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Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, yesterday, Leader Jeffries and I announced legislation to stop unlawful meddling by DOGE or other entities in the Treasury Department's payments system. Our bill will deny access to the payment system by anyone designated as a ``special government employee''--in other words, people who aren't required to disclose conflicts of interest.

Our bill will deny access to anyone with conflicts of interest or lack of appropriate clearance. Imagine where all the Federal funds are going out and someone has a conflict of interest and has access to those funds and can do something with them. That is a formula for waste; that is a formula that makes sure that money isn't spent wisely but is spent to accommodate the needs of a special few.

And our bill will ensure that Treasury payments can only be accessed by those with proper clearance. Everyone should agree that making the government more efficient and more effective is a good thing. But DOGE's scorched-earth policies are dangerous and unlawful. That is their approach.

History shows that when this kind of stuff is done in the dark of night with no guardrails by a limited group of people who don't really know the programs they are dealing with, it leads to bad results. If Treasury payments were ever intentionally or even accidentally halted or manipulated, it could paralyze the economy.

DOGE has said they want to cut $2 trillion, $2.5 trillion from the budget--well, that is going to be massive cuts done, again, by people who don't know the programs, don't know the whole extent of what the government is doing. Some of it might be wasteful. Get rid of it. But much of it is good and needed. One mistake and people's Social Security benefits could freeze. One mistake and disability payments to veterans, loans to small businesses could all be in danger.

If DOGE's meddling caused us to default, it could compromise the full faith and credit of the United States, and that would hurt everybody because interest rates would go up on everything--cars, homes, you name it.

The OMB funding freeze last week was disastrous enough, but a DOGE funding freeze would be far worse if guardrails are totally thrown out the window. And that seems to be what is happening. We don't know any guardrails. They sure haven't been made public.

We should talk about reform here in the open, in the Halls of Congress, in the public forums of the people's government. That is how it has been done by Democrat, Republican, liberal, conservative for centuries because we all know--the Founding Fathers knew, historians know--democracy doesn't work in the shadows--autocracy does, not democracy.

Democracy does not skirt the rule of law. The American people deserve to have a seat at the table when these important decisions are made. But so far, DOGE is operating entirely in the dark.

Our legislation would correct it. We are going to do anything and everything we can legislatively to try and get this done. And maybe, at some point, we will get some help from the other side of the aisle if they see how bad DOGE's actions are.

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