Sheldon Whitehouse

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. The marginal utility of that money in the billionaire's or megamillionaire's life is near zero--near zero. So if you are actually looking at the human side of the financial equation, are we not taking extremely important dollars that make an enormous difference in the lives of normal, regular people, scooping them up by the trillions--according to the graphs I showed--and delivering them to a crop of big corporations that already pay taxes too low and megamillionaires and billionaires who won't even notice the money. It won't change a thing in their lives. They can still buy a $90,000 purse for their wife. They can still buy the ninth house. They can still buy the 190-foot yacht, with its crew of 30 or 40 or 50, or whatever it is. Where is the benefit? You know, we talk about this as being a transfer of wealth from the poor or the middle class to the very rich, but it is really an evaporation of wealth because it is not going to make a difference to people who already have more money than they can spend for the rest of their lives. They couldn't spend it if they wanted to for the rest of their lives. So this additional thing, it is more like a trophy. It reminds me of when I was growing up. People were talking about F.D.R., recalling his Presidency, and talking about J.F.K. while he was President and shortly thereafter. I was alive during J.F.K.'s life. People used to say: Well, you know, the good thing about electing those rich people is that they are too rich to steal. You don't have to worry about them. They are too rich to steal. F.D.R. never stole a nickel, as best I can tell. J.F.K. never stole a nickel, as best I can tell. This crop of creepy billionaires--what happened to ``too rich to steal,'' Senator Murphy.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. And if I can reclaim my time for a moment and ask the Senator another question, it looks to me a bit like, as they are destroying Medicaid--which, as you pointed out, serves a quarter of American households and is essential to most households because it is granny's nursing home care, it is your sister's or wife's childbirth delivery in the hospital, or it is your colleague or friend or family member's opioid recovery treatment--swept away for unnecessary and unfair tax cuts to billionaires and big corporations. But then you move just beyond this immediate budget bill and you look over at what Elon Musk and his little ``Muskrats'' are doing to Social Security and what they are saying about Social Security, and it looks like not only do they want to gut Medicaid through this budget reconciliation bill, but they also are trying to wreck the administration and operations of Social Security, trying to clear out the workforce that makes it work, sending their creeps in to probe into the data systems that support it. Who knows what damage has been done to the data systems or what extraction of data has been done. We don't know. They have never answered questions. They lie and say it is a Ponzi scheme. They refer to it as riddled with fraud when there is almost no fraud at all--1 percent at best. So they are trying to discredit Social Security, they are trying to undermine its operations, and they are talking about an interruption in benefits--in fact, talking kindly about interruption in benefits with the Secretary of Commerce saying: If we had an interruption in benefits, my mother, who is a Social Security recipient, wouldn't even notice. Well, yes. She is living in her billionaire son's house. Of course she wouldn't notice. Duh. But the people who would complain about losing their check, they are probably fraudsters, and so it would actually be beneficial to have an interruption in benefits because that is where we can root out some of the fraud--like there is fraud. Again, feeding the lie that there is fraud. What conclusions do you reach when you see this pattern of activity targeting Social Security, even if an attack on it is not in this bill per se?

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Particularly when there is so much money to be made. So much flows through Social Security. If you take it over by wrecking it and then sending in your private-equity friends and tech bros to get it operational again and then let them slice off a share for themselves by privatizing either it or its operations, you have created a massive new revenue stream for the superrich. So with that, I see that there are a few colleagues on the other side who have come over. It may be that it is their turn. Senator Murphy, are you OK to yield the floor?

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am here in support of Senator Kaine's effort to get this body to take a public view on President Trump's mad declaration that we have a border emergency with Canada happening right now. I can tell you that if I go home to Rhode Island and ask people what the emergency is in their lives, I wouldn't get one person who said: Oh, we have got a real emergency with Canada. They are a huge threat. That whole Canada situation, boy, that is dangerous. This is nutty stuff, and it is dangerous stuff economically. Just in Rhode Island, Canada is our largest international trading partner. Twenty-two percent of Rhode Island's exports are to Canada, and we import from Canada as well. And when the tariffs get reciprocated by our Canadian friends after this ridiculous behavior from President Trump, then that is going to affect all Rhode Islanders. We buy a lot of energy, for instance, from Canada, and that is going to raise costs for Rhode Island families. It is a direct hit to people's pocketbooks. And as has been pointed out, this is just a shady way to hit Americans in the pocketbook, to raise revenue so that this phony-baloney budget resolution we are about to have to deal with can open up revenues that they can then use as a justification for lowering taxes for the billionaires and the big corporations who already pay way too little in taxes. Some billionaires pay no income taxes at all. The corporate share of America's revenue has gone from about 30 percent of America's revenue down to single digits. That is just a huge sucking sound pulling out of America's revenue the revenue of the corporate entities, and it is not the mom-and-pop flower store. It is the huge multinational that goes and pretends that it is doing its business in Ireland or the Cayman Islands or someplace and hides profits. This is a tax racket against the American people that is now being propped up and made worse by a tariff racket against the American people. And the excuse is one of the dumbest ones ever: that the emergency is fentanyl. Well, Rhode Island was at the heart of the opioid epidemic. That is why I worked with Senator Portman to pass the CARA bill, the biggest addiction recovery response bill this body has ever passed. I take this issue deadly seriously--not the President. Not the President. Mr. President, 0.2 percent of the fentanyl in America comes across the enormous Canadian border. If you did it like per mile of the American border, it would be immeasurably small. And over this fake excuse that there is a huge fentanyl problem, 0.2 percent, they are going to dump enormous new expenses on American families. People have called this a sales tax, and it kind of is because what it does is it raises prices. It raises prices because the money that the Federal Government takes in has to be recovered, and it gets recovered from families, from people who are paying higher prices for imported goods or higher prices for the domestic freeloaders who are going to raise their prices to match the imported goods just the way the fossil fuel industry raised their prices to match the foreign prices of fuel after the Ukraine invasion and so gorged themselves that they made the biggest profits off the American people in the history of corporations. It was the biggest gouge ever by the scoundrels of the fossil fuel industry, and now we are opening the door for this to happen across all industries. American families are going to be hurt, and they are going to be hurt hard. And it just puts revenues on the books that the Republicans can then use to go and do what they really want to do here, which is to make sure that all their billionaire cronies, everybody who is surrounding Trump, all the pals in the Cabinet, and all the ones who write the big checks to the super-PACs and who fund Republican politicians don't have to pay taxes anymore. It is ``Leona Helmsley Day'' here in the Senate. Taxes are just for the little people. This is a disgrace, and I hope there will be a few voices on the Republican side to recognize that considering the Canadian border to be an emergency is preposterous. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Would the Senator from New Jersey yield for a question?

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. You take your time thinking about it, sir.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. So, first question: It has been 17 hours. How are you doing?

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Well, thank you for what you are doing. Second question, if you would yield for a second question.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. One of the ways in which I try to discuss what is going on in this country--when people are horrified, anxious, astonished, whatever--is to describe it as the rule of the looters and the polluters. The looters are the creepy billionaires coming to government, trying to figure out how to get even more for themselves. It used to be that people thought that there was a thing: too rich to steal. That doesn't seem to be a thing for these creepy billionaires. They are more than happy to wreck Social Security so that they can send in their tech bros and their private equity folks to put right what they have broken. And the looting goes on across the entire face of government--scarred and disfigured by Musk and his little Muskrats, I like to call them. And then, of course, you have the polluters, who are doing a similar thing, which is to steal from the public. Only instead of stealing from government, they are stealing by dumping their pollution into our common air, into our common climate future, into our waters, into our lands, and defending, through political influence and clout and power and dark money in this building, their privilege to pollute for free. And the endpoint of both of those is regular Americans, who are getting--to put it bluntly--pretty hosed, so that people on the other side of that--the creepy billionaires who are behind the climate denial scheme, who are out to wreck the American Government so that it can't regulate their conduct or make them behave like honest bankers and investors or insurers or whatever. React for a moment, if you would, to that framing of our beautiful country now being subject to the really malevolent whims of the big looters and the big polluters.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. If the Senator would yield for another question, while retaining the floor--

Mr. WHITEHOUSE.--I would add to your comment and request your response to the observation that not only is this an appalling manifestation of greed by people who already have more money than they are able to spend in their entire lifetimes, but the manner in which they are accomplishing their purpose is pretty loathsome in and of itself because the manner in which they are accomplishing their selfish purposes is to corrupt and degrade this great American democracy that we are all here to defend.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. And they do it by taking their billions and running it through phony front groups so it pops up as dark money in elections. And of course, the beneficiary of the dark money, the candidate, figures out exactly who is behind the big dark money contribution that ends up in the super PAC that is supporting them. And of course, the big donor knows that they gave the money, so the deal between the creepy billionaire and the in-hoc-to-them political candidate is made. But because it is dark money, because it is secret, because it goes through front groups and into the super PAC and ultimately into the campaign, courts don't know, the public doesn't know, the voters don't know. Everybody else is left out of the joke.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. So bad enough that they are here arguing for excess benefits for themselves compared to regular Americans; worse, they are using dark money corruption to get there. So how is that patriotic?

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, I am here for the 35th time to call attention to the rightwing scheme to capture our courts and justice system, now out to target and persecute Trump political enemies and do Trump political favors. We have heard a lot about weaponization of the justice system from Trump and his allies. That is for two reasons. One, it is a handy narrative for Trump and MAGA cronies to paint him as a victim, not a convicted criminal who only dodged proper sentencing and further criminal charges because of sweeping Presidential immunity granted by a Supreme Court stacked with rightwing Justices he appointed. Two, it is a tactic. For would-be autocrats, accusations signal intentions. You accuse the other side of doing what you are plotting so that when you are caught doing it, you have set it up to look like offsetting penalties. Accusations signal intentions, and sure enough, now there is real weaponization of the justice system unfolding before our eyes. I am going to take a minute and drill down into one episode. It begins with a climate fund, duly created and appropriated by Congress, maintained after the funds were disbursed at a private bank, and overseen by EPA. But MAGA's dear leader claims, falsely, that climate change is a hoax. That is his catchphrase for the truest things he doesn't like. So this climate fund became a MAGA target. There is a problem, however: The Constitution limits the President's veto power over congressional spending, both with a time limit and the right of Congress to override, and the time limit to veto these funds had been over for years. The funds were properly appropriated back in August 2022 when President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act. The grants were awarded in April 2024, giving recipients legal rights to the funds. And then they were distributed to the bank as fiscal agent for the recipients, all in regular order. Enter Trump's corrupt Justice Department through two colossal Trump suck-ups: the Acting Deputy Attorney General, Emil Bove, and Ed Martin, the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. Martin is an activist MAGA type, a lawyer for January 6 attackers, who had criticized this fund even before he was appointed interim. Bove and Martin cooked up asking Martin's U.S. Attorney's Office to freeze the climate fund by opening a criminal investigation so they could assert that the ongoing investigation justified the freeze. Their problem: They couldn't point to a crime. Oops. The career criminal division chief, an experienced veteran prosecutor at the U.S. Attorney's Office, pointed out that launching a criminal investigation without evidence of a crime--what prosecutors call predication--is a violation of prosecutorial ethics and Department of Justice policy. That warning from the career prosecutors to MAGA Martin is red flag one. But the MAGA U.S. attorney didn't listen to that warning from his career staff. Instead, he demanded that the career criminal chief resign. He forced her out. Well, that is another big red flag--red flag two. With the criminal division chief out of the way, Martin still couldn't find one staff prosecutor in his office to pursue the matter. Now, you remember in the Nixon Saturday Night Massacre, they had to fire all the way down to Robert Bork, who became notorious for ultimately doing the dirty deed for Nixon, but here, no Bork. No prosecutor would sign from this big Federal prosecution office. That is red flag three. Martin then proceeded in his own name alone. That is red flag four. As a former U.S. attorney, I can assure you there is almost always a career attorney's signature on every pleading filed. And bear in mind that Martin is not some rare legal whiz. He had never spent a single day as a Federal prosecutor before he got this gig, and here he was fumbling around by his lone MAGA self. So--no surprise--when Martin presented his request to the Federal magistrate judge, the judge denied the petition. That is red flag five, and it is a massive, flapping red flag to anyone who has served in a U.S. Attorney's Office. Federal prosecutors never want this to happen, so they triple-check and backstop every application to ensure that they are ironclad. In my U.S. Attorney's Office, a Federal judge shooting down one of our warrant applications would have set off internal reviews. That should be what is known in the medical field as a never event. It is a shocker, particularly with the U.S. attorney presenting the petition in person. Even that series of disasters didn't stop this scheme. Somebody started shopping the case to other U.S. Attorney's Offices, hoping that some other office would try again in a different district. Well, shopping a case around U.S. attorney's offices, after the matter has been shot down in court, that is red flag six. It seems that no other U.S. attorney's office has been willing to go before any court with this hot mess, but somehow, a Federal prosecutor down in Florida--Florida--ordered Washington-based FBI agents to start questioning EPA employees about the grant program. Well, we are going to find out more about that. But meanwhile, in a related case, a different Federal judge blew up the EPA Administrator's administrative effort under Trump's Executive orders to freeze these funds, and they defended the freeze with the same pretext that there was fraud that needed to be prevented. Well, the judge asked: Tell me about the fraud. Show me some evidence. There was none. The judge noted in her decision that, for all the big talk, the administration could produce--her words--``no evidence to support that claim.'' So a second Federal judge shoots down the scheme. We are up to red flag seven. Compounding this prosecutive fiasco, both Martin and EPA Administrator Zeldin unleashed a barrage of public comments, flooding the information zone with public accusations of fraud, the same accusations of fraud that the career U.S. attorney staff rejected and the magistrate judge determined to be unfounded and the judge said DOJ and EPA had offered no evidence to support. Well, that is a problem. Unfounded accusations of fraud are what lawyers call ``defamatory per se.'' And derogatory public comments about the subject of an investigation is trouble under multiple Department of Justice policies. The administration officials' public comments were out of bounds. I have been a U.S. attorney. You don't get to do that. Discovery in civil litigation will likely ultimately reveal the depths of the misconduct, the potentially unlawful motive, and their potential liability for their misconduct. We are not at the end of this yet, but what we see is real weaponization--not MAGA phony claims of weaponization, part of a political propaganda campaign to excuse the criminality of the dear leader. Here, all these red flags of actual weaponization are flying: internal warnings that the case had no merit, removing officials for disagreement, proceeding without a career attorney, getting shot down by a magistrate judge, case shopping after the disaster, hunting for FBI agents to harass career civil servants for managing properly congressionally appropriated funding, making derogatory public comments--and all without evidence. Compare that to the Federal criminal cases against Trump. There is no record of internal warnings being ignored that the cases had no merit. There is no removing of officials for disagreeing with the case. No pleading was ever filed without a career attorney signing, just signed by a politico. No application was ever shot down by a judge. Indeed, the Mar-a-Lago warrants were judicially approved. Despite very aggressive lawyering for Trump, no finding of a prosecutor's violation of Department policy was turned up; no matter had to be case shopped to other districts after falling apart in one district; no harassment by FBI agents with no court pleading to back them up; and no derogatory public comments ever made outside the pleadings the government filed. Red flag count in the Trump cases: zero. Red flag count in this sorry episode: seven. If Trump's corrupt DOJ will go through all of this just to grab properly appropriated climate funds, imagine what they are capable of with really bad stuff. We are in store for lots more actual weaponization in the coming months and years under this corrupt administration. So easy for me to say that this will be continued. I yield the floor.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I thank Chairman Wyden. This is a really important investigation, and it bears very exactly on the Republican tax scam that is being cooked up right now here in this Congress, because one of the keys to the Republican tax scam that is being cooked up right here in this Congress is giving big corporations the ability to move their profits--and even their jobs--offshore, away from America, and get a tax break for doing that. And the total value of this tax break--the award to big corporations from Republicans for moving American jobs and profits offshore--is running at about $140 billion that other taxpayers are going to have to make up. Big Pharma is the big winner in this offshore tax scam. If you look at Big Pharma's numbers, most sales are to U.S. patients. They sell their pharmaceutical products to Americans. But when you look at their financial reporting, 75 percent of their profits are declared as coming from outside of the United States. So you have some funky math going on here because we know that Americans are charged more for Big Pharma's drugs than people are overseas. They overcharge Americans, Americans pay the highest prices, and most of the sales are going to Americans who are paying the highest prices. So how is it that, when most of their sales are going to Americans, who are paying the highest prices, that is not where the profits are reported? The profits are reported from overseas, where they have fewer patients paying lower prices. How does that work? That works S-C-A-M, scam. And that is what the Republicans in Congress are trying to push forward into the future. Thanks to the terrific work of our chairman, we have some specific examples. The Republican tax scam went into effect in 2017. So they had to move pretty quickly. So we are looking at now 2019. How quickly did pharma enjoy the benefit of this tax scam at Americans' expense? Well, AbbVie is one company. In 2019, it declared three-quarters of its sales to American customers and essentially all of its profits offshore. As pharma does, they charged Americans the highest prices, and they sold 75 percent, nearly, of their drugs to those highly priced American customers, and yet they claimed that all of their money came from the small fraction of their sales that they made at lower prices offshore. Again, S-C-A-M. Who gets hurt? Well, who gets hurt is American workers because, very often, the jobs go offshore along with the profits. So an American worker loses his job so that an American company can move that job offshore and pay some foreign person for the work that should be here and gets rewarded by Republicans in Congress for a tax break for doing that. Who else gets hurt? Small businesses get hurt because, if you are running a small business, you can't set up this elaborate tax scam. You don't have the accountants. You don't have the lawyers. You may not even have the nasty motive to try to cheat your own government this way. So small businesses take it in the neck against the big businesses that can dodge their taxes through this complicated scam. And even some big American domestic companies, like Rhode Island- based CVS, which are all-American companies, which don't fake their profits to be coming from Bermuda or the Cayman Islands or Singapore or wherever else, they suffer too because they are in competition with the big multinationals that are playing shell-and-pea games with their profits to hide it from the IRS. So here is the racket: One, you overcharge Americans. Two, you use the money that you earn from overcharging Americans to come to Congress and buy massive amounts of influence and get the Republican Party to do exactly what you want. And what you want is stage 3, the tax scam that lets you pretend you are making money offshore when you are really not, and then you save money by not having to pay taxes. And then you keep overcharging Americans, you keep buying Congress, and you keep the tax scam going. It is rinse and repeat, and the big losers are Americans. Where it comes home is where the chairman did his outstanding work for Pfizer. And $20 billion is what Pfizer sold in drugs in America; $20 billion is what Pfizer sold in drugs overseas. They charged more to Americans because pharma charges more to Americans. We know that. And yet Pfizer told the IRS that all--all--of its profits came from offshore--all of it--and, as a result, they got a huge, huge tax dodge. So whether it is AbbVie or whether it is Pfizer or whether it is the industry as a whole, we need to shut down this tax racket. It is not serving anyone. It costs American jobs, it is unfair to small businesses, and it cheats the regular taxpayers who pay their taxes honestly and can't pretend that the revenue they made off American customers is somehow magically appearing out of the Cayman Islands or some other foreign hideaway. I thank Chairman Wyden for his amazing work.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, earlier this month, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin announced he would reconsider over 30 rules and policies that protect human health and the environment, calling it ``the greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen.'' With a barrage of press releases, Administrator Zeldin threatened to replace the central mission of EPA--to protect the environment and the health of Americans--with a newer and more sordid mission: to protect the financial interests of President Trump's Big Oil polluting mega donors. EPA's mission to protect human health and the environment has guided the Agency for more than 50 years, with bipartisan support. The Agency was created by Republican President Richard Nixon, and conservative Presidents like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush chose administrators like Bill Ruckelshaus and Christine Whitman, who took the Agency's mission seriously. EPA's bipartisan pedigree and mission matter little to Trump, Zeldin, and their crew of fossil fuel donors. Administrator Zeldin claims that slashing these protections will ``unleash American energy.'' Huh. In reality, these rollbacks will keep Americans dependent on expensive dirty fossil fuels, while other countries keep moving forward with energy innovation, developing cleaner, cheaper, and more efficient energy. We are deliberately losing a competition. Trump is exalting an antiquated polluting fossil fuel industry and degrading the lives of the American people. Administrator Zeldin gleefully declared, ``We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion.'' But the protections EPA threatens to roll back mostly relate to keeping air and water clean. In the wealthiest country in the world, does it make sense to increase uncertainty about whether water is safe to drink? Administrator Zeldin likely can't juice substantially more fossil fuel production, but slashing these protections will unleash tons more pollution--more pollution from oil and gas producers, powerplants, manufacturers, cars and trucks; fewer protections for drinking water, wetlands, and streams. Coal-fired powerplants will release more mercury into the air we breathe, settling into our water and our soil and eventually finding its way into our food. We will experience more bad air days like we get in Rhode Island from upwind out-of-State polluters, when the air is thick with soot and other pollutants, triggering asthma attacks and respiratory diseases. They threaten even to overturn the good neighbor rule that gives States the ability to push back when upwind States foul the air, as happens to us in Rhode Island. The ability to pollute another State with impunity deliberately is a core thing for EPA to stop, and yet they are caving in to the polluter States. And, yes, these rollbacks do threaten to remove limits also on carbon pollution from powerplants, oil and gas facilities, and vehicles, turbocharging the ongoing heating of our planet. Let's be clear: Climate change ain't religion; it is science--and well-understood, established, mature science at that. My Republican colleagues in this building all have home State universities that teach climate science. Greenhouse gas emissions--science knows--from the production and combustion of fossil fuels are heating our planet, raising sea levels, increasing the severity and frequency of violent storms, worsening droughts, and causing more intense wildfires. Even the fossil fuel industry's own scientists understood the climate risks of unchecked fossil fuel emissions. Exxon's own climate scientists warned that the burning of fossil fuels was changing our planet's climate and correctly modeled the effects of greenhouse gas emissions on global temperatures. When Zeldin testified in January before the Environment and Public Works Committee, he pledged to ``work with the scientists'' and ``leave the science to the scientists.'' What happened to that Lee Zeldin? Where did he go? Because the Lee Zeldin of January has been replaced by a Lee Zeldin willing to ignore his own scientists and ignore the facts for the benefit of President Trump's Big Polluter donors. These fossil fuel industry favors will increase costs for American families. The fossil fuel industry spent almost $100 million--that we know of--to boost Trump in the last election and hundreds of millions more on Congress. Trump famously asked industry executives for $1 billion in exchange for delivering an industry wish list, and here is Zeldin producing that industry wish list. But for people who are not fossil fuel billionaires, the growing exposure to hazardous pollutants and the increase in carbon pollution will increase costs. Tonight, colleagues will talk in more detail about various protections that Zeldin threatens to end and the safety and health policies he is curdling. I will discuss Zeldin's mischief with the social cost of carbon. What is the social cost of carbon? It is a measure of the costs of each additional ton of carbon pollution released--increased mortality, for instance, from heat and storms; increased sickness from heat and air pollution; damage to agriculture and infrastructure from droughts and floods; even insurance collapse. The Biden EPA estimated the social cost of carbon at around $190 per ton, which is consistent with most knowledgeable estimates, and the Office of Management and Budget ordered that this number be used in cost-benefit analysis for regulations as well as in a wider suite of government actions. This analysis is nothing more than common sense. If the government is considering taking a step that would increase carbon pollution, it should consider the costs of doing so. If it is doing something that would decrease carbon pollution, it should understand and enjoy the economic benefits. Zeldin is proposing to have the government ignore the facts. He wants to ignore the science, he wants to ignore the economics, and he wants to utilize a social cost of carbon whose value is deliberately and falsely set close to zero. If he succeeds, the Federal Government will no longer accurately assess the true costs and benefits of climate decisions. This isn't new math or even fuzzy math; this is fake math--fake math to benefit Trump's oil and gas donors, who get to pretend, falsely, that the American people aren't picking up the tab for their industry's carbon pollution. The International Monetary Fund, which is not a green institution, pegs the costs the public bears from fossil fuel pollution at more than $700 billion every year in the United States alone. Last Congress, as chair of the Senate Budget Committee, I organized hearings on the economic and financial costs of climate change. We heard warnings from economists, scientists, medical professionals, insurance and investment executives, the new Prime Minister of Canada, a former Prime Minister of Australia, and even a former Republican Senate majority leader. Throughout the hearings, witnesses emphasized the systemic economic risks that climate change poses and warned that if we don't shift away from our dependence on fossil fuels, things will get much worse. ``Systemic'' was the word I emphasized in that last sentence. ``Systemic'' may sound like a bland academic term, but a systemic risk in economics is one which threatens to bring down the entire economy, much the way failures in the mortgage market led to the great recession of 2008. Zeldin's promised rollbacks will have real economic consequences for families. American families will bear increased healthcare costs. Even with an honorably functioning EPA, healthcare costs from fossil fuel air pollution and climate change are estimated to total nearly $820 billion in the United States each year. Doctors appointments, emergency room visits, rehab and home health support, and prescription drugs all strain the pocketbooks of American families. Lost work and school days and reduced labor productivity cost both families and the broader economy. Last year, the United States suffered a recordbreaking 27 separate billion-dollar disasters, pushing up prices, damaging insurance markets, and burdening the families who were in harm's way. Economic losses from natural disasters reached more than $200 billion. Climate-related extreme weather--hurricanes, wildfires, and floods-- damages property, damages infrastructure, damages agriculture, and damages supply chains. These recurring disasters are disrupting insurance markets across the country. Turmoil in the insurance markets bleeds over into turmoil in the mortgage and housing markets. If you can't get insurance on your house, the next buyer can't get a mortgage on your house, and that reduces the pool of buyers and results in plunging property values. If your insurance premium quadruples, say from $2,000 a year to $8,000 a year, your home's value will fall, as the carrying costs associated with owning it have dramatically increased. Last year, the Budget Committee obtained county-level data for the entire country, showing the evolution of nonrenewal rates for homeowners insurance from 2018 to 2023, and what we showed is that nonrenewal rates were rising--indeed, skyrocketing--as insurers retreat from areas of the country battered by the storms and wildfires that climate change makes both more likely and more intense. While the usual suspects are Florida, California, and Louisiana, nonrenewals are also skyrocketing across areas of southern New England, the Carolinas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, the Northern Rockies, and Hawaii. We found that nonrenewals increased the most in the counties most exposed to climate risk--not surprising--and also that where nonrenewals were spiking, premiums were surging as well. Earlier this year, the nonpartisan First Street Foundation took a look at the data we had looked at in the Budget Committee and looked forward and made some prediction about what increasing premiums and declining availability of insurance will mean for property values. They looked at the 30-year period of a mortgage entered into today, and they found that property values will decrease--decrease--in many counties by 20, 40, 60, or even 100 percent. Change in home value due to insurance costs: minus 100 percent. If you are in that category--and there are a few of them and more coming in the future--your home will lose all its value during the period of your mortgage, and you can bet the people selling you that mortgage are going to notice. Let's not forget that for most Americans, their largest asset is their home. Home ownership is how most families build wealth. So something that is going to systemically reduce home values is hurting Americans. In a future gripped by climate change, the home ownership path to economic security breaks. What Zeldin is proposing will accelerate that danger forward, bringing the inevitable day of reckoning closer. In Administrator Zeldin's home of Suffolk County, NY, for instance, nonrenewals nearly tripled from 2018 to 2023 and annual premiums have already increased by almost $800. And that is just a taste of what is to come. By the way, it is not just me saying this. Fed Chair Jerome Powell warned the Senate Banking Committee that in 10 to 15 years, there will be entire coastal and wildfire-exposed regions of the United States in which it will no longer be possible to get a mortgage. That is our future. When your insurance premium goes up by hundreds or by thousands of dollars, that is Republican climate denial in action. When your grocery bill goes up because orange juice, sugar, coffee, chocolate, and olive oil are more expensive because of climate-related extreme weather, that is climateflation in action. Before I yield, I will close with one last thought. We are where we are, entering the era of climate consequences, because American politics failed to get this right. Our political system failed because the American political process became corrupted by the big money influence of the fossil fuel industry. Our politics got corrupted, and that is why we have so grievously failed at addressing climate change. We have Senators here from States whose State universities teach climate science pretending that climate science isn't real. Mr. President, history will look back at us with anger and disgust, justifiably. I yield the floor to my wonderful senior colleague from Rhode Island.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Would the distinguished Senator from Massachusetts yield for a question?

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Well, you referenced the value to the fossil fuel industry of being able to run to Congress or run to the White House and throw money around and, as a result of that expenditure on politicians, earn the right to pollute for free and get enormous competitive advantage against clean energy. The industry clearly spends a lot of money. We know they spent a hundred million dollars getting Trump elected. He asked them for a billion dollars, which could have come through dark money, in order to deliver on this subsidy program they want. How lucrative do you think the fossil fuel political operation is?

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I would not be surprised, actually, if the political lobbying and dark money influence operation of the fossil fuel industry was not actually its most lucrative line of business because for the $1 billion or $6 billion or $7 billion spent manipulating our politics, they protect a $700 billion annual subsidy, according to the International Monetary Fund. That is a $100 return every year for every $1 invested. They don't make that much off their tar sands. They don't make that much off their oil wells. They don't make that much off their methane leaks.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. And we welcome our colleague from Connecticut to join the festivities here on the Senate floor. All three States are downwind States from the pollution of the Midwest, of Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio. There is nothing we can do about it, other than breathe in the waste that they don't clean up.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Well, it means that the prevailing winds that blow over West Virginia, that blow over Pennsylvania, that blow over Ohio, blow over their smoke stacks that have been deliberately built high into the air so that the pollution coming out of the smoke stacks gets caught up in those prevailing winds and ends up falling down in the form of ozone and particulate matter in Massachusetts, in Connecticut, and in Rhode Island. And the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management and the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection and the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection can do nothing about it because those States have chosen to put it up into the sky above them so that it lands on us.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I am delighted to be joined by all of you. I would make an observation of my own. I think Senator Blumenthal wants to join in. The observation I want to make is our three States are known for great universities--Yale University in New Haven, CT; Harvard University in Cambridge, MA; and Brown University in Providence, RI. They all teach climate science, and they all teach economics as well. But it is not just those three universities. If you go across the aisle and check in with our Republican colleagues, with their Republican home States, they have great universities in their own States, including State universities. And their State universities in their home States teach the very climate science that Republican Senators deny on the Senate floor. I have been through the syllabuses of home State universities for Republican colleagues and gone through the classes that teach climate science, and they teach economics. And you can go to Milton Friedman, the famous free market conservative economist, and what does he say about pollution? He says the cost of the pollution has to be in the price of the product or else it is a big fat subsidy, and it is not market economics any longer. It is a government subsidy; it is corporate welfare; and that is what we see in this dispute. The climate science is real. Their own State universities teach it, and the economics is real. Their own State universities teach Milton Friedman. And what they are doing in this building, contrary to what their universities know, is to fight with political power, to keep polluting, and have the public bear all the cost of their pollution-- have the public bear all the cost of their pollution, not be a real market economy--which the price of the pollution, as a negative externality, gets baked into the price of the product--but pollute for free. This is a huge pollute-for-free scam, running to about $700 billion every year. So no wonder it has taken a while for wind and solar to take off fighting the headwinds of a multihundred billion-dollar subsidy from an industry that gets to pollute for free. And who bears all those costs? How are your fishermen doing in Long Island Sound as that water has warmed or mine or yours? And that is just one example.

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I will.