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Floor Speech

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Mrs. BLACKBURN. Mr. President, today, after 4 years of reckless spending and decades of high inflation under the Biden-Harris administration, our national debt now sits at $36.4 trillion. In many ways, this number represents one of the biggest threats to our Nation, as interest payments on the debt now eclipse our country's total defense spending.

Think about that. The debt--interest on the debt--is costing the hard-working taxpayer more of their money. It is taking a greater share of their tax dollars than we are spending to provide for the common defense.

It is astounding that that is where we are, but this problem has gotten worse through the years. During the last few months of the Biden administration, October to December of last year, our country ran a deficit of more than $710 billion, up 39 percent from the same period in 2023.

The American people know this is unsustainable. Among many other reasons, that is why the American people showed up in record numbers and gave a mandate to Donald J. Trump as the President of the United States, winning the electoral college and the popular vote.

The American people know full well they are overtaxed. Government is overspent. And they are tired of it.

And since Inauguration Day, the President has been hard at work on this issue, getting the economy under control. And one of the first things he did, back in office, was to establish the Department of Government Efficiency. It is being led by Elon Musk, and the agency is working to uncover and eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse from the Federal Government. And to no one's surprise, DOGE has found a lot of waste, especially with programs that should never have been put on the books in the first place.

Now, in recent weeks, the agency, working overtime to find ways to save money for the taxpayer, they found $33 million in Education Department grants to groups that push far-left ideas like critical race theory and $44.6 million in canceled leases for unused office space and $45 million in scholarships for students in Burma and $182 million in Department of Health and Human Services contracts that had nothing to do with health--nothing. They even found $168,000 for a museum exhibit for Anthony Fauci, and a billion dollars in DEI programs.

Now, when you scoop all of that together, you have a pretty good savings for the U.S. taxpayer, who has been funding all of this. Removing these programs and recouping those dollars, that is the right thing to do.

In addition, DOGE has worked to reform the mismanaged U.S. Agency for International Development. We call this USAID. Under the last administration, the Agency used its $40 billion budget to support leftwing and anti-American causes around the world, including terror- tied extremist groups in the Middle East.

As DOGE uncovers the left's abuse of taxpayer dollars, Washington Democrats have tried desperately to paint the agency as unaccountable to the American people. But the exact opposite is true. DOGE, which reports directly to President Trump, is restoring government accountability by reining in the Federal Government and reining in the bureaucracy. By the way, they are unelected.

That is why, last week, President Trump issued an Executive order to support DOGE, directing Federal Departments to work with the agency to reduce the size of the Federal workforce. A downsize is desperately needed. The government employs more than 2.4 million civilian employees at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars each year.

To support these efforts, I recently introduced a package of bills called the DOGE Acts, which would hold the Federal Government accountable for managing taxpayer dollars. Now, all of these bills would help to drain the swamp. And these are bills that I have proposed over the last several years, but we brought them together under the heading of the DOGE Acts. It would implement a hiring and salary freeze, direct Agencies to reduce the size of their workforce by 5 percent within 3 years, and establish a commission to report to Congress on moving non-national-security Agencies outside of Washington, DC.

In addition, the legislation would create a pilot program to determine Federal employees' compensation based on merit, not seniority, something that is so important to do because, right now, the longer someone holds a job, the more they are going to make. Let's move that to how well they do their job and how well they perform in fulfilling the responsibilities that are given to them.

And it would require Agencies to reinstate their pre-COVID telework policies, a measure that is especially crucial after just 6 percent of Federal employees worked in an office full time during the Biden administration.

Tennesseans go to work every day. They are working full time in order to get a full-time paycheck, and they are astounded when they hear that under the last administration--the Biden administration--6 percent of Federal employees worked full time. But do you know what? They all got a full-time paycheck courtesy of the hard-working U.S. taxpayer.

Perhaps most importantly, the DOGE Acts would cut nonsecurity discretionary spending by 5 percent by fiscal year 2028 and every following year, saving taxpayers billions of dollars. When it comes to government spending, Tennesseans--and certainly Americans--demand accountability. With DOGE, Republicans are delivering it.

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