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Floor Speech

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Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, last week, I spoke about some of President Trump's nominees to unleash American energy dominance. Today, I would like to highlight another issue and some of his great picks to help lead his agenda.

For one thing, I am very excited about his partnership with my fellow Texan, Elon Musk, who will help lead the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

We have reached a point as a nation where it is almost a cliche to say our spending has become out of control. We all know that, but doing anything about it seems to be elusive, to say the least. It is a problem that we are all aware of but is one that many are afraid to make the hard decisions to do anything about.

Our Nation's debt has skyrocketed to more than $36 trillion. That is a number that none of us can possibly conceive of in terms of the magnitude of that debt. What we do know is we are now spending more money for interest on the national debt than we are on the defense of our Nation--something that is unsustainable. But what is lesser known is that 61 percent of the Federal budget is mandatory spending, which means it is on autopilot, and we rarely go back and revisit it to make sure that this spending program, this mandatory spending program, is still a priority. There is no cap on it, no cost-of-living index, nothing of the nature to control the costs, so they tend to grow at 5, 6, 7, 8 percent a year. Well, this is no longer acceptable, if it ever was, because it is not sustainable. We have to do something about it, and I think we have a generational opportunity to do just that come January.

But if you look at the other piece of the pie, only 26 percent of our budget is discretionary. We fight over continuing resolutions and appropriations bills here in the Senate, which represent 26 percent of the money that the Federal Government spends, and act sometimes like, well, we need to balance the budget, but in dealing with 26 percent of the spending, that is obviously a fool's errand.

The other 13 percent is interest on the national debt. Just think about the trillion dollars a year that we spend on interest on the national debt. If we did not have a $36 trillion debt, if we didn't have to pay that interest, what good could be done with that trillion dollars a year? We have almost reached the point where our interest payments, of course, as I said, have actually eclipsed defense spending, and that is obviously never a good place to be.

Where we spend what we spend is almost as important as how much we spend. Let me say that again. Where we spend what we spend is almost as important as how much we spend. I have never been one to believe that it is just a matter, in terms of judging our national security, that we need to spend X amount of dollars, because that doesn't really tell you much about how those dollars are spent.

One of the things I am hoping the new administration can do, being disruptors, opposing the status quo, is that we can see some real changes at the Pentagon and in terms of equipping our warfighters with the most modern, most effective weapons and weapons systems that they need in order to restore deterrence.

I think it is obvious--and I think the selection is a referendum on this--that we need to take a look in the mirror and look at our pocketbook and have a reckoning. For this reason, I am excited to work with Elon Musk and his cochairman, Vivek Ramaswamy, who is a founding member of the DOGE Caucus, here in the Senate. Now, I don't imagine that they are going to be able to unilaterally cut out the waste and inefficiency in the Federal Government because obviously they are not part of the legislature, but I do believe they can highlight ways that we can cut waste and inefficiency. Whether it is the President through Executive order or whether it is the Congress through Congressional Review Acts or through other legislation, we can join them in cutting our spending and making the tax dollar that is spent here be spent more efficiently in accordance with our priorities as a nation. So I look forward to working with both of them and our House colleagues on the DOGE Caucus--first to identify the low-hanging fruit.

Now, there have already been some good ideas that we have seen floated. For example, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget recently found that simply reversing every one of President Biden's Executive orders could save taxpayers up to $1.4 trillion.

You know, it is a sad day when we who are supposed to have the purse strings have relinquished to the Executive the ability to basically obligate the Nation to spend $1.4 trillion through Executive orders. There is something terribly out of whack about that. We are the ones who should control the purse strings of the Nation and be the ones accountable to the voters for how we spend that money, but that has gotten terribly out of whack, as I said.

For the most part, these Executive actions are things that folks on this side of the Chamber agree we should reverse. For example, simply preventing the implementation of President Biden's rule limiting vehicle carbon emissions--effectively an electric vehicle mandate-- would save $150 billion. I have never understood the wisdom of low- and middle-income taxpayers subsidizing wealthy people to buy expensive cars, which is what the mandate provides.

While there is incredible innovation in the healthcare space, blocking the Biden administration rule to allow Medicare to cover GLP-1 obesity drugs would save $40 billion. Now, I, for one, think that is a fascinating topic and one we need to explore more in depth, but I do oppose the President's doing this unilaterally before Congress has had a chance to do our due diligence to see ``Does this save money? What is the impact on the public health?'' rather than President Biden, with the swipe of his pen, spending $40 billion.

Then there is the so-called Thrifty Food Plan update that increased SNAP benefits. We have been debating the farm bill, which is about 80 percent of nutrition benefits and very little benefit to our farmers, but President Biden again, with a swipe of his pen, obligated us to spend another $180 billion.

It is a little ironic, to say the least, that we spend billions of dollars on food stamps and nutrition programs that could be used to buy who knows what and then turn around and spend billions of dollars more on obesity drugs to help Americans who are overweight. There is something strange about that juxtaposition.

But another simple but effective way of eliminating waste would be to eliminate COVID-era work policies for employees in Federal Agencies. My friend and our colleague Senator Ernst of Iowa has pointed out that taxpayers continue to pick up the tab for the upkeep of Federal buildings that are, by and large, empty.

The Government Accountability Office conducted a study that found that 75 percent or more of the office space for DC headquarters of Federal Agencies is not even being used--75 percent.

At the same time, the people who rely on these Agencies for services--the public--are often faced with extended wait times due to Federal employees working remotely. I hear it on a daily basis from my constituents, as I am sure many others in this Chamber have as well.

Veterans are calling the Veterans' Administration, and they are waiting for callbacks. Taxpayers are trying to file their tax returns correctly, and they face long wait times at the IRS.

In the meantime, an internal review of the Department of Health and Human Services found that as many as 30 percent of the employees of that huge Agency ``did not appear to be working'' on ``any given day'' during the pandemic and thereafter.

Now the pandemic is over, but those same working arrangements seem to have carried the day and seem to have continued without a thought to what it means in terms of efficiently providing the services that these government Agencies and these employees are supposed to provide.

The Office of Personnel Management has found that now that the pandemic is over, only one in three Federal employees is fully back in the office. If we required Federal employees to come into the office 5 days a week, as we should, there would likely be a number of voluntary terminations. This is something I think we should welcome. If Federal employees don't want to show up for work, then American taxpayers should not have to pay them.

Of course, there is an obvious first step that we should take here in the Senate, and that is to pass the budget come January which provides the reconciliation instructions we need in order to do more work that needs to be done.

Given the fact that Republicans now have the majority in the House and the Senate and the White House, it is not an opportunity we should squander. We must not squander it.

When Democrats had this opportunity, they used it to pass the so- called Inflation Reduction Act, which, as I pointed out time and time again, did not actually reduce inflation. It went to a 40-year high and is still high.

Now, set aside the ridiculous notion that you can reduce inflation by massive spending--something Milton Friedman, I am sure, is spinning in his grave at that concept--Democrats also set a new precedent by working around the longstanding prohibition on making policy changes in a budget resolution, the so-called Byrd rule or law, which says that you have to get 60 votes to make policy changes, and you can only do budgetary matters through budget reconciliation using a majority vote in the U.S. Senate. But this is now a precedent of the Senate that we have at our disposal when it is time for us to pass the budget resolution. I am hopeful we can use this vehicle as an opportunity to reform some of our mandatory spending outside of Social Security and Medicare.

I have always been a proponent of reevaluating the money we spend. This is something that every family in America, every business in America, has to do on a regular basis. We don't do it here, and we need to start, especially with this looming debt and this unsustainable amount of money that we are spending on interest on that debt, when we could and should be spending it on other programs or returning those resources back to the American people in terms of lower taxes.

I look forward to working with the DOGE committee and all of our efforts to identify and eliminate areas of government waste, rein in reckless and wasteful spending, and improve the lives of Texans and all Americans in the process.

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