Peter Welch

Mr. WELCH

Mr. WELCH. Mr. President, I was absent from the Senate on March 3, 2025. Had I been present for rollcall vote No. 100 on S.9, I would have voted no. This legislation is a gross overreach of Federal authority on mandating State action. It does not in fact protect women and girls in sports, nor does it create competitive fairness. Rather, it is an effort to marginalize an already targeted community. Instead of investing in and removing barriers for women and girls to participate in sports, this bill threatens women's sports by creating harmful Federal gender verification standards that impede on the privacy and dignity of women and girls.

Mr. WELCH

Mr. WELCH. Mr. President, last week, the U.N. General Assembly voted overwhelmingly in favor of a resolution that acknowledged that Russia brutally invaded Ukraine. Among those voting in favor were all our friends and allies. Among those voting against it were most of our adversaries--Russia, Iran, North Korea, Nicaragua--and the United States. Of course, no Americans that we represent want to see our country on a team with some of the world's most brutal dictators, but what made that vote remarkable was that the Trump administration voted against something so unquestionably true: It was Russia that was the invader; that Russia's invasion has been devastating; that too many have died, too many have suffered; that peace is long overdue; and that Ukrainian territory is Ukrainian territory. The bottom line: This was a very simple resolution asserting that one country has no right to invade another country. Americans know from experience that peace in the world depends on adhering to a core principle: Countries cannot change their borders by force. One country cannot steal the sovereign territory of another country. Over the years, many Americans have died to uphold this principle for our national security. World War I, World War II, and the gulf war sent a clear message: America will support its friends and allies who are fighting to defend their own freedom and sovereignty. Of course, the U.N. vote last week was followed by last week's meeting in the Oval Office between Ukrainian President Zelenskyy and President Trump. Just hours before that very disastrous meeting, right across from the White House, I, along with many of our colleagues, joined in a bipartisan group of Senators who met with President Zelenskyy. He told us he was extremely grateful for America's help. He told us how thankful he was for the help President Trump gave in his first administration with the delivery of Javelin missiles and what he was doing in his second administration. There was not a hint of anything other than support and respect, and he told us how enthusiastic he was about meeting with the President and signing the minerals deal. It blew up, and, of course, the press will debate whether President Zelenskyy derailed the meeting because he didn't wear a suit or he said a provocative thing or he was rude and not grateful enough, and others will say that it was a setup by the President to derail the meeting. My view: I don't know the answer to that, and I don't really care because that is not the question. The one question that is profoundly important is the one that affects our national security: Whose side are we on? Do we continue to side with Ukraine against Russia and its invasion--with our NATO allies, with the principle we have fought for since the beginning of the last century--or do we flip sides and go with Putin? There is every reason for many of us to be concerned about that being a question actively under consideration by the Trump administration, starting with his affection for Putin and with his assertion that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that started the war. We are suddenly confronted with this unthinkable question of whether our President is realigning whose side we are on. That, in my view, is why all of us in the U.S. Senate--and there has been tremendous leadership on the Republican side of the aisle, and I would like to particularly acknowledge the leadership of Chairman Wicker and Chairman Risch--for us to stand with Ukraine and with our NATO allies. This year, we are going to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II. In the eight decades since that devastating war, America's global alliances and our leadership have been anchored on the principle--anchored on the principle--that no country should seize and occupy the territory of another country by force. That matters. It is anchored on the elementary principle that might does not make right-- something that in the Putin invasion, where he thought he would be in Kyiv in days, was desecrated. So my hope is that we in the U.S. Senate will reaffirm those principles of territorial integrity and do that on behalf of the American people. I have introduced a resolution that does just this. It commits to the principle that the United States remains totally in favor of upholding and defending the proposition that no state shall threaten or use force against the territorial integrity or the political integrity of any other state. I think all of us know that is among the most fundamental propositions holding together the world's very fragile peace. It is also a fundamentally American principle that we have advocated for and defended. It is a principle that we must uphold today on behalf of the people and the sovereignty of Ukraine-- not just for their benefit but for our national security. Therefore, Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the consideration of S. Res. 113, which was submitted earlier today; further, that the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, and that the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.

Mr. WELCH. I yield the floor.

Mr. WELCH

Mr. WELCH. Mr. President, every President of the United States has a right to review and realign programs funded by Congress, but only if the President acts in a way that complies with the law. In the past 5 weeks, President Trump, Elon Musk, and Secretary of State Rubio have done away with even the pretense that they are conducting a review of programs administered by the U.S. Agency for International Development. It is not a review, and it never was. It is the destruction of an entire Agency. If it was, in fact, an honest review, I would support it. We should be looking for ways to maximize the results we get from spending taxpayer funds across the Federal Government. If this was an honest review, they would not have announced the closure of USAID and put virtually the entire domestic staff on leave. The Trump administration cut off their communication with the global workforce and required staff who were temporarily reinstated by court order to work remotely because they were locked out of the--now former--headquarters. If this was an honest review, the Trump administration would not have recalled 95 percent of USAID's global workforce after cutting off their email access without warning and putting their security at risk, while those staff were waiting for instructions to conduct the so-called ``review.'' They would not have, prior to any review, forced American businesses and nongovernmental organizations to lay off thousands of workers by illegally withholding funds previously appropriated for USAID programs. USAID supports programs that serve U.S. national interests overseas, but it is farmers here in America who grow the corn, wheat, beans, and peanuts. It is dairy farmers in Vermont who produce the powdered milk that USAID uses to feed millions of hungry children in Africa, Central America, and Asia. It is American companies that manufacture the generators, water pumps, trucks, and computers for USAID's programs, and American workers--in blue States and red States--that implement those programs. Thanks to Elon Musk--an unelected billionaire--those American farmers and companies have lost their business with USAID, and the workers are losing their jobs. If the administration was serious about rooting out wasteful spending, they would not have stopped programs in countries like Somalia where USAID is a key partner in counterterrorism efforts with the U.S. military. They would not have shut down the Famine Early Warning System, risking medicines and American-grown food aid to spoil in the supply chain. They would not have put more than a half dozen USAID lawyers on leave, including its ethics lawyers. They would not delay payment of invoices for work already completed on behalf of the U.S. Government, incurring needless fees for violating the Prompt Payment Act. If this were truly about preventing waste, fraud, and abuse, if this were truly about rooting out corruption, they would not empty U.S. Embassies, leaving virtually no one trained in financial management and oversight. If there were any truth to their hyperbolic claims of corruption, for which they have offered no credible evidence, they should have asked the USAID Inspector General to investigate, rather than fire him without cause. And if they actually did discover programs they don't support, they could have reprogramed the funds consistent with congressional requirements and past practice. They also could have asked Congress to change the law. What is taking place right now is not about conducting a review, policy realignment, or addressing waste, fraud, and abuse. The administration instead has made every one of those goals impossible to achieve. President Trump, who claims a mandate but who won by the narrowest of margins, does not have a mandate to illegally destroy Federal Agencies and the careers of thousands of dedicated Federal employees. He does not have a mandate to break the law. But President Trump and Secretary Rubio are forging ahead, using Elon Musk to provide cover through lies and misinformation on the social media platform he bought and broke. They highlight select examples of programs they deem wasteful which amount to a fraction of a penny of the foreign aid budget--some of which began under the first Trump administration--and they make baseless claims of fraud and insubordination, blaming anyone else but themselves for the chaos they are causing. And while they say they favor transparency, they are doing this after taking USAID's website down with all its previously publicly available reports and data. Congress, the media, and the public are in the dark about what they are doing. We don't know which congressional spending directives they are violating when they say they have terminated $1 billion in programs. It could impact every single state. We don't know how many HIV/AIDS patients have become sick because the administration cut off funding for treatment or how many children are sick with malaria or other preventable causes or how many malnourished women and children have no emergency food rations because the funding was stopped. We don't know how many thousands of girls can no longer go to school in countries where they are traditionally denied access to education because the funding was frozen. We don't know how many organizations working to stop sex trafficking, child labor, and gang violence are no longer functioning because the funding was cut off. We don't know how many deminers we have trained and equipped to locate and destroy unexploded mines and bombs in Vietnam, Laos, Lebanon, and Ukraine are no longer working because the funding was stopped. But before long, we will know, and our constituents will know. And they will know that this administration is responsible for the chaos and life and death impacts that are reverberating in the United States and around the world. How does cutting off infectious disease surveillance and treatment during outbreaks of Ebola, bird flu, and the deadly hemorrhagic Marburg virus disease make Americans safer? It doesn't. How does abandoning our allies and partners and ceding ground to Russia and China and to ISIS and other terrorist organizations make America stronger? It doesn't. How does cutting off funding for joint USAID-DOD programs with Vietnam, on the 30th anniversary of the normalization of relations with that former enemy, which is now a Comprehensive Strategic Partner, advance U.S. national security? It doesn't. Anyone can see that Moscow is celebrating these reckless actions, while Beijing plots how to fill the void to advance China's interests. This wholesale, thoughtless, and illegal destruction of USAID is playing out across the government. DOGE has told the U.S. African Development Foundation and the Inter-American Foundation, agencies established and funded with direct appropriations by Congress, that their budgets are being slashed. Elon Musk doesn't know and doesn't care why Congress established these Agencies, what they do, or the positive impact they are having on the lives of millions of people. To Musk and his DOGE agents, the law be damned. Congress be damned. The American people be damned. The world be damned. The precedent being set by these illegal actions is a lasting threat to the American people, to our global leadership, our national security, our reputation around the world, and to the checks and balances that are the foundation of our democracy. Vermonters are outraged by what is happening. Dozens have already lost their jobs. They want the United States to be a leader for good in the world. They care about the image of the United States as the world's oldest democracy. They are smart enough to know that abandoning friends and allies is how you lose friends and allies. The destruction of USAID and these other Agencies will reverberate around the world and cause lasting damage. I urge Secretary Rubio, senior Pentagon officials who know the invaluable role that USAID plays in preventing conflict, and my Republican colleagues who in the past have supported USAID, the Inter-American Foundation, and the U.S. African Development Foundation, to stop this. Because if the Congress, especially my friends in the majority party, allow this to happen, people will soon realize that it wasn't China or Russia that did this; we did it to ourselves.

Mr. WELCH

Mr. WELCH. Mr. President, I want to speak about the extreme cuts that have affected the Department of Health and Human Services, the Federal Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, and the Centers for Disease Control. First of all, the DOGE operation starts out with a premise that it is attacking waste, fraud, and abuse. And I am for that. Anyplace that we can save taxpayers money by responsible assessment of what programs are working or aren't, anytime we can uncover waste or certainly fraud and abuse, I want to do that, and I want that to be done across the board. Whether you are talking about health programs where they could be better organized or they could be more efficiently run to achieve the goal of better services for the people you represent and I represent for all Americans, I want to do that. But how is DOGE going about it? And we are here to talk about how they are doing it in the Department of Health and Human Services, under Mr. Kennedy. Basically, they are doing it by sending out firing notices to people. Over 5,000 people have been fired, and that includes 700 in the Food and Drug Administration, 1,200 in the National Institutes of Health, and 600 in the Centers for Disease Control. Here is the question, and the answer is obvious: If you want to make a program more efficient, do you fire the people first and essentially erode any capacity of that program to deliver the services that the American people need? Or do you study the organization? Do you kick the tires? Do you investigate and analyze where the issues are that can be addressed by a comprehensive plan that would include getting rid of any waste? It would include getting rid, obviously, of any fraud and abuse. But what DOGE is doing is not that. It doesn't have a plan. What it has is a decision to fire people. So, essentially, DOGE is saying that the higher the body count of people who are fired, then the more the savings will be. Well, there is truth in that. If you just fire people and they are not on the payroll, you are going to save taxpayer money. But does that mean that you are getting waste, fraud, and abuse out of the system, or are you just wrecking the program? It clearly is going to be the latter. You are just wrecking the program because you didn't even take the time to examine what is going on and how best to do it. Think about it. In the National Institutes of Health, there are investigators, there are scientists. These are people who are working on research that is important to your State and mine about diseases, about cures, about vaccines, about pandemics, things that--you know, American people are entitled to have some confidence and security that we have the best minds addressing health issues and focusing on cures to diseases that all of us can be subject to or the people we love, that they will be doing that job. But these people are now just fired. They are gone. That means--just think about it. An NIH scientist, that is somebody who probably has a Ph.D, went to one of our State institutions. It might have been a land- grant college in North Carolina or a land-grant college in Vermont. And there is probably an enormous amount of talent in that person who was able to achieve a Ph.D in scientific research. And there is probably a good deal of public investment in the career of that person with the return being that person is going to be doing research on trying to cure diseases. And that person may well have gotten some Federal grants, including college assistance or Ph.D investigatory assistance. That could be hundreds of thousands of dollars the taxpayers really invested in supporting a person who has become a scientist, helping us on very important research that is really good for the American people. Boom. They go to work, or they are at home. They get an email, and they say: Don't show up for work; you are fired. There is a certain cruelty in a lot of these notices because it also has an assertion that your performance has been subpar. Of course, we find out there has been no performance review; and, in many cases, these people who were fired supposedly because of subpar performance, in fact, did just have a performance review that said you are doing a fantastic job. Or think about Food and Drug Administration. Their job is to review, among other things, medications that can provide life-enhancing, lifesaving, life-extending, pain-relieving medications that Americans are going to need and can benefit by. The sooner that work of investigation gets done, the sooner that the approval decisions can be made, the sooner cures get to market and to the folks in this country. Boom. They are fired. Again, these people, some of whom do have Ph.Ds, as I mentioned, but others of whom have been at the FDA for 15 or 20 years and have that institutional knowledge of how it works--these people are getting fired independent of any performance review, independent of any assessment of where do we need more people or where do we need fewer people or what are some of the functions that no longer need to be done versus some functions where we actually may need to enhance the staff to get a better job for the American people. What is so bogus about DOGE is that it is not about waste, fraud, and abuse. It really is not because there would have to be an investigation, a plan, people looking at how the functions are being performed. It is simply a mechanism to justify firing people and lowering the head count. And as I mentioned, you know what? That will ``save money,'' but it will destroy the capacity of these organizations that all of us agree are doing incredibly important work. It is going to destroy their ability to do it. It is just mangling the services in the area of Health and Human Services that are so essential to the well-being of the people in this country. By the way, this has a real economic impact; and it is the economic impact, first and foremost, among those individuals who lost their jobs. But it is a real economic impact because we are eroding the infrastructure of science, of inquiry, and of investigation for better health cures. You don't destroy that and put it back together again overnight. That is what is so wrong-headed about the DOGE approach to things--body count versus better service, better performance, more sustainability. Mr. President, you couldn't have a worse approach if your goal is more efficiency, better service, and better outcomes. The other question that is going to be recurring for the American people is the likelihood--the inevitability, actually--of massive reductions in aid for Medicaid. Under the version of the House budget reconciliation act, they have to come up with trillions of dollars in savings. The only place you are going to get that is by cutting Medicaid. We have a contradiction here because the President says he loves Medicaid, but he also says he loves the House bill. And the House bill does not love Medicaid. What the House bill does is it attacks Medicaid. In Vermont, we have 20 percent or so, a little more, of our folks who depend on Medicaid for healthcare. It is kids from low-income families; it is seniors. Two out of three of our nursing home beds are paid for by Medicaid. You are going to have families where the kids are really trying to help their parents. Their parents need a nursing home, and they are going to get kicked out, literally. That is what happens. Finally, what we know is, why is this happening? Why are these firings on a mass level being made when there has been no study and no plan in place to indicate that action will improve services or, in the long run, save money for the American people? It is being done because there is a goal to have a tax cut. That is a fair-and-square debate. What should our tax rate be; should we have a tax cut; if we have a tax cut, how do you allocate; how much goes to corporations; how much goes to billionaires; how much goes to everyday people? But to have that debate without acknowledging that the way you are going to pay for it is by taking away healthcare for everyday Americans, that is not on the level. That is what is happening here, is that there is an agenda: Get that tax cut. I happen to profoundly disagree with the tax cut for major multinational corporations, and I profoundly disagree with lowering taxes for billionaires--totally disagree with that. But when it is the situation that we are going to pay for it by taking away nursing home beds from Vermonters, from folks in the Carolinas, that is really appalling. We should not do it. I am here with my colleagues to defend our commitment to good scientific research, to good cancer research, to good healthcare access for poor kids and seniors, and to sound the alert that that is what is at stake despite what the President may say about his ``love'' for Medicare. What he clearly has as his major agenda item is that tax cut. I will acknowledge we can have a debate fair and square about that tax cut. But I think it is incumbent on all of us to acknowledge that the path to the President getting his tax cut marches right through access to healthcare in an attack on Medicaid. I yield the floor.

Mr. WELCH

Mr. WELCH. Mr. President, there are just two issues: One is about the policy, the energy policy, that the Trump administration is announcing, and we can have a debate about that. I am in full support of the comments that my colleagues have made. But there is another issue that, in many ways, is more important, and that issue is whether this U.S. Senate will accede to relinquishing its authority as a separate and independent branch of government to a President who tries to seize that power by claiming a phony emergency. What justifies this action, as far as President Trump is concerned and legally, is the assertion that we have an ``energy emergency.'' And by invoking that term, he is saying to Congress: Get lost. This needs immediate attention that only the Executive can give. And getting lost means that we don't act as an independent branch of government and fulfill the constitutional responsibility we have to be separate, independent, and a check and balance on Executive power. That is a separate question from whether Members agree or disagree with the ``drill, baby, drill'' policy, but it is fundamental to the well-being of our democracy. Congress, in the past, has never come close to relinquishing that authority. And whether you are a Democrat or Republican, if you are a U.S. Senator, you have to defend the institution, not because it is good for me or you or any other Member of the Senate, but it is good for America. We rely on that system of checks and balances. So the question is, Is it an emergency? And as my colleagues have laid out, no, we have never had more production of power in our history. We are exporting power. The power situation is not an emergency. There is power abundance. Now, second thing, as many of my colleagues are saying, there are real consequences because, essentially, what the President is doing is going all in on fossil fuels and casting aside the opportunities that come--economic opportunities as well as cleaner climate opportunities-- with clean energy. I am not going to repeat all of the information provided by starting with Senator Kaine, but it is true. And, you know, selling out, as some of my colleagues say, to the fossil fuel industry--the President was reported to have said ``get me a billion''--what I don't understand is why you would kill jobs in the clean energy sector that is producing cheaper power and good jobs. There is no justification for an Executive or Member of Congress doing that. The other final point is that we are having this bizarre debate about whether there is a climate situation caused by carbon emissions. Reality is, we all know it is happening. We are all victimized by these wild weather events. And there are only two explanations that explain the actions of the administration: One is they just favor fossil fuels no matter what. There is a lot of truth to that. The other is, there is a lack of confidence on the administration about the capacity of the American people, the American innovators, the American entrepreneurs to take full advantage of solving the issue of climate change by building out clean energy, by doing efficiency. That really, really works. And a confident person, a confident country doesn't deny problems exist. They acknowledge them, face them squarely, and then solve them. And in the process of doing that, they all end up better and have a stronger economy as well. So there is no emergency. We must stand first for the separation of powers and the authority of Congress and not allow us to be stripped of that by an Executive; and, second, we have to have a wise policy that is going to create jobs, be sustainable for our economy and for our future. I yield the floor.

Mr. WELCH

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

Mr. WELCH. Mr. President, I would like to speak about DOGE. The verdict is in: It has been a colossal failure. It has done immense damage to many of our institutions and inflicted immense pain on innocent people. Also, it is not going to be successful in its stated goal of reducing spending and wasteful spending. But before I go on, let me just say what all of us know. Every single person in this U.S. Senate is all in when it comes to attacking waste, fraud, and abuse. Every single one of us knows that we should kick the tires on every program we have in the Federal Government and look to see how we can make it be more efficient. And there may even be some programs where we say: You know what, its purpose has been served; it is time to move on. So those of us who are being critical of DOGE are just looking at what DOGE is doing but not at all quarrelling with the notion that every one of us, Republican and Democrat and Independent, has a responsibility to be the best stewards of taxpayer money that we can be. But here is my problem with DOGE: They are not looking in the right places. There is so much rip-off that is going on. Let's just talk about a couple of examples in our healthcare system. United Healthcare is rigging the system on Medicare Advantage Programs. Our seniors--we want them to have the healthcare they need. But they have set up these billing systems where they have paid nurses and forced doctors essentially to overanalyze and overprescribe and overstate what medical conditions were. This was not to help the senior on a Medicare Advantage Program; this was to pad their bottom line and make billions of dollars. Of course, I am referring to the series of articles that was in the Wall Street Journal that documented the rip-offs and what I think were corrupt practices by United Healthcare. Where is DOGE? All that money is just wasted. It has gone into the pockets of executives at United Healthcare. It has gone into shareholder payouts and dividends, but it hasn't gone into improving healthcare for seniors. Another one: the pharmacy benefit managers. They are ripping us off so badly. We had a bipartisan bill with enormous Republican support and Democratic support to curb the rip-offs in the PBM industry. That was in our final budget deal last year. It got derailed. Why? Elon Musk. He was against it, and he gave the word that this has got to go down. The thing blew up, and we don't have the PBM reform that both sides of the aisle knew was necessary--something that was going to save hundreds of billions of dollars for American taxpayers and allow us to reinvest in healthcare and make things better. So my first question with DOGE is, Why don't you look where the money is, where the rip-offs are, instead of just sending out emails overnight telling people they are fired whose performance has been absolutely exemplary? So that is the core question I have about DOGE. Why are you leaving these practices that we know are really corrupt and a rip-off untouched, unexamined, and allowing them to continue when it is hammering taxpayers and citizens? We have work to do on saving money, and we have places where it is absolutely essential that we act. DOGE is blind to all of those, all of those situations, and that is disgraceful, especially when you have Elon Musk as the person who sabotaged our effort for PBM reform. The second thing is, there is a basic question if you are going to go about examining a program. You can ask hard questions. You can look under the hood. How is it working? How is it not working? Where do we have too many personnel? Where can we actually improve the practices and the performance by some reforms? DOGE is not doing that. It literally is not doing that. It has not even taken a day, an hour, to come up with a plan on how to examine the various programs they are engaging with. What they are doing is firing people. People are waking up in the morning, and they are getting an email that says: Due to your poor performance, you are gone. Now, this is a situation that obviously is incredibly cruel. You are working at the Department of Agriculture, you are working at the NIH, you are working on a USAID program, and life is going on, and suddenly you get this email out of the blue that clearly is a mass email but has a very specific impact on you, your life, your livelihood, and your hopes and dreams. That is just a savage, savage way to treat people who have been working in our various governmental Agencies, and it has enormous impact on our communities. By the way, DOGE is picking on veterans. Literally thousands of veterans have been fired. The VA has announced the dismissal of more than 1,000 employees. That includes researchers working on cancer treatments, opioid addictions, prosthetics, and burn pit exposure. So the issue here was not ``How do we help them do that job better? Where are there ways we can economize?'' The procedure is ``You are gone; that is it.'' President Trump and Elon Musk fired around 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration. These are folks who safeguard nuclear weapons. Now, it was so embarrassing that even Musk had to acknowledge it was a mistake, and those people are now back on their job. But what it does I think very clearly is show how there is nothing about a plan to execute a thoughtful way to save taxpayer money. It is just shoot first and aim later. And 4,000 employees at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. By the way, this is incredibly important: These are all things that affect red States and blue States. This has no political orientation on one side or the other because the impacts of these are going to be felt by the farmers in Indiana just as they are going to be felt by the farmers in Vermont. Another example that is really pretty cruel, and I just don't understand this: We have farmers across the country that I have spoken to--farmers in Vermont--who entered into contracts with the Federal Government under the provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act. What the deal was is the farmer agreed, say, to install solar panels or create a buffer zone between cattle grazing in a streambed or change the tillage practices to try to improve the soil. I get it that President Trump and Mr. Musk are against the Inflation Reduction Act, and they have a right to do everything they possibly can to try to reverse that policy. So this is not about their right to use Executive authority. But here is what I don't understand: How do you stiff farmers who went out and borrowed money because they had a contract, they agreed to do certain things around their farm, and then they get an email saying: Just kidding. We, the Federal Government, are not going to honor our contract. I am thinking of one farm in my own town of Norwich, VT, where folks did borrow the money and they did the work, and it was in anticipation of the Federal Government keeping its part of the bargain and coming through with the cash that it had agreed to, and they are told: No, we are not doing it anymore. I know that the Presiding Officer is like me when it comes to keeping your word. You give your word; you keep your word. The folks you represent, the folks I represent, that is what they do, that is what they expect. But we have DOGE saying: Well, that doesn't apply to us because we want to ``save money.'' That is just flat out disgraceful and unacceptable. FEMA. FEMA is absolutely essential to help folks respond to a catastrophic event. We need reform in FEMA, and I want to work with colleagues in order to do that. But when that disaster comes--you know, a fire in Hawaii or California, floods in Vermont or North Carolina, hurricanes down south, or drought--the response from FEMA is essential because the local community doesn't have the infrastructure in place to provide that immediate emergency assistance that folks need for saving lives and keeping themselves together during that immediate storm event. We are hearing that DOGE and the President want to just abolish FEMA. We have to be there for one another when it is our community that is affected by a catastrophic event where our citizens, the folks we represent, to whom we have a real duty--it is no fault of their own-- they are on the receiving end of Mother Nature. It has always been the tradition in the Senate that we help one another on that. That is not a partisan deal. DOGE is hammering us on that. The people who get hurt--it is the everyday people whom we represent that are working hard, who are struggling each month to pay their bills. They are anxious about the safety of their kids, they are anxious about inflation, they are anxious about meeting the challenges of daily life, and they want to make a contribution to strengthening their community as well as their family, and they are getting hammered. I mentioned, too, that among them are the 6,000 veterans who have been fired by DOGE across the Federal workforce. I mean, that just astonishes me. How do we say to a veteran who showed up to serve us and protect our country and to whom we claim we have great respect and allegiance--how do we send them an email that says ``You are fired,'' with no explanation, no sitdown, no face-to-face, just contempt for the value of what they contribute and how hard they are working? I do not understand that. I just don't. Even in a tough business environment where some of our employers have to make tough decisions because they just know their business can't handle the workforce they have and they may have to make, against their desires, some reductions in force, our employers will sit down with folks face to face: Here is what we can do. Let's work out a plan. We know you need healthcare. DOGE just dispenses with that when it has no plan. So the cruelty-- the cruelty of this is so abhorrent to me. We as a society, really, despite whatever our differences are, have to have some mutual respect, and is it so essential to people that they have meaningful work. If we are going to make adjustments, we have to have a plan to include them, where DOGE says: We don't have to do that. This isn't just about Elon Musk being a multibillionaire. No matter what happens, it is not really going to affect him. It is about Elon Musk treating people with what I think is the utmost cruelty. You are gone--you are gone--such disrespect for people who work hard at the VA, work hard in the NIH, work hard in the Department of Agriculture, work hard in the Department of the Treasury. So that element of this, we should all be shocked at. You know, I can give a few examples of people in Vermont, but I know I am like every single Member of the U.S. Senate: We can give examples of people in the States we represent. Our Small Business Administration Office has been a real help to Vermonters--very effective. One employee there got a performance review that--this is shortly after the performance review: In a very short period of time, you established yourself as an invaluable asset. That was the performance review. The next day, February 7, she was fired because the email said: Your performance has not been adequate to justify further employment at the Agency. So arbitrary, so unfair, so Elon Musk-like. We have a scientist at the Department of Agriculture, Caitlin Morgan. She studies sustainable agriculture and food systems at the ag services Food Systems Research Center. She was fired despite glowing performance reviews. So what we have with DOGE is an assertion that they are seeking to cut waste, fraud, and abuse. Who is to argue? There is not a person here that wants to vote in favor of waste, fraud, and abuse, but the reality is they do have a plan. It is not to look at each Agency and then make adjustments so that the Agency, at the end of the operation, will be fit for purpose and better able to do its job. They have a very simple plan: Kill the headcount, reduce the headcount, fire people. That is it. That is the plan. So we are going to be left with a decimated FEMA, a decimated Department of Agriculture, a decimated National Institutes of Health, and then who is going to put it back together? This brings me back to the cruelty of a guy like Musk. He doesn't have to worry about that. That is not his concern. Tesla is doing fine. SpaceX is doing fine. You know, things are great for him. But they won't be great--not just for the people whose jobs have been savagely terminated, it will be bad for the cancer research that scientists are doing. It will be bad for our Vermont farmers who now find themselves deeply in debt because the Federal Government stiffed them. It will be bad for our FEMA response to the next community in our country that gets hit hard by a natural disaster. So we have got to wake up here and be honest about what is going on with DOGE. We do agree--we do agree, I believe, Republicans and Democrats--that we have got to kick the tires on programs in government, and it is everything from food programs to commodity programs to the Defense Department. And we may have some fierce debates about what the priorities are and what we think is important and what we don't think is important, but that has got to be an on-the-level debate. What Musk has done is just said: Hey, leave it to me. Let me send out a bunch of emails. Let me fire a lot of people in a lot of Agencies. Let's move fast and break things, and it will come back together. It doesn't work that way. You know, you destroy the foundation of your house just like you destroy the foundation of a government program like FEMA or the National Institutes of Health, it just doesn't come back overnight because the organizations that we are trying to build, institutions that are essential to the well-being of our own country, those often take generations to create. It takes the commitment, the service, the dedication, and hard work of Americans of all kinds in all States. This guy Musk is just destroying it all and cavalier about it and contemptuous to the rest of America about what he is doing. We can pay the price. It is wrong what they are doing and how they are doing it. My view is that we do, in fact, have an opportunity here because both sides are quite willing to come to the table and ask these questions: How can we do it better? But you know, if we came to the table and we asked how can we do it better, we would be looking at the long-term function: How do we have FEMA work better; how do we have our NIH work better; how do we assess grants better; how do we help our Small Business Administration be more effective in helping our young entrepreneurs? We would be asking those questions. The other thing we would be doing--and I believe this because I have such respect for all of my colleagues here--we care about how it affects the people. We might have to make some tough decisions because this program could be cut; this one might have to be expanded. But we wouldn't just send off an email telling people to get lost. We wouldn't just be sending off an email to a farmer who just went to the bank and got a loan based on the credit of the United States of America promising to contribute a grant. We would be considering that. DOGE isn't. In my view, we should all be outraged at the cruelty with which DOGE is operating. It is cruel to the institutions that are important for each of our States, and it is cruel to the people who have been doing this work in good faith for so long. We have got to speak up and acknowledge that DOGE is destructive. We can embrace the effort to address waste, fraud, and abuse. We can embrace the opportunity to streamline and save money, make things work better, but we can never abandon our commitment to the people of this country who work so hard. We can never abandon, in a cavalier way, the veterans to whom we have an immense debt of obligation. Mr. President, DOGE is pretty dumb and pretty cruel and pretty destructive the way that it has operated under Elon Musk. I yield the floor.

Mr. WELCH

Mr. WELCH. Mr. President, I ask permission to speak up to 10 minutes.

Mr. WELCH. Mr. President, I oppose Kash Patel. I believe he is the dangerously wrong choice to serve as Director of the FBI. We all have great admiration for the FBI. The men and women there serve our Nation, do hard work every day. For decades, they have served as the nonpolitical Agency that protects us and defends the rule of law. I believe that Mr. Patel is on a mission to wreck the FBI. It is his own words. He wants to turn the FBI building into a monument or museum to the deep state. You know, I believe that this country and Congress is in the midst of a slow-moving but rapidly accelerating constitutional crisis. This is real, and we can ignore it or see it. It began most visibly, of course, on January 6, 2021, when two norms of this Republic--the peaceful transfer of power and the renunciation of violence to affect the outcome of the vote count and certification-- were breached, and where many Members of the House and Senate also voted against certifying the election of the person chosen by the people in their own States. The President continues to say that the election was stolen, and he has coached his nominees to embrace the big lie. The first month of the Trump administration has shown the contempt for the Constitution and the acceptance of lawlessness that is dangerous to the future of our Republic. President Trump's election denialism was an early sign of his disregard for the norms and requirements of the Constitution. Now empowered in a second term by a Congress and a judiciary which refuse to assert their independence, Mr. Trump has enacted Executive order after Executive order to dismantle our institutions. He doesn't have the authority to do what he is doing: the Federal funding freeze, clearly an unconstitutional invasion of the article I power of the purse; shutting down Agencies created by Congress without authority; revoking birthright citizenship, a constitutional provision that he asserts that he can do by Executive order; removing leaders of independent Agencies created by Congress, clearly unlawful; firing inspectors general in violation of notice requirements created by Congress, unlawful; firing government employees who have civil service protections, clearly unlawful; and pushing really a quid pro quo order at the Department of Justice to drop charges against a corrupt mayor in New York so he will accede to whatever the wishes are of the Trump administration regarding local enforcement. That is only a short list. We have reached a point where a Federal judge has found that the White House defied his order to release billions of dollars in Federal grants, marking the first time that a judge has expressed and declared that the Trump administration is disobeying a judicial mandate. That is troubling. The country is headed into a situation where in addition to acting without authority, the President and his enablers are--he will defy rulings from the third branch of our government. Vice President Vance has made it very clear what his point of view is on judges: Judges aren't allowed to control the executive's ``legitimate powers,'' and if the courts don't like it, let them enforce it. Of course, under our Constitution, since Marbury v. Madison, the court is--the court is the final arbiter of what is legitimate or what is not, and the executive branch must enforce the laws as interpreted by the coequal branch of government. It is my view that this administration is showing maximum contempt for core constitutional values, including, most importantly, the separation of powers. This is not about what the President's agenda is. This is about his disregard about the limits that apply to each branch of government. We have a dilemma. There are many in Congress that are fully in support of President Trump's policies. That is his right to pursue them, any Member's right to support them, but it has to be that we accept our unique responsibility, each of the 100 U.S. Senators, that we have to guarantee that in pursuit of those policies, it is done within constitutional boundaries. That is the glue that has held this country together through thick and thin for nearly 250 years. You know, this is not just talk about civic aspiration. It is a recognition that the separation of powers, that the system of checks and balances--we are custodians of that, each of us here--that the concept of the Executive's ambition should be matched with the ambition of the legislature. That is what has held us together through the turmoil of our own history. We have fierce debates about important public policy matters, but what allows us to resolve those, despite intense disagreements, is staying within the guardrails of the Constitution. That process is being threatened directly and aggressively. The President's attack on our Constitution on January 6 has continued to this day. We have witnessed the renunciation of the decision the American people made in the 2020 election by President Trump's nominees. Many of them who came before us, including Mr. Patel, were unable to simply say who won the 2020 election. They continued the ``Stop the Steal'' narrative even 4 years later, and now we have President Trump in his first month in office acting in ways that continue to challenge the constitutional order. I am voting against Mr. Patel, primarily but not exclusively, because he is clearly an instrument in that effort to continue eroding the precepts of the Constitution on separation of powers. I urge all my fellow Senators, Republican and Democrat, to embrace the responsibility we have to assert our responsibility and authority as a coequal branch. This is a difficult time, particularly for many of my esteemed colleagues on the Republican side. You may support, as I mentioned, the policies of the President, but we have got to take a look at how he is going about trying to implement them. That really matters. We are all custodians of the constitutional order. I am regarding what President Trump has been doing in his first month of office as an illegal rampage. It is a rampage of illegality. He is showing a contempt for Congress and a contempt for the U.S. judiciary. Mr. Patel has signed on to that agenda. He isn't just someone who will be forced to participate in the President's campaign of retribution. He is an active participant. He has got his enemies list. We know this because his own words said: What was the FBI doing planning January 6th for a year? No basis for that, other than to set up the attack on the good men and women of the FBI. Mr. Patel is the one who created a list of deep state individuals. This is like Russia kind of stuff, half of whom are Republicans in the so-called deep state. Then he called them ``nothing more than a cabal of government gangsters and their allies.'' This is the Department he is going to be leading, really. He is the one who said ``thank you to President Trump for helping put so many government gangsters in their place.'' Mr. Patel is not the person to lead the FBI. My hope is that all of us should consider what Mr. Patel will do. He is going to use the power of the FBI to go after all those in government, those in the media, and those across the country that he doesn't agree with. He cannot serve as the next Director of the FBI. I yield the floor.

Mr. WELCH

Mr. WELCH. Mr. President, I would like to speak about the importance of FEMA, the importance of fixing it but not destroying it. Mother Nature, this week, provided yet another reminder of the devastating impacts of natural disasters. In Kentucky, we had catastrophic flooding that inundated communities and led to thousands of evacuations. At least 14 are dead, and all of us, our hearts break for the people of eastern Kentucky. To my colleagues from the Commonwealth, I offer all of my support in getting the aid that you need to help recover. That is the same commitment I have offered to our colleagues in Hawaii, North Carolina, California, and Florida, and it is also the commitment many of my colleagues made to me and Senator Sanders after Vermont's devastating floods in July of 2023 and 2024. What we know in Vermont is the disasters that have afflicted us all over the country, they don't care whom you voted for. They don't respect county or State lines. They are indiscriminate and unpredictable, and the storm metes out its suffering in a bipartisan way. There is no escaping it, but we need FEMA. That is what we learned in Vermont. When the storm arrived, FEMA was there. In the immediate aftermath when people had seen literally their homes swept down a river, when the crops and farms had been destroyed, when businesses were ruined, FEMA was there to help in the immediate aftermath. But we also experienced something that I have heard from my colleagues in FEMA-related situations, and that is that in the longer term recovery, you run into the frustration of a distant bureaucracy that can't make quick turnaround decisions and such things as granular as whether you can install a 24-inch culvert instead of a 16-inch culvert. That is why the reform we need is focused on empowering local communities to have much more decision-making and implementation authority in executing the recovery that takes, oftentimes, well over a year or 2 years. You simply can't have that done by folks not in the community. Those folks in the community are totally invested in getting their community back on its feet, helping its businesses, helping the folks who lost their homes, and helping the farmers who lost their crops. So the reform that we need in FEMA is definitely there, and we can do that and must do it together because any of these natural disasters are going to come our way at some point, regardless of which side of the aisle you represent. It is one of the reasons I am absolutely so concerned about what is happening at FEMA now. There has been a DOGE invasion. I use that explicitly. What does Elon Musk know about the suffering in these communities? Where does he get the authority--where does he get the callousness to say FEMA should be destroyed? Something, by the way, the President himself has said. When I think about all the folks in Vermont, all the folks now in Kentucky, all the folks in California from the fires, Hawaii and the fires, to be told that the response of the Federal Government, when a catastrophic event happened in their community, without any responsibility on their part--they were on the receiving end of Mother Nature making its decision to hit that community at that time. Why do Trump and Musk say we ought to get rid of the Agency that is on the scene as the storm arises and stays there, hopefully, until people get back on their feet? The other thing that is happening with DOGE going into FEMA is that they are getting access and accumulating very personal information. If you are in the path of the storm and you seek FEMA aid, you have to give a significant amount of your own personal information, but that is solely for the purpose of evaluating your claim. We now have the DOGE folks. These are very young people. We don't know what their credentials are. We don't know what the use is that they are going to put this information to--getting the personal information of people in all of these communities around the country. They have no right to do that. They have no need to do that. It doesn't facilitate the reform or the destruction of FEMA. It is just an invasion of privacy. We need FEMA. We can fix it. We can reform it, but I have talked to many of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle, and they know that most of our States, really all of our States, are simply not set up and equipped to deal with a catastrophic event. Oftentimes, as in the case of Vermont, a once-in-a-100-year-storm that came 2 years in a row, but we don't have the infrastructure of an emergency response to deal with that. We need the help of the Federal Government. That is exactly the role the Federal Government should play. It has a fiscal capacity that none of our States have, and the definition of an emergency is something that couldn't have been prevented by the actions of the State. So we need to recommit ourselves to assuring the American people in each of our communities that if and when there is a disaster, FEMA will be there. But we also have an obligation to make it work better so in that long-term recovery that is so essential, both emotionally and physically, that we will give the local communities much more authority to make their decisions and empower them with much more control of the funds needed to meet that recovery as quickly as possible. We not only can work together to improve FEMA, the only way we will is if we do work together. How in the world is it a partisan issue when you are talking about the folks you represent or I represent who find themselves in the path of a fire, in the path of a flood, in the path of a hurricane or a tornado? We come together to help each other when that happens. That is the responsibility we have, but more than that, it is really a wonderful opportunity to serve, where we are in a position to help Americans, regardless of where they live, regardless of what their political persuasion is, but because we respect them, the lives they have built, and we want to help them after a destruction of things that are really important to them and their community. We want to help them get back on their feet. I yield the floor.

Mr. WELCH

Mr. WELCH. Mr. President, really delighted to be here with my colleagues: the Senator from Wisconsin, the Senator from Rhode Island, and the Senator from New Hampshire. There are a couple things that just need to be faced directly. One is that the President of the United States is not leveling with us, and he is not leveling with the American people. You can't say that you love Medicaid, and it is not going to be touched and in the next breath say you endorse the House bill that cuts a trillion dollars from Medicaid. And it is a responsibility that each of us has to assess the credibility of the President's assertion here. And we can pretend that we don't know the House bill that is about a tax cut requires a trillion dollars out of the Medicaid budget or we can face the truth and then have a debate about whether we should or should not cut Medicaid. But the President won't level with the American people or with Congress. And it is tougher on the Republican side of the aisle because he is a Republican President, but the truth here is inescapable. The only way the House bill can get passed and the tax cut that is a goal of many on the Republican side of the aisle can be passed and paid for is to take away healthcare, and Medicaid is the big target. And my colleagues have talked about the importance of Medicaid, and that is true, so true. In Vermont, in every single State, it is healthcare. And it is healthcare for kids. It is healthcare for seniors. Two out of the three nursing home beds in Vermont are covered by Medicaid. We have these cuts; those people get kicked out of the nursing homes. We cut Medicaid; kids who are totally dependent on Medicaid for access to the healthcare they need lose their care. It is really, really a problem everywhere. But I think in rural communities, it is even more severe because we have got rural hospitals and we have got rural community health centers that play a major role in rural life. They are all on thin ice financially. They have overworked staff but who are committed to the people in that community. And the only reimbursement they get is through Medicaid. And as we all know, the Medicaid reimbursement is much lower than Medicare and certainly way lower than private insurance. But they pull it together and somehow keep the lights on, keep the doors open, and provide the healthcare that the folks in that community need. You know, another point I want to make--and, Mr. President, I know you served as Governor of West Virginia, and we have got the former Governor of New Hampshire here. You had to deal with really tough budgets. You have got to balance your budget. And I know in West Virginia, West Virginia expanded Medicaid when that became an option. And God bless West Virginia. I mean, God bless ``West by God Virginia.'' But I have been there, went down into the coal mine. Those are wonderful people. They work so hard. But in order to be eligible for Medicaid in West Virginia, your income as an adult can't be a dollar over $20,782. That is 10 bucks an hour, $10.39 an hour. And, you know, when I met West Virginians and went in the coal mines, it so reminded me of the hard-working Vermont farmers. That is tough work to do and people show up and they do it. It is like our farmers in Vermont. It is really hard work. They show up, and they do it. But a lot of folks making $20,782--there is no way--no way--they can afford healthcare. There is no way. And that is another absolute requirement that each of us level with one another. Let's not pretend that there is some fictional healthcare out there that a person who is working 40 hours a week making 10.39 an hour can pay for healthcare. It doesn't exist. And the major responsibility that we have is to make certain that we have a healthcare system where people who work hard, who love their kids, who have an elderly parent, can have some security that the healthcare they need, they will get. So the President says he is not going to touch the big beautiful healthcare bill and Medicaid, when his action is he is taking a sledgehammer to it. And he is taking a sledgehammer that is cutting off folks in West Virginia, folks in Vermont who are working hard, who struggle every week to pay their bills, and who could get some peace of mind that the child that they love, that the grandparent that they are caring for, can have decency and access to healthcare or a nursing home. It is an absolute disgrace that there is any discussion--that there is any discussion--that we would be taking that away. Shame on Trump. Shame on Trump. The other thing I want to talk about is this question of waste, fraud, and abuse. Who of the 100 U.S. Senators is in favor of waste, fraud, and abuse? Not a single one of us. But that is not what is going on here. That is not what is going on here. You as a Governor, Senator Hassan, former Governor--you are on that. If there are some rip-offs going on in the Medicaid Program in your State, you are on it. You want those people prosecuted and put in jail. Waste, fraud, and abuse is just being used as a curtain to conceal what the real agenda is, and that is saving money on Medicaid by dumping people off of Medicaid. The savings program here is about taking away the access to healthcare that people have, folks--like in West Virginia--who make $21,000 or so a year. If we want to talk about the rip-offs, if we want to talk about taking the waste out of the healthcare system--and by the way, I do-- let's go after these pharmacy benefit manufacturers adding billions of dollars to the cost of healthcare, driving out of business our community pharmacies that know the people in their communities and want to take care of them. By the way, we had a bipartisan bill to get rid of the pharmacy benefit manager rip-offs, and do you know who blocked it? A guy named Elon Musk--the guy who wants to ``save big beautiful Medicaid.'' Rip- off. And he is accomplice No. 1 in allowing the pharmacy benefit managers to continue to stick it to our pharmacists, to our taxpayers. If we wanted to go after where the rip-off is in healthcare, what about what United Healthcare did with the Medicare Advantage Program, where they literally paid doctors to overdiagnose so they could boost what they charged, and then when people on Medicare Advantage in their program got sick, they dumped them. And we tolerate that. We tolerate that. Billions--hundreds of billions of dollars. So, yes, the biggest threat to access to healthcare for the people you represent and that I represent is the rip-off in the healthcare industry, with higher than anywhere else in the world prescription drug prices, with rip-offs systemically used in the Medicare Advantage Program, with the gaming of pharmaceuticals by the pharmacy benefit managers. I want to save money, but I want to save money by stopping the rip- offs. I don't want to save money by dumping people who make $21,000 a year off of the healthcare they absolutely need. And that is what Musk is doing. That is what Trump is doing. That is wrong, and we have to stop it. We have to stand up for the hard-working people of West Virginia, the hard-working people of New Hampshire, the hard-working people of Wisconsin, and the hard-working people of Vermont. We have to say no and acknowledge the rip-offs that Donald Trump is trying to inflict on hard-working people in our States so that he can pay for the tax cuts for his billionaire friends. I yield the floor.

Mr. WELCH

Mr. WELCH. Madam President, turning back to the topic at hand--a serious question for all of us. The Health and Human Services Secretary plays a vital role in the well-being of every citizen in this country and is extraordinarily powerful in every respect. It has to do with science, medical research, cancer cures. It has to do with the delivery of healthcare and trying to deal with the very complex and very expensive healthcare system we have. It has to do with trying to create priorities for the administration of our healthcare system. I think all of us, every single one of us, takes very seriously the advice and consent constitutional responsibility that we have when it comes to voting on a Presidential nominee. I start out with the proposition that a newly elected President is entitled to the benefit of the doubt, so my beginning position is my hope that I can be supportive. But saying that I want to give the benefit of the doubt to the President, Republican or Democratic, is different than saying I want to give a blank check. So how do we decide--or at least I will say how do I decide about a yes or no? It is three matters for me. One is character, one is competence, and one is their priorities. So character, competence, and priorities. Now, character is a difficult issue to assess, and I think all of us are reserved when it comes to making an opinion or judgment on the character of another person. There are a lot of reasons anyone does whatever it is they do, and all of us have mistakes that we have made along the way. But difficult as it is, that is a factor that I believe a U.S. Senator has to take into account, exercising her or his best judgment about the character qualifications of the person who is presented to us. So rather than go through my own reading and assessment of Mr. Kennedy's character, I want to read a letter from his cousin Caroline Kennedy, who has known him all his life. You know, it was a painful letter for her to write. She videotaped it as well. But it was a letter that, out of great sincerity and a great sense of concern about the well-being and the healthcare of the citizens of this country, she felt obligated to share. She is a very private person. Her family, as we all know, has suffered great loss and provided great service. She lost her father. She lost her uncle. She lost her other uncle. There has been a lot of hardship that has been reported for many of the Kennedys. I am happy to be a great admirer of the family. I am from Massachusetts. John F. Kennedy was somebody who inspired me to think about going into politics and public service. I say that by way of introduction because this letter that Caroline Kennedy sent to Senator Crapo, the Finance Committee chair, and Senator Wyden, the ranking member, and Senator Cassidy and Senator Sanders, the chair and ranking member of the HELP Committee, was clearly hard to write but heartfelt and, as I said earlier, reflected a deep and abiding commitment that she felt to provide relevant information to those of us who have to take a vote on Mr. Kennedy. Let me read her letter: Throughout the past year, people have asked for my thoughts about my cousin, Robert Kennedy, Jr., and his presidential campaign. I did not comment, not only because I was serving in a government position as United States Ambassador to Australia, but because I have never wanted to speak publicly about my family members and their challenges. We are a close generation of 28 cousins who have been through a lot together. We know how hard it has been, and we are always there for each other. But now that Bobby has been nominated by President Trump to be Secretary of Health and Human Services, a position that would put him in charge of the health of the American people, I feel an obligation to speak out. Overseeing the FDA, the NIH, the CDC, and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services--agencies that are charged with protecting the most vulnerable among us--is an enormous responsibility, and one that Bobby is unqualified to fill. He lacks any relevant government, financial, management, or medical experience. His views on vaccines are dangerous and willfully misinformed. These facts alone should be disqualifying. But he has personal qualities related to this position which, for me, pose even greater concern. I have known Bobby my whole life; we grew up together. It's no surprise that he keeps birds of prey as pets because he himself is a predator. He has always been charismatic--able to attract others through the strength of his personality, willingness to take risks and break the rules. I watched his younger brothers and cousins follow him down the path of drug addiction. His basement, his garage, and his dorm room were the centers of the action where drugs were available, and he enjoyed showing off how he put baby chickens and mice in the blender to feed his hawks. It was often a perverse scene of despair and violence. Of course, people can grow and change. Through his own strength--and the many second chances he was given by people who felt sorry for the boy who had lost his father--Bobby was able to pull himself out of illness and disease. I admire the discipline that took and the continuing commitment it requires. But siblings and cousins who Bobby encouraged down the path of substance abuse suffered addiction, illness, and death while Bobby has gone on to misrepresent, lie, and cheat his way through life. Today, while he may encourage a younger generation to attend AA meetings, Bobby is addicted to attention and power. Bobby preys on the desperation of parents of sick children--vaccinating his own children while building a following by hypocritically discouraging other parents from vaccinating theirs. Even before he fills this job, his constant denigration of our health care system and the conspiratorial half-truths he has told about vaccines, including in connection with Samoa's deadly 2019 measles outbreak, have cost lives. And now we know that Bobby's crusade against vaccination has benefited him in other ways, too. His ethics report makes clear that he will keep his financial stake in a lawsuit against an HPV vaccine. In other words, he is willing to enrich himself by denying access to a vaccine that can prevent almost all forms of cervical cancer and which has been safely administered to millions of boys and girls. During my time in Australia working on the QUAD Cancer Moonshot, I learned that cervical cancer is among the top three forms of cancer among women in a majority of countries. Tragically every year, more than 200,000 children lose their mothers, orphaned due to lack of vaccines and screening. Those are the real-world consequences of Bobby's irresponsible beliefs. We are a close family and none of this is easy to say. It also wasn't easy to remain silent last year when Bobby expropriated my father's image and distorted President Kennedy's legacy to advance his own failed presidential campaign--and then groveled to Donald Trump for a job. Bobby continues to grandstand off my father's assassination, and that of his own father. It is incomprehensible that someone who is willing to exploit their own painful family tragedies for publicity would be in charge of American life-and-death situations. Unlike Bobby, I try not to speak for my father--but I am certain that he and my uncle Bobby, who gave their lives in public service, and my uncle Teddy, who devoted his Senate career to improving health care, would be disgusted. The American health care system, for all its flaws, is the envy of the world. Its doctors and nurses, researchers, scientists, and caregivers are the most dedicated people I know. Every day, they give their lives to heal and save others. They deserve a knowledgeable leader who is committed to evidence and excellence. They deserve a Secretary committed to advancing cutting-edge medicine to save lives, not rejecting the advances we have already made. They deserve a stable, moral, and ethical person at the helm of this crucial agency. They deserve better than Bobby Kennedy--and so do the rest of us. I urge the Senate to reject his nomination. Sincerely, Caroline Kennedy. That is a hard letter for her to have written, a hard letter for me to have read. But a person who has known him all his life, who admires his capacity ultimately to kick the heroin addiction that he had, has expressed very clearly questions about his character. Now, why is that important? You need a steady hand to run a major Agency with the awesome responsibility of the healthcare and well-being of the people of this country. That is a hard thing to do. It is very stressful. And that history that was recounted by Caroline Kennedy certainly raises major questions about the suitability of Mr. Kennedy to assume the responsibility of Health and Human Services Secretary. The second question is competence. Competence has to do with what your experience is, what your training is, what your managerial capacities are. What Mr. Kennedy said is that he wants to be a disrupter in the healthcare system. I am in favor of a disrupter. We need change. I don't want a destroyer. And Robert Kennedy does not have the temperament or the capacity or the competence to be merely a disrupter and a builder, but to be a destroyer. Competence--you know the obvious things: He is not a doctor. He is not a scientist. He is not a public health expert or someone who has led a complex organization like HHS or a private major organization that requires extraordinary managerial skills. He has built a career--we have a debate about this, but I come down clearly on the side that his career is built on misinformation. And it is misinformation in healthcare. And, by the way, one of the things that is so tough: If you are a mother, if you are a father, and you have a partner or you have a son or a daughter who is really seriously sick, you will do anything--you will mortgage your house, you will liquidate your retirement account, you will do anything and everything you can--for the well-being of that child or that loved one. You will do it. But also, if you have a person you love who is diagnosed with a fatal illness, you also are really vulnerable to folks who tell you there is an easy way out, a magic therapy, a special doctor in South America. You are so hungry to get the cure, to get the answer to protect the person you love. Anybody in the medical profession should take great care not to abuse the trust they have. My view: Robert Kennedy has spent his considerable talent promoting misinformation to vulnerable people who have motives we all have, and that is the well-being of people we love. Some of the things that Mr. Kennedy said when he was attacking vaccines, they are not based at all on science, but they appeal to people's distrust of the standard medical profession. Kennedy made anti-Semitic remarks about COVID-19, saying that the pandemic was ethnically targeted to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people. I mean, what is that about? His anti-vax work in Samoa contributed to a measles outbreak in 2019, and 83 people--mostly children--died. Kennedy falsely claimed 5G internet causes radiation sickness and DNA damage. You know, some people believe this. They saw it on the internet. He is promoting it using the magic of the Kennedy name, the credibility that comes from being a member of one of the most storied political families in the history of our country. Kennedy doesn't understand what HIV/AIDS is and has espoused homophobic and racist views on HIV/AIDS. He has said it is ``undeniable that African AIDS is an entirely different disease from Western AIDS.'' Kennedy has also pushed a false theory that AIDS is really chronic fatigue syndrome. And Kennedy said it is antidepressants, not guns, that lead to more mass shootings and has said Big Pharma's influence over the NIH stopped him from researching mass shootings. When I think about how did he come to be the nominee, it is relevant because it obviously isn't on the basis of his scientific knowledge, his skill at running a major organization, the healthcare research that he has done. It was political. He ran for President in the Democratic primary. He lost badly, made no progress, selected his Vice Presidential candidate on the basis of her capacity to write checks and keep the campaign going. It blew up nevertheless, and he went, hat in hand, to Candidate Trump, who was leading by far on the Republican side--pretty much uncontested--and begged for a job in exchange for Kennedy's political support. President Trump--then-Candidate Trump--told Kennedy: You could be HHS Secretary. And here he is. So that is hardly the resume to inspire confidence that he will be good at the job. He was good at ingratiating himself to President Trump, but that is not confidence for me that he will be good at securing the health and well-being of this country. Interestingly enough, one of the things that President Trump did in his first term that I have great respect for is Operation Warp Speed. We were in COVID. A lot of things President Trump did, I think, were bad, but I am going to talk about something he did that was really good. We needed a vaccine. We all remember back then. We knew COVID was deadly. We were all terrified that somebody or a family member, a friend, would contract the virus. We didn't know how it was spreading. There was even a time when, if you got your groceries, you were supposed to leave your bag outside. We just didn't know, and we were trying to figure it out. But what we did all know is that what would give us security and safety was a vaccine, and we didn't have one. Operation Warp Speed was a commitment by the Federal Government to put up money in advance to help facilitate research and put up money in advance to build production capacity for a yet-to-be-invented vaccine. So what happened with Operation Warp Speed was the combination of Federal money going into pharmaceutical companies that devoted their scientific expertise and medical expertise to finding a vaccine, and they found it. Then, when they found it, we didn't start building the manufacturing capacity; we had it in place. That was a risk because we didn't know we would get the vaccine. We didn't know if it would work or it wouldn't. But the Trump administration made a commitment to be ready the moment that vaccine was found, and as a result of that, we were able to get the vaccines out to millions of people way before, in the absence of Operation Warp Speed, it would have been delivered. That is an achievement. Robert Kennedy, 6 months after the vaccine was out and hundreds of millions of lives were being saved, said it was a disaster. He condemned it. So how is it, even in the face of this almost miraculous discovery, creation, and then delivery of this vaccine and hundreds of thousands of lives saved and a restoration of some sense of security even though we had a long way to go, that Mr. Kennedy condemned the scientific breakthrough that led to the saving of lives of people in the Presiding Officer's State and in mine? So it just bewilders me that a person is so rash and so rejects not only science but life experience in this country where Operation Warp Speed helped us get that vaccine created and distributed. That is pretty strange. You know, other things that Mr. Kennedy has said about vaccines--and this really is serious, you know, because we are having debates about these things, and people don't have confidence. The more we undercut their confidence in vaccines--will they get vaccinated for polio? Will they get vaccinated for measles? Will they get vaccinated for COVID? The more you undercut that with specious claims, the more resistance there is for us having the confidence we need as a society to make a decision about how to proceed. But Robert Kennedy, some of the things he did--he falsely claims that vaccines caused autism. He falsely claims that vaccines cause autoimmune diseases, develop disorders and allergies. He claims vaccines can cause rare childhood cancers. He claimed that the Spanish flu came from vaccine research--no evidence in the world for that--and called COVID shots ``a crime against humanity.'' He claimed the COVID vaccine was a conspiracy against Black communities. He raised a lot of money off anti-vaccine propaganda films. He went to Samoa, as others have said, to amplify anti-vaccine voices and contributed to a measles outbreak, and that measles outbreak killed 83 people. As my colleague from Georgia mentioned, he compared COVID policies with Nazi testing programs. He compared vaccination requirements to Nazi experimentation. He claimed pesticides make people trans. He claimed HIV does not cause AIDS. You know, a couple of things that--he claimed fluoride causes diseases and claimed that 5G internet causes radiation sickness and DNA damage. That is not a person I think that we can trust to build up science, build up the credibility of good science, and make decisions about allocation of research. It is just a person--I don't know how to describe it--it is just a conspiracy-minded person who comes up with the conspiracy of the day to challenge anything that is out there to advance his interests. You know, the other priorities--and this is where, on how best to improve our healthcare system, there is going to be debate, and there always is within the Democratic caucus, oftentimes within the Republican conference, and certainly across the aisle. I was a strong supporter of ObamaCare, and my Republican colleagues in the House at that time were united in their opposition. It passed really with the vote of Senator McCain here in the Senate, and the debate never ended. When I was in the House after ObamaCare was passed and the Republicans took the majority, it seemed like every vote was about repealing the healthcare bill. But finally that is behind us. It has been accepted, but it is not necessarily guaranteed. In fact, we have to make a lot of improvement. But the priorities that I am hearing from the Trump administration, which would be carried out by the Health and Human Services Secretary, are very disturbing to me and would be very, very harmful to Vermont. There are dramatic cuts in the Medicaid budget. Medicaid helps low- income kids. It really is also the lifeline for our seniors who need nursing home care. Medicaid in Vermont--194,000 or 30 percent of Vermonters could potentially be impacted by the administration's cuts to Medicaid and health insurance, tax credits, and assistance. And that is all kinds of Vermonters. That is 20,000 seniors, it is 67,000 children, and it is 19,000 Vermonters who have disabilities. By the way, we have real affordability challenges in Vermont. One of our big affordability challenges--we have very high property taxes and one of the highest income taxes in the country, but the property taxes are brutal on local property owners and homeowners. If those cuts occur, as is being proposed by the Trump administration and would be advocated by Mr. Kennedy, that is a $113 million hole in the Vermont State budget. What do they do? Does the State go to local property tax payers to try to make up the difference? Not possible. Not sustainable. You know, three proposals would dramatically reduce Federal funding for Medicaid--block grants, per capita caps, and reducing Medicaid matching rates. All of that has immediate and detrimental impact on our budget. Currently, the Federal Government pays between 50 percent and 77 percent of Medicaid costs and more for certain high-value services. The administration proposals to slash billions in Federal funding from Medicaid, as I mentioned, would really strain our budgets. The programs we have that would really be affected include Dr. Dinosaur. It provides low-cost or free healthcare for Vermont's children and teenagers under the age of 19, and it also provides healthcare for pregnant women, which is so tremendous, women who are pregnant getting healthcare and then after the baby is delivered, care then. That is such a critical time in their life and in the child's life. We are going to keep that, not diminish it. Vermont Medicaid has a prescription cost assistance program that helps uninsured and those enrolled in Medicare with help on their drug costs and long-term care services for seniors. We want to keep these. We want to improve it. If there are ways that we can make it more affordable, we want to do that. But we certainly don't want to blow it up. Vermonters could lose access to substance use treatment or mental health care. Our rural hospitals in Vermont are like rural hospitals in Alabama; they are a lifeline for our communities. They play a very important role in the well-being of communities--not just community health but the local economy. They are under enormous pressure. Doctors there are not being paid what they need to be paid. They do an incredibly good job for folks, but they are really in jeopardy. I am working with Senator Boozman and others to try to get the reimbursement rates for our community hospitals up to where they can be sustainable. The Kennedy plan would cut that and hurt us. So the bottom line here for me on the question of any nominee is character, competence, and priorities. And on all three of these, I come up short with respect to Mr. Kennedy. Aside from the fact that we could do better, it is hard in many ways to see how we could do worse. So I would urge all of my colleagues to consider the consequences of their vote--a vote that would put a person of questionable character, a person of questionable competence, and a person of, I feel, bad priorities at the head of our healthcare system. So I would urge my colleagues to vote no. I yield the floor.

Mr. WELCH

Mr. WELCH. Madam President, I am here to follow my colleague from Georgia Senator Warnock to talk about the Robert Kennedy nomination. But before I start, I just want to share some good news I just learned about with the success of DOGE. As we all know, Mr. Musk is working hard to slash costs, sending out emails to people telling them they don't have to show up to work tomorrow, firing inspectors general--all in pursuit of a smaller government at whatever the cost to a lot of folks around. But busy as Mr. Musk is, he found time--he found time--with Tesla to sign a $400 million contract to provide Tesla Cybertrucks as transportation for the State Department. So it is a tribute to Mr. Musk that he was able to take a little bit of time out of his worthy full- time job of cutting costs, cutting positions, and ``saving the taxpayers money''--that he was able to find an opportunity to sign this $400 million deal for his company, Tesla.

Mr. WELCH

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

Mr. WELCH

Mr. WELCH. Mr. President, I want to speak about what Elon Musk is doing to destroy the U.S. Agency for International Development. Here is what is happening. Mr. Musk--of course an unelected billionaire who knows really nothing and cares less about how the Federal Government works--is demolishing one of the most important Agencies we have for countering Russia, China authoritarianism, and anti-American extremism around the world, all being done in the name of ``efficiency.'' One former State Department official said: Disbanding U.S. aid is the strategic equivalent of scuttling the Navy. Mr. Musk bragged about feeding USAID into a wood chipper. What he is really doing, after locking USAID's staff out of their offices and blocking their access to email, is destroying the careers of thousands of professionals who administer programs that are critical to U.S. national security, not to mention the well-being of their families. I want to acknowledge something. Many Americans ask me and they ask the Presiding Officer, why should we send aid to other countries when we have so many problems here at home? And we do have problems at home, so that is a legitimate question. In my view, we haven't done enough in Congress to solve our own problems--the cost of food, housing, healthcare, or dealing with drug addiction, gun violence, homelessness, the challenges facing our farmers and small businesses, and the devastation to communities from wildfires, flooding, droughts, and other national disasters. Both parties have an obligation to address these issues, and our citizens do come first, but we also have a role in the world that is absolutely vital to our own national security. There is a sense--magnified by a lot of the misinformation Mr. Musk and others put out--that foreign aid is this huge component of our budget really compromising our ability to meet those needs that affect all of our citizens here in the country. People think it is like 25 or 30 percent of the budget. Foreign aid is less than 1 percent of our budget. So as a percentage, it is really quite modest. Incidentally, not that we necessarily want to compare, but as a per capita spending portion of our budget, what we spend in the United States on foreign aid is a lot less than our European allies and Japan. So it is modest but significant. But even at this less than 1 percent, the foreign aid budget is very important to America, and it serves our national interest. Why is that? Our USAID program started 64 years ago under then-President John F. Kennedy. He asked the question: Is a foreign aid program really necessary? His answer: The answer is that there is no escaping our obligations: our moral obligations as a wise leader and good neighbor in the interdependent community of free nations . . . and our political obligations as the single largest counter to the adversaries of freedom. There were adversaries then, and there are adversaries today. President Kennedy went on to say: To fail to meet those obligations now would be disastrous and, in the long run, more expensive. For widespread poverty and chaos lead to a collapse of existing political and social structures which would inevitably invite the advance of totalitarianism into every weak and unstable area. Thus our own security would be endangered and our own prosperity imperiled. A program of assistance to the underdeveloped nations must continue because the nation's interest-- That is, our Nation's interest-- and the cause of political freedom require it. The words of John F. Kennedy. But fast-forward. Only 5 months ago, George Bush's Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice said about the need for continued U.S. engagement in the world: [T]he United States has got to make both a statement and a reality of America's willingness to remain engaged in the world, because great powers don't mind their own business. And if we don't shape the international environment, then others will. And they are others that we do not want to cede the territory for our values and our interests, powers like China and powers like Russia. The words of former Secretary Condoleezza Rice. So the question that we need to answer today is not why we spend money on foreign aid. I don't believe we need to answer that because I think President Kennedy and Secretary Rice explained that very well. The question is, How can we make the best use of the 1 percent of the Federal budget to protect our interests in an increasingly unstable and dangerous world? As Secretary Rice said, ``if we don't shape the international environment, then others will''--because no matter how many times President Trump and Elon Musk say ``America first, isolationism,'' this is a decision that each one of us in the U.S. Senate must make. Isolationism is not an option. What does happen in Central America, in Africa, in the Middle East, in Asia does threaten our own security, far more so today than in President Kennedy's time. Our Secretary of State, Marco Rubio--a valued former colleague, someone we are all quite proud of--has said this administration is not going to eliminate foreign aid and that many of USAID's programs will continue. He and others in the administration have called what the administration is doing a ``review.'' Let's talk about that a minute. If this were a review, I would be all for it. We should always be looking at the best way and the best use of taxpayer dollars to get the best outcomes from the programs we fund. I have been calling for a review of FEMA, an organization that was very helpful to Vermont to recover from the floods of 2023 and 2024. In my view, we should be doing a review of every Agency--from food stamps to the Pentagon. So if it were a review, I would be all in favor of it. But it is not a review. It is a frontal assault to destroy USAID. Just consider: Emails go out telling people not to go to work. Emails go out telling people in foreign lands they have got to come home. Websites are closed down. Work is stopped in its tracks. That is not a review. That is a decision. It is an action to dismantle and destroy an organization. By the end of the so-called 90-day review, people in Africa working for USAID will be in the United States. There won't be anything left. And the administration really makes no secret about it. It acknowledged that it has decided to reduce the number of USAID staff from 14,000 to a few hundred. That is not a review; it is a decision. Many of us know a lot about USAID. Bring on reform, yes. But this organization has helped our country by doing good work in other countries. Many of us have met USAID staff at posts overseas, often in some of the world's most dangerous places. The folks in that organization are serious, purposeful, and patriots. They put their lives at risk every day, and they don't have body armor. If the goal really is reform of USAID, then I say to Secretary of State Rubio and I say to my Republican colleagues: I want to work with you. Anything we can do to make any program that we are responsible for better, I am absolutely all in. And we know there are ways we could make USAID better. But what Elon Musk is doing is dangerous. It is cruel, and it is illegal. It is illegal because this Congress has appropriated money for these programs, and Elon Musk is making a unilateral decision, without any congressional oversight or authority, to discontinue those authorized programs. Also, you know, what does it really say to the millions of people and governments around the world, when we have made a commitment, whether it is one that you agreed with or I did--but as a body, as a country, we made a commitment. And then, suddenly, there is an email out saying: We are just kidding. We are not going to follow through. And what does it mean, when you think about it--that because of, in effect, this stop-work order, we have food for hungry people that is not being delivered? We have vaccines, medicines that can save lives, avert injury, and they are not being delivered. Why are we doing that? Why would anyone do that? It would be like your neighbor's house is on fire, you have a hose, and you won't let them use it. That is not the way we operate--at least, I hope so. And, you know, the USAID work is invisible to most people. It shouldn't be invisible to us. We are supporting civil society leaders who are inspired by our own Declaration of Independence. These folks fight for human rights and democracy, and they do that in the face of corrupt and abusive governments that imprison their political opponents. These programs have been stopped. There are programs that have strong bipartisan support and have had it for decades. And I want to acknowledge many of my Republican colleagues who have done so much-- in particular, Senator Lindsey Graham, who knows this does protect our national security, and they present the best face of America that the rest of the world sees. You know, the administration talks about waste, fraud, and abuse. And when they talk about that, I ask myself the question: Is there a single American any of us can identify that is in favor of waste, fraud, and abuse? So they raise the question without proof of where that waste, fraud, and abuse is found. And instead of looking to identify it specifically so they can actually take action to eliminate it, they just leave it out there as an explanation to justify shutting down a valuable program and not doing the hard work of reform. That is applying not just as an approach, not just to USAID, but to many other programs, like farm programs, where I am getting calls from farmers: What happened to the agreement I had with the Federal Government, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, about doing a new type of crop rotation in exchange for getting a contract price? What has happened to folks running domestic violence shelters who can't get on the portal to get money paid to them that they are owed? This is happening throughout our non-profit systems, including at our community health centers. We had a woman who had an appointment with a dentist at a community health center and got a notice that it was closed because of the order that went out from the administration. So I believe in USAID. I believe it is wrong for the administration to essentially make the decision to feed it to the wood chipper. I believe in reform, but I do not believe that this is a serious effort at reform. It is a serious effort to destroy the program started by President Kennedy that has been embraced by Republican and Democratic Presidents since President Kennedy started it 64 years ago. And while there is a perception that it is 25 to 30 percent of our budget, it is 1 percent. And it is at a time when the reputation of the United States as a country that is going to stand behind the commitment it has made is being jeopardized. So my hope is that all of us, whether we agree or disagree about the ultimate value of USAID, will stand up for protecting what we have already committed ourselves to, and that to the extent there is reform to be made, we work together on that so that the American taxpayer and American national security interests can continue to be served by the men and women of the U.S. Agency for International Development. Mr. President, I conclude my remarks on USAID.

Mr. WELCH

Mr. WELCH. Mr. President, Donald Trump, as we all know, won the last election in November, and he is now the 47th President of the United States. But Donald Trump did not, contrary to what he and the Vice President want people to believe, win by anything close to a landslide. As this chart shows, out of a total of 155,238,302 votes, Mr. Trump won 77,302,000, or 49.8 percent. Kamala Harris won 75 million, or 48.3 percent. President Trump won, but just slightly over 2 million votes more than Kamala Harris. The difference between them was 1.5 percent of the popular vote. And although it was one of the smallest margins of victory since the 19th century, President Trump, in his inaugural address, and others in the inner circle of Trump repeatedly called the victory a ``landslide,'' a ``blowout,'' a ``mandate,'' ``historic.'' Do you know what a real landslide is? Lyndon Johnson, in 1964, won by 22.6 percent. Ronald Reagan won by 18.2 percent. Those are landslides. Why does it matter? Because facts matter. The truth matters. And we cannot survive in our democracy without respect--much more respect--for the truth. It is also really important because whether you are running for the U.S. Senate or for the Presidency of the United States, when one goes from candidate for office to the President or the U.S. Senator in office, the responsibility that we have is to all the people in our district and--certainly for the President of the United States--a responsibility to all the people in the United States. We serve all, whether they voted for us or against us. But what has been happening with the assertion that this was this massive landslide is that it has become the justification for narrow policies that completely disrespect the reality that so many other Americans need to be represented and heard and, also, is so narrow that even those who voted for President Trump for a variety of reasons are not getting policies they thought would be included. The ``America First'' policies, so far, have cut funding for programs to protect water that all Americans need, clean air that we all breathe, whether it is a voter who was for Trump or a voter who was for Harris. We are cutting funding for medical research for cancer, cures for kids who have cancer, for food assistance to feed malnourished kids and parents who are in every district in this country--and, of course, most spectacularly, what we are seeing is the illegal termination of the USAID program, something the courts have rescinded but the administration is rushing pell-mell, nevertheless. All of this, actually, is in service of being able to find offsets in order to pay for the Trump tax cuts that are heavily weighted to folks who are billionaires like Mr. Musk and, of course, to our major U.S. corporations. The folks who need a tax cut are the everyday Americans who have been trying to make ends meet and are having real trouble doing that. The White House is not even trying to hide what they are doing. You have got Elon Musk--you know, it is pretty astonishing. He owns Twitter, which is a source of immense misinformation. He is now trying to buy ChatGPT. He has massive amounts of government contracts for Starlink and for his space program. And he has contributed $280 million to the Trump campaign. And now, without any elected authority, without any advice and consent to the Senate on a position that is very powerful, the so- called DOGE Administrator, he has access to the private information of millions of Americans--all that confidential information about your Social Security and mine that is in the Treasury Department. So how is that happening? That is not in service of the folks who didn't vote for Mr. Trump. It is not even in service of people who did. It is important that elections and the outcomes of elections be respected. In this last election, just like in 2020, the people who oversaw this election worked hard to ensure that it was free and fair. We don't all get the outcome that we want, but it was free and fair. The difference in this election is that we, on the losing side, accepted the result. We didn't falsely claim that it was stolen--the ``Stop the Steal'' narrative--as President Trump continues to assert about 2020 and most of his Cabinet nominees do as well. We didn't try to prevent the outcome from being certified or to promote an insurrection by a violent mob, folks who actually attacked and injured people in this building and police officers--spit in their face, hit them, hit them with poles. And we had police officers who died after that attack. Falsely denying the outcome of an election and then using violence to overturn the result of a free and fair election absolutely subverts the democratic process. And as every American voter knows, free and fair elections--like the checks and balances between our three coequal branches of government--are absolutely essential to the well-being and continuation of our democracy. In the inaugural address that the President gave, I did not hear anything about childcare or the cost of housing or bringing down the cost of prescription drugs and making healthcare more affordable-- things that everyday families in every single part of this country need help with to be able to pay those bills and, at the end of the month, have their checkbook still balance. If and when the President starts focusing on those issues, I and my colleagues are absolutely ready to work with him and our colleagues on the other side of the aisle because those things--affordable broadband, affordable healthcare, affordable housing and rent, some economic security--those are things every single one of us needs. And the challenges that we face, whether it is in red America or blue America-- to try to have better policies to make that happen are things that we must be working on together. But not where what comes first, last, and always are these tax cuts that explode the deficit and go to folks who are not now paying their fair share. So as long as President Trump and his allies pretend that he has this massive mandate to literally disrupt and throw out the traditions and norms and guardrails of democracy, that is something I and so many of my colleagues will resist. We can't do that. The law matters, respect for your opponents matters, and focusing on the everyday needs of everyday people is what matters most. It is what is the goal all of us should be looking to accomplish. So there was no mandate--no massive mandate. There was a victory; but with victory, to describe it as this smashing mandate is a suggestion that what awaits us and has already arrived is overreach and failure. I yield the floor.

Mr. WELCH

Mr. WELCH. Madam President, on behalf of Vermont first responders and Vermonters who need Medicaid, I vote no.

Mr. WELCH

Mr. WELCH. Mr. President, I thank the Presiding Officer. I want to thank all the folks on the floor from the Parliamentarian's office, the floor clerks for spending the night on this important effort. I want to thank the Presiding Officer and your colleagues for occupying the Chair, something I had the privilege of doing for the last 2 years. I want to thank my colleagues, particularly Senator Murphy, who is working the night shift along with Senator Schatz. And I share the concerns that I have heard Senator Murphy express about the peril of our democracy and the peril of the people that all of us represent. My view here is that January 6 is not over. I was here that day, as I know the Presiding Officer was and Senator Murphy was. And I remember taking a walk in the morning from the Capitol, right here, down past the Ellipse where the President later that day spoke, to the Washington Monument, and then down to the Lincoln Memorial. And I didn't have a sense of dread or anticipation of what ultimately happened that day. There were lots of people here who were supporters of President Trump. I was looking at them as just American citizens. I was nervous a little bit about the signs that were so aggressive-- ``Hang Mike Pence''--seeing a gallows that was put up outside the Capitol, seeing the signs about killing Nancy Pelosi. But I had an assumption that I think all of us had that it would be peaceful and orderly, and I never ever anticipated that there would be a direct attack by a mob on the Capitol. And I don't think any of us did. On the other hand, my walk had ended before then-President Trump, in his last days of office--he had 14 more days--had his rally at the Ellipse and encouraged people, invited them to come here and go wild. He said that he won the election, feverish activity in a number of States to try to assert that it was false electors. He filed--I don't know--60 or 70 lawsuits, and they were all set aside, I think, except one on a minor technicality. The courts defended the outcome of the election. There was never any evidence that there was significant fraud that in any way affected the outcome of the election. And that is not me saying it. That was then-Attorney General Barr coming to the conclusion that there was no evidence whatsoever that there was widespread fraud or any kind of fraud that was substantial enough to affect the outcome of the election. So you had 67, maybe 70, courts that rejected all the arguments that the Trump team made. You had his own Attorney General reject it. But despite that, you had intense efforts on the part of President Trump to convince people that he won when he lost. And it got so extreme that he got on the phone with the secretary of state of Georgia and asked him to find him 11,000-plus votes to reverse the outcome of the election. He actually asked a secretary of state to completely violate his oath of office and ``find me the votes.'' You just don't do that when your job, more than anything else, as the President of the United States is to respect the process of the citizens voting for who the next President will be. And that didn't stop after January 6. When he got feverish calls from highly respected leaders here in the Capitol--``Mr. President, you have got to do something''--that was after the invasion of the Senate when Vice President Pence was actually in quite a bit of danger. And the stories are told that when the President was told that at the White House, he said, basically, ``Why do I care?'' And that attitude persisted. It just went on and on and on. And while the President was in the White House watching TV, watching things unfold--and there was incredible violence here. Many of us were in the building--and I was. I can tell the story. I was in the House, and I was in the Gallery. And the reason I was in the Gallery as opposed to on the floor is, of course, that was COVID, so there was social distancing, so we were doing our business both on the floor and in the Gallery. The Gallery was probably the worst place to be in some ways because you couldn't get in and out with any kind of ease. And what I so vividly remember was a couple of things. One, we had the Speaker in the Chair, and we had no idea what was going on outside. It was on TV, apparently, but we didn't have--we weren't watching it. We were watching the floor activities. And, suddenly, the Speaker was interrupted when a Capitol Police officer came out on the floor and interrupted and shouted that the Capitol was under siege and we were to stay in place and that we were to take out the gas masks, breathing apparatus, that were under the chairs and get ready to put those on. Now, one of the things we still have in the Senate and we had in the House was a sense of decorum. And there might be, in a fierce debate, some talking over one another on occasion, but the Chair was always the person who was in charge. And suddenly we had a police officer literally interrupting the proceedings of the House of Representatives. And I just thought to myself: How is this happening? And, of course, he told us that we were under attack. We didn't know what that meant. I had taken that walk, a couple-of-hour walk, earlier in the morning, and I saw a lot of very aggressive activity, but I thought it was peaceful. By the way, the one thing I did see that didn't mean all that much to me in the moment but meant a lot to me after all the events unfolded was there were about three groups of people that were marching in military formation, and they were singing anthems, which were pretty vulgar, about what to do to Nancy Pelosi. But they were in a military lockstep. It was all civilians, or so I thought. But it was a formation that I later, in the videos, saw was used to overwhelm the Capitol Police who were at the gates, the racks that were surrounding the Capitol--all very, very premeditated and practiced. It was a military kind of formation. So going back to the Gallery, we were all mystified what to do. We were apprehensive, obviously. And right after that officer spoke, I saw a couple of other Capitol Police come to the leaders. Speaker Pelosi, Majority Leader Hoyer--I was watching that side of the room--and I think Leader McCarthy as well were just whisked out. They were just taken out. And then it was just silence because the mob that ultimately attacked the House side had to get from this side of the Capitol, the Senate side, over there. And we watched and waited. And one of the things--and then we tried to go back in session, and Congressman McGovern took the Chair and tried to proceed. And I think part of it was that, even though the police officer had told us that the Capitol was under attack, we wanted to get our job done. It was January 6. We had to certify the election. It is a pretty easy job because our job is not to have a debate about who won the election; it is just to validate the vote of the citizens of the State we represent so that their will will be officially recorded and the person that the people of this country, in all our 50 States, elected will be certified. Very, very simple. And as Mr. McGovern was attempting to proceed, there was more and more alarm, and I watched as our security staff began taking heavy furniture and putting it up as a barricade against the doors. And the doors I am talking about were the ones that--the iconic doors where, when the President of the United States is escorted to the well of the House to give an address to a Joint Session of Congress, with the great ceremony and tradition that we have, is escorted over by the Sergeant at Arms, who announces with great fanfare: Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States. Well, those doors were barricaded. And at this point we all began to hear battering at the doors, those very doors--banging and banging and battering. And then I saw something else I had never seen. I saw our security staff with guns out. I had never seen that. And the banging on the door and then, eventually, the shattering of glass on these doors on the House side that are right over there, the comparable ones. And I saw this pole coming through the door itself, where the person with the pole had managed to shatter that glass. And there were a number of us up there in the House. And all of us had different levels of fear, and one of the fears that I think a lot of us had is that this is possibly a mass shooting event. All of us know that the tragedy of modern life in this country is that mass shooting events are all too common. But this is one of the most vivid memories I have. I was standing there and having no idea what was going to happen, but seeing that the police had their firearms out and hearing the glass shatter. And as I was looking at this, and I was feeling actually personally fearful, as we all were, I had another feeling. It was even more dominant than my apprehension about our safety. It was disbelief. Even as I was watching, even as I was experiencing this attack--the breaking of glass, the banging on the doors, the security folks putting up barricades, having guns out--I didn't believe that it was happening. I didn't believe it. And the reason I didn't believe it is that this is the United States of America. We have been able to enjoy something, that apparently we took for granted, for nearly 250 years, and that is the peaceful transfer of power. That is the renunciation of violence as a means of affecting the outcome of an election. That was shattered that day on January 6. So, of course, later we found out that there was a huge mob outside, and they did an immense amount of damage. I know they came over here and ransacked the Senate and some of the offices, including the Parliamentarian's. We had police officers who died. We had many of our Capitol Police injured, and I want to just talk about one police officer who was in the Capitol with me. It was a young man. He was probably about 35. I had been talking to him a little bit. He had two kids. He commuted into work. As many of the folks who work here, they can't live close by. It is too expensive. And they work hard, but it is a tough grind. You have got to commute maybe an hour in heavy traffic to come in and out, especially folks with a young family. And he was literally standing over me when I was on the floor, with his gun out. And as you know, in the Gallery, it is like in the Senate Chambers. There are all these doors around the Gallery, and they were not all secure, although we did have some Capitol Police up there. And the apprehension all of us had at that point was there was going to be a mob coming through those doors and attacking us directly. And this officer, a young man, had his weapon out, and he was intently surveilling. And I could just see--or maybe I am imagining what was going through his mind--the last thing in the world he wanted to do, the last thing, was to have to use that weapon on a fellow citizen who was in the Capitol, and, I am sure, for all kinds of reasons. I mean, just think of the responsibility one has if their job is to protect Members of Congress and the staff, and in the doing of that job, you actually have to make a decision to use your sidearm; and how traumatic that would be for the officer if he, in fact, had to do it-- this person who has a family, who is working hard, whose partner is expecting him home in a matter of hours. Maybe he is going to pick up the milk or pick up his kid at school on the way home. All the activities of everyday life--that is what is important to all of us. But what I could see is that, as horrible as it would be for him to have to take that action, if that was what was required--and, in my case, I was the one he was really protecting--he did not want to do it, but I could just see he was determined to do whatever was required to protect us. You know, that is the point where I really got disgusted with the people who were attacking, because I was wondering how is it? You know, I get it. You think your guy won, and you are over the top here. You have actually shown up at the Capitol. And, you know, some were violent. A lot were really violent. Others were less so, but they obviously were part of the mob scene here. But what disturbed me was the lack of capacity on the part of the folks attacking the Capitol to experience or empathize or see the impact that their actions were having on everyday Americans. Not us in Congress. They don't like us. They don't think we represent them. I get that. But what I don't understand is how a grievance you may have against Members of Congress on that day or the Vice President or on the actors who were going to actually do the certification--how you would allow yourself to be part of a group that did such harm, in this case, to that officer who was standing over me--to put him in such jeopardy, to cause him such anguish and trauma. You know, there is just no justification. We have an obligation to one another. As passionate as we may be about the political concerns that we have, it doesn't justify just treating with enormous disrespect, with physical violence, people who just aren't involved in it? They are just collateral damage. And then to think that while this was going on, President Trump was watching TV, and he was getting frantic calls from people like Kevin McCarthy, the leader, and others: Stop this. It is out of hand. You have got to call them off. He wouldn't do it. He wouldn't do it. So that was a dark day, and it is not over. January 6 was the first time in our history where there was a mob attack like that on the Capitol by a group inspired by the President of the United States, where the purpose was to stop the really clerical administrative process of certifying--not electing, but certifying--the victor of the election for President of the United States. And what the President's team had done is cooked up a bunch of theories, all of which were dismissed by the courts, to make a case that the electors should be rejected and substitute electors provided to get an outcome that the person who lost the election wanted in order to claim that he won the election. But there is the fact that the President of the United States, who is the custodian, really, and the one most representative of the whole people of the United States--and the need and importance of us having additional commitment to the peaceful transfer of power--was rejecting that and encouraging people to act against that tradition. And he did an effective job in persuading a lot of people who supported him. And, in fact, many of the folks who came on January 6 later testified that they thought the President wanted them here and that they believed the President when he said the election was stolen. There is an immense amount of power in that office and in the person of Donald Trump. So a lot of people who came here thought they were doing patriotic work. And then, of course, the Senate and the House reconvened, and we did certify the election. But the dispute continued, and many in the House and many in the Senate voted against certification, in my view, without any justification whatsoever. But there was enormous turmoil among people of our country because a lot of folks did believe--inspired by President Trump's assertions--that the election was ``rigged.'' And then, of course, after the certification and even the swearing in of President Biden, the continuing assertion by President Trump was that the election was stolen. He never stopped that narrative. And I am not enough of a historian to know if what happened on January 20 with respect to the inauguration was unique, but President Trump did not show up. He did not sit on the dais. And the tradition that we have had, of course, in this country as part of the peaceful transfer of power is that the outgoing President does sit on the dais and acknowledges the arrival of the new President elected by the people. And it is a wonderful ceremony because it reminds us that the power that a President has is derived from the will of the people, and it is temporary. It is while that person is in office that they hold the power of that office until they don't. So I have been to a few inaugurations, and the only one I have been to where the outgoing President wasn't there was that one. You know, another thing so incredible, the first inauguration I went to was in 2008, and it was George Bush, a transfer of power to Barack Obama. And the ceremony that I remember most vividly was not what happened on the dais in the taking of the oath by President Obama. It was after. You know, the President takes his oath. Following that, he comes into the building, the Capitol, and there is a dinner with legislative leaders and others, the guests of the President. And there is a lot of fanfare, a lot of people around. But after all that happens, on the East steps, the President and First Lady and the Vice President and the Second Lady, at that time, walked down the steps just themselves. And on each step is a uniformed military person from each one of the service branches. And there are not people out there. There is some press far away so they can record this. But my wife Margaret and I were out there watching, and I got a pretty good view because I was a Member of Congress then. And they have a ceremony where the branches of the military, each of them, wears a uniform that goes back to when that branch of the service was originated. And they have a solemn parade past the President--the newly elected President, who has been President for an hour or for 2 hours-- and it is a beautiful thing to see a military march when they do it in formation. And each branch comes by, and as they get right across from the President, who may be 100 feet away, they all turn and salute. And I just thought: This is a miracle that we have a country where at 11:59 a.m., all of those people who just marched by, their allegiance was to the then President, President Bush. And at 12:01, their allegiance is to the newly elected President, at that time President Obama. And what is so moving to me is the power of this democracy that we have, where these magnificent, wonderful people, who serve in the military and make this choice to serve, respect the constitutional order that ultimately the power belongs to the people. The person they elected is the Commander in Chief, and their allegiance is not just to that person, that newly elected President. It is to the constitutional right that the people are in charge, not the military. You know, we take it for granted here because it has been there since George Washington. That is not the way it works in so many parts of the world. If there is turmoil that is political in many parts of the world, the military steps in, and they take over. But this incredibly durable strength of our democracy where it is civilian control in the military is a testament. And I witnessed that then, and I witnessed it again in the inauguration of President Trump, although that parade because of the weather had to be downstairs in the Capitol Visitors Center. But what made that happen? What made that happen is not just that the military has that respect for the Constitution that they certainly do, but because all of our leaders--all of our elected Presidents-- understood that there was a tradition we had here that was absolutely vital to maintain and preserve, and that is the peaceful transfer of power, and that is to accept the outcome of an election. And we have had close elections. That one wasn't a particularly close election. Just think of Bush v. Gore. It all came down to a few votes, hanging chads in Florida, and ultimately, a Supreme Court decision. A lot of us disagree with that decision, but Vice President Gore then accepted the outcome of the election, including the role that the Court played in that. And there is enormous heartache for the losing side. But what all of us have experienced is the pain of defeat--maybe not all of us, but most of us. And if you haven't experienced it yet, it is waiting for you. Sometimes, it can be an ambition that is thwarted. Sometimes, it can be your health that is compromised. But if we are fortunate, then we understand if you get set back, you lose, you pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and you get back in, and you fight again. In my political life, I lost two elections. It is a big deal when you put yourself out there--whether it is running for office or trying to get a job--and you get set back. But it is universal. It is always there. But in politics, it is not so much about you losing an election. What is really critical is that we don't lose our democracy. Each of us has an obligation when we win or when we lose to move on. And if we lost, we get a chance to fight another day. That is what we all knew. You lose an election--the Democrats lose, Republicans lose-- you come back, run again. Your party runs again, and you have a shot to get the support of the American people. January 6 shattered that, and the lingering effects of January 6 are still here. As we know, President Trump never acknowledged that he lost that election and Joe Biden won. And a big part of his comeback was a continuation of the ``Big Steal.'' And it is really a danger to our democracy that now, emboldened by his win--and he won, OK--he won the popular vote this time; he won the electoral vote. His boast that it was a landslide is totally false. It is about a point and a half margin of victory. We are a divided country. A Lincolnesque kind of President, but acknowledged the obvious, that it was a close call for the American people, but he won. But his job is to represent everybody, whether they voted for him or not. I think all of us in the Senate, we won, we are here, we are really happy we got the approval of the people we represent. But I think all of us know, whether people voted for us or not--I have an obligation to everybody in Vermont, as you do to everybody in Wyoming, they have a right to be heard. What we are getting, I think, is a version of leadership at this point that rejects that. Where we are now, and it is very regrettable, we have an administration that is talking about going after people that they perceive as political adversaries, and that will have real effects. We had hearings about it in the Judiciary and in the Finance Committee. In the Judiciary Committee, we heard from Pam Bondi, the nominee, now Attorney General, and Kash Patel, whom we have not voted on yet, for FBI Director. In the case of Pam Bondi, I was very impressed with her. She is quite an accomplished person--attorney general in the county that she grew up in Florida, then she had the gumption to run a statewide race in the third biggest State of our country, and she won that to be attorney general. By all accounts, she did a really good job. But one of the questions that she was asked, Mr. Patel was asked, and others have been asked is the simple question: Who won the election in 2020? President Trump cannot tolerate anyone acknowledging that Biden won. So the standard answer now that they go through in their preparation for the hearings is that President Biden was the President or he was certified. But they can't say--because it would infuriate President Trump--that he lost or the other guy won. Now, why is that so worrisome to me? Because it is a continuation of the denial of the decision the American people made. And it is an indication of a demand of fealty that the President is imposing on people who are going to be in very important positions. Law enforcement, where an Attorney General and FBI Director have enormous power to prosecute and where aggression is a good quality, you want to be ambitious and work hard for the American people, bring law breakers to justice. But restraint is also extraordinarily important in those positions because the power you have by bringing in prosecution is the power to ruin the life of a person. So there has to be great caution and reservation and restraint in folks who have that awesome power. And my take on the insistence by the President that an individual is going to serve him, not acknowledge who won the 2020 election, is an indication that first and foremost, the President is demanding fealty to him, as opposed to fealty to the Constitution. We are in the first whirlwind weeks of a new Presidency, and I am alarmed. I am alarmed at what appears to be a disregard for the law on the part of President Trump. No. 1, the order the President sent out impounding money that was appropriated by Congress is a direct challenge to the institutional responsibility authority of the U.S. Senate and the U.S. Congress. Under our Constitution, article I, the Congress has the power of the purse, the Congress decides how to raise money, the Congress decides how to spend money. We have a President in the past who tried to end run that and take away the power that the Congress has. And that, of course, is President Nixon. And the Court found what he did illegal, and Congress passed the Impoundment Act to prohibit the President from doing that, although allowing a President to come before Congress to seek a revision in the appropriations we made. That is the way to do it. This Impoundment Act cut across all levels of government and completely rejected the authority of Congress. Now, some people may not care about that; let the President decide. So why is it really important? Just as the peaceful transfer of power has been the hallmark of our democracy and served us well, the system of checks and balances of three branches of government--coequal--where ambition is challenged by ambition, in the words of one of our great legal philosophers-- and what that meant is you have an ambitious executive, that is fine; but you have an ambitious Congress where it knows its role is to protect the interests of the people that we represent and assert our authority and stand up for the rights of the people we represent if there is an overreach of executive authority. So we have the three branches. And there is a tug of war oftentimes. But the last thing in the world any of us can do, in my view, as U.S. Senators, is to abdicate our responsibility under the Constitution to be a separate branch of government. For me, that would be a violation of my oath. And where you have a direct challenge by the executive, as you do with the Impoundment Act--the memo the President sent out basically picking and choosing which appropriations he is OK with and which he isn't, that is a direct challenge to the authority of the Congress. As I say, this is not about us individually needing authority. It is about good governance. It is about the constitutional principles of how, as a large and diverse country, we navigate the political questions that have to be addressed in every generation--questions about war and peace, that we do everything that is within our power to protect that separation of powers and stand up for the institutional responsibilities of the U.S. Senate. The other aspect of this that is very disturbing to me is reminiscent of my experience when I was in the Gallery with a police officer, the young man who wanted to go home to his family and who is now in enormous jeopardy, if not physically, the trauma of what he had to experience and what may have been required of him to do. There is a kind of callousness to that on the part of the attackers where he is just erased. His feelings don't matter. Whether he gets home with the milk he promised to bring, whether he gets there to pick up his child at soccer doesn't matter to them. What reminds me of that is the impact of this impoundment and what it did to everyday people. Of course, I am talking the impoundment, but also, I am talking about the letter that went out telling people who are working in countries like Malawi. They are working with us with USAID. They are working in Rwanda. They are working in Ethiopia. They are providing food to people who are starving, providing vaccines to people who may be sick. They are teaching young girls. I was in Malawi with Senator Murray and this beautiful young girl-- really, she is probably 12 years old--went to school at USAID. She came up to Senator Murray and just threw her arms around her and thanked her that there was this school. She could go to school. But this letter went out in an email. You wake up and open up your inbox, and it says: You no longer work. You are done. How cruel is that? It is cruel to this person, a USAID worker, whose life is to serve. That is why they are in USAID. They get gratification from serving, and you take that away from them. But then think about that young girl who threw her arms around Senator Murray and is thrilled. Here she is in Malawi. It is one of the poorest countries in the world, and she is thrilled that she is reading. She is thinking: Maybe I could be a doctor. She is thinking that she could have a big life and be independent, and the teacher who has been showing up for the past several months doesn't appear, and there is no explanation to her. That has happened in country after country after country and AID project after AID project after AID project. There is a cruelty here that is just bad for us. I mean, that is not how we treat one another no matter how much we disagree on politics. So that actually makes me sad about what is happening. You know, there are really large issues here that affect us. I was listening to Senator Murphy, and I thought he made some really terrific points, you know, about our democracy, about what dynamic is happening here with this new administration, about the wealth transfer that is happening. You know, I will give President Trump this: He did tap into a lot of heartache and a lot of anxiety and a lot of concern that people around the country had. They didn't like the way things were going, and they felt, I think, economically, that they weren't getting ahead despite working really hard. I think that is something that he tapped into, and I think, to some extent, we Democrats did not do the job on the securing of the southern border inasmuch as we did with many of the initiatives, economic initiatives, of the last administration. There is a reality that confronts all of us, Republicans and Democrats, that if you are a young family and you are trying to buy a house, that is out of reach. Healthcare that we used to be able to count on is getting incredibly expensive. The cost of childcare for young families is like going to college. I mean, these things are really tough on people, and we have got to address them, but those challenges that I just mentioned are in all of America. It is not like that is just red America or blue America. You could talk to a family in Vermont. You could talk to a family, probably, in Wyoming or in Idaho or in Ohio. The challenges they face are very similar. What that suggests to me is that the problems that we face and that the people we represent face are real. In a campaign, we can argue about who has the better prescription to address them. You won that campaign the last time. You did. By the way, I can say, ``Donald Trump won the election.'' I don't like to say it, but I can say it, and I should say it because he did. But now is the time where the focus we have together should be to try to solve those problems and make life better for everyday people in the Presiding Officer's State and in mine. But do you know? If you listen to the inaugural speech of President Trump, I didn't hear any words about housing. I didn't hear any words about childcare. I didn't hear any words about clean air. I didn't hear any words about strengthening rural hospitals. All of those things that we share in common and that are real challenges weren't talked about. The big emphasis was on these tax cuts. You know, those tax cuts will help some everyday people--some of them--but an immense amount of the allocation of those tax cuts is going to go to folks who are doing really well and to our corporations that are doing really well. Those tax cuts are going to come and be paid for by cutting into some of the services the government provides through the private sector, oftentimes to the citizens in every one of our States, and Senator Murphy went through a lot of those. The House has now taken the lead on his tax bill. They are trying to come up with ways to cut the spending in order to pay for the tax cuts. Medicare is in jeopardy. Medicaid is in jeopardy. Childcare, to the extent we help, is in jeopardy. So there is a real wealth transfer that has been built into this major agenda item. The other aspect of this that is disturbing to me is just the impact it has on people in Vermont. There is a lot of turmoil for our businesses and for our service providers. Let me just talk about some of the effects of these across-the-board cuts that the President is talking about and how it would affect Vermont. It would freeze funding for Head Start. As the Presiding Officer knows, that affects, like, 1,200 kids in Vermont. It really makes a difference to their getting off to a decent start. It is the poor kids who oftentimes don't get the nutrition that they need, and a lot of these kids with the benefit of Head Start go on to become very successful people. A freeze in funding for community health centers: You know, when the administration sent out that directive just, really, freezing funding-- one of the community health centers that we have is the Wells River health center, a community health center. I was talking to the director. They provide healthcare for people in what we call the Northeast Kingdom--it is a very low-income part of our State with very, very hard-working and proud people--and they have an operating cash margin of, like, 0 to 5 days. So, when the funding was cut off and, of course, the website too-- where you can get payments and find out what is going on--it was closed down just unilaterally, which is something Mr. Vought thinks is a good idea. When that happened, the director was in an incredible bind. He had workers who were showing up. He had moms who were bringing their kids in for a dental appointment they had been trying to get for 7 months. He had support staff who had been working there for years. But with this directive, they couldn't pay the bills. OK? I am not even quite sure what their status is right now, but with that directive imposed on the director of the program--this horrible decision--they were in no capacity to have any confidence whatsoever that he could meet payroll. Why would you do that? You know, if you have a plan where you are saying, ``Hey, we are spending too much money. We have got to figure out how to tighten our belts,'' then you take some time to have a plan, and there is some consultation with the Agency and the people who are affected. That is a responsible way to proceed but not to have just a bolt out of the blue, when you open up your inbox and you are told you are shutting down. There are the ripple effects that that has on a community. Then, of course, people who work there have to make their plans because they can't wait indefinitely to get the decision as to whether they will or won't have a job, whether it be a community health center will stay open or it will close. There is a lot of destruction that goes into an action that the administration took with that. You know, we had a couple of roundtables because people were really, really stressed and calling all of our offices. We are a small State like the Presiding Officer is, and, you know, one of the privileges that I think he and I both have is that of being a Senator in a small State, we really get to know an awful lot of the people we represent. I know I have talked to the Presiding Officer about this: The great joy we get is in that interaction with the folks we represent, and that is whether we agree with them or not, whether they voted for us or not. It also makes it a little more painful because it is very real; it is not abstract. So I will just tell a few stories about some of the Vermonters who got affected. Sarah Robinson is with the Vermont Network Against Sexual and Domestic Violence. She said: Federal funding in Vermont supports emergency shelter and hotline services for victims of domestic and sexual violence. If they get a call in the middle of the night that a woman is getting battered, they respond. They have a network of volunteers who goes out. They will bring that woman to safety, and they will have a safe house for her. That is a pretty amazing service--and, suddenly, that is cut off. Andy Barter is from the Little Rivers Health Care Center. That is the one I was talking about earlier up in Wells River. He said: This has been a week like none other that threatened the continuation of our health center in operations and has dearly affected the feeling of safety for our staff and patients. You know, you get these local institutions, and they are so important to everyday people. You count on being able to bring your daughter or your son to the doctor, and it is somebody you know. I mean, again, I have such respect for the Presiding Officer and admiration in his career as a physician and in the healing he does. I know, you know, the joy he gets in that service; but, suddenly, we have got doctors who end up having that same ethic that you have in Vermont, and, suddenly, the people who depended on them can't go there. Vermont State Representative Kate Logan, who works at Elevate, said, ``Our agencies are currently serving 78 [young people]--youth,'' and if they don't get the resources, they are not going to be able to continue their services. This is about housing and homelessness. Of course, that problem in Vermont, like in all of our States, has increased very, very significantly. Sonali Samarasinghe, U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, said: We have 79 families in temporary housing. This is very challenging for us. We don't have the funds, and it's a public safety issue because there's homelessness, and we don't have the funds to go on paying their rents. So this is not new funds they are seeking. These are the funds that have been authorized and have been committed and--boom--out of nowhere, they are told they are out of business. Karen Price, the Vermont Family Network. She said: The Executive order and the memo have thrown all of our funding that we have relied on into disarray . . . We suspended all of our planned activities. We talked about furloughing our employees . . . Cashflow for a nonprofit like the [Family Network] is tight. We cannot sustain a prolonged nonreceipt of funding. Every day since Tuesday has been filled with anxiety and uncertainty. Steve Schmida from Resonance: They do a lot of work with USAID. He told me: ``Seventy percent of our work is with the [USAID] and the State Department. Before the Secretary of State's and Secretary Marco Rubio's foreign assistance stop work order . . . 62 of those have now been laid off. This is in the inbox: You are not working anymore. It is no different than if we went home tonight--each one of us--had a nice meal with our families, went to bed, looking forward to resting and getting up and facing today, getting up and--boom--in the inbox, we are told: Don't show up for work. The two features that I have seen so far in this administration, it really is a continuation of the January 6 ethic, is a willingness to disregard the law--the shattering of norms--and a casual infliction of cruelty for no reason on everyday Americans who just want to keep doing the job that they have and do the work that needs to be done. I yield the floor.

Mr. WELCH

Mr. WELCH. Mr. President, everything my colleague, the senior Senator from New Hampshire, said about New Hampshire and about how people are really struggling to pay their bills, the cost of rent, the cost of housing, home heating fuel in the winter, which has been brutal, groceries--that is totally the same situation for families in Vermont, and it is around the country. I can't add, really, to the recitation of the practical consequences that this has on businesses and on Vermont families beyond what Senator Shaheen said. But it really mystifies Vermonters. People come up to me, and they say, ``Peter, seriously, this is going to increase our grocery prices. This is going to mean lumber is more expensive. This is going to mean home heating fuel''--and we rely on Canadian gas probably more than you do--but also home heating fuel. ``This is going to raise our prices.'' And that 150 bucks to 200 bucks you are talking about--that is real money. They just are mystified that we would, through the President, increase their monthly bills. And for what reason? You know, I want to talk a little bit about that. New Hampshire and Vermont--we mostly get along, but we are rivals in hockey and other things. But we both have incredibly close relationships with Canada. They are our friends. We have a library in Derby, VT, that is half in Vermont and half in Canada, and our kids are going back and forth to play hockey. That is just on a very personal level, the affection that we have for Canada and they have for us. They come down and ski on our mountains. They come down and visit, and we go up there. There is an element of ``Peter, what is going on? National security is the reason you are doing this? Is there a threat from Canada to our national security? We know there isn't.'' So this is an arbitrary decision that is made by the President, in my view, abusing authority that Congress gave him to use tariffs if there is, in fact, a national security threat, which all of us in a commonsense way would think might be something from a military threat or it might be from the coercive economic policies we face from China. There is a legitimate case there for national security. But Canada has been in the trenches with us in every war we have had. They have been by our side. They are our friends. You know, that is another thing people say: Peter, you don't treat your friends this way. You just don't do that. So I had a concern about what the impact was on Vermont, and instead of me speculating about it, what we did is invited some Vermonters who had businesses and some Vermont families to come and tell us what is going to happen if we have these tariffs. Let me tell you some of what they said. We met in Saint Albans, which is a few miles from the Canadian border. I asked these businesses: Just tell us what happens. First of all, there was nobody from these businesses who said that the cost of this tariff would not be passed on to the consumer, all right? Common sense. It is like somehow, if there is a 25-percent increase in cost, the business can just eat it, when we know, especially our small businesses, they are operating on the margin. They are doing every single thing they can to make their product competitive and affordable for the people they are serving. These are really, really good people who are totally committed to the communities they are in. Every one of them said that whatever the cost of the tariff is, that is going to be passed on to the consumer--not that they like to do that, but they have to pay their own bills. It is just reality. The second thing they talked about was the uncertainty that occurs for businesses. One business was talking about how, when these tariffs go in--by the way, we have some history with this from the last Trump administration. There was supposedly a tariff, but if you knew the back entrance into the White House and could make a connection with somebody who had influence, you could get an exemption. So you get this terrible situation--which is not going to be available, by the way, for our Vermont fuel dealers or our Vermont homebuilders. If you knew somebody, you somehow got out of the tariff. And there was no guidance about how these tariffs would have been rolled out, so there was an enormous opportunity for special treatment to be given. But even then, there is the complexity of this. For instance, one manufacturer was talking about if you got a certain kind of aluminum, it was subject to the tariff, but if you got an ever so slightly different definition of aluminum, you wouldn't be subject to the tariff. So you have a whole production process that has been using aluminum A that would be subject to a tariff, and if you go to aluminum B--if you can find it--it won't be subject to a tariff. If you got a square panel, it would be subject; if it was rectangular, it wouldn't. I mean, this is truly bizarre because there is no common sense in this at all. So I keep asking the question: Why? Why are we doing this? Why are we inflicting this complexity on our businesses? Why are we inflicting this cost on our consumers and on our businesses? And there is no justification for it at all. So let me go through some of the stories: Garret Hirchak at Manufacturing Solutions--they do precision machining. They are a manufacturer. That is what we want. And there are no margins on it. They work with sheet metal and cardboard. He said these tariffs create a whole burden to determine what is tariffed--the type or shape of aluminum--and he is bracing to respond to whatever chaos comes next. This company has been in business for 29 years, and it employs 275 people. That is a big deal in our State of Vermont--a big deal. Why mess with him? Why? Rock Gaulin at H2O Innovation--they make--we have better maple syrup than New Hampshire, I am sorry to say, and definitely better than Canada. They make the equipment that is used in maple syrup production, and this is going to increase their costs and threaten jobs. And it really does threaten jobs, OK. And then, if you lose a market, by the way, then it is hard to get it back. So this company that might face this huge increase in the cost of aluminum to manufacture its product could lose market share and not be able to claw their way back. Mike Tetreault from Poulin Grain: Poulin Grain is a great Franklin County, family-run--actually Northeast Kingdom, too--family-run grain dealer. They have been around for generations. And they have kept--they are a huge contribution to keeping our dairy farms going. They import organic grain, a huge market in Vermont. Their products are heavy to transport--think of corn and canola and oats--so they need to buy nearby, and they buy from Canada. And importantly, it is 30 to 40 percent of what they buy. And these tariffs could cost them about $10 million. And it is just like the fuel dealers. They have got a contract, but they honor their customers. They can't eat $10 million. It just can't be done. So the Poulin family is really worried about the costs rising for farmers, who are on the thinnest of thin margins. And nobody works harder than our dairy farmers. That is hard work. But it is so important to us in the State of Vermont, that we give them every chance to succeed when they are facing tough odds every day. And why in the world would an act of the President of the United States add to the burden these dairy farmers already face when they are trying to hang on? It just doesn't make any sense to me. Mike also said something that is really important: The unknown and uncertainty is very difficult. There seems to be a point of view in the Trump administration--the President, I will be candid--that he thinks chaos is a good negotiating tool. I will leave it to others to decide their view on that, but if the chaos creates this uncertainty for the Poulin Grain Company, for the dairy farmers in Franklin County, for a family that is hoping they can build a house and they thought they had a price, for a family that is struggling to pay for groceries at the end of the month, that uncertainty is really an infliction of distress. It is unfair. And to create uncertainty in everyday people who are trying to live in their community, do a good job for the people that they serve; families that are trying to make their contribution in the community and keep the well-being of their family together, and they are on a tight margin--it is cruel to inflict unnecessary uncertainty. The people from Vermont, the people from New Hampshire--and I think this is true around the country--they are OK with facing hard and grim circumstances, and they will grit their way through it. And they will take care of their kids, and they will take care of their community. They will be generous. But--you know what--when the hardship that is something they have to deal with is a hardship that has been arbitrarily inflicted upon them by authorities or powers in Washington--in this case, the President-- and, in my view, totally improper invocation of so-called national security with our biggest ally, Canada, then they start to wonder. That makes the burden even more and more difficult. So another person was there, Sarah Mearhoff, who was a representative of the General Contractors of Vermont. And they do all the building. They have been incredible with the infrastructure challenges we have had after Tropical Storm Irene--that was a while ago--and then the floods that we had in July of 2023 and then again in July of 2024. The cost of raw materials is already very expensive. And she quoted one of her members--Kevin Moyer from Vermont Frames--saying: Tariffs have always been bad for everyone. As a business owner who buys a lot of timber from Canada, I'm very worried about the impact of tariffs on my company. I cannot absorb those costs, and will have to push them through to my clients in the form of price increases, which will make my company less competitive versus other construction techniques like conventional framing. So I keep asking myself: Why are we doing this to folks who are so essential to the well-being of the communities that we represent? And, by the way, you have got two border State Senators here. And we have a lot in common, but everything we have said applies to similar businesses in every single State in the country. So this is not a Republican or Democrat deal. These tariffs are going to cost our families--our families that the Presiding Officer represents, that the senior Senator from New Hampshire represents, and that I represent--it is going to cost them more money. And for what? What are we getting in return? So I, too, am very relieved, actually, on behalf of the people of Vermont and the people in New Hampshire and the people of this country, that there has been a temporary pause in these tariffs, but the uncertainty goes on. There will be no more justification 30 days from now to impose these tariff taxes on Vermonters and on New Hampshirites than there is today. And today, there is no justification. In 30 days, there will be no justification. And I would call on the President to get real in accepting the consequences to everyday families, to small businesses. These aren't billionaires. These are really hard-working people in Vermont and in New Hampshire, and they just, rightly, don't understand this. So, yes, it is good the tariffs have been suspended. It is really bad that they were ever threatened to be imposed. They will never do any good when there is a bogus reason--so-called national security--and a real abuse of that authority by the President, to invoke that with respect to our closest ally and neighbor in the trenches with our soldiers in every war we have been in. So I just urge President Trump to do the right thing here. He can be tough. He can pursue his policies. But the first principle that every one of us in public office should respect is that we do no harm to the people we represent by the policies we advocate. I yield the floor.

Mr. WELCH

Mr. WELCH. Mr. President, over the past 2 weeks, political operatives in the administration of President Trump and Elon Musk have shown the American people and the world that they plan to destroy as much of the professional workforce in the executive Agencies as they can get away with. Whether it is illegal--and it is--or unconstitutional--and it is--is of no concern. Inspectors general and career civil servants who have served the American people for decades--some for their entire professional lives--are being summarily removed without any due process at all--due process they are legally entitled to. They are being replaced with Musk-approved partisans who have little, if any, government experience or little, if any, substantive knowledge. They do have a qualification, and that is total loyalty to the President. On top of Mr. Musk's list of Agencies to eliminate in the United States is the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, as we know it. That has been the subject of a ferocious attack by Mr. Musk. That Agency is one that not many Americans know about but which fulfills a vital mission. It has a relatively small budget--less than 1 percent of the total Federal budget--and it has a large responsibility to support humanitarian, economic development, and governance programs in more than 100 countries. Whatever ``savings'' Elon Musk might obtain from cutting USAID would have no appreciable impact in offsetting Mr. Trump's huge tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. It wouldn't even amount to a rounding error. And the manner in which this has been done I find extremely disturbing. Mr. Musk--and, by the way, for all his brilliance, he has no government experience himself--he called USAID a ``criminal organization.'' Dozens of USAID's dedicated senior officials, including the Office of the General Counsel, were purged. That has not happened before. That has not happened before in this country. And over the weekend, Musk called USAID ``evil'' and a ``viper's nest of radical- left marxists who hate America.'' Others in the administration have accused USAID personnel of insubordination and acting against American interests without producing any evidence to back that up, reminiscent of the McCarthy era: Make the accusation, destroy the reputation, and move on. That is a serious question, and we should--each of us--be asking the implications of this language. I find Mr. Musk's accusations appalling. I know they are factually baseless, and, frankly, I find them despicable. It is also curious because, in 2022, his company Starlink received millions of dollars from USAID for Starlink's operation in Ukraine, not to mention the incredible amount of taxpayer subsidies that helped Tesla become the major company that it is. Mr. Musk--he is a billionaire, as we know-- has no reluctance to take taxpayer funds from USAID. None. He took money from USAID. It was a good organization when the money was coming to him to help us in Ukraine, but now he is calling it a criminal organization. And I doubt that he knows what 99 percent of USAID employees do or the positive impact they have on the lives of people around the world and on U.S. national security--the obligation all of us have as Members of the U.S. Senate. I wonder if he has ever met or has ever spoken to anyone who works at any of the 60 overseas missions or seen with his own eyes what USAID does in countries like Indonesia, Ethiopia, Haiti, Mozambique, Ghana, or Guatemala, just to name a few, where the lives of countless people really do benefit from USAID. And being billionaires, President Trump and Elon Musk may not be aware that fully 1 billion people in the world live on less than $1 a day. They may not be aware that the lives of hundreds of millions of people, especially children, are threatened by diseases that can be prevented or cured with drugs that cost only a few pennies. Or maybe Mr. Musk is not aware that the life of every American is threatened by the spread of infectious diseases. We saw that with COVID, and there is other diseases out there where what we do elsewhere protects the health and safety of people right here at home. Or maybe Mr. Musk isn't concerned that the Earth's tropical forests and endangered species are being decimated by illegal miners, loggers, and wildlife traffickers, who are often in collusion with local police and transnational criminal organizations, to feed, by the way, China's insatiable demand for minerals, timber, and wildlife--consequences to the environment be damned. USAID works with local governments and organizations to protect forests in South and Central America, central Africa, and in Indonesia, and to train wildlife rangers to combat poaching and trafficking. It may make absolutely no difference to Mr. Musk, as it clearly doesn't to President Trump, that the rising acidity of the oceans and plastic pollution are destroying what remains of the world's coral reefs and marine species at the bottom of the food chain, due to the burning of fossil fuels. And USAID works to protect marine ecosystems and support reduction of fossil fuels, carbon emissions, and reduced plastic waste. Government corruption, repression, and impunity may not be a priority in other countries for President Trump and Elon Musk to take on, even though they are major causes of the poverty in the world, political instability and violence, narcotics trafficking and migration in our own hemisphere. So what happens in these countries makes a difference in what happens here, especially with respect to immigration. And these are just a few of the many complex global problems that USAID personnel work to address every day--every single day--partnering with foreign governments and thousands of nongovernmental organizations. Those are real people; they are doing real work, even though they aren't CEOs. They are doing their best to address poverty, environmental degradation, corruption in governance. It is affecting nongovernmental organizations, contractors, and institutions of higher education in Vermont, this attack on USAID. These are Vermont organizations that have a long history of implementing USAID humanitarian and development programs. I will mention a few. World Learning, Tetra Tech/ARD, Resonance, and the Vermont Afghan Alliance are examples; they are being decimated as a result of this order. Suddenly, out of the blue, without even an hour's notice, these organizations and others were forced to shut down programs and lay off staff with no idea of what comes next. Many of their employees are working overseas where they are stranded without even the ability to have funds to pay for flights home. That is how sudden it was. And unlike Mr. Musk, they don't have their own private jets. This sends a message to the people of those countries that the United States can't be relied on; it is pretty cruel to create that uncertainty, that confusion, and then that desperation. The U.S. Agency for International Development, like any Federal Agency, is not perfect, and any time there is talk of reform coming from your side of the aisle or ours, I am all ears, because anything we can do to make what we have work better, we all have an obligation to do our part. But USAID was established by an act of Congress more than 25 years ago, and constitutionally, no President and no unelected billionaire can unlawfully shut a congressionally authorized Agency down. There is no authority to do that, and we shouldn't stand by and essentially abdicate our article I authority and cede the capacity to a President to pick and choose among Agencies, legally authorized by the Congress, as to whether he will destroy it or continue it. You know, some folks have said that shutting down USAID is part of the President's plan to reduce the national debt; it isn't. You know, I think the President cares a lot less about the national debt--it went up by more than $7 trillion to pay for tax cuts, and eliminating the USAID would make no dent in that at all. Some have said that we need to better align USAID's programs with the policies of the State Department. That is something that is worth discussing, and I would have some confidence in Secretary Rubio taking a serious look at how that can be done. But that is already being done, by and large. Diplomacy is the job of the State Department. It is not the same as development, which is what the USAID does. And you don't shut an Agency down, freeze billions of dollars in authorized programs, silence or remove entirely the senior staff, and lock thousands of employees out of their offices. I mean, this is unbelievable. They locked the door, so people show up for work and they can't get in. And you do that without any notice before having any discussion. This is the difference between disruption, that can be good, and destruction, which is terrible. And I believe that it is our job as Senators to speak up in defense of the civil service, the foreign service, their families, USAID's autonomy, and the foreign assistance programs that Republicans and Democrats have strongly supported for generations, programs that have been the building blocks of U.S. security partnerships and alliances around the world that we depend on to prevent conflict, respond to humanitarian disasters, and by the way, create markets for U.S. exports and counter the malign influence of our adversaries. As my colleague, the senior Senator from South Carolina, has said year after year when speaking about USAID: Soft power is a critical component of defending America and our values. He has been a consistent defender of USAID's workforce and budget, as have many other Republican Members of Congress, leaders of the U.S. business community, and senior military officers who understand that diplomacy and development are as important to preventing conflict as the threat of military force and a strong military, which we support. It wasn't long ago that Secretary Rubio--then our colleague Senator Rubio--praised USAID's work in global health, in aiding victims of natural disasters, in supporting Venezuelans who were persecuted by that dreadful Maduro. Until Elon Musk decided that it is ``time for [USAID] to die''--really said that, ``time for [USAID] to die''--USAID previously had always received bipartisan support. This is no time for the Congress of the United States, the U.S. Senate, to stand by passively while an Agency that plays a unique, indispensable role in protecting the interests and the influence, the security and the reputation of the United States around the world is decapitated and dismantled. Those responsible for this self-inflicted disaster have no respect for the law, no respect for the will of Congress, and no respect for the thousands of truly patriotic public servants who have devoted their lives to defending the interests of the United States and presenting a positive face of America in some of the world's most dangerous places. I yield the floor.

Mr. WELCH

Mr. WELCH. Mr. President, I believe that the Attorney General may, in fact, be the most important position in a President's Cabinet, and if it is not the most important, it certainly is the most difficult. Whoever is our Attorney General is a person that serves all of us. They have two clients. They have the President who appointed her or him and they have the Constitution. Let me be clear that I have no objections to any President, including President Trump, appointing someone that the President is close to. President Kennedy appointed his brother. I do have a problem with any President seeing the job of Attorney General to be the person who runs ``my Justice Department,'' and that is how President Trump has characterized it--``my Justice Department.'' So we have this dilemma with respect to coming to a conclusion on the use of the responsibility that the Senate as an institution has for the advice and consent of a Cabinet member. I start from the orientation that a President should be able to pick his team and that we should take up nominations and move on them, vote on them expeditiously. My orientation is that the President is entitled to the benefit of the doubt but not to a blank check. What is also difficult for me with respect to this appointment is that, in my view, Pam Bondi is accomplished and competent and qualified. I have great respect for her work as a county prosecutor in Florida, and I have great respect for her work as attorney general in the State of Florida. I have great respect for the fact that, as a woman, she made that decision to run for attorney general and had to overcome pretty significant odds in order to win that position. I also remember, Mr. Ranking Member, that she had great testimony from people whom she worked with, and I think both you and I have a great deal of respect for folks who have a leadership position and treat their subordinates with great respect and have their affection and confidence, and that came through in the testimony of people who have worked with Ms. Bondi. My grave concern is really about President Trump and what he is clearly demanding of the person, whoever it is--and now it is Ms. Bondi--what the President is demanding, and that clearly is a loyalty oath to him as opposed to a demand for straightforward, candid advice, including, if the President is asking something to be done, like the prosecution of a political adversary, that the answer, Mr. President, has to be no. That is what the President is demanding. We can argue on both sides about whether that is the case, but the evidence is overwhelming. The question that I have asked a number of nominees, including Mr. Patel and including Ms. Bondi, is, Who won the 2020 election? It is pretty clear that the President's team, in preparing folks for that inevitable question, came up with an acceptable answer. The acceptable answer is that President Biden was the President; President Biden was certified. No one could just say the straightforward: President Biden won. In the closest election in our history, Bush v. Gore, after the Supreme Court made its decision, not only did Al Gore accept the outcome, but Democrats did, Americans did. That was pre-January 6 when we all relied on the guardrail in the Constitution that there would be a commitment to a peaceful transfer of power and that there would be renunciation of violence as a means of persuasion in the outcome of an election. January 6 did change that. There was an attack on the Capitol. Many of us were here. That was inspired by President Trump. He invited people to come: ``It will be wild.'' It was provoked because the President used the enormous authority he had and the enormous credibility he had with people who supported him to begin peddling the ``Stop the Steal'' narrative; the election was stolen. President Trump has never, ever given up on that. As far as he is concerned, he says to every person and every audience: That election is stolen. People who were going to work in his administration, in a vetting process, had to answer that question in the way that was acceptable to then-duly elected President Trump. That is not acceptable to me. It is not acceptable. President Biden won. President Trump won this last election. I didn't vote for him, but I can say it. I can acknowledge it and do the best I can as a member of the minority party. But we now have a President who is now allowing a person to have a dual loyalty to him, yes, and to the Constitution, to make it clear for that person who is nominated for a law enforcement position, that they accept his narrative of what happened in 2020. It is really dangerous, in my view, for our country. The President has gone on, much to my regret, intensifying that concern that many of us have as to whether there will be an adherence to the rule of law. In an extraordinary first 2 weeks, the President has gone on--it is my opinion, but a lot of courts support it--a rampage of illegality. It is a serious threat to our country. Let me start with the impoundment--you know, basic civics. The article I branch--that is the U.S. Senate and U.S. House--has authority over appropriations and spending. The executive can propose, and we can consider, an appropriations request. The President can reject an appropriations bill that Congress passes with a veto. But what the President can't do is pick and choose where he feels like spending or just disregarding the appropriations passed by the Congress of the United States. And he is doing that. The impoundment is patently illegal, not even close. And what is clear to me is the President doesn't care if the impoundment causes enough havoc that affected agencies will either be destroyed or severely damaged. Let me give a couple of examples. When that impoundment notice went out, Wells River Community Health Center in Vermont--it provides healthcare to really poor Vermonters, and they do an incredible job. They have a cash balance that allows them to stay in business from 0 to 5 days. That is it. The impoundment notice comes in, literally, they show up to work, and it says: You shut down. You can't open up tomorrow. Those folks running that organization don't have the money to pay the salaries of anyone: the doctors, the receptionists, the medical providers. We see what is happening at USAID: ``We are shutting you down.'' The doors are locked. People show up for work; they can't get in. That is illegal and unconstitutional, as I see it. The administration, the President, has made a clear decision that he doesn't care. He is not going to worry about the niceties. Things that restrained Republican and Democratic Presidents before; namely, adherence to the law and recognition of their responsibility to preserve a tool that has been a safeguard for our democracy through both Republican and Democratic administrations, those rules don't apply to him. Then we have seen that he has delegated authority to a nonelected billionaire--Mr. Musk--and told him, basically, to go wild with the Federal Government; do what you want; go where you want. And in one of the most astonishing things, they sent over--Musk sent over five kids. One of them is 19; he can't drink in Vermont--and four early-20-year- old folks. They marched in and the Treasury Secretary, basically, of the United States--the successor to Alexander Hamilton--a man I respect, by the way, Mr. Bessent, and the person who ran the payment system, and said: ``We are in charge.'' That is basically what they did. Then they got access to the computers, which means they have your Social Security Number and mine. They have information about our taxes. Every individual in this country, their privacy has now been put in jeopardy. Just think if this were the private sector. Let's say you are Jamie Dimon, and you run a major financial institution, J.P. Morgan, and five kids show up at your bank. They say: Hey, Mr. Musk sent us. Give us access to the computers. And they have access to all the individual information, company information, of the folks who work with J.P. Morgan. That is what happened. It is not really apparent to all the American people what is happening. It is the folks who are directly impacted by this, the folks at USAID who don't have a job, the folks at Wells River Clinic who are operating on the tightest of margins who have suffered and don't know whether they will be able to keep the lights on. It is the woman, the mom, who had, finally, after months and months of trying, a dental appointment through Medicaid--they had it canceled arbitrarily and abruptly. Those individuals are feeling it, and this is going to ripple out to more and more Americans seeing what is happening. We need an Attorney General who will share my shock at a President acting in such a lawless way. The fact is, frankly, I don't think President Trump ever in the world would place a value on having an Attorney General who is willing to tell him: Mr. President, no, you can't get appointed unless you pass the test. And the test was on full display both with Mr. Patel and Ms. Bondi in their inability to answer the basic question: Who won the 2020 election? My concern is not that they ``get the answer right.'' My concern is that they get that their profound responsibility is, first and foremost, to the Constitution and the rule of law. The President is not looking for anyone other than someone who is going to give him the fealty that he demands when these questions arise. What we are seeing with the President in these first 2 weeks of his term is that there is no restraint. The rule of law is for suckers. He is going to break things, and whatever damage is done is not his problem. The problem is, there are a lot of really innocent good Americans who are being affected by this: doctors and nurses, moms whose children get Medicaid help, lawyers who dedicated their career to civil rights or environmental protection. There is a cruelty with the way in which the President has acted. It is almost a casual cruelty that just doesn't matter. So I am looking for some confidence that the checks and balances that are required, that we can build up. Frankly, there is a major question that we face as a U.S. Senator and each of us as an individual Senator. I believe, at least to exercise our judgment--we won't agree, necessarily, and we may come to a different judgment about how best we can do what I think each of us is required to do, and that is to protect the institutional responsibility of the U.S. Senate to be an independent, separate branch of government and to adhere to the importance of the separation of powers, and that this institution has a fundamental responsibility to the American people to be a check and balance. There are 100 of us here, and we may have 100 different opinions as to when it is that we should say no, but my hope is that every single one of us will accept that it is our responsibility to make that judgment and not just passively submit to whatever action the President is sending our way. With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. WELCH

Mr. WELCH. Mr. President, on January 14, 2025, Norwich, VT, lost a beloved member of one of the town's oldest farming families. David Pierce grew up on a small dairy farm on a hill with a view down the valley, less than a mile from Dan & Whit's General Store in the center of town. His father, known by all as ``Bub,'' was the farmer. His mother Janet cared for David and his sister Deb and took in other children when their parents were out of town, as well as tending to her big vegetable garden. She later became long-time town clerk of Norwich. David attended the local Norwich elementary school through eighth grade when he went across the river to Hanover High in Hanover, NH. From an early age, David spent weekends and summers mowing and baling hay and helping with the many chores that come with raising and milking cows. Early spring was spent with his father in the maple sugar house. After high school, he attended the University of Vermont, where he studied physics and did graduate work at nearby Dartmouth College and the University of Massachusetts. He went on to teach physics and astronomy at Tabor Academy in Marion, MA, for 47 years, while still spending summers helping with the mowing and hay baling back in Norwich. He was a familiar sight driving the John Deere tractor in local fields and through town, wearing his shiny metal hardhat. Soft spoken and not one to promote himself, always genuinely interested in others, the depth and breadth of David's academic accomplishments and community service were truly remarkable. His impact on his students was life changing. The remembrance of David by Tony Jaccaci, head of Tabor Academy, reminds us of what a lasting, positive difference one passionate, dedicated, and exceptionally kind person can make to an institution, a community, and to future generations. I want to convey my condolences to David's extended family, and I ask unanimous consent that Mr. Jaccaci's remembrance of David be printed in the Record.

Mr. WELCH

Mr. WELCH. Mr. President, like all of us, I was enormously relieved by the announcement of a ceasefire in Gaza, the gradual release of hostages, and a surge in humanitarian aid for the 2 million desperate Palestinians who are trapped inside Gaza. Despite the daunting challenges ahead and the many factors that could derail negotiations to implement stage 2 of the agreement, I am cautiously hopeful that this could be the beginning of the end of a war that has traumatized millions of Palestinians and Israelis for more than 16 months. There will come a time for the accounting of the conduct of the war, which has caused such appalling loss of Palestinian and Israeli lives, including tens of thousands of children, of health workers, aid workers, and journalists, and massive destruction of property, including practically every hospital and every school and university in Gaza. These things must not be forgotten, and that means investigating and holding people accountable under the laws of war. But today I want to speak briefly on an issue that is key to the lasting peace between Palestinians and Israelis that we seek, and that is the creation of a viable, secure, independent, and demilitarized Palestinian state. The war in Gaza was triggered, of course, by the merciless slaughter on October 7, 2023, of 1,200 innocent Israelis, Americans, and others and the abduction of some 250 hostages, many of whom have died. But, as we all know, the Middle East conflict began many decades earlier and some would say centuries ago. Ethnic hatred and religious intolerance passed down from one generation to the next have fueled seemingly endless violence perpetrated by extremists on both sides, and it has created a chronic state of insecurity for Israelis and insecurity, humiliation, poverty, and hopelessness for Palestinians. In the West Bank, Israel's ever-expanding settlement construction, in violation of U.N. resolutions and contrary to U.S. policy, has created a patchwork of separate and unequal enclaves and illegal outposts, provoking frequent acts of deadly violence by Israeli settlers and also by Palestinian extremists. Gaza, with the overt support of the Netanyahu government, became an open-air prison for 2 million impoverished Palestinians dependent on international aid and under the ruthless control of Hamas. Throughout this period, the wealthy Arab states have called for a Palestinian state, but they have expended minimal political capital or resources in furtherance of that goal--a lot of talk, very little action. Successive Palestinian leaders have squandered opportunities to make necessary political and economic reforms, while Mr. Netanyahu has worked to create conditions on the ground that would actually make a Palestinian state impossible. Despite this grim reality--and it is a grim reality--the attention focused on the remarkable life of President Jimmy Carter after his death on December 29 reminded us that even in the most difficult circumstances, peace is possible between longstanding enemies. It happened. But that possibility depends on the quality of the leadership. If there were ever a time when the leaders of Israel, the Palestinian Authority, their Arab neighbors, and the United States should put the interests of regional peace and economic cooperation and development-- including an independent Palestinian state--over personal and political ambition, it is now. It is now. Gaza is in ruins. Hamas and Hezbollah, still a threat, pose less of a threat than at any time in recent history, and the horrific Assad regime is gone. Iran is also weaker. Most Israelis, Palestinians, Lebanese, and Syrians want peace. But given the absence of visionary and courageous leaders in Israel and the Palestinian Authority, the possibility that a path to a Palestinian state will emerge really does depend on the Trump administration using its diplomatic influence far more forcefully and effectively than previous U.S. administrations, including the first Trump administration, were willing to do. We have got to act. And it will require the same of Congress, which in the past has restricted itself to enacting tighter and tighter sanctions on the Palestinians, causing increasing desperation and resentment for innocent Palestinians, while at the same time, opposing any incentives on Israel to stop settlement construction and settler violence. There are those who believe that because of Israel's construction of settlements, walls, fences, separate highways, factories, and farms in the West Bank, that the West Bank and Gaza can never be reconfigured into a viable Palestinian State. And having seen a current map of the West Bank, I can certainly understand that. But others reject the very idea of a Palestinian State as incompatible with Israel's security, without proposing any alternative that would preserve Israel as a democracy in which all its citizens, regardless of ethnicity or religion, have equal rights. Given Hamas's horrific attack on October 7, I can also easily understand that. Then, on January 25, President Trump called for the ``cleaning out'' of Gaza, suggesting that a million and a half Palestinians should be resettled in Jordan and Egypt. And, you know, seriously, there are just so many things wrong and unrealistic with that reprehensible and unworkable idea, that it barely deserves a response beyond the predictable and immediate repudiation by all those who would be impacted. It is not serious. But to me, as elusive as it may seem, there really is no solution that offers lasting peace and continued U.S. support other than two independent states: Israel and Palestine, side by side. The Palestinian State will only be possible if both sides are pressured to make the difficult compromises both sides have so far refused to make. And only the United States and our heretofore reluctant Arab allies can exert the kind of pressure that is necessary to bring people to an agreement. There have been far too many missed opportunities and disappointments since the Oslo and Camp David Accords, and far too much needless death and destruction resulting from the unchecked ambitions of leaders motivated by their worst instincts. And history will judge us, whether we seize this moment to finally chart a different course--a course that does enable Israelis and Palestinians to finally accept that there is no turning back the clock, that both are here to stay, and that as many Palestinian and Israeli neighbors have shown throughout the years of conflict and loss, they have far more in common than their differences. I yield the floor.

Mr. WELCH

Mr. WELCH. Mr. President, I thank my colleagues. You know, President Trump likes to think that chaos is a useful tool. He can create disarray and disruption, and things will end up all right. There is another word that more aptly describes what he did: ``cruel,'' deeply cruel. You know, on Sunday night in Vermont, it is really a special night. You have got the work of the week behind you. The errands of the weekend are done. If you are fortunate and have a family, you have dinner; you are watching the football game; you are gathering yourself for the week ahead. The week ahead for people is different. It is a mom who has a dentist appointment that she finally got after 8 months on Medicaid. It is a dump truck driver who is looking forward to getting back and seeing his friends at work and getting that construction project in town completed. It is a Medicaid doctor who, as tired as he was from the week before, is excited about the week he faces or she faces. It is the Meals on Wheels recipients--folks who have had a quiet weekend who are lonely and are anticipating the delivery of that meal, not only for physical nourishment but for the emotional comfort that comes with having that contact with the person who is delivering that meal. These are the everyday things that people do. They are living their lives, where they do work; they make appointments for their kids; they see them to childcare; they help their neighbors. Out of the blue--with no discussion--an announcement goes out. It is illegal. It is sent out by a person who hasn't even been empowered to act. It says to that mom who is going to the Medicaid appointment: It is off. It says to that person who was going to get a Meals on Wheels delivery: It is not coming. It says to that construction worker: That project you are so proud of that you are working on in that you are making a contribution to your community, don't show up for work. It comes out of nowhere--with no explanation, with no discussion. It is cruel taking away the expectations that people depend on to live the hard lives that a lot of people have. By the way, I talk about people who have a fair amount of stability in their lives. There are women who are getting beaten, and they have refuge because they can call a hotline, and they can go to a shelter-- closed. It is some kids who are homeless and have a shelter that they can go to because of the incredible effort of people in our communities--in your community and in mine--who care about that, when it is invisible to so many others. So the jeopardy of those people-- taking away their security in the name of showing how chaos works to accomplish your goals--that is cruel. That is cruel. You know, it is also cruel because of the folks who volunteer at some of these places. You are depriving them of the opportunity that makes so much of a difference in their lives when they see their lives being fulfilled by being able to help others. I got a ride from an Uber driver, and I was talking to him. He told me that he was retired. He is retired like a lot of people where they have a job or two, and his was driving. But the other thing he did was he delivered Meals on Wheels, and he told me about his mother-in-law who, until she was 91, delivered Meals on Wheels, oftentimes to people 30 years younger. The joy he had in doing that is what made life so vivid and worthwhile for him to live. It is the joy of helping your neighbors. The President's order took that away from him--no meals to deliver. That is cruel. It is also totally illegal and totally unconstitutional, and this is the test that we face. If we are U.S. Senators and we believe that the Constitution is important, not in the abstract but in the role it has played in preserving and protecting the freedom of all Americans, and if we believe that freedom is preserved when there is a check and balance against unbridled power, then we are the ones who have to act in order to protect the well-being of this country against the illegal actions by a President who just doesn't care whether it is legal or it isn't. He worships power, and he is creating a new culture where, if you worship community service, if you worship generosity, forgiveness, empathy, you are a sucker. That is the emotional message from this President Trump. Our people in Vermont, our people in Utah--they want and they do better that, when they see injustice, when they see suffering, they respond to it. They don't intensify it. So we have a decision as U.S. Senators to stand up for what this institution requires, and that is that we are a separate and coequal branch of government, and when the responsibilities are being subverted by an overreach by the Executive, we resist, and we resist because it is absolutely vital to the well-being of this country that our democracy prevail with three branches of government and checks and balances. But it is really fundamentally important to the well-being of the people we represent--in their opportunity to live with stability, in the ability to help their neighbors, to have confidence that promises made are promises kept, that we defend the good work, the good will, and the integrity of the people of Vermont, of the people of Utah, and of all of our 50 States. I yield the floor.