Trump Executive Orders
Floor Speech
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Mr. KAINE. Mr. President, I am honored to be with my colleagues on the floor to talk about the actions that have become very manifest in Virginia today because of the President's Executive orders, particularly the recent order pausing Federal funding--grant funding, program funding.
I want to thank my colleagues for being here on the floor to talk about this and share just in the last 24 hours what Virginians are saying and what Virginians are asking and what Virginians are worried about. Then I want to make one point about my Federal workforce and an offer the President made to them at the end of the day and then finally raise a question of what President Trump is afraid of.
President Trump has two Republican Houses. If he wants to do something to shrink the size of government, if he wants to do something to reduce spending here or there, we have a March 14 budget deadline, and he has two Republican Houses, and there is a way to do this--unless you are afraid that your Republican majorities don't want to go as far as you do in cutting Medicaid and cutting Medicare and endangering Social Security and hurting kids and hurting veterans and hurting families.
Let me talk about the orders of the day and then the Federal workforce and finish with this question: What is President Trump afraid of?
I started to hear from Virginians about this Federal funding pause yesterday. I was at an event in Fredericksburg to kick off tax season. The local United Way and chamber of commerce were initiating something they have done for 21 years in a row--volunteer tax assistance for low- and middle-income folks. It is a classic community program. A lot of volunteers help everyday folks figure out how to file their taxes and make sure they can get benefits they are entitled to.
As I was at this kickoff, people came up to me and said: Hey, I am a veteran. I am trying to get an appointment at a VA hospital or clinic, but the VA portal is closed to me. What is going on?
What is going on? This was the leading edge of this chaos.
Someone else came to me at this kind of good-news event about volunteer tax assistance and said: The Federal Government has paid to build a VA clinic in Fredericksburg--state-of-the-art, right on Interstate 95, visible to all, scheduled to open in February. We are still being told that the grand opening is going to happen, but now those working there are saying they are under a hiring freeze. We spent tens of millions of dollars to build this facility that looks great, but we are under a hiring freeze. Can we even hire people to serve the veterans in this region?
This was how it started.
From then to today, let me tell you other calls of anguish we have received in our office. Two childcare centers, one in the Williamsburg area and one in Appalachia, far, far away in southwest Virginia: We think our funding is being cut off. We think we may not have enough to pay staff. We also think parents who are receiving some childcare funding--that may get cut off. So neither they can afford childcare, nor can we afford to maintain the employment of these hard-working childcare workers in childcare centers.
Universities reached out to me today: We are doing cutting-edge medical research. We have contracts that are ongoing right now, and we are about to send a bill to the Federal Government because we do the work and then we submit bills. We are not sure it is going to be paid. What do we do--lay off the researchers and not get the research done? What should we do, Senator?
There is an organization in Virginia called the Virginia Health Care Foundation. What they do is they help low-income people and seniors apply for Medicaid, apply for Affordable Care Act subsidies. They have a contract with CMS to help them hire eight staffers--they call them navigators--who work around the State helping low-income people access programs to which they are entitled, for which they have paid taxes.
They received a note suggesting that that grant to hire these navigators to help everyday people was going to expire and they couldn't get any Federal funding after 5 today. They heard this late yesterday. So they did what any good organization would do. They reached out this morning to the CMS to say ``Please give us the payment right now, before 5 o'clock today,'' and what they got back from CMS was ``Sorry, our website is down. We just decided that today will be the day that we will just spend time repairing our website, and it will be open again soon''--open again soon but after the 5 o'clock deadline.
You don't have to be a genius to figure this out. Hurting people getting health insurance. Hurting people trying to get Medicaid benefits. Hurting childcare centers. Hurting veterans trying to get appointments. Hurting a VA clinic we spent tens of millions of dollars to build by threatening, through a hiring freeze, the ability of this place to open.
That is just a little snapshot. There was an earlier order freezing foreign assistance funding. A whole lot of nonprofits, church-based nonprofits like World Vision and other organizations that do foreign assistance work around the world--humanitarian aid in Ukraine, for example--they were told they don't get funding anymore. The only foreign assistance we will give, according to the Trump Executive order, is military armaments transfers to two countries in world: Egypt and Israel. No humanitarian aid. No transfer of military assistance to other nations.
This is all on the say-so of a President trying to overturn existing appropriations bills that have been passed by a bipartisan Congress.
If I heard these stories in 1 day and my colleagues have heard these stories in 1 day, I know what I am going to hear tomorrow. I know what I am going to hear through the weekend. This is going to build like an avalanche, and it is not just Democratic Senators who are hearing these stories.
We have to respect the law and congressional appropriations.
I ask anyone hearing who is concerned about this: If you are in Virginia, call my office. If you are not in Virginia, call your Congress man or woman, call your Senator and tell them the President is not above the law, the President must follow the law, and it is Congress--Democrats and Republicans--that has to ensure that the President follows the law.
Second, I want to talk about Federal employees. The Federal employees received an interesting email at the end of the day today. I happen to have some fellows assigned to me who are not Senate employees, but they are executive branch employees, as most of us have, working in my office. They received an email from the administration that said: If you tender your resignation by next Friday, we will guarantee you payment through the end of September whether or not you show up for work.
So tender your resignation and then, boy, it is just going to be a gravy train. You are just going to get paid for 7 months without working.
The President has no authority to make that offer. There is no budget line item to pay people who are not showing up for work. This is a guy who made this promise to contractors again and again and again when he was a private business guy: Oh, come work for me at my casino. Come work for me in a hotel. We are going to do a handshake. We are going to do a contract.
The contractor does the work and then finds out they get stiffed.
So my message to Federal employees who received this is, yeah, the President has tried to terrorize you for about a week and then gives you a little sweetheart offer: If you resign in the next week, we are just going to pay you for doing nothing for the next 7 months.
Don't be fooled. He has tricked hundreds of people with that offer. If you accept that offer and resign, he will stiff you just like he stiffed the contractors. He doesn't have any authority to do this.
Do not be fooled by this guy. You were here before he was here, and you will be here after he was here. Show up for work. Be diligent. Serve Americans every day. Make their lives better. Answer their phone calls. Give them an answer. Track down their constituent's calls. Don't be fooled by a fake offer that, because he has terrorized you in the last week, it would be easy to just resign now and get a check for 7 months because I can tell you, that promise is worth nothing. And you will regret it just like these contractors regretted it who did work for this guy while he was a businessman.
Finally and lastly, I will say this: What is this move by the President to try to shrink the Federal workforce? Because we all know this: If he can persuade a bunch of people to resign, he will stiff them, and then he won't fill the position.
OK. That is one way to shrink the Federal workforce: If I can get away with not distributing money pursuant to a congressional appropriation, OK, that will shrink the Federal budget.
But wait a minute. Wait a minute. The President has two Republican Houses. We are supposed to come up with a budget deal by March 14. What is today? Is it, like, the 25th, 26th, 27th? Is it the 28th? Is today January 28? Do you think I am right? March 14 isn't very far away. We are supposed to come up with a budget deal by March 14, and the President is sitting in the captain's seat. He has got two Republican Houses. So if he wants to slash Federal spending, if he wants to reduce the Federal workforce, if he wants to gut Medicaid, gut Medicare, gut Social Security, gut the SNAP program, gut low-income heating assistance, gut rental assistance, gut title I funding to our public schools, guess what? He has got two Republican Houses that he can persuade to do his bidding. He has been pretty good so far at persuading these two Houses to do his bidding.
So why didn't he do that? That would be the lawful way to accomplish that. If President Trump could convince the two Houses to slash all of these programs in a budget, that would be lawful and get an appropriations deal that cuts all of these programs the way he and Russell Vought and Project 2025 want to do it.
But that is not what he is doing. He is trying to do it on his own. Why? Why would President Trump, who has a clearly legal path ahead of him that he can exercise over the course of the next 6 weeks--it is not very long--to get a budget deal with two Republican Houses--why would President Trump, with two Republican Houses and 6 weeks to get a budget deal to do everything he wants--why would he not exercise that route but, instead, use an illegal route as an Executive to slash funding contrary to clear statute?
It is because he doesn't think that elected Republican Members of the House of Representatives and the Senate will go along with his radical plans. He doesn't think he can convince my GOP colleagues to take the ax to all of these programs and hurt the American people in the way he wants to.
Let's make President Trump do this the right way, not the wrong way. Let's put it on the shoulders of President Trump and the two Republican majorities. Do you want to slash this stuff? Fine. Have that debate on the floor of the Senate and on the floor of the House when we are doing the budget negotiation between now and March 14. Show the American public your homework. Show them who is going to get hurt. Show them that we are going to hurt everyday people at the expense of the big guys, who are getting a tax cut in the reconciliation bill later. Let's really have that debate right here in the full view of the American public with these spotlights on and the TV broadcasting it.
That is what this President is afraid of, and that is why he is using this illegal strategy to accomplish what he is afraid he can't accomplish in the article I branch.
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