Setting Forth the Congressional Budget for the United States Government

Floor Speech

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Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, I am here today to speak in favor of the underlying resolution and urge my colleagues to support it. I will be very brief.

I would like to tackle three topics, amongst many, in this package. I would like to talk a bit about the crisis that stands ahead of us with respect to summer learning and summer programming for kids all across this country. I would like to talk a little bit about the importance of expediting the pace of vaccinations and then, lastly, about the global fight that lies ahead of us to make sure that we are building a pandemic response infrastructure around the world that makes sure this never, ever happens again.

Before delving into those three topics, let me just say that we have an opportunity to pass programming to meet this moment that is wildly popular. There was a poll out yesterday that suggests that many of the most important programming in this package enjoy 70 percent support amongst the public. The relief checks, which will total $2,000--$600 from last year, $1,400 in this package--have 74 percent support among the American public. Only 13 percent of Americans oppose those checks. Increased Federal funding for vaccinations--69 percent favor that increased funding; 17 percent oppose it. Those are difficult numbers to get on any major area of policy in the United States today. To have 74 percent in favor of anything is pretty impressive.

But it speaks to the moment. It speaks to the expectations that Americans have. But it also speaks to the fact that there is unity in the American public about what we need to do.

President Biden rightly talked about unifying the country around an agenda to build back this country better, and these polling numbers show that he has done that because you don't get to 74 percent support for an initiative without a whole bunch of Democrats, Independents, and Republicans supporting that measure.

So we hope--we want to get to a place where we have bipartisan support in the Senate, but we know we have bipartisan support for this agenda out in the American public. These polling numbers and polling numbers to come will prove that. The reason is that the crises we are trying to address don't really care what your politics are.

Let me talk about these three distinct areas.

First, I want to talk about what is happening in our schools. Others have done that in a far more articulate way, so I want to drill down specifically on what is going to happen this summer.

Schools are in crisis right now. I know that because I have two kids in public school--in a big, urban public school. They haven't been back in the classroom at all. They have continued to learn from home the entire time. But they have all the support that they need around them-- two loving parents who are willing and able to help in any way that we can. Not every child has that. So schools have been scrambling just to make sure that they are doing instruction right, that they are opening schools safely, that they are building support systems around students.

But come this summer, you are going to have all sorts of kids who aren't going to have programming ready for them, aren't going to have a safe place to go, and are going to have tremendous amounts of learning loss.

You are also going to have kids who are in need of a really healthy, safe place to be this summer. Some kids will need deep academic experience, but others kids are just going to need some emotional growth, are going to need something fun to do so that they have the ability to restart and be ready to reenter what will, hopefully, be a much more normal-looking classroom.

In this bill is over $100 billion for schools, to support the safe reopening of schools. And what we do in this plan that the President is proposing to us is to allow for some of that money to be used for summer programming.

I am going to make a pitch to have a set-aside, a portion of money dedicated to summer programming. But what we all agree on--those of us who support this package--is that the challenge ahead of us is not just how we keep schools open and open those that have had their doors closed, but what we do to support kids for 12 months of the year, not just 9 months of the year.

This is going to be a tough summer for a lot of kids, and we have to have a specific focus--as this plan does--on meaningful summer programming for kids--programming that is emotionally healthy, that addresses some of this learning loss.

In a typical year, middle-class kids--kids with families that have some means--are five times as likely as those living in poverty to attend a summer camp, twice as likely to visit a museum or go to a performance. We can't allow for that disparity to be present this summer, not this summer. We have to have funding in this bill. We have to pass funding through Congress to make sure that every kid in this country, especially kids coming from limited-means backgrounds, can get into quality summer programming. This summer we have to make that promise to them.

Second, let me talk about vaccines. I know my colleague from Connecticut is going to talk about this as well.

We did well this past week. There were 1.36 million doses administered. I say ``well'' because that is 20 percent more than we did the following week, but it is not good enough.

In this plan from President Biden is $10 billion to operationalize the Defense Production Act. Senator Baldwin and I have been working on this issue for the better part of a year. If you want to produce more vaccine, if you want to produce more testing equipment, more PPE, then you have to organize America's industrial base better than what was happening under the Trump administration. You have to go out and find every potential manufacturing partner who can help Pfizer and Moderna and Johnson & Johnson and any vaccine maker that comes after them be able to make more and make it faster.

We are standing up capacity in Connecticut. We are doing well--No. 3 nationally in terms of the percentage of shots that we get into people's arms--but we can do a lot more. We just need that production to be ramped up. In this bill is specific money to operationalize the Defense Production Act so that we can make more vaccines. That is one of the most important parts of this bill.

Finally, I wanted to talk about the global challenge that we have ahead of us. This virus didn't start in the United States. But, man, it moved quick--from a wet market in China to the west coast of the United States to today, with 400,000 lives having been lost. And the question is: Why? Why was this virus able to move so quickly? Why weren't we able to contain it? Why didn't we learn more about it earlier? Why wasn't the world ready for this moment?

Now, China has a lot to answer for. But, frankly, the whole world has to understand that we didn't allocate resources properly. The United States didn't allocate resources properly. We spent, last year, $740 billion on hardware for the Department of Defense and $12 billion on global public health. Nobody today, living in the United States, would tell you that that was the correct allocation. So inside President Biden's package is funding to start to rebuild the global pandemic prevention infrastructure.

I won't go into the details of how we do that today, but there are estimates suggesting that we are going to need over $20 billion globally in order to stand up greater capacities. That means more resources at a reformed WHO. That means more U.S. diplomats who are working in the public health space. That means doing partnerships with developing nations in which we put some money on the table in exchange for public health reform so that they can strengthen their own systems of pandemic detection and prevention.

But even if you drive this thing down in the United States, so long as there are outbreaks that exist on the other side of the world, we are still at risk. And there may come along a virus down the road that is even more contagious, that spreads even faster than this one, so shame on us if we don't, at the same time, lock down this virus domestically and set up a system of defense internationally to make sure that we are ready for the next one.

We can walk and chew gum at the same time. And President Biden's focus on rebuilding our alliances comes at the right time because we are not going to be able to do this by ourselves.

We have to meet the moment. We can't go small right now. The problems are too big.

Senator Blumenthal and I have spent lots of time at food banks in Connecticut. We have never, ever seen the desperate need that exists today in our State. Shame on us if we don't use the power that has been granted us to both take on this virus and deliver economic prosperity to people who have had it robbed from them through no fault of their own.

I urge my colleagues' support for the budget resolution.

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