Biden Administration

Floor Speech

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Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, dating back to his time as a Member of the Senate, President Biden--then-Senator Biden--frequently shared a piece of advice from his dad:

Don't tell me what you value. Show me your budget, and I'll tell you what you value.

He is not wrong. We have heard countless iterations of the same message from President Biden. Actions speak louder than words. Talk is cheap. Or, as we say in Texas, sometimes someone is all hat and no cattle.

So I want to take President Biden up on his advice. We have spent plenty of time hearing what his values are. He has talked about the importance of rebuilding our economy following the pandemic. We all agree with that--restoring public trust in government, check; protecting low- and middle-income families from tax hikes, check; and standing up to Russia and China, the two greatest threats to the world order. These are priorities shared by Americans with diverse political views, and they are critical goals that any President--Republican or Democrat--should have.

But we don't have to take the President at his word when he talks about the importance of each of these things because we have his budget. We have a written plan from the President of the United States, outlining how his administration wants to turn his spoken intentions into concrete action.

So based upon President Biden's budget, what does he value? It just takes a quick glance to see that responsible spending is not one of the things that he values. The overall pricetag of the President's budget is a whopping $6.4 trillion. Even with the President's massive tax hikes, the United States would still be running more than a trillion dollar deficit each year.

It would only take 2 years for our debt burden to reach the highest level in American history, surpassing even World War II-era debt.

As a reminder, the government has spent a massive amount of money over the last 15 months, as we know. Much of it was a necessary investment in our fight against COVID-19.

On top of that funding, though, our Democratic colleagues circumvented the bipartisan legislative process and added an additional $2 trillion on a host of partisan pet projects, only about 10 percent of which related to COVID-19, even though that was the caption on the bill--a COVID-19 relief bill that was only 10 percent COVID-19.

Now, perhaps nobody expected the President to dramatically cut spending and solve our national debt problems in one go, but this is not a time, after trillions of dollars of necessary COVID-19 spending, to go on another unrelated spending spree, especially once you see where all the money is going. Once again, this is his budget; these are his values.

One of the most critical lines in any President's budget is discretionary spending. For a decade, my colleagues on the other side of the aisle have pined for parity between defense and nondefense spending. But as soon as they get unified government--majority in the House, majority in Senate, and the White House--what do they do? Well, they abandon that parity argument and provide a measly 2-percent increase to defense spending while providing a 16-percent increase in the President's budget to domestic spending--hardly parity.

The Federal Government simply cannot provide for the common defense without the resources to do so. In the face of growing threats, which we all have acknowledged--China, Russia, Iran, North Korea--you would think that the President would propose a substantial increase in defense spending, but he proposed a whopping 2 percent.

Now, compare that to the Department of Education, where the President's budget calls for a 41-percent increase, a 28-percent increase for the Department of Commerce, and a 22-percent increase for the Environmental Protection Agency. Well, when you adjust for inflation, the small increase for defense spending actually represents a decrease.

The Department of Defense isn't the only national security Agency that the Biden budget expects to do with less. Even with a humanitarian crisis on our border, the budget for the Department of Homeland Security remains flat. Once again, after inflation, that will represent a decrease in spending over the current year.

Customs and Border Protection personnel are working overtime to take care of unaccompanied children, to stop dangerous drugs from crossing our border, and to enforce the laws that we in Congress have passed. They need more support to handle the situation in a fair and humane way. Cutting already thin resources for the entire Department will only make the circumstances at the border more dangerous--for law enforcement, for local communities that are being overrun by the huge numbers of people coming across the border--and a danger to the migrants themselves.

If this $6.4 trillion budget doesn't support our most urgent priorities, what does it support? What priorities are so critical that they supersede the need to support our national security and protect our borders?

Well, for one, the administration would double the size of the Internal Revenue Service. I am sure that is good news to every taxpaying American. The President has called for increasing the number of IRS agents by 15 percent a year for the next decade.

We have previously seen the damage that a politically motivated IRS can do. We saw the apparent leaking of taxpayer information recently, which is supposed to be confidential by law. And we can remember the IRS targeting controversy under the Obama administration.

Bureaucrats at the IRS subjected conservative groups that they disagreed with politically or ideologically to a different level of scrutiny than left-leaning groups. And, unfortunately, with this sort of huge investment in the IRS, it looks like the Biden administration simply wants to weaponize the IRS once again.

But that is just the start of it. A massive portion of the President's budget stems from two of the programs he has already told us about--one being the $2.6 trillion American Jobs Plan, which relies on a very generous interpretation of the word ``infrastructure,'' and it reads like the Green New Deal 2.0: more than $200 billion to build or retrofit more than 2 million affordable and sustainable places to live; a civilian climate corps; and an unrealistic 100-percent renewable-generated electricity by 2035.

His budget includes a range of other spending to address climate change, including over $1 billion to help other countries--not Americans, not the United States, but other countries--to lower their emissions.

I am sure China will be glad to take our money while continuing to build coal-fired powerplants to meet the demands of their growing economy.

Then there is a broad range of spending from President Biden's $1.8 trillion so-called American Families Plan--you have got to love the names of these pieces of legislation--which includes everything from universal preschool and free community college to mandatory paid leave policies and using the Tax Code to disguise more Washington spending.

If you read through the President's budget, which, as he said, reflects his values, you see the incredible way that President Biden is simply caving in to the radical left. Mothers are no longer called mothers. They are now called ``birthing people''--unbelievably.

Well, it is one thing for far-left activists to use these kinds of terms on Twitter, but it is entirely different to diminish the role of women in an official government document. Women are more than ``birthing people,'' and I think it is insulting to women to characterize them or define them by that.

The President doubled down on the woke ideology by proposing taxpayer funding for abortion. We know abortion is enormously controversial in our society, but this is a jarring break from a decades-long bipartisan, consensual ban provided by the Hyde amendment. It is also stands in stark contrast in the views of most Americans. The majority of Americans say they oppose using taxpayer dollars to support abortions because they are morally or religiously opposed to the practice.

Adding to the list of absurdities is a massive expansion of welfare. We already know that under the COVID-19 relief bills, the administration has argued in favor of paying people more not to work than they would earn if they did work.

A number of Governors--more than 20 of them now--have refused the $300 weekly supplement because of their concern that this was actually discouraging people from returning to work.

We are hearing from employers all across the country that it is hard, if not impossible, for them to find the workforce they need to get the economy growing again. Business owners in my State--and I would bet across the Country--are already struggling to find a reliable workforce following the overly generous pandemic-related unemployment benefits that our Democratic colleagues insisted upon.

We can't continue to discourage Americans from going back to work, because our economy will never recover if we stay on that path.

Overall, the President's budget would dramatically increase the size of government and the role it plays in our everyday lives, especially with education--as my friend Senator Tim Scott has said, putting Washington even more in the middle of Americans' lives, from the cradle to college. Is that really what the American dream is all about--more and bigger government intervening in our lives, denying us the freedom to make our own choices and to seek our own way?

It is no wonder that the White House rolled out the President's budget so quietly. Frequently, a lot of this happens on Friday afternoons after the press has left and nobody is paying much attention.

While President Biden has told us what he values over and over again, his budget actually speaks to much more. This is not the plan of someone who is fighting for a strong national defense and a swift economic recovery. This budget prioritizes climate justice over American military servicemembers. It further hampers our economic recovery at the expense of hard-working taxpayers, and it prioritizes the restriction of wealth over the prospect of economic growth, which would lift all boats. It digs the United States deeper and deeper into debt, creating a massive financial pit that our children and grandchildren will have to dig their way out of. We are writing the checks, but they will pay the bills, and that, I believe, is immoral.

It is all well and good to tell the American people that you value the same things they value--freedom, security, prosperity--but this, which in President Biden's own words reflects his values, this is not a blueprint to rebuild America. This is, indeed, strong evidence that President Biden has bowed down to the woke political left in his own base and is ready to bury the United States and future generations with unprecedented debt.

When he released his budget, President Biden said, ``Where we choose to invest speaks to what we value as a Nation.'' The President of the United States has made clear what he values. The Nation? Its future? Its prosperity? Its security? Not much.

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