CNN "Newsroom" - Interview with Kirsten Gillibrand

Interview

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Joining us now, Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York.

And as we were just listening to this confusion, Senator, for a lot of parents in New York, the mayor saying schools were closed until September, the governor saying the mayor doesn't have that authority.

Are you concerned about the mixed messaging in your state today?

SEN. KIRSTEN GILLIBRAND (D-NY): No. I think they'll sort it out. My view is I think we can't really reopen schools until we are further along in this epidemic. The one thing we don't have, which I really think is necessary for parents and students and teachers, is testing. We really need to get a rapid test at every school in the country, and until we can create the manufacturing pipeline to get that done, it's going to be very hard.

I think most parents would want to know that every child has had a test before they go back to school. I'm sure teachers and administrators think that would be the best way to start school, and the technology is available. We just need the manufacturers to then create enough of these test kits to send to every school.

HILL: Governor Cuomo has been calling on the president to use the DPA for that exact purpose. We know that the testing exists, the Department of Health in New York state has approved it, they're working on tests at this point, but as Governor Cuomo said he has 9 million people that need to go back to work. He can't do that with only hundreds or thousands of tests a week.

Do you see that changing? The president didn't seem to think that it would be needed to help move forward, this testing.

GILLIBRAND: Well, the president's been wrong from the beginning. He didn't take this crisis seriously. He did not shut schools and ask governors to ask people to have stay-at-home orders early enough, and we squandered months. We knew about this virus in probably December, certainly in January, and the president failed to act.

And so, now, governors and mayors are doing their absolute best to meet the needs of their communities, but we know that this virus is highly contagious. We know that the stay-at-home orders are working. We know that the spread is being stopped in its tracks because people are taking this seriously.

But to bring kids back to school to get things up and running, you need a lot more testing.

(CROSSTALK)

GILLIBRAND: If the president would -- if the president was using his Defense Production Act authority, he would be talking to the labs, Abbott Labs and Roche Labs, and demanding that they increase manufacturing of these tests and he would be organizing a national pipeline for this testing to get done.

HILL: As you look at what may be needed to reopen the economy in your state, testing is a key component. As you point out, as we've heard from Governor Cuomo, he also said you can't separate public health and the economy. You can't divorce the two, as you're looking at when to reopen businesses and schools.

What are your markers beyond testing? What are your thresholds? What do you need to see?

GILLIBRAND: So, I can speak as a parent, and as a senator. As a parent, I want to know that my school community is safe and that my child isn't spreading a virus or that other children aren't spreading the virus to people who are home who may be vulnerable like grandparents or older parents.

And so, I think testing is absolutely necessary before we go back to school, and I think remote learning is working. The parts where it's not working, not all of our at-risk and at-need students have the devices they need. We need more of Silicon Valley to actually donate more devices for homeless children, low income children, children in foster care.

New York City has done a very good job of getting computers to people quickly but we still have about 200,000 kids in New York City alone that don't have a computer. In upstate New York, not everybody has access to Wi-Fi. We've still not guaranteed Wi-Fi to that very last mile, and so as a consequence, there are still kids who do not have Internet in their homes.

And so, we have a lot of infrastructure to be building. I'm hoping that Congress can appropriate more money for remote learning to close the digital divide between the haves and have-notes, between rural America, between low-income America and so I'm hoping that we can work on that in the next package and the next package.

I'm also concerned we've not -- we've not put enough resources in for, frankly, our first responders and our at-risk workers. The people who are on the front lines, whether you're a food worker, you are at a grocery store, at a pharmacy, in a hospital, we still don't have the protective equipment we need. So, we need the Defense Production Act to be utilized to get that supply chain, again, streamlined and flowing more aggressively. HILL: I also want to get your take. This morning, House Minority

Leader Kevin McCarthy and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell issued a joint statement and they said they will not agree to any compromise with their proposal that would add $250 billion to the Paycheck Protection Program being run by the Small Business Administration because they want this to be a clean increase in funding and they say that program is actually going to run out of funds by next week without that additional infusion of cash.

Is it worth putting those paychecks in jeopardy?

GILLIBRAND: It's worth writing a bill that's going to work. One of the problems with the paycheck protection provisions is that it's not working for all businesses.

It's certainly not working for restaurants and bars. They cannot be up and running by June. It's not working for a lot of rural businesses. It's not working for businesses that are owned by minority owners and from some communities throughout our state.

And so, some of the banks just aren't lending to some businesses. They are only lending to people that they have a relationship with or they think they could make money from. So we need more of the money to actually go to the community banks, to rural banks, to banks that service minority owners and women-owned businesses.

And so we need to fix what we did in the last bill so this money can get everywhere and for the Republicans in Congress to be unwilling to negotiate in good faith, they are really harming Americans by their belligerence.

HILL: Senator Gillibrand, we're out of time. We'll have to leave it there. Appreciate you joining us this afternoon. Thank you.

GILLIBRAND: Thank you.

Source