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Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, well, as everyone knows, government funding expires at midnight tonight. As I announced yesterday, I will vote to keep the government open.

I believe it is the best way to minimize the harm that the Trump administration will do to the American people. Clearly, this is a Hobson's choice. The CR is a bad bill. But as bad as the CR is, I believe allowing Donald Trump to take even much more power via a government shutdown is a far worse option. A shutdown would allow DOGE to shift into overdrive.

Let me repeat: A shutdown will allow DOGE to shift into overdrive. It would give Donald Trump and DOGE the keys to the city, State, and country. Donald Trump and Elon Musk would be free to destroy vital government services at a much faster rate than they can right now and over a much broader field of destruction that they would render.

In a shutdown, Donald Trump and DOGE will have the power to determine what is considered essential and what is not, and their views on what is not essential would be mean and vicious and would decimate vital services and cause unimaginable harm to the American people.

Making matters even worse, in a shutdown, there is no check on their determinations, Trump and DOGE's determinations on what is essential and what is not. In fact, on February 26, OMB, led by Russell Vought, told Agencies to work with DOGE to create a list of nonessential workers so that they could reduce staffing even faster in a shutdown.

They are already preparing for a shutdown. Musk has told everybody he wants a shutdown because he knows it will help him achieve his horrible goal of just decimating the Federal Government from one end to the other. In other words, if government were to shut down, DOGE has a plan in place to exploit the crisis for maximum destruction.

In a shutdown, American families would be hurt in ways they almost have never been. It could disrupt regional Veterans Affairs offices, curtail mental health services, and accelerate plans to slash staff at Social Security offices. The list goes on and on and on of the damage-- the severe damage--they could do, virtually unchecked.

They can stay in a shutdown as long as they want. There is no off- ramp unless they decide to take that off-ramp, and they won't because this is their best tool for achieving their goal: slash government, slash spending, and use that money for tax breaks for billionaires.

So a shutdown would be the best distraction Donald Trump could ask for--distraction from his awful agenda. Donald Trump owns the chaos in government. He owns the chaos in the stock market. He owns the damage happening to the economy. But he knows that if government shuts down and all the fighting is over which Agencies should be kept and which shouldn't and Republican Senators and Congressmen in just obeisance to Trump keep putting bills on the floor to decide that, it will totally distract from the most important fight of all: fighting Republicans for eviscerating Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid while giving trillions in tax cuts to the ultrarich. That is the fight American people must know about. A shutdown will be a costly distraction from this all-important fight.

Finally, I want to close by reminding everyone it was Republicans who pushed this false shutdown choice. Their inability to govern has led us to this precipice. Our caucus Members have been torn between two awful alternatives, and my colleagues and I have wrestled with which alternative would be worse for the American people. Different Senators come down on different sides of this question, but that does not mean that any Senate Democrat supports a shutdown.

Whatever the outcome, our caucus will be united in our determination to continue the long-term fight to stop Donald Trump's dangerous war on our democracy and on America's working families.

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