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Floor Speech
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Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, the Senate has made good progress on implementing President Trump's agenda. After just 100 days, we have confirmed his Cabinet. We are now working on a number of Ambassadors, and we have passed budget resolutions in the House and the Senate. And, of course, we are now grinding out the reconciliation process to make sure that the tax cuts that expire at the end of this year do not expire and we are able to prevent the largest tax increase in American history--a multitrillion-dollar tax increase were we to be unsuccessful.
But, as we know, passing the budget is probably the easiest part of this process which we have just been through, and now the various committees of jurisdiction have their work cut out for them, both in the House and the Senate, to meet the targets laid out by the budget.
Perhaps, one of the most difficult parts of this process will be to identify savings to meet budget targets in order to offset the necessary costs in this ``one big beautiful bill.'' It is going to be really complicated, and it is going to be hard, and there are a lot of moving parts.
But one of the ways we can, I think, make good progress on cutting down on some of the excess spending that Washington seems to always fall into is by implementing work requirements for able-bodied adults without dependents for all means-tested programs.
So means-tested programs--obviously, that refers to the fact that at certain income levels, people can get access to certain benefits by the government. Medicaid is one example; food stamps is another; temporary assistance to needy families--all of these are means-tested.
But over time, the work requirements for able-bodied adults has been eroded. Now this used to be part of our bipartisan consensus. This goes back to the Clinton era where there was an agreement between Democrats and Republicans that government assistance should be conditioned on work. The philosophy, which I think is a sound philosophy, is that government programs are here to step in to fill the gap, a safety net, if you will, when hard times come along. But we don't want any of our citizens, for a whole variety of reasons, to fall into a trap of long- term dependency. That is not good for them; that is not good for their families; it is not good for the communities in which they live; and it is unfair to taxpayers. Taxpayers shouldn't have to subsidize people who can work and who should work but who don't work.
So conditioning aid on some form of work participation, whether it is an actual job or a job training program or volunteer service was a way to keep Americans from falling into this trap.
So it was 1996 when President Clinton and Newt Gingrich, the Speaker of the House, came together to pass the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. That is a mouthful. It came to be known more commonly as the Welfare Reform Act of 1996.
This landmark legislation created a program called TANF, or Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. TANF imposed a 5-year limit on cash assistance and also implemented work requirements for able-bodied adults without children.
And the success of this law was beyond expectations. Within 5 years, welfare caseloads declined by close to 50 percent, the first significant decline since World War II. At the same time, employment and earnings among low-income individuals went up dramatically. Their standard of living improved dramatically. Employment among single mothers increased from 50 percent to 70 percent within 7 years, while the number of children living in poverty--this is a big one--the number of children living in poverty declined by 2.9 percent.
Unfortunately, this era of bipartisan consensus and good policy was turned upside down by the Obama administration's disastrous decision to roll back the TANF work requirements by issuing waivers.
The U.S. Government spends $1 trillion on means-tested programs, and work requirements are a commonsense way to reform these programs and to save hard-earned tax dollars of American working families that are now spent on people who can work and should work but don't work.
Recent research from the Foundation for Government Accountability found that more than 62 percent of able-bodied adults who receive Medicaid benefits do not work at all. Let me say that again because it is so shocking: The Foundation for Government Accountability found that more than 62 percent--almost two-thirds--of able-bodied adults who receive Medicaid benefits do not work at all.
Implementing work requirements have worked well for TANF, and adding SNAP or food stamp programs would be a great step forward as well. This policy alone would save up to $281 billion over the next 10 years.
It was also found in polling that this sort of requirement has been supported by nearly 75 percent of voters. So this is a successful requirement, work requirements, something that enjoyed bipartisan support, and in polling, voters show that 75 percent of voters said they thought it was a good idea.
But setting aside the budgetary implications, work requirements have many other positive, downstream effects for American society. As a nation, labor force participation--that is, those who are either gainfully employed or actively searching for a job--has been on the decline among working-age men for decades now. And, of course, COVID was a huge body blow on the workforce participation rates already. Between 1960 and 2023, the fraction of working-age men who are out of the labor force increased from about 3 percent to a whopping 11 percent. And by 2024, this number was increased to 22 percent--it doubled. This is nearly a 700-percent increase over the past six and a half decades.
Significant numbers of men are opting out of the labor force, and it is detrimental to society for a whole host of reasons. And the truth is, it is detrimental to them because there is dignity that comes with work, self-respect providing for your family, and your contributing to your community. Those are intangibles, perhaps, but important in American society and American culture.
But we also know that many businesses struggle to find workers. The Wall Street Journal recently highlighted that a common complaint among employers, particularly in the manufacturing sector, is that they have many well-paying jobs and they can't find enough workers to fill those available jobs.
Around half of small business owners in construction and manufacturing recently reported having job vacancies they could not fill. Recently, progressive policymakers have decided that widespread illegal immigration was the solution to these workforce shortages, opening up our borders.
Well, we know President Biden--I think unwisely--granted work authorizations to many of the illegal immigrants that were released into the interior of the United States, which further incentivized illegal immigration. That is not the answer.
To make matters worse, President Biden started the Cuban-Haitian- Nicaraguan-Venezuelan Parole Program, which granted work authorization for up to 30,000 illegal immigrants each month--from four countries. None of these programs were authorized by Congress. They were created by the Biden administration, acting outside the law, and they included none of the protections for American workers that Congress wrote into our existing programs.
Thankfully, we have a new President, and President Trump has been taking action to end these illegal practices by the Biden administration.
When we think about what a healthy and flourishing society looks like, it does not include large numbers of prime-age workers sitting on the sidelines or sitting on the couch at home. Rather, it does include a fully engaged population, fully engaged in productive activity like work or training or looking for work.
Opening our borders to criminals and who knows what and granting them work authorizations while able-bodied adult American men sit on the sidelines has never been the answer. Yet that seemed to be the answer that the Biden administration gave us.
I have a better idea, and it is not my original idea. Let's incentivize able-bodied individuals who are currently not working to get back in the job market and fill these positions. If they need training, let's make sure they get the training so they can fill these good, well-paying jobs so they cannot only get off this cycle of dependency, they can support themselves and their families. They can contribute to their communities and contribute to the welfare of our Nation.
By enhancing the work requirements on means-tested government aid programs like Medicaid--but not limited to Medicaid--we, as policymakers, have a much better shot at making our communities function better and allowing more and more people to pursue and achieve the American dream. Human beings were not meant to sit idly, not meant to sit on the couch and play video games all day, not meant to be dependent on others that do labor productively. We were not meant to sit and watch while others toiled and to reap the benefits of their labor.
So as we, the various committees in the Senate and the House, get to work to hash out the details of President Trump's big, beautiful bill that will extend these tax cuts, there is a lot more we can and we need to do. I encourage all of us to use this unique opportunity to do what happened back as a result of the Clinton-Gingrich agreement and the Welfare Reform Act of 1996, and that is reinstate reasonable work requirements for all of our means-tested programs. It will help us deal with the $37 trillion in debt that we currently have. And as we all know, we are spending more money on interest on the debt than we are on defense, an unsustainable situation for more than one reason.
But this policy will help us get our fiscal house in order and will help us address the societal ills that our country is facing by encouraging greater workforce participation.
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