Brian Schatz

Mr. SCHATZ

Mr. SCHATZ. And we have the Fair Housing Law, we have equal employment law, like you are not allowed to discriminate in housing. And so just to understand, they are not trying to just like cancel these programs related to DEI; they are trying to cancel the civil rights movement, like in statutory law, and defund anything that mentions a woman or mentions gender or mentions civil rights, right? And these are like long-settled questions. And so everybody needs--we don't need to spend all night talking about this, but we do need to--like to me, when I saw that thing where it was maybe DEI was the cause of a plane crash, I thought, this is when the DEI thing jumped the shark. And as I see these pages, you can Google ``jumping the shark'' later on.

Mr. SCHATZ. Don't Google it. Google doesn't work anymore. But anyway, this is the end of this as a useful way to understand something. It is now just an epithet that you hurl when you are not sure what else to say, right? And so, look, back to Russell Vought for a moment, he is part of a crew, right? And it is Homan, it is Brendan Carr of the FCC, who is now trying to intimidate the media. The Project 2025 crew is--I mean, they are really rolling. They are populating the Cabinet of the President. And the President was clever enough during the campaign to disassociate himself with Project 2025, but that did not last long because about two-thirds of his senior staffers are closely affiliated with 2025. This isn't some like ancillary thing; they are like in it. Let me read to you something from my local FOX affiliate: Hawai'i's rural healthcare at stake as federal funding freezes The freezing of federal funds has thrown many nonprofit organizations in Hawaii, especially those providing healthcare services, into a state of uncertainty. Amongst these organizations is the Maui AIDS Foundation, which serves some of the most vulnerable populations on Maui. Linda Puppolo, executive director of the [Maui AIDS Foundation], is deeply concerned about the potential consequences of this freeze. Many clients fear being exposed in other healthcare settings due to stigma, which makes [Maui AIDS Foundation's] discreet, nonjudgmental environment crucial. ``We have quite a lot of clients who are terrified right now because they feel like they will be exposed somewhere else.'' The foundation's operating budget is about $2 million, but a significant portion of that [comes from federal funding]. Some grants are directly administered, while others flow through state agencies. One of the most at-risk programs is the housing subsidy for people living with HIV. And Puppolo fears the worst. Without the housing grant, ``That's over $1 million of our housing subsidies right there.'' People are going to be homeless. In addition to the financial strain, Puppolo expressed frustration with the lack of transparency . . . ``There's a gag order on federal employees, and we can't get any straight answers.'' And by the way, this has been the case, I am sure, Chris, you have seen this in Connecticut, Russell Vought has already done it; he is not even confirmed. He is not even a government employee, but he is clearly already at the helm, and he has clearly already achieved his objective, which is to terrify and terrorize public employees. And so one of the things I have been saying--and it is easy for me to say, I understand that, but I will tell you that the Federal employees I have talked to who got that e-mail saying, ``fork in the road,'' were like, now I am not going anywhere, right? And I know 20,000 people say they signed up for it, but I was thinking about this, 20,000 people out of 2 million--first of all, I don't know if that is true. And certainly, it is unclear to me whether that would be honored, but that is actually 1 percent of the workforce.

Mr. SCHATZ. Well, and just to be clear, they don't even have their e- mail accounts working, so think about that. First of all, it is a little weird to send people home and say, We are still operational, and then they can't even get their dot-aid, dot- gov e-mail to work, and they are not permitted to use their private e- mail to conduct public business. And so I know someone who said: I am reading spy novels, like, I am just killing time. And we are paying them.

Mr. SCHATZ. Right.

Mr. SCHATZ. Well, I think I have been, on one level, trying not to overreact, but I also think there is a little danger of underreacting. And I have been talking about this a little bit with my brother, who is a professor with an expertise in former Soviet Union countries, Kazakhstan in particular. And so in this town--and you know this, Chris--in this town, the worst thing is to be overreacting, like that is just very not cool for the cocktail party and pundit circuit. Everything is always going to be fine, and if you are alarmed, you are shrill; that means you are not savvy. And the savvy thing is always that this will land fine. And I feel like we are sleepwalking into a very dangerous place. And so as I think of my theory of change, just mine, I don't presume to know exactly what we should do, all of us, I know in the legislative context, we have got to do a couple of things: We have got to find opportunities--we only have 47 of us, so we have to find opportunities to find three or four Republicans. And I have had some very constructive conversations with Republican appropriators who are super uncomfortable with what is going on. Now, they might not be quite ready to go public, but they are certainly trying to figure out how they are going to exert their authorities and reestablish that it is coequal branches here. So part of our strategy has to include: Find Republican support where we can. I think part of our strategy has to be, where we can't, to not make it easy for our Republican colleagues as they try to march to the beat of Donald Trump's drum. I think we also have an obligation to just speak out and explain to the public, especially when we are powerless to stop things, what exactly is happening and why it is bad. But the rest of society has a role here too. I think the media has an obligation to stop underreacting, to stop treating super unconstitutional, illegal, ``thuggy'' acts as if it is just, like, the President proposed there be an AI commission or something. The way these things are talked about, it is like: President attempts to reform USAID. It is, like, no, that is not what happened. They stormed in, and they took over the servers. They stand over people and tell them what to do. And if those people don't do exactly what the DOGE folks say--or, yeah, say--they are relieved of their duty on the spot. And then they sent everybody home, and then they got into the secure conference facility, the SCIF. Like, this is not to be characterized as something kind of mundane and, oh, this week there is a markup on the social media bill. Like, this is different, and we have got to treat it differently. And there also is a role for the Federal employee--and, to your point, where they can, because I don't presume to know anybody's personal situation, and a lot of people have other personal stuff going on, and I can't ask for them to be brave on my behalf. But there are some people who are deeply committed and deeply patriotic and care about the mission and care about public service, and all I would ask you is: Stay if you can. Stay if you can. And if someone tries to shove you around and if someone tries to tell you to do something that feels like it might not be permissible, don't do it. Talk to your union. Ask them whether this is authorized by law. Stick, because they are counting on you, sort of, vanishing from the scene. And then the other thing--and, Chris, you and I have talked about this. You are the one that pointed it out to me. The difference between this week and last week is that individual citizens are physically showing up to protest what is happening all across the country. I mean, we have been here in Washington, DC, and we have seen it at the Treasury building and at the Senate--they call it the Senate swamp--and elsewhere. It has been a minute since people have shown up in person this organically, and I think that is a really important aspect of any mass movement to preserve democracy. It can't just be your legislators fighting in the legislative context. We only get credibility if there are people behind us. And now I think--look, I think we were in a bit of a slumber, frankly, and I think the American public was in a bit of a slumber. There was this sense that some people were excited about the election; some people were sad about the election. But everybody was kind of not animated in the same way that they were prior to the first Trump term. And over the last week, people said: Oh, my goodness, this is real. And by the way, even Republicans who were sort of imaging that this was all going to be manageable and that you are just going to get your conservative outcomes with some mean tweets. That is what people thought they were going to get. I really believe that. Good people that I know thought: This guy is going to be good for the economy. He is going to be provocative on line, and that will be that.

Mr. SCHATZ. I am a no on that one.

Mr. SCHATZ. Or pardon everyone in the January 6 event. You know this, and you have talked about this on the floor.

Mr. SCHATZ. They recommend that he pardon, essentially, the people who improperly entered the building. Now, I would have opposed that. But then he just said: You know what? Pardon them all.

Mr. SCHATZ. Yes, I think you are exactly right that we are--look, every day I try to sort out, of the 20 outrages, how many can I even focus on? And to your point, the Gaza thing was deeply offensive, right? Deeply offensive. But also probably not worth devoting a ton of bandwidth to because, by some accounts from people I think who do know, it is pretty clear to me he does not have a plan. He was just literally talking. And so sometimes we are going to have to not quite pull a punch, but not ``hair on fire'' freak out because that is not--to your point, that is not happening, right? That is not happening. They would need an appropriation. They would probably need a war authorization. And, by the way, occupying a country in the Middle East, it doesn't usually work.

Mr. SCHATZ. Yes.

Mr. SCHATZ. He is a smart dude. He is a smart dude, and he is a serious guy and actually knows the government. I mean part of the problem with the DOGE folks is they don't really know what they are even looking for. So they literally just, like, ``Control F.'' Oh, does it say ``gender''? Maybe this is bad; maybe this is woke. That is terrible and irresponsible, but it is also incompetent. But Russ Vought is not incompetent. He has an actual project, not just Project 2025. But he has been like this for a while. He has a view of the government, which is that the bigger the government is, the less freedom you have. And Ben Sasse, our old friend and colleague who is now retired from the Senate, he had that sincere view, right? And it was a kind of radical view. But it was sincerely held that--I mean, I would go to him and go: What about rural health clinics? And, like, he was consistent--nope--right? What about Federal firefighters? Counties can take care of that, right? I don't want to characterize all of Ben's views, but--what about the Federal Emergency Management Agency? Nope, we have got to get rid of that. And FEMA is a really good example of--there are just some things that, if you are going to have a country, that your Federal Government has to do, because I think of two examples: When the town of Lahaina burned down, the County of Maui is kind of small. It is a couple hundred thousand people. It is not a poor county. It has some tax base and all the rest of it, but it is not capable to respond to a disaster where a whole town burned down, was incinerated to the ground in like 3 hours--2,200 structures. So 2,200 structures, basically, between 6 and midnight, all of them gone--110, 109 lives lost. And so the Federal Government comes in when--you know, this is how a disaster declaration works. The county or the State submits something to the President of the United States and basically says: We can't handle this. This disaster is bigger than our ability to handle it, right? And then the President signs the disaster declaration, and then that releases FEMA to go and be on the scene. And if there is no FEMA, there is no recovery. FEMA prevented--I got into some fights with FEMA about the way they were doing it, but they are good humans. They are trying their very best to alleviate suffering. And in the immediate wake of those wildfires, nobody went hungry, nobody lacked a place to live. And it is going to be a long recovery, but people's most basic needs were met. And when I think about Western North Carolina, in particular, on some level it is worse. It was bigger. It was more structures. It was actually more property damage, and it was so vast. I mean, just the portion that got flooded is like the size of small States. And these little towns are not even as big as Maui County, right? These are 500 people, 700 people, 2,000 people, 75 people. If the Federal Government doesn't come in and help folks like that through FEMA, then you are just leaving people, I mean, really to fend for themselves. And over the last year, these disasters keep getting worse and worse. I suppose we can pretend it is not climate change. Even if you want to pretend it is not climate change, you have to concede that something is out there that is causing us to have more frequent and more severe disasters. So let's set aside the question of climate and what we ought to do about it. Everybody knows my view about it, and everybody knows yours. But the fact is we had about $150 billion worth of damage last year. And so I am not prepared to tell small States, small counties, little towns that they are on their own. But that is what Project 2025 wants to do.

Mr. SCHATZ. Before you came on, Senator Kim talked about taking on the New Jersey political machine. Political machines everywhere work pretty much the same. If you behave well, you get your stuff. And pork is distributed based on political alliances. I think you are right to notice that the President of the United States wants to sort of create a Tammany Hall vibe nationwide. I will say, just to take your own advice, that on, say, withholding disaster aid from California, that feels like just--like he is just ranting, and he is not actually in a position to do that because the Stafford Act provides that this is a disaster and that once we fund it, they have to help, and they will help. They are not permitted not to help. Now, he may stretch the boundaries of the law, but I do not think he is in a position to withhold aid. Now, do I think Mike Johnson is going to initiate a disaster supplemental for California? No. But the terrible fact of the matter is, there will be disasters going forward, and they hit blue States and red States equally. You just never know.

Mr. SCHATZ. It is not changing laws regarding disaster preparedness or infrastructure; it is changing laws on voter ID.

Mr. SCHATZ. That is one of the things I have noticed about this President is just the unapologetic ``I have leverage, and I am going to use it'' aspect of it and nobody bats an eyelash. If you behaved like that, you would get lit on fire, appropriately. So I think one of the things that I have noticed over the last couple of weeks is there's--look, Democrats need to understand, this guy is unusually talented. And we used to say ``what a buffoon,'' whatever-- maybe--but he is a very talented politician in a very unconventional way. But he is also not infallible. He is capable of making incompetent decisions. He is capable of being beaten legislatively and in the court of public opinion. Right now, he is in the saddle because he has all these EOs, all these Executive orders. But, eventually, events overtake. And a President, usually, is responding to events rather than creating conditions on the ground. So part of the thing that I want everybody to kind of understand as they feel their frustration, as they kind of process and try to metabolize the flurry of nonsense coming at the American people, is just to understand it is not always going to be like this. They don't have 1,200 days' worth of Executive orders ready to go. And as these things are--some of them are like wishes and could have been a tweet. Many of them are illegal and, in some cases, the President does have pretty raw authority. Tariffs, he can do; and there is not much the legislature can do about it. My favorite EO was--I think it was a Presidential memo, not an EO. But after the plane crash last week, they did a memo that this was Joe Biden's fault.

Mr. SCHATZ. I was like, now we are cooking. He was like, I want another EO to just say it was Biden's fault. That is like when they admitted that what they are doing is when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. They understand that their agenda is so unpopular--their agenda is so unpopular--that they can't even get it through the Congress of their own party.

Mr. SCHATZ. As happened in 2017. They couldn't even do the things that they promised they were going to do, except for the tax cuts. So I think they understand the fundamental weakness of their position, which is we have a President who is likely to do very unpopular things. And although he is not unpopular at the moment, he is, relatively speaking, very unpopular for a newly inaugurated President, historically unpopular for a newly inaugurated President. And it is going to get worse because everybody knows the way he conducts himself does not age well. So they are in a hurry. But it is not always going to feel like this; it is not always going to be like this. They will lose in court. They will lose in the court of public opinion. I am not suggesting we are not about to experience some bad public policy outcomes and that people will not suffer. A lot of bad stuff is about to happen. But the roots of democracy are deep; and like my friend Calvin Say says: ``Bend but don't break.'' I want everybody to understand, ``bend but don't break.'' I am so proud of Chris for coming here and staying from 2 to 5. I may go get a little more coffee and come and join you, or I may take a nap. I yield the floor.

Mr. SCHATZ

Mr. SCHATZ. Madam President, I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. SCHATZ

Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, I want to thank Senator Coons for his leadership on trying to restore international order. And that is what we are talking about. The chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee is talking about reforms to the way we deliver aid. Look, 10 days ago, I had a conversation with Senator Graham, who is the chairman of the committee that has jurisdiction over spending in the State Department--I am now the ranking member of that committee--and we talked about the opportunities for reform. We talked about the need to align American foreign policy with USAID. And to the extent that we are all alarmed at the Belt and Road Initiative, to the extent that we watch what China does internationally and we think, ``How smart of them; we should do something like that,'' the response should be to better align USAID with the State Department's objectives, with our geopolitical strategy, but not to eliminate our power internationally. And I think the point that has to be--has to be--understood right now--because some Republicans that I am talking to kind of agree that we don't want to get rid of foreign aid, we don't want to get rid of USAID, but they want to institute some reforms; they want to have a negotiation. Fine. Understand two things: One, this freeze is just flatly illegal. Let me explain what I mean. Every year, we pass an appropriations bill. And unlike in State governments where, if you appropriate money to something, a Governor can actually restrict those funds, our Constitution provides and our statutes provide that when we appropriate money as the article I branch, the executive branch has the obligation to see to it that it is done in a way that is meritorious. But they don't get to decide not to spend the money. If they didn't like a particular provision in a bill, they could have threatened a veto or been part of the negotiation or whatever. But once it is enacted, it is literally the law of the land. The other thing is: USAID is a creature of Federal law. It is true that it was originally established by an Executive order. That is true. But that sort of misses the point. There was an Executive order. Look, if you establish something by an Executive order and nothing follows, then the next President gets to revoke that Executive order. The thing vanishes. That is a total authority that a President has. But what happened was USAID was established by Executive order, and then Congress made a law. So it doesn't matter whether it was originally made by Executive order or memo or speech or that someone sang a jingle to establish USAID. It is now a Federal law, and you don't get to waive it because you don't like it. I just don't understand--look, there will be a Democratic President, and I want people to do the thought experiment of how unbelievably angry you will be when President whoever comes in and says: I am canceling the F-35. I am canceling a road in your community because I don't like it, because it doesn't fit with my ideology, because I won. That is not how this works. And it is sometimes very frustrating, especially when you are the majority party, to understand that all you did was you just won to be at the helm of the executive branch and to be at the helm of the legislative branch. But that didn't mean that you won a monarchy. That doesn't mean that you get to start just issuing memos and that is the new law. I think one of the problems right now is that there really are a bunch of billionaires who really do think: Ah, it ought to run like a business. If what you mean by that is things ought to be efficient and that we ought to be good stewards of the taxpayer dollar, count me in. But if what you mean by that is that there is one CEO and that CEO tells everybody what to do, and it doesn't matter what anyone else thinks or what the rules or the laws are, that is not our system of government. That is not the way this works. So that is No. 1. This thing is illegal. You can hate USAID and still hate what is happening to it because, if this is allowed to stand, it will happen to a Department you like. It will happen to an initiative you like. It will happen to something that you want to protect in your community or that you consider important for the country. So this isn't about the particulars of USAID. Let's have a debate about USAID, but let's have it in the context of the constraints of the Constitution and the laws of the United States. That is not a provocative partisan statement. It is a statement of fact that we all swear an oath to the Constitution and laws of the United States. And the context in which we have fights about things is within the four corners of statutory law. And if you hate a statute, we all know what to do. There is still literally--you know they say put a bill in a hopper? It is the year 2025. We still have a hopper. You can still drop a physical bill in the hopper. You have a proposal--great. But not: I have a proposal; let's draft an executive memorandum and start acting like there is a chief executive officer of the whole country. That is not how this works. The second point is this: People are dying now. People are dying now. So as we think about, ``Oh, what kind of reforms do we want to make? Why don't we align this better with U.S. foreign policy? I want to target wokeism''--or whatever the hell someone wants to think about the USAID budget, all of that is the kind of thing that you can do while you keep the Agency open--my God. I talked to Lindsey the other day, and I said: You know what would be really interesting--because we know administrative tasks are going to get easier and more efficiently done with the advent of AI. And I thought it would be pretty cool to figure out if we could drive the overhead rate in the USAID budget down over a period of time so that more aid goes to the people and the places that we intend it to go to. Now, if there was a for-profit or a nonprofit and you were in the process of trying to become more efficient, right, and you were looking at a bunch of people who did a bunch of things and you think, ``You know, we need an electronic system for this, or we need a better way to do this; we need a better mousetrap,'' you don't shut the whole thing down and then figure it out. I am looking at the Presiding Officer. I am looking at the Senator from Delaware. Both of you have run big operations--private sector, public sector--and you know this is no way to run a railroad. You don't shut something down in order to reform it. You take seriously the proposition that there should be reform. You get aggressive. There should be no sacred cows--all of that. But what they did was they stormed into the offices of a Federal building, sent everybody home, broke into the secure conference facilities, broke into the SCIFs, locked people out of their emails. Does that sound like the United States of America? It really, honestly, does not sound like the United States of America to me. These people were not elected. There is a law in place. And it doesn't matter what you think about this particular Agency. I have got Agencies I don't like. I have got Agencies that I think are spending too much money or too little money. You know what I do about that? I introduce a bill to change it because I believe in the American system of government. And part of what we have to establish here is, Do we believe in the American system of government or has the internet broken our brains to the point where this is just another partisan fight? They stormed into a Federal office and purged employees. Think about how you would view that if it were some faraway place. Think about how the press would cover that if it were in Africa or Central Asia or South America or Central America. They would characterize it, appropriately, as autocratic behavior. So this isn't some small, little partisan dispute among a bunch of progressives who are bleeding hearts and worried about people and suffering and all that. This is about literally: Do we uphold the rule of law in the United States? So many people are in the U.S. Senate who care about this country and fled that kind of authoritarianism: my grandparents, my wife's grandparents. I won't presume anyone else's personal history, but, frankly, most people come to the United States to flee those kinds of behaviors. And so we are here to uphold the Constitution and laws of the United States.

Mr. SCHATZ

Mr. SCHATZ. We are not done, but I yield the floor.

Mr. SCHATZ. Back to the Affordable Care Act: [T]he ACA subsidy schemes simply masks these impacts. That is a funny one. The ACA subsidy scheme masks the impacts, which is really to say we have an inefficient healthcare system--I think everybody can agree with that--and what they mean by ``masking the impacts''--right?--is we have a terrible system; under normal circumstances, people's monthly payment would be 5, 6, 7, $900, and under the subsidy scheme, people will have to pay less, masking the impacts. And so just to understand, there are a lot of euphemisms in here for coming after your healthcare.

Mr. SCHATZ. No. And I thank the Democratic leader for his leadership on this. I will just say, I think the idea of getting rid of USAID is a radical one and a wrong one, but that is actually not what we are arguing about. They stormed into the offices and purged the staff and took over the servers and, we do think, entered the SCIFs. I mean, this is the kind of thing that, if you read about it in the newspaper, it would sound like it was in a country that was falling apart.

Mr. SCHATZ. Yes.

Mr. SCHATZ. It truly is. I thank the leader. It is absolutely unparalleled. The idea that someone from DOGE--we don't even really know who it is--basically barged their way in, had a very contentious negotiation with the Treasury Secretary, and now they have access to the Federal payments database--they have no expertise. There are only five people in the Federal Government who have this kind of access, and somebody was just granted it--

Mr. SCHATZ. It is true. And the firing of the IGs was not just a random, like, ``I don't like those guys'' kind of a firing; it is a precursor to corruption. They literally got rid of the watchdogs, and then they stormed the building. I just want everybody to understand that. The leader is exactly right. It is OMB, and it is IG. So a lot of people out there in the public are like ``I can't sort this all out.'' Think of this it way: They got rid of the watchdogs, and then they stormed the building and took control of the servers and the data.

Mr. SCHATZ. Yes, absolutely. And I think that is one of the things that everyone has to wrap their mind around, is that you might have voted for Donald Trump for whatever set of reasons, but I don't think you signed up for a bunch--it is not just that billionaires are influencing the government--that would be one thing, but it wouldn't be that unusual--but billionaires are in charge of the mechanics of the government. That is different. That is very scary stuff.