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Floor Speech

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Mr. WARNER. Mr. President, I know my time has been squeezed a little bit. I have other colleagues. I want to mention one thing to my friend from Louisiana. I love to listen to him talk. There are a lot of things he says that I tend to agree with, a lot of things I tend to disagree with.

I do want to make sure folks know what I have some concern about. You want a debate about any of these programs; that is fair cooking. If there are ways to save spending, count me in. In fact, you are a former Governor; I am a former Governor. Virginia got named best managed State in the country when I was Governor. And you know how we got that information about line item programs? Because about a decade ago--maybe 12 years ago--Rob Portman and I did something called the DATA Act, which gives you that line-by-line information.

We can debate about the validity of these programs. What you don't need to do is to put two--I have the name of one person, maybe not the name of the other--into the Treasury with, to my knowledge, at least for one of them, we are not sure if they have any security clearances at all--to look at $1.3 billion of checks being written out by the U.S. Treasury.

You want to debate about USAID; have at it, if the programs can't be defended.

But why would you give someone--a coder--the potential keys to the kingdom of the U.S. Treasury? Why does this coder--or Mr. Musk's DOGE bros--need to know how much the U.S. Government paid the Senator from Louisiana on a tax refund or the Senator from Virginia or anyone? I will make it a simple question to ask. Come in and explain yourself.

I would love to go through more, but I know I have colleagues waiting too.

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