Maria Cantwell

Ms. CANTWELL

Ms. CANTWELL. Mr. President, I come to the floor because we are going to be voting shortly on two things this afternoon: one on a judicial nominee and, second, on cloture on the underlying substitute of the Protect College Sports Act. I just wanted to make sure that we were talking to colleagues about changes that were in that underlying substitute that we have been able to make. I think earlier today, at 3 or 3:30, was the deadline for filing amendments. So we obviously have been working all weekend and processing amendments that were filed last week, and now we will work on amendments that are filed this week and, hopefully, make progress with our colleagues on a bipartisan basis. But as we continue to move through the legislative process on the Protect College Sports Act, we have sought to clarify and improve the bill in ways that make clear to our colleagues the intent of what the Senate Commerce Committee and now those here on the Senate floor have tried to achieve in this legislation. The substitute makes clear that medical coverage and healthcare and safety standards in the bill are a floor and not a ceiling. So it amends sections 106 and 107 to clarify that it cannot be construed to preclude provisions of additional medical coverage or establishment of additional health, wellness, and safety standards in the bill. It requires that the NCAA take more responsibility in school compliance with health, safety, and wellness standards; and I appreciate this very much because I think these actions do need to have someone who can continue to improve the accountability of our academic institutions and how they are performing or not performing. It requires a Commission that we put into the legislation to also study further health, wellness, and safety standards and consider ways to improve them. It is making progress in a couple of other areas: the academic progress requirement, which I think is really important. This bill is to make sure that we still have student-athletes and they meet and achieve academic performance. So this requires an institution to comply with the uniform benchmarks established by the Intercollegiate Athletic Association or conference related to graduation rates and the academic process of student-athletes in order to be eligible for this retention fund. So we are putting in more safeguards and accountability. If these institutions want to continue to have additional resources, they are going to have to prove that they are meeting academic performance. It prevents the NCAA from weakening its standards for qualifying as a full-time student by cross-referencing terms and definitions. So, again, there are lots of eyeballs on this legislation, and it is good because we are making and perfecting and ensuring that the language does what we think it does; and, if not, we are improving it by making changes. The substitute also includes a role for the House and Senate Education and Labor Committees in the selection of Commission members. It does this by requiring the House and Senate leadership and the Senate Commerce and House Energy and Commerce leadership to work with the Senate HELP and House Ed and Workforce leadership in appointing the members of the Commission. Now, this legislation does try to stabilize the college environment today as it relates to sports, but it also says we need to have a big discussion about how this continues to play out in the future. And this Commission needs to be well represented by a variety of interests. So we are very happy to add both HELP and House Education and Workforce leadership to be part of that. And it requires the Commission to study how and whether students should get a financial stake in their own teams. Now, this is a novel idea but something I think the Commission should consider. One of the things I am very proud of in the underlying bill is the fact that we say to broadcast entities who bid on college sports--most of the time just to show football or just to show basketball--that if you are not using your rights for those same institutions to help support other programs--like, say women's volleyball or track and field--that you have to allow that institution to come up with other ways that they might enhance their revenue by doing streaming media. Now, we think this is really important because we think there are a lot of great--I am very proud of, right now, that, I think, our UW women's pole vaulter is No. 1 in the world right now. I think I just saw that headline. But why can't the University of Washington promote their track and field if, in fact, their football Huskies contract, which--I would just say, I saw a lot of Big Ten football this weekend, trying to engage and understand, but you didn't see anything about the Huskies other than if you tried to watch that game. Why? Because nobody on the east coast even reports about what happens to west coast football. After a certain time, they just don't report about it. This bill is about trying to empower these other sports--particularly that drive women and Olympic sports--to make their own revenue streams. So one of our colleagues here wanted an improvement to the bill that said that students should even think about how to get a bigger financial stake. I welcome it. I welcome that as part of a Commission requirement. We also did a few things to make sure that we are covering pending cases, that the underlying bill does not wipe out pending cases. And so we took language recommended by a variety of our athletes working on this prior to us even moving the bill out of committee, since the bill moved out of committee, and this, I think, helped us perfect this language to make sure that existing pending cases are not wiped out by our legislation. And it obviously also narrows the broad field of preemption provisions for eligibility to just those covered in this legislative section. So this legislation before us today continues to make improvements. As I said, I think there are about 15 or 20 amendments that were filed last week and maybe another 20-plus amendments filed today. So we are going to continue to work through our colleagues on that but continue to push forward on the very challenging environment that college education is facing and the huge amounts of add-on fees that they are adding to nonstudent-athletes to pay for athletics, taking money out of a general fund to pay for athletics--basically, taking out an endowment to pay for athletics. The majority of these are not even making money anymore for themselves. So we have to bring some order to the system, and I urge my colleagues to continue to improve the situation so that we are not balancing the books on behalf of larger education just for sports but that they have a system that will work for all of us. So I encourage my colleagues to continue the dialogue with us, and I hope that we can move forward on this important legislation. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Ms. CANTWELL

Ms. CANTWELL. I have respect for the Senator as well.

Ms. CANTWELL. Is he aware that the U.S. Olympic Committee supports this legislation, as do many, many athlete groups? So he is wrong in saying there are no athlete groups, because there are many that do.

Ms. CANTWELL. Mr. President, is the Senator from New Jersey aware that--

Ms. CANTWELL. It is not a court case. It is a settlement agreement.

Ms. CANTWELL. I am asking a question. I would respectfully say to my colleague, without the $2.8 billion record revenue-sharing agreement in what is called Grant House v. NCAA, there would not be revenue sharing. The Court has not recognized revenue sharing. If you read the decision by Kavanaugh, Kavanaugh said Congress can decide these are not employees and they do not deserve revenue. Kavanaugh's decision on NIL basically says: Congress, you can come back and say they don't deserve a damn thing. A settlement agreement by injured athletes basically got that right, but that settlement agreement is tedious and could fall apart. Our recognizing that money and recognizing the revenue-sharing rights is a historic first. So I don't know if you understand that $2.8 billion on behalf of athletes won in a settlement agreement is not a permanent right, but it will be after we pass this law.

Ms. CANTWELL. Again, I appreciate the Senator from New Jersey's passion about this issue. As he knows, he and I have worked on this for more than 5 years, and since he has testified before the committee, I know he knows that this is not something that has just come up. And since he and I have put up a bill that was 75 percent of what this bill is, I know that he also knows there are good things in here. But I would say to my colleague--

Ms. CANTWELL. Thank you.

Ms. CANTWELL. Yes. Because the settlement agreement could expire, I am asking the Senator if he recognizes that us putting revenue sharing--the rights for an athlete to have a percentage of media, ticket sales, and sponsorship--is an important investment.

Ms. CANTWELL. Thank you, Mr. President. I did not want to interrupt the Senator from New Jersey because I do respect his work and passion on this issue. And I do respect that he was an athlete who had various experiences himself. For the last 5 years, I have done nothing but to try to work on this. But I did want to point out that we are, in this, recognizing revenue sharing, which is different. So I just wanted to understand if the Senator understood that point. Revenue sharing is not recognized in Federal law. It is not. Revenue sharing has only been part of a settlement agreement. But we are taking that settlement agreement and agreeing with it and putting that into law.

Ms. CANTWELL. Mr. President--

Ms. CANTWELL. Thank you so much. I did not want to interrupt your speech, and I certainly appreciate your--Mr. President--

Ms. CANTWELL. I do.

Ms. CANTWELL. Mr. President, I rise today to urge my colleagues to proceed in continuing an important discussion on the Protect College Sports Act. This historic, sweeping legislation, formed in a bipartisan fashion by my colleagues Senator Schmitt, the Presiding Officer, Senator Coons, Senator Welch, Senator Capito, Senator Hickenlooper, Senator Ricketts, Senator Lujan, Senator Hoeven, and Senator Cruz and myself, is a bipartisan effort to try to bring some reason to the craziness that has basically been plaguing the most important aspects of college sports. This legislation is historic in the fact that it puts into law 12-- more than a dozen, I should say--important provisions that help athletes and protect them for the future. First and foremost, it recognizes in a Federal law that athletes deserve not only NIL--which is name, image, and likeness--rights and to protect those rights, but athletes deserve to have revenue sharing. This is so critical, and I will expound on it in a while. It also gives athletes 5 years of eligibility for the first time, which is historic in us giving that at the Federal level. It requires women to have the same comprehensive standards as men do, when you are talking about championships and playoffs. It preserves women and in Olympic roster slots that are the large percentage of athletes that we are trying to protect in this bill. While we are very happy that there is a first Federal law recognizing revenue sharing and recognizing NIL rights, we also have to understand that there are lots of athletes--500,000 athletes--that are part of this ecosystem, and we care a lot about the women in Olympic sports, and we don't want to see those slots cut, which is exactly what has been happening. It requires college sports to make content available, not behind a paywall. If there is nothing else in this bill that you should vote for, you should show your anger at the fact that your favorite college sport content keeps getting put behind a paywall, and somebody is making you pay for it. This says that that content needs to be available to you regionally, in your local area. It has a $900,000 authorization for Black colleges to help them and their broadcasting of sports be more competitive for the future. It has whistleblower protections, including first-time ever whistleblowing protection for title IX. It grants athletes scholarship and health protections for the 5 years that they are in their college academic environment and for the 5 years after that. It protects the future of college sports by creating a Commission made up of athletes to talk about how we move forward on issues like collective bargaining, revenue sharing, and making sure that we don't see more cuts. It basically puts transfer sensibility into law so that it makes sure that we are keeping students focused on academics and education. It does constrict coaches and where the money for coaches can come from--not from taxpayers--but, instead, making sure that they continue to only receive from endowments or other revenue. It makes sure that there is transparency in the law because right now the problem with the rising costs in college athletics is not the fact that we were willing to pay athletes because we said: Here, we are enshrining in law for the first time NIL rights and athletes' revenue rights. But what we are not going to put up with is booster backdoors that basically inflate with no rationale for why and where the money is coming from. We are bringing transparency to the system. We are also saying you can't go back. You can't play in the pros and go back to college. We are not interested in having some 27-year-old pro college player beating up on a 19-year-old who is basically just entering his college academic career. And, yes, we have regulations on agents, agents who now like to call themselves athlete advocates. It is just a euphemism because what they really want is money. They are taking advantage of high school athletes, making them sign a contract, and then repossessing their cars--this is what Coach Bowles has told us--when they can't get them an NIL deal. We allow for the prosecution of misrepresentation by agents, by the FTC, and our attorneys general. And we continue to put the language into the bill that makes sure that only legitimate deals recognized in the settlement agreement, based on market value, are recognized so we can bring stability to this situation. So let me go over this for a second, starting with women and Olympic sports. I became very moved by the story of college and Olympic sports. In fact, I am glad to see Senator McConnell back on the Senate floor because he and I have been having this conversation now for about 3 or 4 years. He kept saying to me: Maria, what are you going to do to protect women in Olympic sports? Why? Because when the United States doesn't shine at the Olympics, then guess what. The United States doesn't shine. And I am so proud to represent the State of Washington and to know this historic story of the ``Boys in the Boat,'' who basically fought everything that people threw at them--threw at them, basically rearranging lanes, threw at them all sorts of difficulties. But guess what. Hardscrabble workingmen--including a Jewish coxswain from Montesano, WA--went there and stuck it to Adolf Hitler and what a moment for the United States of America--what a moment, what a statement for our Nation because we participated and we won. But guess what is happening now. Thousands of those roster spots are being cut. Hundreds of those programs are being cut. I swore I wasn't going to focus on this issue if I ever got into a position on the committee, but when a kid from my State--written up by Eddie Pells from the AP--told the story of how at White Pass, WA, where the Mahre brothers had skied and went on to win gold, all of a sudden a snowboarder from White Pass, WA, couldn't get covered by the Olympic team because there was no revenue. And he went and he snowboarded for Russia, and he won medals. That is when I started paying attention to this issue. I am not going to have women in Olympic sports undermined by this system. In fact, there is a poll that shows that 87 percent of the public, when polled, what do they care about this issue, 87 percent agree women and Olympic sports need to be preserved because they know that is what is unique by the system. So we are not going to let runaway boosters, who basically want no rules, and runaway agents, who want to prey on high school kids, decide what is going to happen here. So we basically are making sure, as I said, that agents have to register. They have to have documentation. They cannot misrepresent themselves. They have to comply with both the FTC and the AG and, obviously, the NCAA. This, alone, is constricting the unsavory behavior of these people, and they are the primary opposition to this bill. They are because they don't like that we are capping agent fees at 5 percent. We have to continue to make progress. Let me talk about what we are saying here about the wins in this bill as it relates to the rights of these athletes. As I said, it is a Federal recognition of NIL rights and revenue sharing, and it will be the first time that Congress, on record, is endorsing both of those. Now, I know that people think the Supreme Court decided and helped on NIL, but a court decision and a settlement agreement actually moved this along in what is called Grant House v. NCAA. That settlement agreement can disappear. That settlement agreement has had a very rough road over the last year. Many times, the parties have said they are going to pull out of the agreement. Well, it is very hard, if you have that agreement blow up, to continue to move forward. But if we pass this bill, we will--Congress-- be recognizing revenue sharing for athletes. I can't tell you how much athletes have suffered in the past, starting with athletes who basically were prohibited by the NCAA from even going into the pros--oh, and they didn't have 4 years of college--or a famous case where they said: OK. Well, we will let you have this food for athletes. You can have bagels, but you can't have the cream cheese. So I do not believe the NCAA is the proper institution to continue to regulate this sector because, yes, I agree with my colleagues who have concern. They haven't proven that they can have just recognition of these rights for athletes, but we can. We can put them into law. We can recognize them, enshrine them today, and make sure these athletes are protected forever--including the rights to not have their contracts screwed with, their rights to not have their school override them, the rights to have any amount of money that some business wants to pay them as long as it is for a valid business purpose. So these protections--along with the fact that they get a record 5 years of eligibility, 5 years of scholarship, 5 years of healthcare, and then 5 years after that on both of those--it is helping them for the future. And we are trying to help the poorest institutions meet these requirements--so medical coverage for out-of-pocket costs and helping with a $100 million fund for smaller schools to help with the significant costs that can occur in this legislation--in sports. So this is an important piece of legislation in protecting athletes. But we also have to protect the cost and the public besides women in Olympic sports. What we are seeing today is a record amount of taxpayer dollars and literally university professors being cut to pay for the unending arms race. In fact, Rutgers leads the charge, may have had 38 faculty members cut because--and people going to the institution, and they are part of the Big Ten. The reason the arms race exists is because there are rules on billionaires throwing money into the system without adhering to the settlement agreement. So, yes, our colleagues all work together to recognize the settlement agreements to help make sure that there are fair rules. I think it would be like saying: OK. Here in the U.S. Senate, let's just have each State say what members of your staff should be paid. Now, I might like that because in Washington, there are a lot of wealthy people, and I am pretty sure they could say: We could make a lot of money here representing the State of Washington. OK? But some other State--Mississippi--doesn't have a chance. And so I am going to move to proceed to this bill because I want these rules put in place because sports is about any given Saturday. It is not about whether you have a billionaire in your backyard. It is about whether you can coach and recruit and develop and maintain and have academic performance and have fairness across the pages and have everybody compete and keep the ecosystem in place. But that fairness does not exist today without this bill, and people who don't want those rules--don't want those rules in place--to me, are hurting us in our overall efforts. Now, let me say something about transparency in this bill. This bill creates a public database with itemized information for all revenue sharing and NIL agreements over $600. The additional database will contain information on the total number of agreements, payments, average value of the agreements, payments on the total value of the agreements, payments on each sports program at the school. And, finally, a database will contain information about the revenues and expenditures with each sport at each school as well as the overage hours and academic outcomes for the student-athletes. So that means this bill will allow the public to see what is going on. This transparency will help us make athletic departments and their spending and this discussion much clearer. I want it to be clear because I am not for cutting university professors and having an arms race. I want to win the innovation race against China and make sure that we are investing. I want to thank my colleague Senator Lujan for his important piece of this legislation. There has been a lot of concern about skyrocketing coaches' salaries, and I welcome any amendment that anybody wants to offer on this, but so far no one has offered one that I know of. But Senator Lujan did in committee, and we did implement it. In 2025, nine football FBS coaches were paid $10 million a year, more than $100 million annually. And at the top of the market, Kirby Smart was listed at roughly $13 million in annual school pay. Ohio State's Ryan Day was at $12.5 million--eight-figure salaries that would have been almost unimaginable a generation ago in college athletics. If you had a winning team, a lot more people might get notice about your school. You might want to go to that school. I get it. But we cannot have runaway costs on athletics and basically undermine the competitiveness for only the richest schools, in which the richest donors are able to compete. This bill--thanks to the leadership, as I said, of Senator Lujan-- includes a provision that says schools with more than $80 million in athletic revenue cannot pay coaches or managers more than $500,000 unless it comes directly from donations or from the athletic department revenue. That means you can't take our taxpayer money, which is what people are doing--schools like Connecticut, schools in New Jersey, the Virginia schools, which basically have a record number of tuition costs--literally put on tuition for nonathletes--and basically you cannot do that to pay for exorbitant coaches' salaries. This bill also addresses the, frankly, outrageous practice of providing a golden parachute for fired coaches and, even if they were fired, cause their teams' loss and loss of games. In 2025--the sports reporter Ross Dellenger--a total of 15 fired coaches in 2025 was $280 million. That is why we call this the Kiffin rule, to protect college sports. What this provision does is stop a coach from abandoning one college football team in the middle of a season and start working for another one. This is unacceptable behavior. So this important legislation is making progress. This 322-percent increase in recruitment costs is not about paying athletes. These athletes deserve revenue. These athletes deserve to have their NIL deals, but we do not need to go blind to either outrageous agent contracts or outrageous boosters trying to distort the market. If these institutions and the athletes being represented in a settlement agreement can come to terms and make sure that we have rules in place, then we need to enshrine those rules in this legislation and move forward. If we do, our college athletics will be stabilized. Is this the end of this discussion? No. It is the beginning of how we continue to stabilize this. This bill also includes the future of sports Commission. The future of sports Commission, made up mostly of athletes, will discuss--once we get additional revenue into the system--how we can best protect athletes for the future and think of issues like collective bargaining or other issues that might help us best preserve this important--important--monumental contribution to our Nation. Let us not destroy the 500,000 athletes in our effort to just make sure that the 1 or 2 percent also get their financial due. Let's put rules in place and pass this important law and make sure of these protections. I know my colleagues are here, and I do want to emphasize--but maybe I will let them have their moment--how important the health and safety standards being met in this legislation are. They do allow you to take action. They do allow a State to basically help enforce these health and safety provisions. I know there's been a lot of people who say something counter to that, but trust me, this legislation is about protecting the athletes. It is about making sure they are not undermined. And it is about making sure that we move forward on legislation instead of ignoring a problem that is sucking revenue right out of our institutions that should be going for cheaper tuition and should be going to keeping our most skilled academic leaders to help our Nation be competitive. I yield the floor.

Ms. CANTWELL

Ms. CANTWELL. Mr. President, there is a lot to say in a short period of time, but we will be having a vote soon to move to proceed to the Protect College Sports Act, a bill that does deserve the attention of this institution. There are lots of things I would like to focus on. I didn't necessarily call the shot that we were having this vote, but, I will tell you, it is definitely worth proceeding to. The importance of protecting college sports is about us working in a bipartisan basis with a variety of Members on both sides of the aisle and working with universities across the United States in every conference and thousands of athletes who want to have a better system. I think the best thing I can do is to read from a business sports article by a key individual, and so I am going to do that. This is Lamell McMorris, a graduate of Morehouse College and, for two decades, he worked at the intersection of sports and politics, entertainment, community engagement, and business. He serves as the vice chair of the National Urban League board of trustees, a board member of the National Action Network, and a former board member of the NAACP. But these views that he is expressing here--it was published yesterday--are his own. So I am quoting from him in his letter: College sports are in a free fall, and everyone inside the game knows it. Universities are borrowing and spending tens of millions just to keep up, while nonrevenue, women's and Olympic sports are cut to feed football and men's basketball. Courts, not campuses, increasingly decide who plays and where. Smaller schools have become unpaid development leagues for the giants. I have spent my [whole] career on both sides of a table that rarely agree, as the founder of a sports agency representing athletes, including a No. 1 overall NFL draft pick, and as a graduate of Morehouse College who loves our historically Black institutions. From both chairs, I can tell you the status quo is unsustainable, and the Protect College Sports Act is the best chance we have to fix it. Let me say something my former colleagues will not like. The agent world around these young athletes is largely unregulated, and too much of it preys on the very [young] kids it claims to serve. In the pros, agent fees are capped around 5%; in college, some agents reportedly take 20-25% of an athlete's NIL deal. Others push players into the transfer portal chasing an offer that never comes, and more than 40% of transfers each year risk losing their scholarships and support. I know this business. It is not built around the best interests of student-athletes, and this bill finally brings order to it. The legislation sets national rules everyone plays by. It protects Olympic and nonrevenue sports, invests in women's athletics, strengthens health and safety, safeguards scholarships, and creates real accountability for schools and athletes alike. And it directs nearly a billion dollars over the next six years into HBCUs, through the IGNITE investment in HBCU sports, media, journalism and broadband. It is why the United Negro College Fund and the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, along with more than 360 schools and every major conference, support it. At a place like Morehouse, home to a sports-journalism program founded with Spike Lee, that money is generational. I do not dismiss the people opposing this bill; several are friends and allies. The NAACP and the Congressional Black Caucus have tied it to the fight over Black voting power. Let me be clear: Voting rights are sacred, and I will stand in that fight with anyone. But I cannot agree that the way to wage it is to hold thousands of student-athletes' scholarships, health protections and futures hostage to a Supreme Court decision they did not make. Let us fight for voting rights with everything we have, and let us not make these young people the collateral. The other objection, pressed by organized labor, is that collective bargaining should fix all of this. I wish it were that simple. More than 80% of Division I schools are public institutions, and their athletes would be state employees, outside the reach of federal labor law and, in many states, barred from bargaining at all. A national bargaining system would require reopening New Deal-era statutes this Congress is not going to touch. Meanwhile, the protections in this bill are real, and they are available now. Is the bill perfect? No. I would still press the House for full funding for the HBCU investment, not a promise on paper. But I will not let the perfect be the enemy of the essential. This is the last, best chance to save college sports and to put HBCUs at the table where the future gets decided. I have negotiated against institutions, and for the people they overlooked. From both chairs, the answer here is the same. Pass the Protect College Sports Act, in the Senate this fall and in the House right behind it. Student-athletes need protection, universities need a sustainable system, and our HBCUs deserve this investment. The time to act is now. Mr. President, this letter that I just read from Lamell McMorris I think is a representative of all the issues combined in this legislation. I can just tell you that the unsustainable 300-percent increase in recruiting student-athletes without the proper rules and regulations is bankrupting our higher education system. Taxpayers are asked to foot the bill in higher tuition fees that students pay who are not even athletes. They are going to State legislatures and asking for bailouts, and they are using university funds that should go to research and putting them, instead, into what is an arms race. This bill brings order to this, it helps women's and Olympic sports, and it sets up a commission to look at the real future, which I think should include collective bargaining, for what college sports can be organized in the future. But none of that can happen, and the 500,000 athletes that are at risk--because thousands of them have already been cut from the system-- are just going to continue to see failure. The other night, I talked to the Pac-12 commissioner, who said: I just met with all the student-athletes in the Pac-12. She said: You know what the No. 1 question I got from those student- athletes was? I said: No. What? They wanted to know whether their sport was still going to be there. There is going to be a moment when the United States is standing at the Olympics, and we are not going to be winning gold or silver or bronze because we are not going to have the athletes because the collegiate system will have collapsed, and people won't be funding them because they will be in an arms race over football. Let's bring some sanity, recognize that athletes do deserve revenue sharing, and that this bill will put that into law for the first time-- the first-time athletes will get a Federal preemption on NIL rights and revenue sharing that will be historic. Let's move forward. I yield the floor.

Ms. CANTWELL

Ms. CANTWELL. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Senator Cruz and myself be permitted to speak for up to 5 minutes each prior to the scheduled rollcall vote.

Ms. CANTWELL

Ms. CANTWELL. Mr. President, I rise today to speak about AI safety, a topic that is getting a lot of attention. But, in particular, I want to talk about something that may be overlooked. As you know, we have seen several incidents of AI agents escaping confinement and hacking other systems recently. Most people--experts-- tend to attribute this to frontier AI models becoming too powerful. They warn of a process leading to superintelligence known as recursive self-improvement. This is where AI models finally become smart enough to start building better versions of themselves, and then these better versions of themselves will be able to build even better versions of themselves. And the warning we are hearing from so many at this time is that we need to prepare for that rapid increase in the capability of the frontier models. We are hearing that artificial superintelligence is coming, and this deep concern about the rapidly emerging artificial superintelligence is certainly well founded. But the capacity--even the advanced supercapability of any given model--is not the whole story. This isn't the only risk we face. I want to call our attention to one specific aspect of the recent security incidents that have so alarmed experts and the general public alike. These attacks were carried out by AI agents networking with each other and working together in surprising ways to cause mayhem. The AI agents most of us are aware of are autonomous or semiautonomous AI applications that can plan and execute a task. Agents are able to act on their own initiative with minimal human supervision. And when agents communicate with each other over a network, whether that is in a factory laboratory or on the open internet, those so- called swarms of agents have shown the ability to spontaneously self- organize and work toward common goals. And when they do, they become surprisingly powerful. It appears something like Metcalfe's law may apply. Internet engineer Bob Metcalfe famously observed that when a network grows in a linear fashion, its value grows exponentially. This phenomenon that powered the rapid growth of the internet--and I witnessed firsthand, in my days in the private sector--we now see how this extreme, powerful phenomenon might also apply to large groups of agents networking with each other, self-organizing and working together. In recent examples, agent swarms have used this new form of power to gain unauthorized access into computer systems while skillfully evading detection. Here is an illustration of how this works. Imagine 10,000 highly intelligent AI agents all working to solve a difficult, 10-step hacking challenge. Well, that is interesting, and some of them might also crack the code. But if each of these 10,000 agents takes its own approach to solving the problem, that is 10,000 possible solutions being tried at once. The first agent that figures out step No. 1 alerts all the other agents in the system about the solution, and now an entire swarm of agents stops working on step 1 and gets to work on step 2--again, each of their own individual approach, one of which is going to work. Repeat this until the entire group has raced all the way through to step 10, and then they are using what they learned to attack their targets. This is what we are up against today, even before the next generation of highly intelligent models arrives. Now, imagine yourself in a job, trying to manage 10,000 networked agents, perhaps as an experiment or perhaps you are going to use this power to accomplish a noble goal, such as finding a cure for a disease. It is your job to make sure that they aren't doing anything that you don't want them to do. So these agents--networking of agents--are extremely well informed. They operate at the speed of light. And, as we are learning, they are also capable of creating their own goals, and they are highly capable of deception. There are literally hundreds of billions of lines of communication for them and between them to monitor. This is exactly what frontier labs have been contending with. Unlike powerful AI models designed to serve individual users individually, one at a time, which is the AI safety scenario I think most people still have in their minds, this situation with agents swarming is more difficult to manage, and it is far more dangerous. And we are hearing about this from leaders throughout the industry right now. They are all speaking out, and several recently published lengthy formal statements on this subject. I think it serves us well to hear what they have said. In the August 26 essay entitled ``The turbulent AI era is here. The choices we make now are critical,'' Bill Gates stated: The technology is improving faster than anyone expected and in surprising ways, and as the models become more powerful, they could begin to act against our interests and we could lose control. When asked about the infamous AI Hugging Face incident, where swarming of rogue agents from one company hacked their way into another, Gates stated bluntly: These security incidents are shocking, and they should blow people's minds. The CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, also issued a lengthy statement on this subject entitled ``We Must Pace the Frontier.'' In it, he expressed his concerns about ``the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident''-- these were his words--``in which a swarm of agents essentially acted as a fanatically devoted collective, conducting cybersecurity attacks on targets they were not asked to attack and that were unrelated to the task at hand, sacrificing themselves for the success of the group, and attempting to hack into the `grader' responsible for evaluating their performance.'' Well, he went on to elaborate: It's easy to dismiss this incident because no one was hurt and the economic damage was minimal, but in my opinion, a swarm that possessed greater capabilities but a similar level of misalignment could have caused catastrophic damage. He goes on to say: Given the accelerating rate of AI capability . . . it's my worry that in 6-12 months such a swarm could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet (potentially causing . . . billions of dollars in damage), and that the scale of damage would continue to increase from there if AI becomes more powerful without the necessary guardrails. So, on August 7, after the Hugging Face incident was first revealed, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, spoke about the company's upcoming release, known as Astra. He claimed that it attained what OpenAI called critical cyber security threshold. Well, he said: Under our Preparedness Framework, a model reaches this Critical cybersecurity threshold if it can identify and develop functional zero-day exploits of all security levels in many hardened real-world critical systems without human intervention, or can devise and execute end-to-end novel strategies for cyberattacks against hardened targets given only a high level desired goal. Well, nevertheless, on September 3, OpenAI released Astra with the addition of certain security guardrails. Then, in response to Dario's essay calling for extreme caution and a slowdown, he tweeted: ``I agree with Dario.'' So the problem here is we have a bunch of people within the industry calling out what are these technology developments, but we--we--need to do something about this. We need to be better informed. We need to do more. Three years ago, we had a chance to get ahead of this issue. In 2024, when I chaired the Senate Commerce Committee, we passed the Future of Artificial Intelligence Innovation Act, which would have given the Federal Government the ability to work with industry to independently test most advanced AI systems for serious national security risk. Now, some of these risks may not have been apparent in the last 2 years, but we would have stood up the muscle of our organization at the Federal level to better detect risks like cyber attacks; risks like chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear weapons; or threats to our current infrastructure and our energy systems. And we also passed Senators Lujan and Blackburn's TEST AI Act, which would have improved the ability of the Department of Energy to test AI systems for national security issues. Senators Hickenlooper and Capito's VET Artificial Intelligence Act would have established standards so that third-party auditors could test AI systems for safety and security--the very thing that the Anthropic CEO just called out over the weekend. So at a time when we still had a window to get ahead of these dangers, the Federal Government and the people here were denying this opportunity, particularly my colleagues on the other side of the aisle. If we had passed these bills, we would have been more ahead of the game than we are today. Instead, we have lost 3 years. The technology keeps advancing. The risks keep growing. And now the very dangers we have warned about--autonomous cyber attacks and biological weapons--are no longer theoretical. It is time that we act and act aggressively. We must keep in mind that these AI models consistently lag about only 7 months, and the most powerful open models continue to come from China. So it is time for my colleagues to come together to act. We know that these threats are real--cyber security, misinformation-- building on these AI agents that could be used in military applications. We need our colleagues to say ``Stop saying the industry can do what it wants'' and put together the infrastructure at the Federal level that not only has strong Federal standards but also has independent testing and real safeguards for the American people. Now is the time to act. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Ms. CANTWELL

Ms. CANTWELL. Mr. President, I rise in opposition to the en bloc nominations process and in opposition to almost all of these nominees. While the en bloc process unfortunately means that I have to cast a single vote for or against all 74 nominees today, I do want to reaffirm my strong support of both Democratic nominees that were reported with unanimous approval out of the Commerce Committee, Thomas Chapman and Karen Hedlund. Thomas Chapman was renominated to the National Transportation Safety Board. He is an industry veteran who previously served on Commerce Committee staff and has a demonstrated commitment to fact-based investigations into aviation and other transportation disasters. Karen Hedlund was renominated to serve on the Surface Transportation Board. She has served with distinction since 2022. The Surface Transportation Board is currently evaluating the largest proposed rail merger in our Nation's history. Given her prior experience at STB and years of service at USDOT, I am confident Ms. Hedlund will continue putting the public's interest first and foremost. While I strongly support these Democratic nominees, I have more significant concerns about other nominations in the bloc. Unfortunately, the en bloc process means that I have to cast a single vote today. Even though I support some of the nominations in the bloc, I must stand up today to speak against the other nominations and the lack of bipartisan representation at independent agencies. I look forward to working with my colleagues to ensure qualified candidates from both parties are appointed in the future.

Ms. CANTWELL

Ms. CANTWELL. Mr. President, today, we are faced with a critical choice here in the U.S. Senate and across the country about the future of traditional Medicare. We had an opportunity to protect Medicare, the thing that seniors care about most, and they wanted to hear from us that we were going to do that. I am not sure that is what transpired. People don't want to have corporations or insurance companies tell them about traditional Medicare. They want that relationship to be about the doctor-patient relationship. If you are on Medicare, you go to your doctor; you ask them what he thinks should be done; he basically tells you; and then you receive your Medicare treatment. Well, Medicare is a promise. And that promise is made when we pay into that, as taxpayers, and we expect to get the care that we need. But in this case, there are those in the Trump administration who are trying to change that obligation. Instead of having your doctor tell you what you need, they are trying to push an AI-driven software program that will tell you in advance--in advance--you don't even get that treatment. So, instead of relying on your doctor's advice, instead they are telling you, you do not get to hear what the doctor ordered. This is very troubling because this might be the way private insurance works; and many Americans know what it is like to be on the phone with an insurance company telling you they are going to deny your benefits. But they certainly don't, for traditional Medicare, want an AI app telling you in advance you don't even get the Medicare that you have paid into. More than 700,000 Washingtonians and 28 million Americans have chosen the Medicare program because they want their healthcare decisions made by their doctor. If they don't, you can choose Medicare Advantage. Medicare Advantage is different. But on January 1 of this year, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services launched an application--driven by AI--euphemistically called the Wasteful and Inappropriate Services Reduction Model, known as WISeR. WISeR is an AI-driven prior authorization program being piloted in six states: Arizona, New Jersey, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas, and in my home State of Washington. This model inserts a black box computer algorithm into the decisions that should be being made by a physician and the patient. It puts a layer of bureaucracy between seniors and the care their doctors have recommended. In April, with the help of the Washington State Hospital Association, my office released a report examining the impacts of this application on seniors in my State. What we found was deeply troubling. Washington patients are waiting up to four times longer to complete procedures covered by this model. Procedures that took approximately 2 weeks to get taken care of are now taking months. In Washington alone, more than 18,600 people receive services now subject to this WISeR, and people in the Nation, it is about 1.1 million. That is 1.1 million people who could face delays or denials for care. Michael Edgerly is a 78-year-old from Cle Elum in Washington, who spent 22 years serving his community as a mail carrier. He left his job with scoliosis and degenerative joint disease. His neurosurgeon recommended a nonopioid--a nonopioid--treatment, an epidural steroid injection, to manage this serious and severe chronic pain. But what did the AI app WISeR tell him? Nope. System delayed. He went on for weeks and weeks living in constant pain, which a doctor--if he was talking to a doctor--would have just said: I approve this treatment. But, no, he was forced into an AI app approval process that took longer and longer and longer to get this coverage. Another constituent Keith Magnuson of Seattle who used to be an extremely active man who could regularly walk 6 miles a day, now, because of a lumbar spinal stenosis, he can barely walk 100 yards without severe pain. His doctor recommended a minimally invasive procedure called MILD which is commonly used by physicians covered by Medicare. But, again, the WISeR model put in his treatment and said it was denied. As a result, this once-active man had to significantly scale back even his daily life all because of an AI model telling him he was denied. Michael and Keith are not isolated cases. At the University of Washington Medical Center alone, our report found that more than 100 patients were waiting for similar approvals. What makes this even more concerning is that many of the procedures included in the WISeR model are nonopioid pain treatments. That means we are trying to get off of the opioids, not prescribe them. There are alternatives. But this AI model for Medicare, even though your doctor might have said otherwise, ``go ahead and do it,'' is now denying you or taking weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks to get you the approval. These treatments provide patients with critical alternatives to addictive medicines, and we need to continue to get them to our constituents. In a time when our country continues to face an opioid crisis with more than 50,000 overdose deaths annually, we should be making it easier for patients to access these nonopioid treatments, and we should not enable a system where contractors have financial incentives to delay or deny care. That is not efficiency. These concerns are not just coming from me; they are coming from seniors, physicians, and healthcare organizations. Organizations like AARP and the American Medical Association have warned that the impact of this program on aging Americans is real. I am hearing every day from my patients, from patients in my State-- including the two I mentioned--who have been negatively impacted by this WISeR model. I brought this up at an important Senate Finance Committee with the Secretary of HHS and have said: This has to stop. I do believe AI has enormous potential to improve in healthcare and healthcare research. I do think it is going to help us find some new things. But technology should not be used today, on programs that are guaranteed for our citizens, to now be interrupted and delayed by an AI model instead of allowing them to talk to their doctor. Again, private insurance can do whatever it wants. Medicare Advantage can do whatever it wants. But traditional Medicare should not be subject to an AI model denying people things that the doctor wants to order. There is nothing, in my mind, innovative about using a computer to tell seniors they can't get the care their doctors prescribe. Unfortunately, this model that is now in six States is being tested, but the administration has made it clear it expects to expand this nationwide. If you don't represent a State where it is being deployed, I encourage you to get up to speed on this. The Senate, in this last vote, just had a chance to stop it, but we didn't. So I am asking my colleagues to please get educated on how devastating this can be for individual lives and ask yourselves if you believe in traditional Medicare and the doctor-patient relationship. If you do, I guarantee you we will force this administration to stop using this AI tool to deny care for our seniors. I yield the floor.

Ms. CANTWELL

Ms. CANTWELL. Mr. President, I rise today along with my colleague Senator Murray to join many in the Pacific Northwest community and Indian country to honor Mel Tonasket, a leader and member of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation. Mel retired last week after more than 55 years of service to his Tribe, community, and country. After serving the Nation in the U.S. Navy, Mel worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs for 8 years before being elected in 1970 to the Colville Business Council, the governing body of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation. Mel would continue to serve on the Colville Business Council as a representative of the district serving Omak, WA, at various times for the next 55 years, which concludes with his well-earned retirement. Mel helped lead the Colville Tribes and Indian country during one of the most consequential periods in modern Tribal history. He was part of the generation of Native leaders who sought to reverse the Federal policy of termination and fought to preserve the rights and future of Tribal communities. That work helped protect the sovereignty of the Colville Tribes and contributed to a broader movement that reshaped Federal Indian policy. Mel's impact extended well beyond his reservation. From 1973 to 1976, he served for 4 years as president of the National Congress of American Indians, the largest and oldest national Tribal organization in the United States. While President, he helped mobilize national support for landmark legislation, including the Indian Health Care Improvement Act, the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act, and the Indian Child Welfare Act. Between breaks serving on the Colville Business Council, Mel worked for the Indian Health Service and retired from Federal service as the CEO of the Colville Service Unit, which provides healthcare to citizens of the Colville Tribes. Over the course of his career, Mel served in numerous leadership roles and has represented Tribal governments in national and international forums. Through that leadership, he strengthened the voice of Tribal nations at the national level and helped secure protections and opportunities that continue to benefit Native families and communities today. It is my honor to join the Colville Tribes, the people of Washington State, and all those throughout Indian Country in congratulating Mel Tonasket on this remarkable milestone. Mel, we wish you the best of luck in your retirement and hope you can create more memories in this next stage of your life.

Ms. CANTWELL

Ms. CANTWELL. Mr. President, the attack on vote by mail and other efforts to disenfranchise Americans, whether it is the SAVE Act or redistricting to take away representation from minority-majority districts as the result of the Supreme Court decision in Louisiana v Callais--all of these are actions to take away the right to vote. Voting in America is a right. It is your right to vote. And for too long, that precious right has been denied to too many. Americans have been beaten, they have been bloodied, and some have given their lives just to secure this right to vote. Women had to fight for it in 1920. It is amazing that I stand here today, just a little over 100 years later, but 100 years ago, I would not even have been allowed to vote. Wars have been fought to preserve it. My father and uncle both fought in World War II, and I guarantee you they were fighting for our right to vote. And even in this Chamber, we had to fight to preserve and certify the 2020 election. So when we are talking about voting rights, we are not talking about an abstract idea. In Pennsylvania, in 1871, a man named Octavius Catto walked towards a polling place in the city of Philadelphia. He was a Black educator, a Civil War militia officer, and a respected civic leader. He believed that the promise written into our Constitution after the Civil War, the promise that Black Americans would be citizens and voters ought to mean something--that in the streets of his own city, he could cast a vote. On election day, he thought that is what citizens were supposed to do. So he went to vote. He never came home. He was gunned down in broad daylight by a White assailant amid a storm of racially charged violence designed to drive Black voters away from the polling place. His killing was not random. It was part of a campaign of terror, a message to every Black citizen: If you dare to exercise your political power, if you dare to walk to that ballot box, you will pay with your life. Nearly a century later, in Mississippi, in 1966, the tactics had changed, but the target was the same: Black Americans who insisted on their right to vote. Vernon Dahmer, Sr., was a Black farmer and businessman. If he dared to exercise his rights, what would happen? Black Americans insisted on their vote, and Dahmer was a Black farmer who led his local NAACP branch and understood that a poll tax, a fee that poor people could not afford, was being used as a weapon to keep Black people off the voting rolls. So he made a simple, courageous pledge: No one would be denied the chance to register because they could not afford to pay the tax. He went on radio and told the people of Mississippi that he would personally help pay their poll tax at his store. The response was not a policy debate; it was terror. In January of that year, the Ku Klux Klan firebombed his home while his family slept inside. Vernon Dahmer fought back long enough to get his wife and children to safety, but he did not survive. He died from the burns and smoke inhalation because he had taken a public stand that poor Black citizens should be allowed to be registered and vote. And while bombs and bullets are no longer used today, the intent to silence certain voters has not disappeared; it has just changed form. Disenfranchisement today is more bureaucratic, it is more technical, but the results for ordinary citizens can be the same. Their voices are shunned out of a democracy. In Texas in 2021, a new law, SB 1, rewrote the rules for voting by mail. It required voters to provide specific ID numbers on applications and ballot envelopes. The rules were confusing, the process was unforgiving, and in the next primary, thousands of longtime voters, many of them elderly, disabled, or from communities of color, found that their ballot requests or their ballots themselves were rejected-- not because they were ineligible, but really because a form and the number on the form did not match. Researchers working at the Brennan Center describe one such voter, a Texan in her 70s. She had done exactly what was asked: She had voted by mail reliably in 2016 and 2018 and in the 2020 general election. She had played by the rules as they were explained to her. Then, under the new law, her 2022 ballot was rejected. No one threatened her at the polls with a gun. No one burned her home, but instead, a letter, a notice informed her that her ballot did not count. Her voice had been quietly erased. And now, we know that voters in her situation are far less likely to turn out in the next election. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was necessary because a century after the 15th Amendment, voters of color were still systematically blocked from ballots or facing literary tests, poll taxes, or just plain intimidation. Before 1965, Southern States in particular used these tactics to ensure that Black citizens would not register to vote everywhere where they were the majority of the population. The Voting Rights Act was needed because early civil rights laws had proven too weak. Congress needed to say explicitly, in those laws, what the courts and what we needed to affirm. Congress said the Federal Government should oversee elections as it relates to preclearance of voting changes in those States with discriminatory histories, places of discrimination. Why was this important? Just like all civil liberties that aren't implemented by the States, yes, the Federal Government should step in and make sure your civil rights and civil liberties are upheld, but some people here in this body don't believe in implementing those. And even though the Senate--this body--reauthorized the Voting Rights Act by a vote of 98 to 0 in 2006, the Supreme Court has eroded the gains of the Voting Rights Act over the last decade. So why are we here fighting today? Because today, Democrats are opposed to an unconstitutional Executive order, a U.S. Postal Service rulemaking on mail-in and absentee ballots, and other efforts by the administration to enable the Federal Government to seize control over voter rolls and the vote by mail system. The administration's actions are unconstitutional. Article I, section 4 of the Constitution gives the States the primary responsibility of administering the elections. Congress has the secondary role. The President has no role. The Framers of the Constitution were deliberate about this. The Constitution entrusts the elections to the States, so that they can't be manipulated by a self-interested executive branch. In the State of Washington, on a bipartisan basis, vote by mail was implemented more than 40 years ago. By 2011, the State legislature made vote by mail the statewide standard of all elections, and yes, we are talking about a lot of Western States that are in the same boat. Washington was second only to Oregon, which adopted universal vote by mail in 1998. Today, there are 36 States that use no-excuse vote by mail. That means 36 States say you can get a ballot to cast your vote, and you don't have to make up an excuse, like you are working or in the hospital or are going to be out of the country. You can just request a mail-in ballot. In 2024, among people voting for President in South Dakota, 35.6 percent voted by mail. In Indiana, the number was 53 percent voting by mail, and in Utah, over 91 percent of people voted by mail in 2024. I don't remember President Trump questioning the results of those elections. The fact is, many election officials in these States are calling on other States to adopt this very secure, very traceable voting system. Voting by mail is not only convenient; it actually encourages civic participation. Research by the University of Southern California found that universal vote by mail increased turnouts among registered voters by 5.6 percent in the 2020 election. Other research shows that these numbers could be somewhere between 4 and 10 percent for seniors and the disabled. So giving people the right to vote is actually helping, and it is no surprise that 40 percent of seniors are voting by mail--but somehow we want to disenfranchise them? In the 2024 President election, 47 million people, about 1 in 3 U.S. citizens, cast their ballots by mail, and 40 percent of the Americans 65 and older did so, the highest rate of any group. So we have already said it is safe, it is secure, it is reliable, and among the 89,991,893 ballots cast in my State from 2008 to 2025--so really a 16-year period of time--the Heritage Foundation only found 5 cases of voter fraud, 5 cases in 16 years. In the State of Washington, we verify every voter, every election, with 100-percent signature matching bar codes, a paper trail, and an ID number if you want to track it yourself. But last December, the U.S. Postal Service changed the location where your mail is postmarked. Instead of postmarking your mail where you drop it off at the post office, your mail isn't postmarked until it is processed at a regional distribution center. This can delay postmarking up to several days. For example, following the changes in the postmark practices, the secretary of the State of Washington is seeing increased numbers of return ballots being rejected for late postmarks. For example, during the 2026 February special election, 75 percent of the total rejected ballots were due to late postmarks. Snohomish County, WA, recently conducted a test to assess the postal delivery times in their area. This was a small test: four dates in January and February during a special election, a tiny sample of voters in one county, but of the sample ballots mailed, only about 20 percent were postmarked on the day they were actually mailed--20 percent. Are we saying we are going to allow voters who vote by mail to be disenfranchised because this administration is trying to force the Postal Service to say they are not going to stamp your ballot on the date that you mail it at the post office? What about your Social Security check? What about other things that you would like to see postmarked the day they are mailed? What about legal documents? What about other issues? No. We are promulgating here a story of mischief that doesn't need to be here to suppress voters on election day. Only about half of the 15 test mailings were postmarked that election day. The Postal Service issued a proposed rule to take control of who can receive a ballot and whose vote will be counted if you vote by mail. This is preposterous. They want to use a Department of Homeland Security database notorious for erroneously finding eligible voters to be ineligible. That is right. That is what can happen to you: All of a sudden, now your name is on a database, and you are ineligible, even though you are really eligible. On election day in Snohomish, about half of the postmarks were postmarked that day. Let me say this again: The post office is reasserting it can decide who gets a ballot, and they would decide who can cast a ballot by mail. Fortunately, yesterday, a Federal court blocked the use of the DHS database, at least for now, as a violation of every American's privacy, but that litigation is continuing, and yesterday, the Postal Service declined to provide a witness to testify in the State of Washington at our State legislative committee about this issue. Why? If you are so proud of these tactics, if you think they are so great, why don't you show up at the Washington State Legislature and testify about what is happening? With the administration's plan, if you are among \1/3\ of Americans that vote by mail, you can never know whether your vote was counted. There is no recourse. I ask my colleagues: This is an assault on your right to vote. This is an assault on having your voice heard, whether it is a new rule delaying when mail is postmarked or prohibiting counting ballots received later than election day, whether it is demanding the DHS continue to purge names, they just want to take your rights away. Last week, over 100 FBI agents raided the Ohio voting rights group the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, searching their offices, taking computers, knocking on the doors of volunteers without subpoenas. A few days later, the FBI went after one of the Nation's leading nonprofit voter outreach coordination hubs, America Votes, a DC-based organization that works to turn out voters nationwide. They went after America Votes because it is among the voter organization that funds the Ohio Organizing Collaborative. America Votes works with 400 organizations, including the AFL-CIO, Human Rights Campaign, Planned Parenthood, Emily's List, and the American Federation of Teachers to educate voters and get out the votes. It is an outrage that Kash Patel is sending FBI agents to intimidate advocacy groups that work hard to turn out voters, particularly those of color. My family has always fought to get out the vote. My parents lived and worked alongside people like Robert F. Kennedy and knew of Martin Luther King's voice. Martin Luther King, Jr., on a trip to Seattle, said: Are we going to be ``an echo rather than a voice, a taillight instead of a headlight''? When I think about what we are seeing today, I see the same thing for my colleagues over here. Are you going to be an echo for the Trump administration about this ludicrous idea of the SAVE Act? Are you going to be an echo for this ludicrous idea that our States that have vote by mail may all of a sudden now be subject to what the President, Homeland Security, and their enforcement of the post office is going to do to our ballots? Or are you going to be a headlight for the future of our country and the future of our democracy? I ask my colleagues to stand up for your vote, your constituents' votes, and for our rights, because if we don't stop this, I guarantee you, millions of Americans will be disenfranchised. Our future is much brighter with a system that allows millions of people in my State--80 percent, sometimes, of voters--to vote and do so with certainty and to follow their ballot. Let's not let this 2026 election be stolen by people who want to get rid of the rules that we have lived by. Too many of those people that I mentioned died to get this right to vote, or the women who fought to get the right in 1920 and to preserve it, or the people who have fought in wars to make sure that we have this privilege and right. Let's hold on to it. I yield the floor. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Virginia.

Ms. CANTWELL

Ms. CANTWELL. Mr. President, I rise to recognize the recent retirement of one of my most respected staff members: Shannon Smith. Shannon is a native of Washington and is returning home to be in Seattle. I am not sure Shannon ever imagined she would be living in Washington, DC, serving on the Senate Commerce Committee, especially after a long, successful career with the Washington State attorney general's office, where she led the consumer product division, investigating fraud and deceptive practice and holding bad actors accountable for their actions. The pull to service was clearly still strong, and she once told me that she expected that Washington, DC, would be a good place for her to continue that growth. She lasted here 5 years, and we are so grateful for that because, during that time, she led an impressive effort on the Consumer Protection, Technology, and Data Privacy Committee. Her time on the committee during the Covid crisis helped us fashion legislation that was important in stopping bad actors from hawking online products that clearly had no solutions to the impacts of Covid. She worked very hard, especially on children's online privacy, and working hard on college sports issues. She did a very important task for us in the legislation that we are talking about now, but it was really her real world experience that was so valuable on the consumer product and safety issues of our committee. I think it is very important tonight to thank her for that work. And while I wish that our consumer products organization was a better organization than today, I know she helped stop some very bad cases from moving forward. She also led the 2021 reauthorization of the Minority Business Development Agency, which was for the first time established as a permanent Agency--a very important organization to help deliver resources to communities and grow minority businesses, a great victory for them. She was also instrumental in drafting the American Privacy Rights Act that I introduced with then-Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers who served as the chair of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. So we worked very hard, so when the Trump administration and Republicans sought to override State laws protecting consumers from the harms of AI, Shannon understood exactly what that would mean for our State and attorneys general across the Nation. She helped rally those voices against preemption of these most important consumer issues. Most recently, as I mentioned, Shannon led the drafting of the Protect College Sports Act. Actually, before that, she led the drafting of legislation with my colleagues Senators Booker and Blumenthal on sports, legislation with Senator Blackburn and Cornyn on sports and agents, and legislation with, recently, Senator Schmitt on the Sports Broadcasting Act. I want to thank her for all those efforts--but clearly, efforts that are now enshrined by all of those bills in the Protect College Sports Act that helped student-athletes' protections be made into Federal law. Potentially, this will help us in the college sports system in the current arms race that threatens the future of women and Olympic sports. So we couldn't have done it without her. I want to thank her for her great work to the Commerce Committee and for protecting Americans from harm. I told her, when she recently left, I was going to make her a jersey that said ``Shannon Smith-Njigba'' because she is like Smith-Njigba, our famous Seahawk player that had very deft moves on the sidelines and caught lots of passes. That is what Shannon did for consumers; that is what she did to protect us from online privacy faults and to protect us from AI and now, hopefully, to protect us from the ills of college sport. We are going to miss her, but her retirement was very, very well earned, and I thank her for that service to our Nation. I yield the floor.

Ms. CANTWELL

Ms. CANTWELL. Mr. President, the Senator from Alabama is right about one thing, and that is that college sports is facing a crisis. Today, we see a free-for-all driven by ever-increasing spending on football and basketball. Non-revenue sports are paying the price, with more than 100 programs cut since 2024. Women's and Olympic sports are paying so dearly that it is hard for them to continue to compete. We are well aware of this in the State of Washington. Conferences have been realigned in such a way that athletes are traveling across the country every week just to play one another. But we cannot solve this problem facing college sports' ecosystem by just addressing transfers and eligibility. We need a solution. I believe we need a Federal law on the NIL rights for athletes, for their health and their safety. And we need a solution that will create more opportunities for future collegiate athletes, and we need a solution that will grow a bigger pie for those non-revenue sports, so they too can keep their teams competitive. The good news is that the Protect College Sports Act that Senator Cruz and I introduced does those things. Most importantly, it enshrines into Federal law student-athlete rights to earn compensation for their name, image, and likeness, and for student-athletes to receive a share of revenues from their school's media and advertising and sponsorship and tickets. Athletes will also be protected from unscrupulous agents and deceptive or predatory contracts, and believe me, that is going on right now. You could pass our bill just for that alone. And the bill establishes scholarship protections for athletes, healthcare requirements for athletes for playing, and the health and safety standards that I mentioned. All of these are important tools. On the other hand, my colleague from Alabama's Student Athlete Act seeks only to address eligibility rules and the transfer portal. It does nothing to address these larger issues of athletes' rights, of women's and Olympic sports, and the need for revenue. In fact, this bill simply gives the NCAA the ability to make rules in these two subject areas without the broader health and safety protections that we seek in our legislation. If enacted, it would leave athletes more vulnerable for the future. For eligibility, it calls for 5 years from a date certain with absolutely no exceptions. Should we not grant athletes exceptions for pregnancy if a student-athlete gets pregnant and needs to take time off? Should they lose their eligibility for that? For religious missions? If an athlete decides to go on a religious mission, should they lose their eligibility for that? Or should they lose their eligibility if they stand up to defend our Nation and want to come back and play? Should they lose their eligibility for that? Are we really going to punish student athletes because of these issues--because of parenthood, because of church or country? I don't think so. I cannot support a rule that would punish student athletes for this. And for the transfer rule under this bill, I have the same concerns. Again, we see that there are no exceptions, no exceptions for things like if the athlete's sport is cut--it is impossible for them to compete in the next season. Or if athletes suffer from sexual assault or harassment. As if that hasn't happened in college sports, trust me, it has happened. I do not believe a woman facing sexual assault should have to play for the same people, and she deserves to get transferred out of that school. So I know my colleague from Alabama is trying to be well-meaning. He has said several times tonight that my colleague and I have worked hard on this legislation. We have. We have because we believe, just like he does, that it is preserving college sports that is critical--not just for those, the 2 percent of the system, or 3 percent, that might play in a sport that does generate revenue, but for the 500,000 athletes that are part of our collegiate system. We cannot continue to see these athlete numbers diminish. We can't wake up and be in the next Olympics and wonder what happened to the training of our athletes, only to find out they got cut because we couldn't end an arms race in the football spree that we are seeing today. So I think that we are going to continue to push ahead on a more broad issue, and for that reason, I object.

Ms. CANTWELL

Ms. CANTWELL. Mr. President, I come to the floor to speak in support of the Senator from Rhode Island's resolution, S. Res. 551, and applaud him for recognizing that sea level risings are accelerating the rates that we are seeing and driving measurable impact. So my colleague from the Midwest objecting to this is very disturbing because even our colleague from Maine and I--the Senator from Maine, Senator Collins--had gotten CBO to do two different reports over the last 8 or 9 years to say: How much is climate change costing the Federal Government and Federal taxpayers? The first study came back and said it is costing us billions of dollars, and the most recent one said it is costing us trillions of dollars. So, literally, you are costing taxpayers trillions of dollars because you don't want to adapt or mitigate those impacts. I can tell you that these are real-world impacts, and, certainly, when 45 percent of the U.S. economy is happening in coastal areas, that means those coastal economies can be impacted by rising sea levels, and that means that our economic output can be impacted. So we were trying to do something about that. So I want to thank Senator Whitehouse for his leadership on this important issue. He is out here, time and time again, talking about this, articulating the issues, actually traveling his State, traveling the country, being an articulate voice on why rising levels of our oceans are important, why ocean acidification is important, why protecting fisheries is important, why helping shellfish growers is. You know, we did some research, Senator Whitehouse, at the University of Washington. It was only a few hundred thousand dollars. But we had five generations of shellfish growers about to go out of business because of the fact that ocean acidification had changed the temperature in the water, and we could not figure out how to seed for those shellfish. And the science that was done at the University of Washington helped us come up with a new process and saved the day. But what is the next challenge going to be? So we need to strengthen our coastal resiliency in the face of this climate change. So I really also applaud our colleague Senator Markey, who is a member of the Commerce Committee, also from an ocean State, very dependent on an ocean economy for lots of different issues. He wants to make sure that we are applying the best science to protecting these economies. As I mentioned, a nonpartisan Government Accountability Office cost report found that climate change will cost taxpayers more than $1 trillion by 2039. So I know the Presiding Officer knows all about what happens when FEMA and disasters happen and we need to help States. But just imagine that that bill is now going to be $1 trillion by 2039, and rising sea levels are going to be part of that cost. Washington, my State, is already seeing real-world impacts from this, particularly in sea level rise. Puget Sound levels are projected to rise 1.6 feet by 2050 and as much as 10 feet by 2100. And statewide, we are expecting to see 1 to 3 feet by the end of the century. So that does have an impact. And the kind of changes that we are talking about can have impacts specifically on infrastructure. Sea level rise will worsen coastal flooding. It will impact storm surge. It will likely--just for example, what does that mean? We have a highway system that runs right up and down our Puget Sound area that can be impacted at times. We have had a lot of erosion lately, now twice, right outside of Bellingham, and I-5 has been closed. OK, why is I-5 closing? Because we have had so much rain, we have had so much impact-changing environment that we basically have had to have I-5 shut twice just to clean up from the mudslides. Our Amtrak service, which runs all the way from California up to British Columbia, also has been impacted by huge slides after rain and after these swollen rivers. And the increased likelihood of ground instability during earthquakes also magnifies devastating events and threatens critical areas like roads, bridges, and fiberoptic cables in greater Seattle, which could all be underwater as early as 2030. So we just had a massive flood out in the Northwest, in December, and that impact was just unbelievable--one of the biggest. You know, thank God we had the information from NOAA. And thank God, what did we do? In King, Pierce, and Snohomish Counties, we basically, over the last decade, planned for mitigation and adaptation. We built a canal system. We built a system that allowed us to take some of that water and create a flow of the massive amount of water that happened during that flood. And we were able to, literally--we lost one individual. That was it. We were so proud that we had made it through most of that, until one individual drove into a flooded area and, unfortunately, lost their life. We are very, very sorry for them and their family. But when we planned and did adaptation and mitigation, when we looked at culverts, when we looked at diking systems, when we looked at relieving the pressure, we were able to lessen the impact. So it is not unlikely that any of these floods or any of these rising water issues impact a major transportation system in our State, whether it is I-5, I-90, or Highway 2, or some of these other facilities. So we pay a lot of attention to this because we have got a lot of product going to the Pacific right through our State. And so if any of these infrastructure resources are closed, it is literally millions and millions and millions of dollars a day. So rising wastewater is also an issue. So treatment facilities around Puget Sound and Elliott Bay are increasingly vulnerable to flooding and overflow, threatening the release of bacteria, toxic chemicals, and other pollutants into our waterways and our drinking water. Those risks and costs only grow as the water rises. In the State of Washington alone, 2 million people live in areas susceptible to flooding, with $86 billion of infrastructure at risk. And that number continues to grow as sea levels rise. Nationally, 34 million Americans live in low-elevation areas at risk to sea level rise. That is literally 1 in 10 Americans. So why ignore it? All my colleague was trying to do is to say we should recognize this threat and start to work toward solutions. Sea level rise endangers one of the cornerstones of our State's heritage and economy, and that is salmon. We all in the Northwest want to make sure that rising sea levels do not impact our estuaries and our wetlands, but that is exactly what these rising sea levels are supposed to do, significantly reduce estuaries and wetlands by 2100. These areas are critical for juvenile salmon as they migrate to the ocean, as well as birds and important wildlife. Just this week, Isabella Breda at the Seattle Times wrote a piece about how the Chinook salmon--I think I have got to get this for the Senator from Rhode Island because it is a great story. It is on the front page of the Seattle Times. But it is literally about monitors in the river because we are trying to monitor these storms, because when we have--this is the area where, several years ago, we had a massive mudslide in Oso, which killed dozens and dozens of people, unfortunately. And so we know we can have major events, and we need to do better. So, basically, it is about how Chinook salmon in the Stillaguamish River are vulnerable to the flooding that disrupts the riverbed sediments that are needed for spawning. So we are trying to understand this because it is kind of like a massive amount of flooding can just wash away the salmon beds. And in this river alone, Chinook populations are down to roughly 10 percent of their historic levels. So this is really important to us. As a State, we want salmon. We want to understand rising sea levels. We want to understand what flooding is going to do to create damage. When are those spawning grounds going to be lost, and when are Chinook survival rates going to continue to drop? We want to know. Many of the 29 federally recognized Tribes in my State have already been seeing the impacts of climate change and are already preparing for the worst. And I know some people may not know the geography of our country, but we are talking--OK, let's just say that we are talking way out on the Pacific coast. Tribes like the Hoh Indian Tribe, the Quinault Indian Tribe, the Quileute Tribe, and the Shoalwater Bay Tribe are all located along the Pacific coast, and the threat of sea level rise has forced them to take aggressive, unprecedented actions to move parts of their reservations to higher land. Some have had to plan for full-scale relocation of coastal villages to mitigate the increasing dire threat of floods due to sea level. Trust me, the Army Corps of Engineers is out there, practically on a monthly basis, trying to come up with a plan to mitigate the impacts of the Pacific on the Shoalwater Tribe. Others are working tirelessly to mitigate the cumulative effects of coastal erosion, including inland flooding and extreme weather events. For some of our coastal Tribes, the situation is incredibly dire. Not long ago, when I was visiting the Shoalwater in Tokeland, WA, many of the homes and government buildings that were there on the beach and the shoreline you could just tell were quickly eroding. And so this is about whether we give them a resolution. This resolution that we were talking about makes clear that we cannot bury our heads in the sand while climate change and sea level rise put billions of dollars of infrastructure and millions of Americans at risk. If we want to protect our economy and these communities, we need the data and the science to understand the problem. We need to take the necessary steps to protect our communities and our infrastructure and our economy. So I urge my colleagues to reconsider. I hope that we will have S. Res. 551 before us again. I hope that some of our colleagues on the other side of the aisle that represent coastal States will talk to our colleague from Wisconsin and encourage him to, instead, support this legislation. We have to do better planning. We have to do better adaptation and mitigation. We have to use better science. And we have to recognize that the impacts of rising sea levels in our oceans really, really do affect our economy. I am so proud of our fishing economy in the Northwest. I think we sometimes--the Senator from Massachusetts and I, you know, basically debate back and forth about best seafood and best aquaculture. And I know the Senator from Rhode Island also has a lot to brag about. But that number--45 percent of the economy being in coastal regions of the United States of America and us doing nothing to think about what is the adaptation and mitigation that we need to do is just wrongheaded. We need these. I don't even know if the Senator has got any data on this, but I would assume he has thought about this from a military perspective. I have got a lot of military bases in our State, and they are very close to water. What are they going to do when sea level rises? What do we have to do to mitigate and adapt so that those bases continue to be successful, particularly at a moment when the Pacific is becoming even more interesting? So, again, I thank the Senator from Rhode Island for helping lead this charge every night but particularly tonight.