Government Funding
Floor Speech
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Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, as the Presiding Officer will recall, it was 2:30 in the morning on Saturday--just a few short hours ago, it seems like--that the Senate voted to pass a budget resolution amending the House budget resolution, the next important step to passing President Trump's ``America First'' agenda.
The budget will go back--and has gone back--to the House, and then it will be time for the committees to do really the hard work. This was the easy part, passing the framework, but now we have to write the bills to implement not only the continuation of the current tax provisions but also the spending cuts that are so important and to help the President keep his other promises that he made on the campaign trail. And we are on our way to what President Trump likes to call ``one, big, beautiful bill.''
Well, a lot of important conversations have been taking place, on both sides of the Capitol, about what the result will be. But while these questions and some differences are natural, the critical matter at hand in this budget resolution is to make sure that we don't impose a multitrillion-dollar tax increase on the American people.
Now, there have been a lot of crazy allegations made about what the budget actually did or did not do, while some of our colleagues have said that the American people don't want to see their tax cuts extended, which is false, and I don't know who they are talking to. And then they claim that the extension would benefit the wealthy few at the expense of the middle class. That is also another false statement.
As I said, if the President's tax cuts are not extended, we will see a multitrillion-dollar tax hike, the largest in history, and 62 percent of American taxpayers will see a tax increase in 2026. Working parents will see the child tax credit cut in half, and the average family of four that earns $80,000 a year will face a $1,700 tax increase. Back home in Texas, my constituents would see their taxes increase by $3,000 on average next year.
Now, imagine this. If we failed to follow through on President Trump's campaign promises and on our campaign promises, if we agreed with the Democrats who were demagoguing this issue, can you imagine what that would do to the standard of living of hard-working American families? And that would be on top of 4-year high inflation--actually the highest in 40 years. So that would be, to me, insult added to injury, to add a huge tax increase on top of all of the inflation that Americans experienced during the last 4 years--roughly, on average, about a 21-percent increase in the cost of living.
But not just families would be affected. Small businesses would see their Federal tax rates increase by almost 50 percent. One recent survey found that 61 percent of small business owners said they would have to increase prices as a result of the tax increase on them. Can you imagine what that would do to already high prices as a result of inflation?
Nearly half of these small businesses reported that they would have to postpone or cancel capital investments; in other words, they couldn't grow their business, hire more employees, or improve their equipment.
Now, these are not massive corporations, as we hear from folks on that side of the aisle. They talk about businesses as if they were all Fortune 500 companies. Most businesses in America are small businesses, the owners of which pay business income on an individual tax return-- so-called passthrough entities. And these are the folks--these local entrepreneurs are the ones--that create jobs and help employ hard- working Americans who are pursuing their American dream.
Republicans, it is good to announce or report or reassure that we are united against these defenseless claims coming from the other side. That doesn't mean they will stop. They are depending on low-information voters, people who just read the headlines or read certain propaganda to carry the day on their false allegations about this just helping the rich people. Or one of my favorite is they were arguing during the budget vote-arama, as it was called, that this was going to affect Social Security.
They know and we know that the law prevents Social Security from being even included in these discussions. So how could it possibly be true? It can't be true.
So we have to get this bill over the finish line by sometime this summer. In addition to preventing the biggest tax increase in history, this bill will provide an opportunity for us to take important steps in controlling spending and addressing our national debt.
Now, I noticed the chairman of the Armed Services Committee just came into the Chamber, and he knows, like I know, as the Presiding Officer knows, that we are now paying more for interest on the national debt than we are on defense, in a very dangerous world--perhaps the most dangerous since World War II.
So we have to begin the process of controlling our spending, and the only way we do that is by looking at everything that the Federal Government spends.
The Federal Government spends about, I think, roughly $6.7 trillion a year, but it is crazy to acknowledge that we only typically look at about 28 percent of what the Federal Government spends--so-called discretionary spending. So we have to find a way to reduce our spending, not only on the discretionary side but on the mandatory side, so we can fund our Nation's priorities.
And our top priority as the Federal Government has to be to defend and protect the American people and our way of life. But we can do this without tampering with essential programs like Social Security, as I said, and programs like Medicare that our seniors rely on.
Now, one of the ways we can do this, which I hope we will embrace wholeheartedly, is to look at means-tested Federal programs. So what does it mean to have a means test?
Well, it depends on your income. Wealthy people don't qualify. People of modest and lower income brackets can qualify for these means-tested programs. But they need to have work requirements for able-bodied adults because there are a lot of able-bodied adults that are simply living off of the American taxpayer, costing billions and billions of dollars for the taxpayer, running up our national debt, when they should be contributing to our economy and contributing to their families and their communities by doing meaningful work.
For a long time, there was a bipartisan consensus around work requirements. In 1996, for example, President Clinton and Newt Gingrich, when he was Speaker of the House, came together to pass monumental reforms on the way our welfare system works in America, and one of the key components of that was that welfare assistance depended on work for able-bodied adults.
We are not talking about children. We are not talking about the elderly. We are not talking about the disabled. We are talking about able-bodied adults.
The Welfare Reform Act of 1996 replaced AFDC, as it was called, with TANF, or Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, which imposes a 5- year limit on cash assistance and required recipients to either work or participate in some type of job training. The bipartisan goal of this policy was to promote self-sufficiency rather than dependency, something the Federal Government ought to encourage and incentivize as much as we possibly can.
And here is the good news: It actually worked. It worked.
It is not just a theory. Within 5 years of passing the law, welfare's caseloads declined close to 50 percent--the first significant decline since World War II. Employment and earnings increased among low-income individuals, with employment among single mothers increasing from 50 to 100 percent 7 years after President Clinton signed it into law. During the same time period, child poverty declined by 2.9 million people.
But despite the success of this bipartisan policy, the Obama administration began to roll back these requirements by issuing TANF work requirement waivers. In other words, they said to the various States: You don't need to impose this work requirement on able-bodied adults in order to collect temporary assistance for needy families.
The Trump administration built on previous successful work requirement policies by issuing a rule that would condition SNAP, or food stamps as they are sometimes called, on similar work requirements. After all, why should somebody be able to qualify for food stamps if they are able to work and simply refuse to do so--and, in fact, when it is good for them to actually go back to work and provide the dignity that goes along with that, to self-sufficiency supporting themselves and their families and their communities.
The U.S. Government spends about a trillion dollars on means-tested assistance programs, and work requirements are a commonsense step forward for reform.
But setting aside the budgetary impact of work, there is a moral reason for these work requirements. Gainful employment has dignity. People feel better about themselves. They are more productive. They are happier. They are able to contribute not just to their own well-being but to that of their community and their family.
So it is more than just a paycheck. It can help address the loneliness epidemic that we saw, particularly post-COVID, and it is proven to improve mental health outcomes across the board.
So I would encourage my Republican colleagues to join me in strengthening work requirements across means-tested programs when the time comes to identify these savings within our committees.
The American people voted overwhelmingly for President Trump, and now it is our turn to deliver the ``America First'' agenda that our constituents voted for and take this opportunity to address our national debt and encourage more Americans to pursue gainful employment instead of solely relying on government benefits.
The Senate has completed our next step by passing President Trump's budget, and it is time for the House to do the same.
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