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Floor Speech

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Mr. WARNER. Mr. President, it is good to see you sitting up there.

As a recent former Governor--I say that as a former Governor myself-- I won't ask you what you are hearing in West Virginia, but I have to tell you, I rise to the floor today amongst a huge amount of confusion.

Two days ago, the Trump administration, without warning to any States, to any Governors, without warning to Congress, late at night, put out an order freezing all Federal spending for 90 days.

Earlier today, less than 48 hours later, that order was formally rescinded. But hold it. The good news--entirely good news--lasted about 30 minutes, 45 minutes, because 45 minutes later, the Press Secretary in the White House says: No, the freeze will actually stay in place and be rigorously enforced.

So--I don't know--as a Governor, which one do you follow? Because, as the Presiding Officer knows, an awful lot of our State programs are actually Federal dollars passing through our capitals into these programs. So I ask, which one is it?

Unfortunately, I am not the only one asking the question, and I have an awful lot of stressed Virginians to prove it.

In Virginia, as in West Virginia or any other State, Federal funding supports countless programs that serve kids, seniors, community infrastructure, and a whole lot more. Yesterday alone, my office was literally flooded with outreach from organizations and local governments.

I heard from firefighters from Southwest Virginia. They are worried they won't be able to replace their tanker truck with Federal funding that was supposed to be coming pretty soon.

I heard from an affordable housing organization in Northern Virginia that if they go 90 days without Federal dollars, they might have to shut down their organization. People would have to find different jobs. That organization--you can't turn on or off the flow of these resources.

I heard from law enforcement in the Shenandoah Valley and from the greater Richmond area that a lot of these localities depend on Federal dollars to pay police officers. If they don't have those funds for the next 90 days, this will take cops off the street.

I heard from a number--not just one but a number--of domestic violence shelters across the Commonwealth that without this funding, because they don't have huge reserves, they will have to leave women and children without housing support.

Listen to this one. We have a little town called West Point, VA. It was an old mill town. They have a very good Head Start Program. Head Start gets funded by the Federal Government. Their Head Start funding runs out on Friday, January 31. They had been told--they can't get any answer--that their next round of funding was in process and there would be no break in the action. What do the Head Start moms and dads who have kids in that program in West Point, VA, do starting next Monday?

Senator Kaine and I probably had 8 to 10 Head Start Programs here. As a matter of fact, there is a gag order put in place right now so that people can't talk about these things inside the administration, and the Head Start directors were trying to call their contact, kind of their resource person, and they got no response.

So whether you care about meals for low-income seniors, whether you care about Head Start for vulnerable kids, whether you care about teens who need that mental health support oftentimes coming from Federal dollars, that all is up in the air at this point. What do we tell these folks?

Many of these folks voted for President Trump because they thought he was going to bring grocery prices down.

Like the Presiding Officer, I have not only been a Governor, but I was a business guy. I can claim still that I was in business longer than in politics. This is not the way you run an operation. The truth is, this is unbelievable. I was so proud when I was Governor of Virginia. We got named the best managed State. This is management malpractice 101.

The most important enterprise in the world is the American Government, not only in terms of safety and security but in terms of how we treat our people.

The truth is, rescinded or not, these chaotic antics have real consequences. I know of an organization in Virginia that had to call an emergency board meeting yesterday to see if they should go out of business. I have heard from folks who are worried that they will have to lay off their employees. Without this Federal funding, they are just not going to be able to make payroll. One Virginian wrote to me and said that ``the mental and physical damage is already immense.'' It is not right to play with people's lives in such a grossly irresponsible way.

I have been doing this for a while. I have never heard of some kind of arbitrary freeze on all Federal spending. It was bad enough what happened when they put a freeze on Federal assistance to folks around the world.

I commend Secretary Rubio. One of the reasons why I was proud to support him was that he has actually tried to back off from that order, making sure that humanitarian aid is not going to disappear.

The story has been out. I have been very interested in the conflict in Sudan. There is a ship in Port Sudan right now with American medicine on it. The aid group was going to take that out--the medicine--to save people's lives. That medicine will go to rot if those funds are not flowing.

It is bad enough, this issue of how we are treating Americans who depend on these Federal funds--these are real programs with real people--you take that and layer on the other whammy. In Virginia, we have a disproportionate number of Federal workers. You have quite a few in West Virginia I know as well due to great former West Virginia Senators. Suddenly, in an, again, unprecedented and I believe potentially illegal move, every Federal employee is offered this chance to quit and get paid for 6 months, until September 30, if you quit.

Now, nothing like this has ever been done before. Maybe this is the way you do business in the tech world, and I used to be in the tech world, but if you manage a good company, you don't go out and basically say to all your workers: Quit.

Of course, the problem is--and I urge my Federal workers to think about this--unfortunately, this President has a record of not only sticking it to Federal workers, but he has a record of sticking it to all the business contractors he did business with by not paying the bills.

So I worry because not only is there very much a legal question of whether the President can offer this buyout offer to all these Federal workers, but I can assure you, there is nothing in the budget--there is nothing in the budget--that we still haven't negotiated for the balance of this fiscal year that has got this X-billion-dollar number next to it that is going to pay for all of these buyouts.

We know where this comes from. It comes from the fellow that is being put up to be head of the OMB, Russell Vought, who wrote Project 2025, the very project that President Trump as a candidate said: Don't worry. I didn't read it. I don't know anything about it.

In that document, it goes on at length about how the goal of Project 2025 and Mr. Vought, who wants to be head of OMB, which kind of controls the management and budget of the Federal Government, was that he wanted to traumatize Federal workers. He wanted them not to go to work. He wanted to classify them as villains--his words, not mine.

I can tell you this: For a whole lot of Federal workers, they have already hit that goal. They are traumatized. And I worry like heck.

You say: Gosh, I don't know what I should do. Maybe I will take the offer.

But before you sign that and send it back--what may be an illegal offer that is not funded, that chances are you are not going to get paid--think a little bit about it. If this becomes another kind of passing fad where there is not any enforcement and not a payment, if you sign that and send it back, chances are you have made an indication that you are going to be the first person that gets RIFed, maybe without that 6- month severance.

I also have to wonder. You know, we are a couple thousand air traffic controllers short right now. If air traffic controllers--who, by the way, take about a year to get trained--if 5,000 of them say ``You know what, I am going to take that offer,'' what happens to air traffic safety? We don't have a fallback. We don't have a reserve of air traffic controllers to make sure that when you climb on an airplane, it is safe. Yet we have made that offer, to my understanding, to all the air traffic controllers in America: Sign here. We are going to pay you. You don't have to work for the next 6 months.

Again, how many Americans are going to be happy with the fact that we are paying folks without them working for 6 months?

What happens as well--are we going to really say to all the folks who do bird flu research and are trying to seek it out--we have a lot of poultry and turkeys and chickens both in the Shenandoah Valley and on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. One of the things people are experiencing most now is the rising cost of eggs. If suddenly all the folks who are working on bird flu quit, maybe people won't buy eggs, but I actually think it will drive up the already high cost of eggs two, three times. I thought President Trump was hired to try to bring down grocery prices.

What happens as well with the folks who are the food inspectors-- salmonella? Are you going to really feel all right about going to the grocery store and buying something if a whole lot of folks have taken this buyout offer? This is not the way to run an operation.

I think about earlier today. I asked a question of Mr. Kennedy, who wants to be head of HHS. He had told me in his earlier comments in my office that he wanted to get rid of 2,200 people in HHS. I asked him: What is your plan? Who are those 2,200?

No answer.

I know he has got strong feelings about NIH, where, candidly, we have the best researchers in the world that have taken years for us to recruit. If suddenly, based on President Trump's offer, all these NIH researchers quit because they can make two, three, four, five times as much in the private sector, but all that basic research is done at NIH, who are we going to fill those back in with? Not with as qualified people.

The list goes on and on and on.

Again, I would say this is management malpractice 101. You want to change your workforce. You want to make them more effective, more efficient. You don't try to traumatize them. But that is what has happened so far.

To Americans across the country and to my fellow Virginians, if there are ways to find more efficiency, if there are ways to logically-- business-minded--think through the efficiency of our Federal Departments and maybe save some money and maybe cut back staff in a rational way, sign me up. But don't sign me up for something that looks like it is a flimflam con job where people are being potentially suckered into sending an email back when there is no assurance that that email or that whole offer is legal in the first place. There is no money in the till. And if you go back to the case of the current President, look at his record from when he was in the private sector. Did anybody get paid 100 cents on the dollar?

So I know other Senators are going to be coming up. But I just think that, in many ways, President Trump got hired because they thought we could bring down consumer prices; they thought we could bring down grocery prices. None of this is bringing down grocery prices. None of this is bringing down consumer prices.

None of this, I think, is going to make our Federal Government more efficient or effective or, in the long term, save money. If our most talented people quit, it is going to cost more to rehire them. Anybody knows that who has been in the private sector. And we are not going to get people with the same experience.

What it feels like, and I know what I have been thinking, is one of the things that was the most troubling about the first Trump administration was this sense of chaos that people kind of got exhausted with. My goodness gracious, this is day 10--day 10--of the Trump administration. We have chaos on steroids.

What I would hope is that my Republican colleagues in Virginia, in the legislature, in statewide elected office, and I would hope my Republican colleagues in the Senate and in the House would say: Hey, better efficiency, count me in. Across-the-board freezes of programs without regard to the people's lives that are going to be changed or affected, that doesn't make sense.

State budgets--all the State legislatures are in right now doing their budgets. How do you plan with those Federal dollars that are maybe going to be suspended for 90 days or then maybe arbitrarily suspended forever? How do you plan that?

And to the Federal workforce: I tell you, the idea of what potentially is illegal--a nonfunded buyout offer with no guarantee and, if anything, the opposite being true--I would urge people to think long and hard and not take this offer, not set you up for being fired, riffed, or eliminated.

And I would appeal again: There is a better way to do all of this. And I say this as somebody who has now voted for five of President Trump's nominees for Cabinet positions. I have gotten a lot of grief from that already. From somebody who was a chief executive, I feel like a Governor or the President ought to get most of their choices but for people that I think fall outside the norm and don't have the credibility or judgment, and I will make those decisions.

I have a very important hearing tomorrow, as the former chairman of the Intelligence Committee and now the vice chairman, on Tulsi Gabbard.

But I want to reach out and work with this administration. Let's get back to lowering costs. Let's get back to driving grocery prices down. Let's not put people in fear not just for their jobs but for their lives, if you are that victim of domestic abuse, if you are that kid who needs Head Start, if you are that senior that is dependent upon Meals on Wheels.

Those programs don't last for 90 days. And if they suddenly shut down and we decide after 90 days, ``Oh, we want to start them again,'' the cost is going to be double or triple.

There is a better way to do this. So I appeal to my Republican friends. Maybe we need a gang on this to try to think about this in a more bipartisan way. But in the meantime, I implore the administration: Get your act together. Don't put out two separate statements totally contradicting each other on the same day about your intentions--two totally opposite. It just makes chaos and the stress go up, and, ultimately, later in this week, the services disappear.

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