Brian Schatz

Mr. SCHATZ

Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the mandatory quorum with respect to the Miran nomination be waived.

Mr. SCHATZ. I ask unanimous consent that the previously scheduled rollcall vote begin immediately.

Mr. SCHATZ

Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, we are 50 days into Donald Trump's second term, and the American economy is already in free fall; prices are soaring, stocks are plummeting, and people are panicking about a recession. None of this was inevitable. All of this is Trump's own making. This week after Trump couldn't categorically rule out that his policies would lead to a recession, Nasdaq had its worst day in years while the Dow Jones dropped a whopping 1,300 points. But it is not just the stock market that is taking a hit; it is regular people everywhere. Consumer confidence is down by 7 points--7 points in 50 days--since Trump took office, and spending has dropped for the first time in 2 years. The dollar is weaker, hiring is slowing, interest rates are unlikely to come down, and the GDP is expected to shrink this quarter for the first time in 3 years. You know, usually Presidents get too much blame or too much credit for the state of the economy but not this time. Trump is going out of his way to plunge the economy into chaos and make life harder for everyone. Whether you are buying groceries or trading stocks or hoping to retire next month, you are getting hit. When the Commerce Secretary was asked yesterday about a potential recession, he said: ``It's worth it.'' ``It's worth it.'' They actually think a recession would be worth it. And if the economic numbers coming in are bad, if they show that the economy is shrinking or the costs are rising, their solution is to cook the books to make them seem better because when the data is bad, change it. Everybody knows that. Instead of getting to work on lowering prices on day one, like he said he would, the President has spent his days plotting the rebirth of a gilded age with tariffs and tax cuts. That was a time when the rich got richer while everyone else got screwed. Trump tells a different story. We were at our richest from 1870 to 1913. That's when we were a tariff country. . . . We were a very wealthy country, and we're going to be [that way again]. So I just want to make clear, yes, I am a partisan. Yes, I think Donald Trump is screwing up the economy. But it is really important for us to understand they actually do have a theory of the case, and that is the golden age from 1870 to 1913. I didn't say that; the President said that. I didn't say ``Hey, these guys think a recession is worth it.'' They said a recession is worth it. It is true that in the gilded age, some people were very wealthy then. Robber barons and business tycoons built enormous empires on the backs of working people, who had little to show for it. Profits boomed. Billionaires emerged. Regular people suffered in tenements and on factory floors, and poverty was everywhere. But the gilded age is exactly what the President is trying to recreate. Whether it is tariffs on our largest trading partners that will jack up the price of our food or our homes or our cars or mass layoffs of the people who inspect our food or keep the skies safe or care for our veterans or the tax cuts for the richest people to ever exist, funded by slashing regular people's healthcare and hard-earned retirement savings, all of this is about taking money from people who don't have enough and handing it over to people who already have more than anyone has ever had. Whether you voted for Trump or not, whether you believed he would be good on the economy or not, whatever sort of side of the political, tribal, ideological, partisan, algorithmic divide that we are all experiencing in our little filter bubbles on Instagram and TikTok and Twitter and wherever else we get our disaggregated information, this economy sucks. People are paying too much. It is the intentional policy of the President's economic team to recreate a time when--until just about 50 days ago, everybody agreed we should never go back to that time. Kids working on factory floors, people working 70 hours and not able to feed their family, unprecedented disparity between the extremely wealthy and everybody else--that is what they are explicitly going for. This is not me putting spin on the ball. That is what they are saying. That is what the Commerce Secretary is saying. That is what the Treasury Secretary is saying. That is what the President of the United States is saying. This is their plan, and it is going according to plan. These people have the ability to short things and ride the volatility and monetize all of the craziness and make side deals and do crypto and park their assets here and there. They make money no matter what. But if you are retiring next month with a 401(k) or an IRA or a 403(b), you just got screwed. Trillions of dollars of wealth were eliminated. And the President sprang into action. Why? For what purpose? To help his buddy sell cars on the White House lawn. I don't have a preference for electric cars or nonelectric cars. I don't care. That is fine. But what a weird thing to spring into action about when everybody is getting kicked in the face economically except his buddies.

Mr. SCHATZ

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

Mr. SCHATZ

Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, the price of everything is going up. Outbreaks of measles and bird flu are killing people. Airplanes are almost crashing or actually crashing and falling out of the sky. Tens of thousands of Federal workers, including veterans, are being laid off in Donald Trump's government purge. So obviously it is a Monday, and we have two votes tonight, and so we are going to address one of those critical issues. Oh, no. Actually, we are going to do something totally irrelevant to 99.9 percent of all people across the country. Now, let's just start with the basics, which is that everyone has and deserves human dignity without stipulations or preconditions--not just the people you like, not just the people you understand, not just the people you agree with. Every human being is God's creature. Everyone-- especially in the United States of America--has the right to be left alone. That is what freedom means, right? You have to be left alone to live your life however you want within the bounds of the law. So what Republicans are doing today is inventing a problem to stir up a culture war and divide people against each other, and, worse, they are trying to distract people from what they are actually doing, which is, at a time when people are finding it harder and harder to afford the basic necessities, at a time when diseases we eradicated almost 20 years ago are making a comeback and killing kids, at a time when people are getting on flights and saying an extra prayer or breathing a little heavier, you have Donald Trump and the Republicans saying: You know what, let's cut taxes for billionaires. Let's take money from regular people and the things they rely on--Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act. Let's take hundreds of billions of dollars from there and shovel it into the pockets of the richest people who have ever walked this earth because that is what we need and that is what people voted for. Republicans are focusing on the wrong 1 percent. Trans people are not the reason people can't afford groceries or healthcare or housing. The other 1 percent, the top 1 percent economically, is responsible for a lot of that, and that is who Republicans are desperate to help. They are doing it by going after some of the most vulnerable people in our society. I will be joining my Democratic colleagues in voting no on the pending legislation. (Mrs. BRITT assumed the Chair.)

Mr. SCHATZ

Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, as I hear the senior Senator from Iowa, it is like I am living in another world. I am not alleging that Mr. Patel has an enemies list. He is the one that has said that. I am not alleging that he would use law enforcement against Donald Trump's political enemies, he is the one that has said that. And so I will be voting no, and I hope I am wrong.

Mr. SCHATZ

Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, it is not often that the stakes of a vote to confirm a Cabinet nominee are this high, but tomorrow, when we vote on the nomination of RFK, Jr., to be the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, the stakes will be life and death. Mr. Kennedy, in his words but more importantly in his actions, has proven over and over again that he is a unique danger to society, but he is on the edge of becoming the country's top health leader, with the power to unleash bygone diseases and undermine trust in science for generations to come. For the first time ever, we will have a Health Secretary who has actively helped to cause outbreaks instead of to contain them. We will have someone in charge of medical research who has taken every opportunity to undermine science instead of promoting it. We will have someone who has never come across a crazy idea that he didn't like, whether it is that anti-depressants are the cause of mass shootings or that chemicals in the water are turning children gay. This is the Secretary of the Health and Human Services Department. Those two things right there should be immediately disqualifying. This should be 100 to 0. This guy used to be a Democrat. This guy was pro-choice. This guy was for clean energy. This shouldn't be a partisan issue, except to say, for HHS, you need somebody who has devoted their life and hopefully has some expertise in the area of public health. It is not just that we didn't get someone who has expertise in public health, we have someone who has caused disease and death. I say those words with precision. I understand that both sides of the aisle are prone to exaggerating their case and being apocalyptic when we describe a pending vote. I have been here for a while, and everything is always the most important vote that we will ever cast. I don't know if this is the most important vote we will ever cast. I do think--gosh, I hope I am wrong; I really do hope I am wrong--I do think this is likely the Cabinet Secretary vote that is likely to age the most poorly because this person has the potential to actually cause diseases like rubella, like mumps, like measles, like polio that have been gone for many generations because we have a vaccine regime. I want to tell you what he did in Samoa. In 2019, he flew to Samoa to discourage people from taking the measles vaccine. The reason was that he wanted to run a ``natural experiment'' to see how people would fare against the disease without protections. Some of you may know this. My father was the first whistleblower against the Tuskegee experiments in which the U.S. Public Health Service did a similar thing. They knew that penicillin cured syphilis, and they knew that, for the most part, untreated syphilis caused death. But the U.S. Public Health Service decided to divide a cohort of African-American men into two parts. One would receive the medicine and be safe and be cured. Another cohort would receive a placebo and not get the lifesaving cure for syphilis. Why did they do that? To ``observe the disease process.'' To observe the disease process. When you investigate whether or not a medicine works, there is a whole process to it--the FDA, double-blind studies, all the rest of it. The basic idea is that you try to get to some level of reliability or statistical significance so you can project out into the population what is going to work and what is not. The sick-in-the-head way to do it is to say you can't achieve statistical significance until you just let a bunch of people get sick and figure out what happens. The U.S. Congress, led by someone with whom I served for a couple of years, Tom Harkin, when they found out about the Tuskegee experiments, they made a law against U.S. Public Health Service ever doing that again because it is immoral. It is bad science, sure, but more than that--they treated these African-American men as if they were worth experimenting on; as if this category of human beings in the United States was expendable for scientific research purposes. And that is exactly what happened in Samoa. That is exactly what happened in Samoa: 6,000 people got the measles, 83 people died, 79 of them were kids. It is so chilling to contemplate the idea that someone as recognizable as a Kennedy would fly across an ocean to a small, developing country and basically tell everybody: Be afraid of this lifesaving medicine. It is not like he did that once and said ``I am sorry, I misunderstood'' or ``I am being misunderstood.'' This dude actually sells onesies on his website saying--I think it is like ``Unvaxxed, Unafraid'' for a little baby. This guy has views that are out of the mainstream of, I would guess, 99 out of 100 U.S. Senators. I do understand the pressure that some of my colleagues are facing. They are being told: If you vote against one Trump nominee, you will be primaried. That is not a small amount of pressure. But this one, I just promise you, is not going to age well. Some of my colleagues are expressing reservations in private. I think that is better than not expressing any reservations at all. Some of them are getting private assurances from Mr. Kennedy that he does not, in fact, hate all vaccines; he just wants to answer questions and all the rest of it. I am not reassured. I think this person has demonstrated over a pretty long career that he says whatever is convenient in the moment. This is like an unreconstructed--he is a Kennedy. He was running for President in the Democratic primary, and now he is a Trump guy like 10 months later. What does that mean? It means he has no core values. There is just no way to go from over here to over here politically in such a short period of time except that he was offered something, and he was offered this job. Why does he want this job? Because he has a very specific view about public health. I just want to make one other point. The problem of our food system, the problem of the extent to which we subsidize ultraprocessed foods that are coming from commodities, that are subsidized in the farm bill and causing people to get increasingly diabetic and all the related health problems that happen related to that--that is a really legitimate place to do some good, bipartisan work. I would love to do that. It is also not what the HHS Secretary does. It is what the U.S. Department of Agriculture does for the most part, and it is what the Congress does. The problem is the farm bill. The problem is, you get what you subsidize, and we are subsidizing all the corn products and all the soy products and all the sugar products that go into the lab-tested, extra- delicious, extra-bad-for-you, extra-addictive stuff that is making us all--even though we are the wealthiest country in human history--a very unhealthy country. If that is all this guy were working on, you could count me in. But if your idea of public health has to do with healthy food, has to do with prevention, has to do with understanding that our food system and our agriculture system and our USDA and our farm bill process is essentially broken, you don't have to purchase this kind of crazy, evil stuff. You just don't. You don't have to do it. There are lots of good people on the food system side you can work with, work for, cheer on, organize with. But this man is going around--he is not talking about the COVID vaccine. He is not talking about whether or not it is appropriate to require masks in public, and Democrats and Republicans are still arguing about stuff like that. He is talking about stuff that, like, if you are a parent and now you don't know whether, when your kid goes to school, they have reached herd immunity for stuff that is like way, way, way, generations back in the rearview mirror. So I don't know if this is going to mark one of the most important public health moments in American history, but I can't think of another time where we actually have the technology, we have the medicine, we have the science, we have the distribution system, we have the public infrastructure to keep people safe, and we just decide by a vote of 53 to 47 to make people unsafe. Secretary of Defense, DNI--all these are important--Treasury--every Cabinet position is important. It is going to be a little more challenging to know whether your vote is vindicated in the sweep of history. I think this guy is going to age very poorly in the job because I think we are going to see bad public health outcomes very, very shortly. This really is a matter of life and death. I understand what I have learned over the last 10 days is, if Republicans are going to display courage, it is not going to be on the Cabinet. There are a few that have voted not with their party, but for the most part, they are in line, and Trump is going to get his Cabinet. But let this be a marker for everybody. Let today be a marker for everybody. Even if you voted for Trump, if you didn't vote for Trump, if you are not a voter--it doesn't matter. If you think it is a good idea to leave all of these diseases in the rearview mirror, then this is a very, very bad person to have running the Department of Health and Human Services. I yield the floor.

Mr. SCHATZ

Mr. SCHATZ. Can I say one thing about--I did not know that this whole Senate is powered on Celsius. I never had Celsius before. I was walking around offering people coffee, and everyone had a Celsius.

Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, I just want to say how much I have come to admire, in a short period of time, the junior Senator from New Jersey. That was a--that was a real speech, you know. We are, obviously, spending 30 hours on the floor to oppose Russ Vought's nomination, and, you know, a lot of people have to come here and speak for 60 minutes or 30 minutes or 90 minutes, and we will take anything, right? Some people just read whatever they have got, and we appreciate all of it because we have to take the floor, and we have to maintain presence on this floor. But that was a beautiful, well-crafted speech about American democracy, about his life story, about his dedication to public service. So I am very honored to work alongside him.

Mr. SCHATZ. Last week, without any advanced notice, OMB issued a memo freezing all Federal funding in order to end wokeness, ``Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies.'' Like, I just want to--we can pause right here, right? This is not the kind of thing that the OMB is supposed to say, right? It is the Office of Management and Budget. They are not supposed to have an opinion about wokeness or not wokeness or anything like that. It is just a very odd way to view what is otherwise a kind of technocratic position, and that is what is very important about this particular OMB and this particular OMB Director. He does not view it as merely administering the budgets and the spending bills within the government. He views it as a power center through which all of his ideology and all of Project 2025 is going to be implemented. Like, to think of the Office of Management and Budget as a place to fight wokeness and Marxist equity--I don't even know what any of that means, but I think a lot of us know the previous OMB Director. She was really well-regarded by both sides of the aisle. I think the Presiding Officer actually knew her from Louisiana. And, you know, like, she was left of center, but she would never say anything other than what is sort of straight down the middle as it relates to the Office of Management and Budget. And that is--why would we take the floor for the OMB Director? Well, because he is the author of 2025. He is essentially the architect behind the Federal funds freeze. And in Project 2025, among all the things that they talk about, they also, like, devote a huge passage to how important OMB is and how powerful the next OMB Director should be. Just so happens that the author of that section saying the OMB Director should be, like, pretty close to all-powerful and, essentially, representing the President in all things policy and budget, so happens that the guy that wrote that passage is the guy that is going to be in the job to do that. So, I mean, that seems kind of neat. I think OMB should be all powerful; also, I think I should run OMB. So that is what we are talking about. But just understand what happened last week was not some attack on wokeness--whatever the hell that actually means. It was an attack on all of us. It really was an attack on all of us. All Federal funding was suspended. Millions of Americans around the country were in the dark, how they would access basic things--healthcare, education, childcare, small business loans, VA loans, disaster relief, opioid treatment. Everything from road repairs to cancer research was shut down across the country. And you have to ask, aside from the very obvious fact that withholding funding from Congress that has already appropriated funding is plainly illegal, you have to ask: What on earth does so-called wokeness have to do with repairing a road? Or letting people refill their prescriptions at a community center? Or helping survivors of a flood or wildfire to try to rebuild their lives? Is a child having a healthy meal wokeness? Is that DEI? Is that, I don't know, gender ideology, or is that the Green New Deal? Like, seriously, what the hell are we doing here? A President is allowed to make policy. A President is expected to make policy. But they can't take a law and repeal it by Executive order, and especially as it relates to a spending law. Those laws are not actually optional, right? And there is a very simple way for a President to get his way in the spending context. The Republicans control both Chambers of the Congress, the House and the Senate and the Presidency. They had a big victory--I didn't love it, but they had a big victory. So if they want changes in spending policy, they can just do it the American way. And so this is like a combination of laziness, impatience, a not- inconsiderable splash of illegality. But, I mean, this is amateur hour. You want to change something. You want to fight wokeness--again, whatever the hell that actually means. If we have gotten to the point where shutting down a construction project is, like, attacking wokeness, then the actual word has ceased to mean anything. And DEI is this other, like, epithet they throw at things, but it is--the dragnet has caught all of Indian country, most Native people everywhere. Do you know what they did? They literally ``control F'' searched for keywords and then pulled those things out. They don't know anything about these programs. They pulled these things out if it said ``gender'' in it, or if it said ``equity,'' or if it said ``inclusive,'' or if it said ``climate,'' and they just, like, pulled it out and said: We are not funding that. First of all, what a goofy way to make policy. Seriously, what a goofy, like, childish way to make policy. Second of all, just to reiterate, you don't get to do that. If you want to make a change in a law, you have to make a change in a law. You can't just write a memo saying: I don't like the law; therefore, it no longer exists because I won. It is true that the President won a free and fair election, absolutely a free and fair election. I didn't like the result, but I was absolutely prepared to tolerate policy outcomes that I didn't like. But this is not that. This is them, like, skipping a step. And by skipping a step, I mean literally skipping the legislative branch. And so there has been a lot of consternation on the Republican side; I mean, a lot of consternation. Rightwing Republicans, moderate Republicans--all of them are a little, like, I don't know about this. But you can't stand up for the legislative branch in secret. You can't uphold the Constitution privately. At some point, you have to stand up for your prerogatives. And, listen, there is a lot of very talented people here, actually. I don't agree with them. Some of them I don't even like, but supertalented people, high-achieving human beings who could be doing something else. And my view is, like, if you are going to forfeit your constitutional prerogatives, like, go be--I don't know, whatever. Do something else. Do something more interesting. Do something more lucrative. Do something more easy. But if you are going to be here and you are going to go through all the pain of running for election, of getting beat up by everybody left, right, and center, of people complaining about you, of putting your family through challenges--I am serious. Why would you do that and then forfeit, like, I would say two-thirds of the power that you are in possession of. You ran, presumably, to achieve some measure of influence so that you could actually change things. And now there is just a collective shrug of the shoulders. So the problem with Mr. Vought is twofold: One, we have a government with three coequal branches, and Congress is the article I branch that holds the power of the purse, and we decide what to fund and at what levels. And in the face of an illegal action, the courts can step in and strike it down, as several judges did with the original funding freeze memo. And this is one of the things, to the extent that there are at least 20 or 30 people still watching, Donald Trump and his team are running a huge bluff. It is not that they are not causing damage. I know they are causing damage. But understand that what they want to do is multiple illegal things and then see if they can get a few of these things to stick. They have articulated that pretty clearly. Mr. Vought has said that. JD Vance has said a version of that. And just say: We are going to defy the Federal law and see whether we can come up with some judges who will give us a different interpretation. And so the reason that that is an important thing to say is not just for me to be another Democrat saying: I can't believe he did this--but to understand Donald Trump is not the only person in the world who is not constrained by Federal law. We saw last week the Federal funding freeze was found to be illegal and it was suspended and there is an injunction against it. Last week--or maybe it was 2 weeks ago--the birthright citizenship nonsense was rejected by a Federal judge. Even what is happening with the access to the Treasury payments is being constrained in the court system. So I am not, like, Pollyanna about the status of the court system. I am very frustrated, especially with the Supreme Court, and I do not expect, if it is at all a close call, for it to break our way. But these are not close calls. These are clear violations of Federal statutory law, and so we don't want to give up in advance. The roots of democracy are still strong. And, like, my old now-friend, one-time adversary, the Former Speaker of the House in the State of Hawaii Calvin Say, he used to say: Be like the bamboo, bend but don't break. So we all have to understand that Donald Trump is a disrupter, and it is going to be rocky. But this idea that he is just going to rack up wins and there is nothing anybody can do about it is a dangerous premise because it can become self-fulfilling--people out on the streets, people in the courts, people in the legislature. We are out of power, but we are not powerless. So everybody needs to understand that Russ Vought represents a very specific view of Presidential power, which is essentially unitarian, executive--whatever you want to call it. But it is a view that once you win, you are basically a monarch and that all those niceties--rules--I mean literally rules, right? You make a law, and usually the Agency has to make rules to kind of explain specifically how to implement any law. They view that as just an impediment to the inherent constitutional power of one man. This is also consistent with the way that the tech bros view government. They view government as unnecessarily slow, too many checks and balances. Why doesn't the government run like a business? Let me tell you why. Because if you ran government like a business, you would shut down every rural hospital. If you ran government like a business, you would actually not have a national transportation network; you wouldn't have a library in Kai. If you ran government like a business, by the way, most of the money would be spent in the cities. So we have a system of government that we all have to be committed to defending. I want to spend a little bit of time with some letters that I received from constituents last week. I just wasn't expecting it all to go sideways so quickly. After the OMB memo came out that said Federal Agencies must temporarily pause all activities related to the obligation or disbursement of all Federal financial assistance--what a crazy--can you imagine being a person who previously was at OMB--this person is not new to this--issuing a memo saying: Pause all activities related to obligation or disbursement of funds. I knew immediately--I was like, oh, my God. There are these portals, and they are basically websites. If you are the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands or the Hawaii Department of Transportation, almost daily, you are doing draws. You have your little code words. You have to send your little invoice, and then there is an electronic transfer of money to a clinic or a construction project or the Veterans' Administration or whatever it is. Those portals were shut down, and everybody was in an actual panic. I am not exaggerating. People voted for Trump for all sorts of reasons, but one of the reasons that kept coming up over and over: They thought he would bring down the price of eggs, the price of groceries, the price at the pump. What they did not vote for was to lose their ability to get a home loan or healthcare or childcare or a healthy meal or a good education for their children. I want to read a couple of letters from constituents: I am reaching out with a heavy heart as a program planner and student adviser who works directly with students across several Maui County schools. I also want to include representation of our sister programs, which collectively provide vital support for low-income, first-generation Native Hawaiian students. This year has been one of the most difficult in recent memory for our students and their families. The devastating Lahaina wildfires left deep scars in our community, and many of our students are still working to recover from the emotional, physical, and financial toll that disaster caused. For many of them, this catastrophe was a breaking point where they saw their homes, their schools, and even their sense of safety and stability go up in flames. Despite overwhelming loss, these students are still resilient. They are fighting to stay afloat, to keep their dreams alive, and to continue their education, despite the trauma that they have endured. These support programs have been there for them every step of the way, offering them emotional support, academic assistance, and a safe space for students to process their grief and focus on the future. Through our programs, they have found a sense of community and hope. Our academic advisers and mentors have been working tirelessly to ensure, even in the wake of the fire, that these students know that they are not alone, that there is a path forward. But now we face a crisis that can further jeopardize these opportunities for these young people. OMB has imposed a Federal freeze on funds set to take effect at 5 p.m. eastern time. This freeze will halt the disbursement of federal funds, including those essential for our programs. Without access to these funds, we will be unable to continue providing services that our students need to heal, thrive, and succeed. The support that they so desperately need--academic tutoring, mentorship, college prep, and a strong network of peer support--will be in jeopardy. For many of our students, this isn't just a program; it is a lifeline. These students are not just looking for a way to finish high school; they are looking for a chance to rebuild their lives, to break the cycles of poverty and hardship, and to find their footing in a world that has been turned upside down. To take away the programs that have supported them through the wildfires and their ongoing recovery would be devastating. Is this program woke? Is it DEI? Is it Marxist? What the hell are we doing here? What the hell are we doing here? Why would we cause this amount of pain? Some sense of like fiscal discipline? We are not saving the money. On top of everything else, thousands and thousands and thousands of employees--not just at USAID but at the Small Business Administration and at the CIA--were sent home. By the way, because of civil service law, we can't lay them off. It is not a private sector situation. You can't lay them off as a matter of law. So we sent them home to not work. We are shutting people out of their emails to not deliver service to the public. Awesome. Let's run the government like the worst business ever where we are just going to pay people not to work. I am an eighth grade student at Halau Ku Mana in Honolulu, Hawaii. I am writing to ask for your support in protecting federal funding for Native Hawaiian education. The proposed freeze on federal financial assistance under executive memo M-2513 puts programs like ours at risk. Without them, students like me will lose access to the cultural education that connects us to our identity. At Halau Ku Mana, our learning is different from other schools. We don't just sit in a classroom all day. We malama aina, meaning care for the land. We learn from cultural experts and study through real experiences. Programs funded by federal grants allow us to go on educational journeys, restore fishponds, grow food in kalo taro patches, and learn traditional skills. These experiences teach us about our past and prepare us for the future. I guess it was too woke. As your constituent, I am writing to express strong opposition to the White House order to freeze federal funding across all federal agencies. Millions of families will lose access to services provided by SNAP, TANF, and HUD housing assistance. Millions of students in Head Start, grade schools, and colleges will lose access to classroom funding, school resources, federal loans, and Pell grants. Millions of local firefighters and public safety officials will lose federal grants and resources needed to protect communities. Millions of veterans would lose access to VA mortgages and home loans and suicide prevention services. Is that woke, Marxist ideology? You see, what is happening is they want to dismantle the public services that we all rely upon. Can you imagine a week ago--I guess it was a little more than a week ago--air traffic controllers were told to quit? And we have--I think it is a 30-percent vacancy rate. We are short of air traffic controllers. I understand. I have been in politics, I have been an appropriator for a while. Sometimes people cry wolf: If you don't give us this money, it is going to be dire. But the air traffic controller situation is quite dire, and we saw the impact of being understaffed last week. So the language about woke and Marxism and all that stuff is a smoke screen. What they truly want to do is dismantle whatever the Federal Government does--if it is firefighting, if it is the CIA, if it is the National Weather Service, if it is VA home loans. Their Project 2025 is to--they call it dismantle the administrative state, but really what they want to do is provide less service to people. The reason they want to do that is they have a yawning $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion gap that they have to fill because they want to provide a $1 trillion to $2 trillion tax cut for the wealthiest corporations that have ever existed--literally have ever existed. They have a bunch of hardcore fiscal conservatives on the House side that just won't do it on a deficit finance basis, so they have to find savings, and that is what this is. They really are cutting the stuff that matters to regular people, and then they are going to book that as savings, and then they are going to shove it in the direction of billionaires and billionaire corporations. I see my friend Senator Murphy is here. It is a little bit like old times to see you on the floor at 2 a.m. It used to be easier when I was on Hawaii time, but I have been here for a couple of weeks, so this is actually late for me. I just want to recognize that we have most Democratic Senators speaking at some point through this 30-hour period, but Murph decided to take the 2 a.m. to 5 a.m. shift. I hope you haven't had too much Mountain Dew at this point. I would be happy to yield to the Senator from Connecticut. With the permission of the Chair, I ask unanimous consent to engage in a colloquy without having to go through the Chair every time.

Mr. SCHATZ. I just want to drill down on why the profit motive is so dangerous to public service. If you are in the business of trying to figure out where to drop a Starbucks or whatever, you have got to figure out where the people are, right? You would not drop a Starbucks in a place where it is, you know, a 300-person town. Fair enough. You don't have to drop a Starbucks there, but you do need a health clinic somewhere around there, and you do need a public library somewhere around there, and you are going to want a fire station somewhere around there. And if everything becomes a question of profitability and arithmetic and ROI, what is going to happen is that rural communities are not going to get what they need because, if you do that arithmetic as if you were a private sector investor, I promise you that the only place anything makes any sense to do it is in the cities, and that is what they are going to do. They are going to eviscerate public service across rural America. You know, I think the Senator from Connecticut knows this: I care very much about NOAA, the National Weather Service. Part of Project 2025 is this idea that we should privatize NOAA. Like, these people launch satellites; provide us with data; and then people can make, I mean, basic plans of what they are going to do that day. But aviation depends on it; farming depends on it; shipping depends on it. And the backbone of this is, like, a pretty expensive data collection enterprise and satellite-launching and maintenance enterprise. Then, in the back of that--right?--like, there is AccuWeather and these private sector companies, and they will put a skin on it and give you an app that tells you what the weather is, but they are all using the NOAA data. They are using the National Weather Service data. What they want is to be able to monetize this public service. It is always that--it is socializing the losses and privatizing the gains. I think that is what these folks want to do, but--they have always kind of wanted to do this. They have always had this point of view, and some of our Republican colleagues, like, have a point of view where, at the edges, we could have an argument about what ought to be a private sector enterprise or what ought to be a public- private partnership. Like, those are all kind of within the bounds of normal political discussion. But that is not what this is. This is, like, arson.

Mr. SCHATZ. If there is any internet.

Mr. SCHATZ. That seems like normal attrition in a 9-month period, so I think what we just did, is of the people who were planning on retiring anyway, we just gave them like a 6-month payout. So we get nothing because they get paid through September--if this thing sticks, very unclear. But if this thing sticks, they get paid through September but just retire early, and we don't achieve any sort of turnover savings. So I just think these people are trying to terrorize the workforce.

Mr. SCHATZ. I used to run a social services agency. We had a couple hundred employees, and we delivered mental health services, and we were a Medicaid provider. It was back in the day when we weren't yet receiving electronic payments, and I would go to--like, I would wait for the mail every Wednesday and Thursday to see if we had to dip into our line of credit to make payroll. We ran a successful agency, and we were one of the bigger social services agencies on the island of Oahu-- the most populous island in Hawaii. But that is what this is like. Even if you are a pretty solid social services agency or health clinic, it is always hand to mouth. You don't have some, like, cash reserves. So when they turned off that spigot, it was instantaneous, right? I think part of what is happening with 2025--and excuse me for, you know, maybe diverting our conversation slightly--is that there is just a lot of very ideological people in cubicles who haven't been outside of Washington, DC, and are actually thinking in abstractions, and they truly believe in their heart of hearts--it is the billionaires, first of all, but it is also some other people who wrote the document who believe--I mean, deeply--that no one is going to miss the Federal Government if it doesn't deliver these services. I think one of the things that has given me some comfort in the last couple of weeks--and, you know, it has been a rough couple of weeks--is that, boy, it was instantaneous, right? People were freaked out across the country--red States, blue States, rural, urban, suburban, exurban. Like, everyone was, like, what the hell, right? Like, I might have voted for Donald Trump or I might not have, but, like, nobody wants this. You are at the helm of the Federal Government, and then you just, like, within the first 2 weeks, go, like: I am going to destroy this place. Isn't that what you wanted? No. People didn't vote for Donald Trump so he could destroy the Federal Government. They like that he is a disruptor. They like that he, you know, doesn't talk like the rest of us. They were pissed about the cost of eggs and groceries and gasoline and all the rest of it. I understand all of that, but I don't think this is what people signed up for. Like, I would like this guy to shut down the Medicaid portal. I would like for Head Start to have difficulty making payroll. I would like for construction projects to be staged and then send everybody home because there is no money to pay them. Like, this is not the kind of disruption that people thought they were getting. They thought it was going to be like, I am going to make those Democrats uncomfortable or I need a businessman to, like, not--you know, to ``think outside of the box.'' But this is not that. This is arson, and people see it for what it is. It wasn't one of those things where we are arguing about the impacts, and then 3 years from now everybody figures out what the impacts were. It was instantaneous, and it was pretty violent, right? I don't mean physically violent, but I do mean, like, Whoa! What are you doing to us across society--right?--and all under this, like, Marxist ideology, woke, DEI? Like, it is just like you put a bunch of--like, ``Please say cliche stuff about Democrats'' into ChatGPT and then, like, spit out an Executive order.

Mr. SCHATZ. I think about my constituents in the IFPTE who work at the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard. I think about 20 years ago, I guess, the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard was low-performing. It was not great. There was the BRAC Commission to determine if we were going to get rid of some of these bases and installations, and quite reasonably, people were looking at Pearl Harbor as one of those to possibly get rid of because it was so low-performing. They have, in the great tradition, by the way, of--after Pearl Harbor was bombed and they quickly built a fuel storage facility and rebuilt ships in, like, months when it was expected that it would take a couple of years, what they did was literally miraculous and caused us to win the war. Without it, we wouldn't have won the war. Those guys dug in, understood there was a need for improvement, and now it is the best performing naval shipyard. Are they woke? Are they DEI? What are we doing here? I want every American to share our sense of outrage on behalf of the nurses and the firefighters and the technical workers and the welders and the boilermakers and the TSA agents and the Coast Guard men and women. These are patriots. By the way, some are also in a cubicle pushing paper. That paper probably matters. It might be your VA benefits. It might be your Social Security benefits. It might be your ACA subsidy. Nobody likes a big bureaucracy. I am a Kaiser member. God bless everybody who works there, but I have my frustrations getting through to someone, navigating the system. So it is easy to hate anything that is big, whether it is Verizon or Comcast or Kaiser or the Federal Government. You don't have to love everything that happens in any big organization, and you don't have to think it is perfect. It is not perfect. The Federal Government needs reform. I actually think there are some really interesting opportunities to provide better service using AI. I am all in if you want to make the government work better. But DOGE is kind of dressing up what they are doing as some sort of effort at efficiency and a better delivery of service. That is actually not what they are doing. You don't terrorize your employees. Anybody who has run an organization larger than two people knows that if you are going to get stuff out of someone, then you can be tough, but you can't actually terrorize them.

Mr. SCHATZ. They would get--I was about to swear. It is the Senate floor. I will not. But they would get canned. They would get immediately sacked.

Mr. SCHATZ. Like, this guy is nuts. Get rid of him.

Mr. SCHATZ. Even in the private sector, just so we are clear--because there are also differences between the public and the private sector in terms of civil service protections and unions and all that. I am happy with that because, by the way, the unions are some of the people who are standing up not just for the rights of the workers but the services they provide. I think this is a little bit of a--look, I know not everybody is paying super close attention to all aspects of this, but I think in the abstract, people might have gone, like, yeah, maybe you should cut the Federal workforce by X, and there is probably a lot waste, fraud, and abuse. Conceptually thinking, yeah, who cares? Then suddenly you realize, oh, no, that is a VA home loan. Oh, I actually don't want a shortage of air traffic controllers. No, I don't want a private company collecting my biometric data as I go through the airport. So there is kind of a broad recognition, there is a waking up to the idea that destroying the Federal Government is doing damage to the United States of America. It is not doing damage to woke something. It is not doing damage to the left. It is just that the Federal Government has an important role in society whether you like it or not. We can argue about the size and the scope of that Federal Government, but that is not what we are arguing about anymore. They are out to destroy it. They don't want to make it 4 percent smaller over a period of time or 20 percent smaller; they want to commit arson. I want to talk about USAID. I understand USAID is not an animating issue for, like, most voters. Fair enough. You have got your own problems, and imagining money going elsewhere is sometimes hard to swallow. But I want to set that aside, whatever your view is of foreign aid, which you and I both strongly support because instability elsewhere is dangerous to the United States of America. But setting all of that aside, they literally just shut everybody out of their email and told them all to go home. We were standing there trying to enter USAID to just conduct some oversight and ask what is happening, and we were told by the security guard that no one was there. No one was there. So this isn't, like, some efficiency effort; they are sacking everyone. Now I think it is 1,400--it might be more--Foreign Service officers across the planet who got an email. They are everywhere. They are at the Embassies in Europe, in Asia, in Africa, in Central America-- everywhere--and they just got an email saying: Come home. You have 30 days. If you want an exception for any health reason or any specific circumstances, you can submit it to us, but otherwise, you are out. These people have their kids in school. These people are there to respond to disasters. These people are there to build relationships on behalf of the United States of America. Imagine the kind of person who takes the Foreign Service exam and then says ``I want to work in Ghana'' or ``I want to work in Ecuador on behalf of this country.'' Those are legit patriots, and they get deployed wherever they get deployed or sent--I shouldn't say ``deployed''--they get sent wherever they get sent, and they try to dig in. Their kids are going to the American school in whatever city it is. It is challenging, but it is exciting, and it is important. Then they just get an email saying: We are recalling you, and there is no choice. That is not an efficient way to do anything; that is just arson.

Mr. SCHATZ. Is that it has too many Democrats.

Mr. SCHATZ. Well, I want to just sort of pause on that because, Chris, you are right. This is a purge. I was sort of yelling in the Press Gallery--maybe not the best idea, but it was at a press conference--and I just basically pointed at all these people whom I have a lot of respect for in the media, but I am getting quite frustrated because this is actually not that hard to see if this were happening somewhere else. We are both on the Foreign Relations Committee. We do a lot of travel. A lot of times, you sit down with some foreign leader--a Minister or a Prime Minister or another legislator from another country--and if you can see autocratic behavior like that, then it is literally on your talking points to encourage them to not engage in purges, to maintain a free media, the importance of an independent judiciary, blah, blah, blah. But when it happens to our own country, we just can't see it. If this were happening in Belarus, we would be like, ah, creeping autocracy. If this were happening in a Middle Eastern country, we would know what this was. So I think you are really, you know, hitting the right point as it relates to public service. I think about the U.S. military, which has been always, always a bastion for integration.

Mr. SCHATZ. All sorts of integration. And now we are deciding that some people are not eligible to serve, not because they can't meet the requirements but because somebody finds it weird. We are going back not 5 years but 20 or 30 in terms of--by the way, this anti-DEI and anti-woke thing, I just want to drill down on it just for a moment. If what you don't like about DEI is the whole consultancy where someone comes into your workplace with a PowerPoint or whatever and makes you feel guilty for your personal ethnic background, I have been in some of those meetings, and there is a lot of eye-rolling in there, and they are very ineffective, and they do not increase diversity, equity, or inclusion. I am sure there is good versions of it. But there is a lot of people who got frustrated with DEI because when they think of DEI, they think of a kind of goofy consultant guy telling everybody how to divide everybody in the workplace and how to be sensitive in the workplace, and a lot of people are thinking, I am fine, I am nice to people, I don't harass anyone, I don't discriminate, why are you hectoring me about this issue? But what DEI has become is anything that is related to civil rights, right? And so as these people, mostly kids, are getting access to the Federal payment system, they are clearly just looking for words like ``gender,'' right? So I think in the NSF, National Science Foundation, or CDC, I forgot, research, they are no longer allowed to say gender and--

Mr. SCHATZ. Yeah. So the problem is though, you have to do research on females in order to understand what is happening with females.

Mr. SCHATZ. Yeah, yeah. This is the crazy thing. By the way, different, I am an Ashkenazi Jew, right, I do actually have--there is a thing called--I think it is called Tay-Sachs or something that I have a proclivity to having it, so we have to have a special check. And the reason we know that is we actually do the kind of medical research to know how people of different ethnic extractions and different sexes will respond to medicine and what they may need. African Americans need certain things that Jewish Americans don't need. And this isn't some woke DEI thing; it is like a biological fact. But now because these guys are, I mean, childish, right? They are not just saying: Hey, we should have a colorblind workplace; they are saying: You can't say sex--the word ``sex''--in medical research.

Mr. SCHATZ

Mr. SCHATZ. I vote no for the 400,000 people in Hawaii who depend on Medicaid.

Mr. SCHATZ

Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, thank you to the ranking member of the Budget Committee for his leadership. We are doing something a little unusual. First of all, every Democrat is united on the vote that will occur 26 or 27 hours from now. Second of all, almost every U.S. Senator on the Democratic side is going to come to the floor to articulate why we are united and why we think this moment is so important. If confirmed, the Director of OMB, Russ Vought, may well be the most important man that no one has ever heard of. Under normal circumstances, the OMB Directors are powerful but kind of anonymous because they are responsible for technical things, nerdy things-- developing and implementing the entire Federal budget, and they advance the priorities of the President, whomever--Democrat or Republican. But Russ Vought wants to go way beyond that. He wants to take an Agency that people outside of Washington haven't even heard of and turn it into the nerve center and power center of the Federal Government. He wants to consolidate power at OMB in such a stark and sometimes illegal way that he alone will get to decide who deserves the government's help and who doesn't. You do not have to take my word for it. I am a Democrat. I always want to make the case for our side. But I want you to understand these are his words, because he is one of the authors of Project 2025. Let me just say what he says about this job: The Director must view his job as the best, most comprehensive approximation of the President's mind as it pertains to the policy agenda while always being ready with actual opinions to effect that agenda within . . . legal authorities and resources. This role cannot be performed adequately if the Director acts instead as the ambassador of the institutional interests. . . . Once its reputation as the keeper of the ``commander's intent'' is established-- This is like--everybody has watched ``Game of Thrones.'' He wants to be the king's hand. He wants to be able to say: I represent the President in any and all things: foreign policy, domestic policy, tax policy, spending policy, all of it. That is actually not what an OMB Director is supposed to do. He then talks about a practice called apportionment to essentially get around the bills that we passed, the appropriations bills. He wrote: No Director should be chosen who is unwilling to restore apportionment decision-making to the PAD's-- Program associate directors, who are political appointees, not career officials. --personal review, who is not aggressive in wielding the tool on behalf of the President's agenda, or who is unable to defend the power against attacks from Congress. Look, the door swings both ways in Washington, and this attempt to consolidate power and basically make the legislature irrelevant is going to bite us all in the butt. There is going to be a progressive President, and if this is allowed to stand, they are going to reach in and defund stuff you like. That is the creature of a dually enacted law. I get that this is nerdy. I am not saying anybody should make this their primary point of opposition to the President, but we are on the floor of the U.S. Senate, so let's be a little serious for a moment and say that we swore an oath to uphold the law and Constitution of the United States. The Constitution is actually--it is ambiguous about a couple of things, but it is not ambiguous about this. We hold the purse strings. We are the article I branch, and our power, besides confirming or rejecting nominees, is substantially that we set the parameters for a spending bill. I get that there are 53 Members on the other side of the aisle that have a different view of spending than I do, and I get that we just lost, and so we are in for some outcomes that we don't like. I am not complaining about outcomes that I don't like; I am complaining about an unlawful view of the separation of powers. We saw it last week when they just literally froze all Federal funding--not even with a pretext of like ``Hey, we are just going to review this and make sure everything--you know, no fraud, waste, or abuse.'' They just shut down the Medicaid portal. They shut down Head Start. They froze construction projects. So I want everybody to understand that what is at stake here is literally the American system of government because these guys view this branch of government--the one that is plural; not just 1 person elected but 535 people elected from their States and their districts to represent all of the people in the United States of America. It is supposed to be messy, and it is supposed to be contentious. And do you know what? It is also sometimes supposed to be slow. It is supposed to be slow. It is supposed to be hard. We have the best document underlining any country that has ever existed in human history, and what it does is it says: We don't want any branch of government to be too powerful. So this is not some trivial little partisan dispute about particular programs; this is the ability for the executive branch to literally seize power, storm into the offices of an Agency that they hate and shut it down operationally and use a bunch of white-shoe law firm fancy-pants words to develop a pretext for eviscerating the U.S. Constitution, which clearly gives us the authority to establish spending laws, right? And can we spare ourselves the punditocracies? ``Well, Democrats should be focusing on something else.'' I understand. I understand that some of the stuff that we are going to say to each other on the Senate floor is not necessarily compelling to people outside of this building, but people outside of this building understand on a very basic level that there are three branches of government, and they are supposed to be roughly equal, and stealing power from the legislative branch is inherently bad even if you agree with the outcome, even if you think: Well, I kind of agree with them. I don't like this program. If you don't like a program, introduce a bill. If you want to defund something, there is an actual process for that. There is a lot of stuff I don't like in the Federal budget, and I usually propose cuts to those things I don't like. Sometimes I prevail, and sometimes I don't. But I have no illusions that I am a monarch. It is true that this President of the United States won a free and fair election to be at the helm of the executive branch, but he did not win a free and fair election to be the monarch of the United States or the CEO of the United States. I think one of the conceptual problems with bringing in all these billionaires is they really are the monarchs of their companies. That is like how the private sector works. You are the CEO and you want something to happen, you tell them: This is what is going to happen. This is not a democracy. I am the boss. Do it. That is literally not our constitutional system. So Russ Vought has ideas that I disagree with about the size and the scope of the Federal Government, and that is part of this, right? He really does want to cut Medicaid, cut Medicare, cut the Affordable Care Act, eliminate programs that I think are essential for people in Hawaii and people across country. But there really is something bigger at stake right now. We, all of us--Democrats, Republicans, Independents, the media, which is so damn casual about what is happening--we have to understand that when you are in the middle of the fight, you are not sure if this is a historic moment. When you read about it in the past, you can identify that historic moment. When you observe it in a faraway place with a hard-to-pronounce name, you can identify what is happening--creeping fascism. When it happens and you are in the middle of it, you are not so sure if it is your moment to display any sense of independence or courage. If this is going to be stopped, we only have 47 votes. Three people, at some point--I have no illusions that it will be in the next 30 hours, but three people at some point have to say: I like conservative outcomes, I like conservative justices, I like tax cuts, but I don't like unlawfulness, and those are my parameters. I am an adult. I have been here for 13 years. I have been in the majority, and I have been in the minority. I have been in sort of every iteration of whatever elections bring. That is OK. That is the way this process works. What is happening right now is an attempt to reorder the whole damn system in a way that is going to make every individual citizen across the country less powerful, because when you elect someone--and I will yield to the Senator from Minnesota in just a moment--when you elect someone and you tell them your spending priorities and they come home and say ``Good news; I got this'' or ``Good news; I cut this'' and then you realize that is only a recommendation, it is the OMB Director whose name you have never heard of--his name is Russ Vought--who gets to decide. That is not our system of government, and that is why we are going to be fighting all night about this issue. I yield the floor.