of China's recent history, China is copying the best aspects of America's, striving to take the edge [away from] . . . the United States [as though we are going] through [our] . . . own cultural revolution. Learn from the fascists in China. Fareed's article is over. This is me now. Learn from the fascists in China and don't do what the Chinese did. What America has done to lead humanity in the sciences, in innovation, in research, in breakthroughs, in science--we are the global model. And one administration, in 71 days, has our best universities cutting the number of Ph.D. students they bring in, cutting the research that they are doing, cutting the planned development of research buildings. This is insanity, insanity. We are America. Why is the President of the United States attacking the science and the research at the top universities on planet Earth, bullying them, undermining them? I have had universities from my State. I have had universities from my neighboring State--not Connecticut, New York. And I have had my college, Stanford, come to see me--top researchers. The academic community--not the political community, not the history majors, not the political scientists, not the literature students, not the Af-Am departments--the scientists of America have been coming to the Senate to say: What the heck? What is going on? How could you take America's edge, America's advantage, America's strength, America's brilliance and undercut it in 71 days of your administration? We are killing the golden goose. Why? Because we have a President who is taking money that we already approved--the article I branch of government--and claiming that he could claw it back, all on some trumped-up charge that these institutions are too woke. The solution to that is not to cut science funding. This should make people mad. But more importantly, it should make people stand up and not be bystanders and wait until we lose our edge because our adversaries globally are smiling as we destroy our institutions, from Duke to Rutgers, to the University of Michigan, to Berkeley, to Stanford. This is madness. This is insanity--and one of a dozen reasons why we are going through this, a dozen reasons why I am standing here, that we should not be doing things normally. If we are complicit in what Trump is doing--I am hearing it not from political people but from scientists who show up in my office from Cornell, medical researchers who show up in my office from our research hospitals in New Jersey and are saying-- they are not political. They are just saying: What the heck? You are undermining the research of today that will affect the breakthroughs 5 years from now, 10 years from now. What is China doing while we are doing this? They are investing in record numbers, record levels. The country of Tiananmen Square, cracking down on college students, is now trying to act like America, while America is acting more like them because our President is violating the separation of powers, taking away the money we approved. And we are letting it happen by doing things normally here and not holding one hearing. Here is another example of what Fareed was talking about. It is an article entitled: ``Graduate student admissions paused and cut back as universities react to Trump orders on research.'' Again, this is not from a political magazine. It is not from the New York Times or the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal. This is from STAT News. When did science become political? Acceptances for biomedical graduate students and postdoctoral scholars are being cut back at some universities and medical centers across the country as many grapple with the potential impact of the Trump administration's order to cut National Institutes of Health research funding. That paragraph alone should have people--all in this Chamber--upset. Let's just give European universities, Australian universities, Canadian universities, Chinese universities a leg up because we are going to cut the number of graduate students and postdoctoral students. The geniuses in our country will have less opportunity. The cuts come even as the proposed reductions to funding for overhead expenses, set to start Feb. 10, were temporarily halted last week by a federal judge, at least until a court hearing this Friday. Universities appear to be exercising caution, with some freezing positions and not taking new applications, or accepting fewer students than normal, according to interviews, public announcements, and internal emails obtained by STAT. The abrupt narrowing of training opportunities is leaving many future researchers at the start of their scientific journey in limbo. The academic calendar runs to the rhythm of its own seasons; right now is typically the time of year when offer letters for Ph.D. programs and postdoc positions in labs start hitting inboxes. Universities and academic medical centers were in the thick of that process when the NIH-- Under President Donald Trump-- policy about overhead costs, known as indirect costs, landed. ``This couldn't be worse timing for doing this,'' said Waverly Ding, an associate professor at the University of Maryland who studies the biomedical sciences workforce. ``It's creating a jolt in the market that is going to be disabling for labs, especially the smaller ones, because they won't have the human capital to do their science. It's also going to create chaos for Ph.D.s. It's going to be a cascading kind of chain effect through the entire ecosystem.'' I know we don't read science--actually, we have a few doctors in here that do--but look at the alarm that they are sounding that this is not normal. The slowdown is happening at some universities and not at others; some students may be unaware of the issue as they anxiously await acceptance letters without fully understanding the role national politics is playing in those decisions. Some faculty are grappling with admissions that are paused and then unpaused, while others say they are receiving little information or guidance from leadership. At the University of Southern California-- And as a former Stanford football player, it is hard for me to talk about USC. I had to jab them, Senator Murphy. At the University of Southern California, faculty in some departments were told last week to pause admissions, and not formalize offers to students--even those who had visited and been given verbal acceptances. ``The awkward part is that we already told these applicants that they were provisionally accepted and invited them to an in-person recruitment day; many have already purchased flight + hotel reservations''-- I mean, that is just cruel-- one professor said in a faculty discussion list-serve observed by STAT. I know Senator Murphy hangs out in faculty discussion list-serves. That pause on admissions, in psychology, was lifted this week, STAT was told. Jennifer Unger, a professor who runs a doctoral program in health behavior research in the department of population and public health sciences at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine, said Wednesday she was still not able to admit the six graduate students her department had accepted after a visit day on Feb. 3. ``We had just flown them out, we told them we love you, we want to admit you, and then everything just stopped,'' Unger said. ``On the day Trump announced they were cutting indirect costs . . . USC paused all Ph.D. admissions.'' ``I just don't know what to tell them,'' Unger said of the students. ``Some of them have other offers and will likely go somewhere else. We've probably lost them.'' Despite USC's ``unpausing'' of admissions in many departments, Unger said Wednesday she was still not able to admit students. She hoped her portal to admit students would open soon, but said the disruption was coming at a time when her field, public health, was already reeling from the actions of the Trump administration, something affecting potential graduate students as well. ``It's very stressful for them, this is a major life decision,'' she said, adding they were already worried about their futures. ``They were asking, `Do you think we'll be able to get a job in this environment? Do you think we'll get grants?' '' The dean of the Graduate School at USC told STAT late Friday that the university briefly paused Ph.D. admissions to ``assess the uncertainties around federal funding,'' but that the admissions process was now open. Some schools were continuing to accept students or had accepted graduate students before the recent turmoil and said those offers are intact. ``We have no knowledge of any disruptions to graduate student admissions in the science fields . . . ,'' Rachel Zaentz, senior director of communications [said]. In some cases, the pauses to hiring and admissions were implemented ahead of the NIH policy change--evidence of how quickly the Trump administration's threats to withhold federal research dollars over diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts are shifting the financial footings of universities. On Feb. 6, faculty at Vanderbilt University were instructed to reduce graduate admissions by half across the board, according to an email obtained by STAT. Reduce graduate admissions by half. On the same day, faculty at the University of Washington School of Public Health received an email to pause offers to doctoral students as well as offers of financial support to graduate students. Faculty hiring was also frozen, the email said. This Tuesday, the public health school sent out another email informing the community that some faculty hiring and Ph.D. student offers would continue, but at a greatly diminished level. The school is also planning to take more ``cost containment measures,'' including hiring freezes and reappointment freezes . . . through the end of the academic year due to the volatility caused by the Trump administration. Existing offers will be honored, wrote Hilary Godwin, dean of UW's school of public health. Marion Pepper, chair of UW's immunology department, said she was instructed by university leadership to keep her program's next graduate cohort smaller than the usual five to nine students admitted each year. That's easier said than done, because the proportion of students who accept offers of admission varies year-to-year. Pepper told STAT that while she expects the incoming class to be slightly smaller than normal, she has spoken with program heads at UW and elsewhere who are reducing class sizes by half or more. ``I know for other programs, they're feeling very bleak about how they're going to keep labs running without funding or students,'' Pepper said. ``It's pretty overwhelming.'' Medical schools are hit hard. Medical research is hit hard. It's unclear how many other universities are taking similar preemptive belt-tightening measures, but schools of public health and medical schools are particularly vulnerable, because they tend to have many faculty, postdocs, and graduate students supported by grants. Boston University School of Public Health has also ordered an across-the-board hiring freeze on all new faculty and staff positions--including student workers and postdocs. In a campus-wide announcement, Dean ad interim Michael Stein said the move was being made due to ``the uncertainty of the moment.'' A spokesperson for the school told STAT that graduate admissions are unaffected by the freeze. Unger said USC had cut funding for some [teaching assistants] in her department earlier this year before the new executive orders, which reduced the number of graduate students her program could accept from 10 to 6. On Feb. 11, Columbia University's medical school faculty were told that the school was putting a temporary pause on hiring as well as other activities like travel and procuring equipment, according to an email obtained by the Columbia student newspaper, the Columbia Spectator. A spokesperson for Columbia declined to comment on the pause. In other cases, schools may accept fewer graduate students than they had planned, not because of an overt directive from university leaders, but because faculty feel unsure about future funding, given the Trump administration's intent to cut billions of dollars in overhead funding. At the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 25% fewer graduate students will be admitted this year-- Twenty-five percent fewer-- based on a survey of faculty members taking new students, said Mark Peifer, a professor of cell biology there. This means the school will admit about 75 students across the biomedical sciences. He noted the numbers of graduate students vary each year so the decline was not unprecedented. And the numbers continue to go down. In an interview with STAT, Robert Ferris, the director of UNC's Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, said that hiring freezes, fewer Ph.D. student offers, and other similar cost containment measures are being considered as the center is eyeing the same financially turbulent waters as other research institutions. ``Every one of those things is on the table, unfortunately,'' Ferris said. ``There's so much uncertainty. Can we hire this faculty member? Can we purchase this equipment?'' They just don't know exactly what or how many measures the center may have to take, he said, as there are simply still too many unknowns--for instance, the outcome of the NIH indirect rate cut policy is still up in the air. ``Not knowing how it's going to shake out,'' he said, ``it just freezes everybody into inaction.'' Adding to the uncertainty is disruptions to key parts of the NIH approval process for proposed research grants. Although some meetings of study sections--in which grant applications are reviewed--resumed at the start of the month, meetings of advisory councils have not. Each of the 27 institutes of the NIH has its own advisory council, which meets three times a year to issue final funding recommendations on new research projects. None of these councils-- None-- has met since the Jan. 22 communications freeze was ordered across all federal health agencies. A law called the Federal Advisory Committee Act requires that advisory councils post meeting details in the Federal Register 15 days prior to their scheduled date. But because submissions to the Federal Register have been put on hold indefinitely, these meetings can't take place. And without these meetings, no new grants can be funded. According to one NIH employee, at least one NIH meeting scheduled for this Friday to allow an institute director to provide updates that could proceed because it had been posted to the Federal Register was nonetheless canceled Wednesday. This was because the meeting specified it would include a session open to the public--but because a ban remains in place on any public communications, meetings with open sessions cannot be held. ``And they can't update the federal registry with a revised agenda stating no open session because the federal registry is closed.'' Principal investigators who had been counting on awards to pay the salaries of new graduate students and postdocs are now left wondering if their labs will be able to make it through the summer, let alone take on new members. Referencing the hold on submissions to the Federal Register, MIT neuroscientist Nancy Kanwisher posted on social media Wednesday: ``So much for the grant I submitted last September, which was supposed to be reviewed next week. Hardly the biggest tragedy on the current scale of things, but it will force me to severely downsize my already small lab.'' Fears were similar for one computational genomics researcher at a prominent East Coast institution who asked for anonymity for fear of being targeted by the new administration. ``We have people coming to visit the lab next week, and these are students we haven't made offers to yet because we can't,'' he said. ``I don't know what I'm going to tell them.'' Beyond the immediate harm to young scientists, he worries about the long-term damage to fields like computer science and biomedical engineering--areas where the U.S. has long been the world leader. ``If we stop training students, we're going to lose that lead very quickly,'' he said. ``It's not clear anyone else is going to pick up the ball. We're just going to be worse off and people won't even be aware of it-- it's hard to notice when it takes 20 years instead of 10 to get a cure.'' Cuts within NIH are also adding to the rapidly constricting pool of places prospective scientists can go to train. Since the 1960s, the NIH has provided opportunities for recent college graduates to spend one or two years in a full-time research position within one of the institute's labs, which many scientists see as a key tool for recruiting young people into biomedical fields. On Feb. 1, a notice appeared on the NIH website announcing that all training programs had paused recruitment ``pending guidance from Health and Human Services.'' The NIH's Postbac Program, which provides recent college graduates with research positions and career advising and last year admitted roughly 1,600 people, will not be accepting any new applicants for 2025, according to an NIH employee who asked for anonymity for fear of repercussions. Of course, that is my add. ``It's a vital link in the training of doctors and biomedical scientists in the country,'' the NIH employee said. ``You can't find a medical school or biomed program that doesn't have students from the postbac program.'' And it is ending. While the Trump administration may be hoping that the headwinds it's creating for academic hiring may push recent graduates or newly minted Ph.D.s into private industry, it's unlikely to play out that way because of the speed and scale of the disruption. ``Pharmaceutical firms are not going to suddenly open up more jobs for graduates to adapt to this situation,'' said Ding. More likely is that people will start looking for opportunities outside the U.S., or wind up without jobs altogether, she added. At this point, it's still too early to say if these are the first signs of losing a generation of American scientists. But even people like Ding, who track the data that could provide clues about how extensive the damage will be, are facing uncertainty about their ability to continue their own work. Her plans to hire a postdoc are currently on hold as she waits to find out if a grant she has through the National Science Foundation--which is facing its own drastic cuts-- will come through. (Mr. HUSTED assumed the Chair.) I mean, honestly. I am here because I said at the beginning, some 9 hours ago, that I was going to stand here because what is going on in America is not normal. We have gone through healthcare cuts. We have gone through Social Security being attacked and undermined and slashed, and the Department of Education. But if those things don't worry you, statements like this should: It is still a little too early to say that these things are the first signs of losing a generation of American scientists. I know this. I have been privileged. I studied at Oxford University overseas. I have studied at Stanford University in Silicon Valley, and I have studied at Yale. I watched friends get degrees in the sciences and things I couldn't spell, and they had options, not just in America. But for the brightest minds on the planet Earth, there is a global competition going on for them from Canada to Oxford, to countries in Asia. If you are telling me that thousands of people, right now, 71 days into the Trump administration, are losing opportunities in the sciences to do research in the most important areas of human endeavor can't get hired, they will go elsewhere. For over a generation, America has led the planet Earth because of this combination between research universities, private sector industry, and government. How do I know this? Because I am here because of it. The whole computer revolution in America was because incredible computer science researchers at academic institutions were partnering with industry and being funded in many ways by the government, and it helped companies like IBM with their mainframes dominate. My dad was one of IBM's first Black people hired as a salesman in the Washington, DC-Maryland area. My parents were IBMers because when scientific endeavor explodes into new industry, new ideas, new biomedical breakthroughs, it creates a ripple effect in our economy lifting so many people up. And in 71 days, Donald Trump's actions have led scientific articles like this to talk about a postbac program that provides bright recent college graduates--brilliant people, 1,600 of them--to usually get jobs to be canceled. And this article laments from scientists--not political people, not politicians--that this is a crisis. It is a crisis in America, and we haven't held one hearing on this in Congress. Yet university after university--I can't be the only Senator having this happen--not just from my State. The universities are coming from New York to California, sounding the alarm that we are going to lose our competitive edge against one of our greatest competitors, China, which is doubling down, as the article said, in research on the sciences. But let me just give you some examples, and then I will yield for a question. I want to talk about some New Jersey institutions that have written me: Rutgers has been a partner in the Air Force Research Laboratory Minority Leaders Research Collaborative Program, a grant which has been led by the Ohio State University and is on pause. God forbid they use the word ``minority.'' And the annual program review and summer internship programs are not expected to happen this year. Rutgers School of Nursing has been working with the Institute of Human Virology in Nigeria on an action to sustain precision in HIV response toward epidemic control, and they were funded through a CDC and PEPFAR grant. A stop work order came in. Multiple Rutgers entities have received communications from Federal Agencies related to DEIA cancellation of apprenticeship programs. Many conferences have been canceled that are trying to find the best minds wherever they might be because there is many geniuses at Howard and Fisk and Morehouse that are often overlooked. Annika Barber, a faculty at the Rutgers department of molecular biology and biochemistry writes me this: Rutgers holds an NIH initiative for maximizing student development training grant that supports an additional five doctoral students. This grant expires in January 2026, and we put in for renewal this fall, for which I wrote a letter of support. However, it seems likely that this grant proposal will not even be reviewed. I just completed the first year of funding on my NIH Maximizing Investigators' Research Award and put in my progress report for the next years of funding. These are noncompeting renewals, which means they don't go through peer review. In the past, they were reviewed by the NIH program officials to ensure the funds were being managed in accordance with the approval grant and the research funds. However, NIH has been extremely slow to process even these noncompetitive renewals. This type of grant requires a plan for enhancing the work. I want to read this last letter. It is handwritten: I am writing you not only as a concerned parent that believes in progress, education, and the power of science to improve lives. My daughter is a Ph.D. in neuroscience, dedicating her life to research that has the potential to save countless lives. As a minority in science, she has worked tirelessly to overcome barriers in a field that is already competitive and abandoned. Watching the current political attacks on research funding is devastating not just her future but the future of the American country. Science is not political. It serves all people. Yet funding cuts to Agencies like NIH and the National Science Foundation threaten to halt critical research that leads to medical breakthroughs. These cuts will not only slow progress in fighting diseases like cancer, Alzheimer's, and Parkinson's, but they will also discourage young, diverse scientists, many of whom have already fought hard to be in these spaces, from staying in the field. This is not just about scientists. It is about every American. Diseases do not know political parties. Without adequate research funding, we are all at risk of losing the chance for better treatments, new cures, and improved healthcare. If we truly want a stronger and more innovative America, we must invest in science, not abandon it. Defunding research will also harm our economy. Scientific innovation drives job creation, medical advancements, and global progress. A country that does not invest in science is a country that falls behind.

Mr. BOOKER. I will yield for a question while retaining the floor.

Mr. BOOKER. Wow.

Mr. BOOKER. Yes.

Mr. BOOKER. I just want to answer you. Again, I would drive myself mad trying to understand what the ambitions of Trump were or the ambitions behind some of the crazy stuff in Project 2025 that he said wasn't there, and he tried to run away from it because it was so unpopular, and now so much of it is being done. It almost sounds too partisan, too insane. What I do want to do, Senator Murphy, in answer to your question--all I can do is try to be as fair and factual in describing what is happening in our country and appeal to people who are moderates in this country, the people who are fair arbiters of what is happening, to try to appeal to them that this is a crisis. So when university after university after university is cutting scientific research, stopping bringing in the best minds, Ph.D. candidates, post-docs, when they are telling you that they are stopping investment in state-of-the-art research buildings, when they are telling you that they are shutting down programs to bring the youngest, brightest minds in and our competitor China is doing the exact opposite, flowing money through because China understands if we get two steps ahead of America on quantum computing, we can break all kinds of encryptions. We can locate every submarine they have. China understands if we can get two steps ahead of America on artificial intelligence, it is an endgame for them. This is a global competition, and a President, in 71 days--if you are a moderate in America and just want America to win in human endeavor, look at what the President is doing. And here is to the point you were driving, Senator Murphy. It is Orwellian. The bastions of freedom that are our universities, as an article from Fareed Zakaria has said, even if universities got too woke and too excessive, the antidote to that isn't to try to shut down the thought of the left. It is to try to make a fair, more competitive marketplace for ideas from all around the political spectrum. But this isn't about politics; it is about science; it is about research; it is about cutting NIH funding, science funding. But I want to stick with that because that is the controversial nub, right? Like, we need to go after DEI programs. I am hearing it all the time. It was like the confusion I had 5 years ago when people were asking me: Oh, the Republicans are talking about critical race theory. As my father says, I have more degrees than the month of July, but I am not hot. But I had to go back and research: What is critical race theory? Oxford, Stanford, Yale grad, I wasn't sure what they were talking about. And this is the rub on that because I don't want to just talk about what is obvious, which should enrage people on both sides of the aisle, not just enrage people on both sides of the aisle because of the China outcompeting us, but because we allocated this money in a bipartisan way that he is now trying to pull back. That should raise a violation of article I of the Constitution. But I want to stick in this more controversial era that you talked about that has, all across the country, people banning books. When I heard Toni Morrison's ``The Bluest Eye'' was being taken out of libraries, when I heard my favorite author James Baldwin was being taken out of libraries--what kind of world do we live in where, somehow, studying what they call Black history is something that we have to--that Trump feels like it is a rally for people to stop, where a person working for the Department of Education can't look you in the eye and say: Yes, we need to study Black history? Black history is American history. I had a brilliant friend of mine, brilliant. He looked at me with deadpan embarrassment and told me he just found out that year about the bombing in Tulsa, OK, something I worked with Senator Lankford to do more to memorialize, but he just never knew about it; that this thriving African-American financial community was the first recorded aerial bombing--not Pearl Harbor--in the United States of America, and he was never taught it. Is that Black history or is that American history? Why do these people who attack our history think they have to sanitize, homogenize, ``Disneyfy'' American history to make us proud? I am more proud of our country when we tell the truth about what happened, when we learned from the wretchedness and the difficulties and the bigotries and the hates and demagogues who pit us against each other and how we all overcame that. That is our greatness. How the genius of inventors that were women or Blacks in the most oppressive of times still manifested their genius that transformed humanities. These are stories that should make every American more proud. So, yes, when you have a President now that is making people scrape through programs that they don't even know what they are doing, but if there were more diversity in it, that is bad? That is insanity. My mom worked for IBM before they used words like ``DEI.'' One of her jobs was to find a bigger pool of highly qualified applicants. You know what she did is what is being stopped by the Trump administration. She just made sure that they were going to HCBUs to find the brightest students so that their applicant pool would be better. This isn't about preferential treatment for one group over another; it is about trying to create a more competitive pool where we get the best of the best. It is about merit-based. And this President talked about merit--and I watched Senator Whitehouse ask one of the top lawyers of the EPA if he ever brought a case, if he ever had a hearing, if he ever did a deposition--no, no, no. Wait a minute. How are you qualified for this job? And that is the conflict in the logic that I am observing. In one sense, they are exalting the wealthy elites. I have never imagined that I would see a Presidential inauguration where the billionaires, leaders of tech companies, would sit in front of Cabinet members, many of whom were billionaires themselves--but that kind of elitism. Yet they call academic excellence, brilliance, and achievement in the sciences at these universities the elites we need to go after. If we start going after our educational institutions and weakening their ability to advance excellence in human endeavor, we are injuring ourselves, and we have models for that. As Fareed Zakaria says, the best example was Mao Zedong and the cultural revolution where one of the first groups they went after were their universities. Now they are reversing that. They watched what we did so well. They are doubling down on their funding of universities. They are taking their best scientists and taking away their passports because they don't want them to come here and study. They are trying to get ahead of us in DeepSeek and AI. They are trying to get ahead of us in quantum computers. They are trying to get ahead of us in robotics. They are trying to get ahead of us in biomedical engineering. They are trying to get ahead of us in all of these things. They know the way they do it is do what America did in the sixties, seventies, eighties, the nineties, the aughts, 2010--to do what they did all those times and look at them now.

Mr. BOOKER. I will yield while still retaining the floor.

Mr. BOOKER. Yes.

Mr. BOOKER. I want to interrupt you before you go to your last question. I know you want to get your last question out before I get to the next area so related to this, immigration. I mean, the brightest minds on the planet Earth are coming here.

Mr. BOOKER. I want to say something to you. You got me triggered when you said we had some consensus over the last 4 years. I love how you say just yesterday. I remember the CHIPS and Science Act. That was a bipartisan bill. I was sitting in a SCIF with all of us, and I watched a whole national security apparatus talk about why science endeavors and chipmaking and the breakthroughs that are happening on chips are so essential for our national security and how we had to stay ahead of the competition. And we marched out of that meeting in a bipartisan fashion. We saw this in the bipartisan work we have been doing on AI here, talking about how America has to lead in this area. And with all of that bipartisan vigor, we let a President come in and in 71 days, halt scientific research, pausing literally experiments in their tracks, halting researchers in their tracks, shaking universities to the core that are afraid of free expression for getting on the wrong side of ``Dear Leader'' that it might cost them their science funding. So you are putting your finger on it. But can I just say something on a personal level because I just want to remind folks, as we are closing in on the 10th hour, that you and I were here for 15, and you are here because you agree with me. You agree with me that from science and research to higher education, Department of Education, Social Security, to healthcare in America, we are at a crisis. Any one of those alone should have Americans--but the case we are making going through all these, we are pulling from people on the left and the right. We quoted Republican Governors. We have quoted Republican mayor organizations, represented by organizations. We quoted Republican business people. We quoted the Wall Street Journal. This is not a partisan crisis that people across the spectrum are pointing to. But I do want to point out, you have been such a good friend to me to spend 10 hours, almost, on the floor, and it means a lot to me tonight. Thank you for that. As I switch to immigration, I appreciate the sentiments that you have and that you had after the Pulse shooting that you were so worried about when I listened to your maiden speech when you first got here in the Senate that we would normalize gun violence in this country. What I am worried about--I share your worry there. I grew up in a time where fire drills were the big thing. And the space between people ducking and covering because of nuclear fears and left school before we were a country that had more active shooter drills than fire drills, and we just sort of are normalizing this terror in our country and haven't stepped up to the challenge of really doing something about it. This is one of these crises where if we act like business as usual, 71 days so far of the Trump administration, when we get to 100 days, catastrophic things could have happened to Medicaid and healthcare, crashing of research for science, attacks on programs our senior citizens rely on. We, as a country have to, as I said at the very beginning 10 hours ago almost--we have to do what John Lewis challenged us to do: To stand up, to speak up, to get in good trouble, necessary trouble. And tonight, my friend, in the wee hours--there are so many songs about 4 o'clock in the morning. It is like the hour nobody should be awake. I want to thank the Presiding Officer for being here. I want to thank the clerks and parliamentary staff and the impositions. But the cries of American citizens for their leaders to do something different, to stand up, to speak up--I felt like this has to be done. Let's keep going. Almost 10 hours in, I am thankful. We are going to start the next session. Like I am trying to do in all of these, I am trying to elevate the voices that don't get to come to this place--voices I am hearing from, voices that identify themselves as a Republican veteran, a Democrat. Most of them are just people saying this is not normal. Many of them are saying, ``Do something.'' Some of them get me very emotional saying, ``What can I do?'' I get that question a lot: ``Tell me what I can do to try to stop this.'' We are going to take this issue of immigration. And here is--I am not sure where this person is from. My staff has covered it up, probably to protect the person's identity. I am going to read this handwritten note. It is from New Jersey. Thank you, Senator Booker. Please continue to fight the good fight against the injustices being done by the current administration. I am the pastor of Emanuel Lutheran Church in New Brunswick. As a faith leader and your constituent, I am deeply concerned about the treatment of LGBTQ people and immigrants by this administration. The demonization and marginalization of these groups is unchristian and deeply offensive to the values of my faith. I ask that you continue to oppose all Executive orders and legislation that targets these groups. You have been a consistent ally. Please continue to be a champion for justice for all people, but especially the most vulnerable. Another person, late yesterday, in fact: Court filings of the Trump administration reveal that a mistakenly deported Maryland father with protected legal status to this horrific prison in El Salvador--Abrego Garcia is married to a U.S. citizen and has a 5-year-old disabled child who is a U.S. citizen. He has no criminal record in the United States. Despite receiving a legal status call withholding of removal where a United States immigration judge found that he would more likely than not face persecution if deported to El Salvador, the Trump administration deported him, where? The very country from which he fled gang violence. Here is a story that was written about him in The Atlantic. The Trump administration acknowledged in a court filing on Monday that it had grabbed a Maryland father with protected legal status and mistakenly deported him to El Salvador. It was said that U.S. courts lack jurisdiction to order his return from the mega prison where he's now locked up. The case appears to be the first time the Trump administration has admitted to errors when it sent three planeloads of Salvadorian and Venezuelan deportees to El Salvador's . . . ``Terrorism Confinement Center'' on March 15. Attorneys for several Venezuelan deportees have said that the Trump administration falsely labeled their clients as gang members because of their tattoos . . . But in Monday's court filing, attorneys for the government admitted that the Salvadorian man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, was deported accidentally. ``Although ICE was aware of his protection from removal to El Salvador, Abrego Garcia was removed to El Salvador because of an administrative error,'' the government told the court. Trump lawyers said the court has no ability to bring him back now that Abrego Garcia is in Salvadorian custody. Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, Abrego Garcia's attorney, says he's never seen a case in which the government knowingly deported someone who had already received protected legal status from an immigration judge. He is asking the court to order the Trump administration to ask for Abrego Garcia's return and, if necessary, to withhold payment to the Salvadorian government, which says it's charging the United States $6 million a year to jail U.S. deportees. [The] Trump administration . . . told the court to dismiss the request on multiple grounds, including . . . Trump's primacy in foreign affairs. ``[P]rimacy in foreign affairs.'' I am not going to stop now, but I ask anybody who has read the Constitution to understand that the President of the United States is not King. He does not have primacy in foreign affairs. I continue with the article: ``The claim that the court is powerless to order any relief,'' Sandoval-Moshenberg told me, ``if that's true, the immigration laws are meaningless--all of them--because the government can deport whoever they want, wherever they want, whenever they want, and no court can do anything about it once it's done.'' Court filings show Abrego Garcia came to the United States at the age of 16 in 2011 after fleeing gang threats in his native El Salvador. In 2019, he received a form of protected legal status known as ``withholding of removal'' from a U.S. immigration judge who found he would likely be targeted by gangs if he was deported back. Abrego Garcia, who is married to a U.S. citizen and has a 5-year-old disabled child who is also a U.S. citizen, has no criminal record in the United States, according to his attorney. The Trump administration does not claim he has a criminal record, but called him a ``danger to the community'' and an active member of MS-13, the Salvadorian gang that Trump has declared a Foreign Terrorist Organization. Sandoval-Moshenberg said those charges are false, and the gang label stems from a 2019 incident where Abrego Garcia and three other men were detained in a Home Depot parking lot by a police detective in Prince Georges County, Maryland. During questioning, one of the men told officers Abrego was a gang member, but the man offered no proof and police said they didn't believe him, filings show. Police did not identify him as a gang member. Abrego Garcia was not charged with a crime, but he was handed over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement after the arrest to face deportation. In those proceedings, the government claimed that a reliable informant had identified him as a ranking member of MS-13. Abrego Garcia and his family hired an attorney and fought the government's attempt to deport him. He received ``withholding of removal'' six months later, a protected status. It is not a path to permanent U.S. residency, but it means the government won't deport him back to his home country because he's more likely than not to face harm there. Abrego Garcia has had no contact with any law enforcement agency since his release, according to his attorney. He works full time as a union sheet metal apprentice, has complied with requirements to check in annually with ICE, and cares for his five-year-old son, who has autism and a hearing defect, and is unable to communicate verbally. On March 12, Abrego Garcia had picked up his son after work from the boy's grandmother's house when ICE officers stopped the car, saying his protected status had changed. Officers waited for Abrego's wife to come to the scene and take care of the boy, then drove him away in handcuffs. Within two days, he had been transferred to an ICE staging facility in Texas, along with other detainees the government was preparing to send to El Salvador. Trump had invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, and the government planned to deport two planeloads of Venezuelans along with a separate group of Salvadorians. Abrego's family has had no contact with him since he was sent to the megaprison in El Salvador, known as the CECOT.

Mr. BOOKER. I think I need to. I will yield to a question. I will yield to a question while retaining the floor. And I thank my brother, I thank my friend who has now stood with me for almost 11 hours.

Mr. BOOKER. Yes. Yes, yes.

Mr. BOOKER. Senator, I appreciate your question, but I just have to say this to you. You worked so hard with Senator Lankford, and one of the things I have to say--and I hope I don't hurt his politics by telling people how much I love Senator Lankford. We disagree fundamentally on a lot of issues, maybe that will help. We both are people, though, of faith. We just recently worked together in a massive--I think there must have been like a thousand people there, maybe 500 at least, at a National Prayer Breakfast event. He is such a man of character. What I like about him, I know his values because every day, he tries to be a good Christian. (Mrs. MOODY assumed the Chair.) And this idea of love thy neighbor or you are a stranger in a strange land--I just took a lot of pleasure watching you, my friend, whom I have known for the last 12 years, and sitting down in this honest, sincere negotiation. Let's be real. Everybody on your side of the aisle didn't agree with you, and everybody, before Trump's involvement, on his side of the aisle didn't agree, but you guys had the makings of a comprehensive bill that would have passed. I tell you also I came in here in 2013 right after the Gang of 8. They did the same thing. They got the bill out, and it died in the House. There are people in America, despite Lankford and you--who many people would put on opposite sides of the political spectrum--on these issues, they agree. Why do they agree, Senator Murphy? Because our economy is dependent upon immigration. You want to talk about a conservative-leaning group, Senate moderate Republicans, the national chamber of commerce will tell you that our economy will be crippled if we don't find a way to bring more people in legally to work on work visas. When I go to the tech community or the biotech community or the AI community or the community that is trying to go forward in quantum computing, all of them are saying this is crazy that we are not allowing the brightest minds on the planet--when they get here and get Ph.D.s and have things half of Congress can't spell, that we drop kick them out of the country. There are so many points of agreement. Take Dreamers, who people on both sides of the aisle held up as a group of people that are Americans in every way except for a piece of paper. I could go through everything in the immigration world we need to improve on, including the need to secure our southern border. I listened to you on this section, and I look at you, and I remember your frustration. You are standing up in front of our caucus saying: We are so close.

Mr. BOOKER. I will yield for a question while retaining the floor.

Mr. BOOKER. I thank you for the question I see in there. Again, great Presidents have great ideas they bring to Congress, and they fight to pull together and cobble together legislation that will last. The problem we have right now is this whiplash between Trump's Executive orders and Biden's Executive orders and Trump's Executive orders, and it is not solving the problems. We have shown there is enough common ground to do something on it. I don't want to stick with common ground now, actually, because there are some things in here that are not common ground, like private prisons. I am one of these folks that don't want to criticize. I have flown out to a private prison down south to get a tour. I met really kind and nice people. But there is something problematic to me about a profit motive for imprisoning, shackling, detaining, and holding people and this combination of that and a corporate reality where you are giving campaign contributions to people that will then turn around and give you government contracts to restrict the liberties of human beings. The story that I read about this woman feeling like they lied to her lawyer and said if she had only said she could pay for her own flight home, and they were keeping her. Every day they were keeping her, they were getting more money from American taxpayers. This isn't a system designed for justice. This isn't a system designed for the rights of human beings in our country. This is a system that has every day an incentive to deny liberty, to hold people. It is wrong. It is wrong. It is broken. With a President that doesn't care about these things, that is giving greater latitude so that more stories like the Canadian woman's story-- it is stunning. I want to keep moving, though. I just want to talk about children and the way this system is extended to children. Last week, the government canceled a contract to provide legal services to 26,000 unaccompanied immigrant children. Remember what Anton Scalia said about due process in his strict interpretations of the literal writings of our Founders. So 26,000 unaccompanied migrant children no longer have legal representation. We started on that idea. We started on that idea. We started on the idea--the 15th and 14th Amendment--that ``no one shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process,'' and our country has now rolled back. Trump got rid of a policy that prevented ICE from arresting kids at schools and people from their places of worship. Now, every day, families face the impossible choice of whether to send a kid to school and risk permanent separation from their families. There is a story from New Jersey. Recently when I was home in Newark, NJ, a woman in my neighborhood came up to me to tell me a heartbreaking story. One morning, she was on her way to walk to school, and a mom of other children--I won't make this anonymous. One of my closest friends--she is like a sister to me. She lives in The Ironbound in Newark. She was very emotional because her neighbors were so terrified that they came to her and asked her to walk their children to school. They were American children. There are so many teachers and school administrators who are speaking out now that they have been ordered that they must allow ICE to enter their schools. Trump has plans to revoke temporary protected status protection for hundreds of thousands of people from various countries--from Venezuela to Haiti--paving the way for those deportations. We know who they are. He has done this despite the State Department maintaining a ``Level 4: Do Not Travel'' warning for Haiti and Venezuela due to widespread violence, danger, sexual assault, kidnappings, and more. He claims that he is tough on crime because he wants to go after child sexual abusers, but you are sending children running into schools and churches and sending them back to environments that are known for sexual assaults on young girls. The Department of Justice Office of Civil Rights recently dropped its case that it filed against Southwest Key, the Nation's largest provider of housing for migrant children, in which the DOJ alleged sexual abuse and neglect perpetrated against undocumented children in Federal custody. It was a case DOJ brought against this company, which housed migrant children, because of alleged sexual abuse. What did our government do under Trump? They dropped charges. They dropped charges. Why? Why? Children being sexually assaulted--it is not worth an investigation? Is it because the administration thinks that pursuing the lawsuit and holding perpetrators accountable will somehow interfere with their immigration agenda? They literally let alleged sex abusers go free with no explanation--the hypocrisy. Family detentions have restarted. They failed in the past to meet basic child welfare standards and exposed children to trauma. The President's own Department of Homeland Security concluded in 2018 that family detention centers posed a high risk of harm to children and families. Despite his own Department of Homeland Security back in 2018 saying that, they have restarted. One of the points I want to make is on crime. I was a mayor. The No. 1 issue my residents were concerned about was fighting crime, fighting crime, fighting crime. I went back to Newark recently for a horrible, tragic death of a police officer by a 14-year-old with a ghost gun. It was horrible. The sendoff--hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of police officers from all over our State, from New York. This police officer was murdered by a 14-year-old. I still pray for his family, his mom. As I was standing there looking at this parade of police officers who were waiting for the casket, I had police officers come to me and complain that they are having a harder and harder time in New Jersey solving crimes because now victims of crime--victims of sexual assault, victims of robbery--who happen to be undocumented are afraid to go and talk to local police because of all this rhetoric that is creating the fear that they will be turned over to ICE. Imagine, in our country there are people out there who are sexually assaulting people but who are getting away with it because they are targeting immigrants. And if you don't think that hurts Americans' safety, you are wrong. When you are afraid to go and talk to police officers to report crimes, when you are subverting people's constitutional rights and incarcerating people in foreign prisons with no criminal records, it does harm to children. We talked about all of the diverting of law enforcement resources away from investigating national security threats, terrorism, drug smuggling, human trafficking, illegal arms exports, financial crimes, and sex crimes. It is taking law enforcement away from investigating those crimes and forcing all Federal law enforcement Agencies to enforce boat-level immigration crimes or, I should say, undocumented people with no criminal activity beyond their being in our country. Reuters wrote about this misguided redirection of Federal resources. I will read their article: Federal agents who usually hunt down child abusers are now cracking down on immigrants who live in the U.S. legally. Homeland Security investigators who specialize in money laundering are raiding restaurants and other small businesses, looking for immigrants who aren't authorized to work. Agents who pursue drug traffickers and tax fraud are being reassigned to enforce immigration law. As U.S. President Donald Trump pledges to deport ``millions and millions'' of ``criminal aliens,'' thousands of federal law enforcement officers from multiple federal agencies are being enlisted to take on new work as immigration enforcers, pulling crime fighting resources away from other areas--from drug trafficking and terrorism and sexual abuse and fraud. This account of Trump's push to reorganize federal law enforcement--the most significant since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks--is based on interviews with more than 20 current and former federal agents, attorneys, and other federal officials. Most had first-hand knowledge of the changes. Nearly all spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss their work. ``I do not recall ever seeing this wide spectrum of federal government resources all being turned toward immigration enforcement,'' said Theresa Cardinal Brown, the former Homeland Security official who has served in both Republican and Democratic administrations. ``When you are telling agencies to stop what you are doing and do this now, whatever else they were doing takes a back seat.'' In response to questions from Reuters, Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said the U.S. Government is mobilizing federal and state law enforcement to find, arrest, and deport illegal aliens. The [FBI] declined to respond to questions about its staffing. In a statement, the FBI said it is ``protecting the U.S. from many threats.'' The Trump administration has offered no comprehensive accounting of the revamp. But it echoes the aftermath of the 2001 attacks, when Congress created the Department of Homeland Security and pulled together 169,000 federal employees from other agencies and refocused the FBI on battling terrorism. Trump's hardline approach to deporting immigrants has intensified America's already stark partisan divide. The U.S. Senate's No. 2 Democrat, Dick Durbin, described the crackdown as a ``wasteful, misguided diversion of resources''. . . . It is ``making America less safe'' by drawing agents and officials away from fighting corporate fraud, terrorism, child sexual exploitation, and other crimes. The focus on immigration is drawing significant resources from other crime-fighting departments, according to the more than 20 sources who spoke. Until January, pursuing immigrants living in the country illegally was largely the job of two agencies: Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, and Customs and Border Protection, with a combined staff of 80,000. Other Departments spent . . . [on crime]. In Detroit--where immigration prosecutions have been rare-- the number of people charged with immigration offenses rose from 2 in February . . . to 19 last month. Case managements records from the Justice Department show that fewer than 1% of the cases brought to prosecutors by the DEA and ATF over the past decade involve allegations that someone had violated immigration law. Since January, however, DEA agents have been ordered to reopen cases involving arrests up to five years old, where prosecutors have declined to bring charges. As Trump and billionaire Elon Musk flash the size of the Federal Government bureaucracy, jobs that deal with immigration enforcement appear largely exempt. In a January 31 email to ICE employees, a human resources official told them they wouldn't be eligible for retirement buyouts offered to some 2.3 million Federal workers. ``All ICE positions are excluded,'' said the previously unreported email.

Mr. BOOKER. Yes, I will yield for a question while retaining the floor.

Mr. BOOKER. Yes. Yes.

Mr. BOOKER. I was going to ask a question. Did the Senator finish his question?

Mr. BOOKER. I want to first start by saying that the Senator has a reputation around this place; that there is a deep, penetrating goodness that is in you. I love to watch my Senate colleagues when other people are not--it is a habit of mine--because I think what you do when no one is watching is really telling. There is a belief I have that someone who is nice to you but not nice to the waiter is not a nice person. And we have a body full of people that show some deep, decent goodness. You are one of those people. And what I love about watching you is that it could be the farthest ideological person away from you, and you just have this--like, you look at people like you see their divinity, whether it is the person at the highest position, a leader of the Senate on either side, or someone who holds the door. What I love about you is, when I watch you, you are one of the Senators--some people just keep to their side of the aisle--I always look up, and I find you over there talking to somebody. And I just rely on that decency in you as a friend, and I have come to love you like a brother, and I want to thank you for being here before your alarm in the morning goes off. It really touches me. And I don't know if you remember this, but about 12 hours ago, you sat right here and you embraced me in a hug, and I leaned on that hug because I wasn't sure that I would even make it 12 hours. I take strength from you, my friend. And I take strength from you to hold to my kindness, to look for it everywhere. This is a story I don't think I have ever shared with you, but it speaks to how we get things done and how we should get things done. When I first got to the U.S. Senate, my mentor, Bill Bradley, gave me three real lessons for me to learn. I think I have obeyed two out of the three. One was to know the rules of procedure really well. That is the one I have probably failed. I am still learning things, 13 years into this, about the rules of procedure. The second one was become a specialist in some areas; don't be a mile wide and an inch deep. I feel like I have done a pretty good job on that. But the one that he told me that was most fruitful--I already mentioned one of the benefits I had in doing this with John McCain earlier in this 12 hours--he commanded me to go and meet with all your Republican colleagues; take them out to dinner, sit with them for lunch, whomever they are. I went out to dinner with Ted Cruz. It was hard--to find a restaurant--because I am a vegan and Ted Cruz is from Texas. But I still remember that we went out and how people were sort of shocked just to see two human beings breaking bread. But the story I want to tell my friend about is when I went to see Jim Inhofe, a Republican from the same State as Lankford. And I couldn't get him to meet with me. I couldn't get on his schedule. And I found out that he had Bible study in his hideaway, and so I go up to his hideaway for Bible study. Thune was there. And we all have implicit biases. We all have implicit biases. My implicit bias was that I did not expect of this older, conservative man that I would walk in and see on his mantle this beautiful picture, centered, of him hugging a little Black girl. I am embarrassed by that, that it so surprised me. And I--especially in those days, I didn't talk to, like, the senior giants in the Senate. I didn't call them by their first names. I still have a problem calling Senator Durbin by his first name, for example. He is a lion of the Senate, in my opinion, and one of the kindest people to me since I have been here. So I go to him--I go to Jim Inhofe. I go, ``Mr. Chairman, sir,'' and I look at the picture and I go, ``Who dat?'' And he smiles and chuckles, and then he tells me the most beautiful story of his family adopting this little Black girl out of some of the most terrible circumstances. And I was so moved. And thinking about my friend Bill Bradley, I would have never known this incredibly beautiful thing about someone who is my--ideologically, we disagreed on so many things, but knowing this personal moment, it created this thread between us--not a rope, not a cord, but a thread-- that connected me to him, and it created a deeper affection. So fast-forward many months in this body, and there is a big education bill, which Chris Murphy referenced earlier. A big education bill was going through the Senate because No Child Left Behind--we were going back the other way. Senator Durbin has told me about this pendulum that sometimes swings and swings back in its place. And it was a deal. Lamar Alexander was in the well of the Senate. He was the manager of the bill. And there were no amendments allowed. No amendments allowed. Of course, I am sitting back here. This is where I sat. And you talk about egos. My ego--I had this great amendment, and I was frustrated that they were having this rule--no amendments--but I have a great amendment to do something about homeless and foster children, who have the worst educational outcomes, and I thought I had a modest amendment to try to make a difference for American children who are in foster care or that were homeless. And I am frustrated. I am sitting back here, something that I dream of doing again one day--sitting--and just kind of upset. And then I see, walking through those doors, Senator Jim Inhofe, and he walks to the well kind of talking. And I remember the story he told me about this little Black girl in his family, and something tells me to get up. And I walk into the well, down these steps, and I say to him, ``Mr. Chairman, sir, I know how much you care for children in tough circumstances. I have an amendment.'' And I explained my amendment to him, and he looked at me and gave me the Senate version of no, which is, ``I will think about it.'' And I got frustrated, and I said, ``Thank you, sir, for considering it,'' and I walked back and I sat down right here. And then when I picked my head up, he is marching into our side--like you do on the other side--like his GPS coordinates were off. He marches up to me and just sort of grunts at me, ``I'm in,'' and then turns around and starts walking away from me. I step up and I say, ``Wait. Excuse me. What do you mean?'' He goes, ``Cory, I am going to cosponsor your amendment.'' And I was so happy. And now I go over to Senator Grassley and say the same thing to him-- a relationship that, thanks to Dick Durbin, I really bonded; I have a sweet relationship with him even though, again, we disagree on so much. He doesn't even make me wait. He looks at me, and he goes, ``You got Inhofe?'' And he signs on my amendment. (Mr. YOUNG assumed the Chair.) By the time I go to Lamar Alexander, I look up and I am like, I got a full house. Sorry, I got no other Democrats, but I got all these Republicans. He looks at me, and he laughs. He goes ``Really?'' and he puts the amendment on the bill. It is the law of the land right now. So what you said in the beginning of your long windup question, my dear friend, my dear brother, is how real change is made. That man, Dick Durbin, when I first got to the Senate, he knew how much I cared about criminal justice reform. He brought me to the table. I started working--as I presided, I started working in conversations with Mike Lee, in conversations with Chuck Grassley. We cobbled together a bill. It wasn't done by Executive fiat; it was done in the Senate--87 votes. It is the law of the land. Thousands have been liberated from unjust incarceration. So my point to the Senator is that his spirit is so right, is so true about what it takes to make real change, but the President we have right now doesn't seem to be coming to this body with any kind of bold, bipartisan legislation to solve the problems of our Nation, to cobble together the common ground of this country on immigration. No. He is not acting like that. He is using language like ``Presidential primacy.'' He is defending his corrupt practices in immigration by saying things like ``Presidential primacy.'' He is invoking the Alien Enemies Act. He is invoking the Alien Enemies Act--an act from the 1700s--to deny due process, and Antonin Scalia, a textualist, said that whether you are born in this country or not, you have due process here. The Constitution states only one thing twice: Both the 5th and the 14th Amendments say that no one--not no citizen--no one shall be deprived of liberty or property without due process of law. Yet this President is disappearing people and, as we documented here, disappearing the wrong people; as we documented here, unjustly detaining Americans, separating families--all while pushing his agenda and doing things that the values of people on both sides of this aisle don't believe in, like stopping the investigation of children for alleged sexual molestation. This is wrong. I sat down with some of the advocates who were telling me and who are trying to fight to stop the law from being broken, and they scared me, Dick Durbin, because they said what I said on this floor: If someone is willing to violate the Constitution for some, it endangers the constitutional rights for us all. Do not think this is, oh, those people. If they are violating the rights of some, it is a threat to the rights of all. I am standing here because of a national crisis that is growing. We talked about Social Security. We talked about healthcare. We talked education. This is a crisis for us. This is what the person said. They talked about the Insurrection Act. They have been hearing people in the administration talk about the Insurrection Act. Every person in this Congress and across this country wants a safe and secure border, but scapegoating immigrants to erode basic constitutional freedoms does not make America safer, does not make our communities safer, does not reform our immigration system like we should be doing in a bipartisan manner like Lankford and Murphy. It does not stop our longstanding problems in our agricultural industry and our tech industry. History has shown that when due process and basic constitutional rights are eroded for some people, it does not stop. It continues to erode. The shoreline that kept you safe will shrink until it reaches you. I am reminded of German Pastor Martin Niemoller's quote about fascism in Germany: First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out--because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out--because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out-- because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me--and there was no one left to speak for me. Well, everything that has happened in the last few months contradicts American values, shared values. I am most concerned about what this signals for the future and the potential indication of this President of the Insurrection Act. Some of our country's most prominent lawyers have warned that the invocation of these two antiquated laws--the Alien Enemies Act and the Insurrection Act--may result in the true erosion of our constitutional rights. Trump's recent indication of the Alien Enemies Act is the first step to securing people without due process, which Justice Scalia said is wrong, and then on the first day in office, Trump directed the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Homeland Security--Trump directed them to initiate a 90-day review to determine whether the President should invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807. That 90-review-- when do the 90 days come up, folks? This month. In 19 days. April 20. The President of the United States has already invoked a 1780- something law and also asked his immigration folks, his homeland security folks, to do a 90-day review about the Insurrection Act of 1807. Now, there are probably people watching and saying: What is the Insurrection Act? I had to look up what the Alien Enemies Act was. So let me tell folks what the Insurrection Act that our President on his first day in office--of all the things a President has to do, he turned to the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Homeland Security to initiate a 90-day review of the Insurrection Act. America, what is the Insurrection Act of 1807? It is among the President's most powerful authorities. He can deploy the U.S. Armed Forces and militia during a national emergency. He can declare a national emergency. This President has already wrongfully declared national emergencies. He declared a national emergency on energy. Senator Kaine talked about the outrageousness of somebody declaring a national emergency on energy when we are at the highest level of petrol chemical extraction in our country's history. Until he started rolling back what we were doing on wind and solar, we had an all-of-the-above strategy. Nobody ``drill baby drilled'' more than Joe Biden. The Insurrection Act gives the ability of the President to declare a national emergency to suppress insurrections, to quell civil unrest or domestic violence, and to enforce the law when he believes it is being obstructed. When can the President invoke the Insurrection Act? Well, nothing in the text of the law defines insurrection, rebellion, or domestic violence. Those are prerequisites for deployment, but they don't define those things. One of Trump's first Executive orders signed the evening he took office on January 20 was titled ``Declaring a National Emergency at the Southern Border of the United States.'' In that order, he said ``America's sovereignty is under attack.'' He has already declared a national emergency. Neither Congress nor the courts played a role in deciding what constitutes an obstruction or a rebellion. If Trump does unlawfully invoke the Insurrection Act, he can conceivably use our military to carry out his deportation agenda within our country's borders, all without any due process or opportunity to prove that their presence in the U.S. is lawful or even that they are a citizen. Trump himself said he wants to deport American citizens to foreign countries. Trump himself has said: I want to deport American citizens to foreign countries. On February 4, he said: I am just saying if we had a legal right to do it, I would do it in a heartbeat. I don't know if we do or not. We are looking at it right now. This is what he has asked his Secretary of Defense and his Secretary of Homeland Security to say: Can I invoke the Insurrection Act? So don't be mistaken. This is not just about immigrants. This is not just denying immigrants the due process that Antonin Scalia said that immigrants have a right to so you don't disappear the wrong people like the Trump administration has done, that you don't wildly disagree with what a citizen is saying and use that as a pretext to disappear them. He is creating the pretext to invoke that 1807 law, the Insurrection Act, and if he does that, when they came for the immigrants and denied them due process, he is trying to get us to surrender our commitment to the constitutional guarantees that Americans have. He has said he would invoke--he would deport Americans if he could. When the President denies due process to some in America, it threatens the due process of all. Let's see what happens on April 20 if this President, who has already invoked the Alien Enemies Act, follows through and invokes the Insurrection Act. But why wait until April 20? Raise your voice now. Stand up now. Do something now. Cause some good trouble now. Let this President know that if he does ever do that, there will be a rising up of people's voices, a rising up of good trouble, as John Lewis would say, to say: Not in my country. This is unacceptable.

Mr. BOOKER. To Senator Dick Durbin, to somebody who has been my mentor and friend, I will yield for a question while retaining the floor.

Mr. BOOKER. Yes, yes, yes, it does. I mean, you put forth this litany where what we have to ask ourselves is at what point do my colleagues in the House and the Senate and the Republican Party say enough? Enough. God bless John Kennedy for calling out the absolute absurd. I was in that hearing where you have nominees for some of the highest positions in the administration failing to say that they will abide by a court order. I mean, that is something we haven't heard people on either side of nominees just say so bluntly now, not, yes, I will follow the orders of a court. They are equivocating. And God bless one of my colleagues, John Kennedy, who said: That is absurd. You either obey the order or you resign because we have a Constitution. And so when is it enough? When is it enough? This is the week, this is the month of Passover, and there is a wonderful song I love singing when I am at a Pesach seder--the Dayenu. ``It would have been enough,'' is the song, if God just delivered us from Egypt. It would have been enough if he parted the seas. Dayenu. This is kind of a twisted version of that. When is it enough when the President of the United States starts a meme coin on his first day, violating the emoluments clause immediately and enriching himself? When is it enough when he takes an Agency that is on the frontlines of stopping infectious diseases, like Ebola or drug-resistant tuberculosis, from coming here? Is that enough? When we created that in Congress, and he has no right to stop that Agency, would that have been enough? When is it enough for him to issue Executive orders that trample on the highest ideals of this land, when he mocks members of the courts so badly that even the current Chief Justice admonishes him? When is it enough when Elon Musk is indiscriminately firing people and then realizing oops, we need the FAA safety folks; oops, we need the nuclear folks who are helping us keep our regulations? When is it enough that you will say: ``OK. I will call them in and have a hearing to create some transparency in what he is doing''? When is it enough when he activates the Alien Enemies Acts and starts disappearing human beings without due process? When is it enough? Well, it is enough for me. It is enough for me. Twelve hours now I am standing, and I am still going strong because this President is wrong. And he is violating principles that we hold dear and principles in this document that are so clear and plain. The powers of the article I branch are spelled out, and he is violating them. Don't take my word for it, Republican-appointed judges, Democrat-appointed judges are saying it and stopping him, and then he maligns the judge that did that. When is it enough for people to speak out and not just fall in line, to put patriotism over a person that is in the White House? So to your question, sir, to my friend, and I am sorry to get a little animated at this early morning hour, but I am so frustrated and not just because of that, but I am reading the stories. We are going into the next section, which is national security, and I am reading the stories of our citizens of this country, not just New Jerseyans, there are a lot we have read in these 12 hours, but there are people from all over the country who are reaching out to my office. And I know they are yours, Senator Durbin. You are the second highest ranking Democrat in here. I know they are reaching out to you because you are a man that stands for justice. I know they are reaching out to your office, too, because you are one of the outposts for sanity in a Congress that is being too complicit to an Executive that is overstepping his authority and violating the Constitution and hurting people who rely on healthcare and Social Security. I am reading these stories, sir, because of the voices of the Americans that don't have the privilege of the 100 of us, who don't get to stand here, but I believe the power of the people is greater than the people in power. Those are the ideals of our democracy and our Constitution. So I am rip-roaring and ready. I am wide awake. I am going to stand here for as many hours as I can, 12 hours, and I recognize that my other friend, another person I consider more than a friend, like a sister to me, from the State of New York, my neighbor.

Mr. BOOKER. My sister, for you I will yield for a question while retaining the floor.

Mr. BOOKER. Seven thousand.

Mr. BOOKER. I read last night--thank you for the question, my friend. I read last night some of the most painful letters of people over and over again, from throughout my State and throughout other States, who are living in fear, who use words like ``terrified'' and told stories that they couldn't sleep because of the rhetoric of this President, the rhetoric of Elon Musk calling it a Ponzi scheme, telling lies during the joint address.