Rescissions Act of 2025

Floor Speech

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Mr. MERKLEY. My colleagues from Wisconsin and Michigan have spoken to the destructive nature of this rescission because of the programs that will be canceled midstream.

I have seen, so often, the power of our international aid programs in assisting in nutrition and fighting tuberculosis and malaria and AIDS across the world. But what many may not understand is that the small fraction--less than one-third of 1 percent--that we spend on those programs has an incredible yield not just in doing good works around the world, but have been doing good for America because of relationships that are forged through those programs. The respect that is forged through those programs comes back to benefit us in all kinds of cooperation on a huge range of diplomatic goals--be they economic; be they trade; be they issues of national security.

That is, in fact, what is referred to as ``soft power,'' and soft power is at risk with this strategy of canceling these programs.

I think about rural Oregon, where so often the warnings on floods or fires is broadcast over the public radio system, and all kinds of different channels have different programs that people become quite attached to. So there are simply good humor programs that are fun to listen to, and others are good music programs. But a lot of it is good news programs--things deeply appreciated throughout the State but often harder to access in rural Oregon. So I am concerned about this concerted attack on rural America.

First, my colleagues across the aisle say: We are going to make it very, very hard for people in rural America to get healthcare if they are on Medicaid. And then, without Medicaid financing and paying for services, you lose an entire hospital or you lose an entire clinic. The whole rural community is profoundly damaged because everyone's healthcare is affected. An attack on rural America continues through this bill.

But what I really want to talk about now is to give a sense of how this bill is an attack on the separations of power that we all here in the Senate have taken a constitutional oath to defend.

When I first came to Congress as an intern for Senator Hatfield, we were celebrating our 200th anniversary. That is so long ago, 49 years ago. And Senator Hatfield had a saying about appropriators, and that was that appropriators--that is, those Members of the Senate who served on the spending committee--they were first appropriators, and then they were Republicans or Democrats. That is how strongly they felt about their shared responsibility to manage the power of the purse.

The power of the purse--article I, section 9, of the Constitution says:

No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.

And here is the thing. The Congress is vested with that power, but when you decide how to spend money, you are really talking about your values. So those who serve on the Appropriations Committee were doing their best to enact the values of our country, be they investment in healthcare, in housing, in education; investments that created good- paying jobs, investments that helped small communities thrive, investments that helped build infrastructure across the country. That was the responsibility that was so cherished.

And there was a term for those who chaired the 12 subcommittees on Appropriations, and that term--the colloquial term--was that they were the Senate's ``cardinals.'' It was taken from the Catholic Church, where cardinals helped steer the church on the right path. And the cardinals of the Senate had the responsibility of steering our Nation, through our spending decisions, on the right path for the people of America.

This is, in fact, a key part of government by and for the people: that shared responsibility to spend that money wisely. But even in the early years that I was here in the Senate, we were starting to see signs of the breakdown of that relationship.

In the last conversation I had with Senator Hatfield before he passed away, he said: What happened to the Appropriations Committee?

Now, Senator Hatfield was a Republican, and he had been chair of the Appropriations Committee. And he said: I worked so closely with Dan Inouye of Hawaii, and I worked so closely with Patty Murray of Washington. What has happened to that collaboration?

That was several years ago. But as we have watched, over time, some significant things are happening that we should understand as Senators. In the not so distant past, you have tried to have a fair allocation of revenue laws that raised money, and then, as you filled the Treasury, the question became: How shall we spend it?

So the responsibility shifted from the Finance Committee to the Appropriations Committee. But, over time, it has become more and more popular to spend money for programs through tax credits and deductions. So much of the spending that was in the Appropriations Committee has shifted to the Finance Committee. And then it became more and more popular to shift discretionary spending, over which the Appropriations Committee has control, into mandatory spending. If it is mandatory, it is not a decision decided by the appropriators.

And then, on top of all that, we started to build up more and more national debt, and so all the money that went to interest on that debt is money unavailable to be spent on basic programs of healthcare, housing, education, investments that create good-paying jobs across America, infrastructure, security. That money isn't so available because it is tied up paying for interest.

So these trends are changing the role of those Senate cardinals--the chairs and the ranking members of the subcommittees who help guide us in the 12 different sections of spending. And, I will say, that problem of the debt growing, that is very significant.

Back in 1974, Democrats and Republicans came together and said: Let's have an architecture to ensure that we are very responsible and don't run up massive debt. We will have a filibuster-free pathway for one purpose, and that is to reduce deficits--only to reduce deficits.

And then my colleagues, 22 years later, across the aisle--my Republican colleagues--said: Well, you know, we want a filibuster-free pathway to do tax cuts which will increase the deficit. And they brought in a new Parliamentarian in order to get a ruling that they could do the exact opposite of what 100 Senators had agreed to. So more and more payments diverted into interest.

We had that Big Beautiful Bill, as Trump calls it--or as many of us call it, the ``Big Ugly Betrayal Bill.'' You know the one I am talking about, the one where families lose and billionaires win that was passed 2 weeks ago. Well, this rescission bill is a continuation of that vision of families lose--particularly rural families, particularly all Americans, who lose out on the advantages of soft power that we exercise around the world--and billionaires win. But it is a direct attack, as well, on the immediate process of Democrats and Republicans working together on the Appropriations Committee in this really sacred responsibility of exercising the power of the purse.

Let's examine that word ``rescission.'' It is a fancy term. What does it really mean? A rescission is a repeal of a previous spending law.

A law was passed. It spent a certain amount of money on a certain program or on a certain Agency. And a repeal of it--that is all that fancy term means.

And so the spending process is one where those members of the spending committee come together--Democrats and Republicans together-- and they work out a bipartisan bill. And in that bill, last year, for fiscal year 2025, 11 out of 12 bills that came out of the spending committee, out of the Appropriations Committee, were unanimous or nearly unanimous. Where do you look for that type of bipartisan cooperation in Congress anymore? Well, last year, in the Appropriations Committee, 11 out of 12 bills passing unanimously or nearly unanimously out of committee. But what is happening right now is consideration of undoing that bipartisan work with a partisan repeal.

Now, just kind of stick with me here about a normal deal. You make an agreement with a friend: I will do this if you do that.

Well, everyone kind of understands that is a partnership. You have an agreement. But what if one person bails on that agreement later? It is a betrayal. But bailing on the agreement is exactly what this bill is.

Democrats and Republicans together made those spending decisions, and now they are being undone in a purely partisan fashion. They are breaking the deal. They are going back on the agreement. They are breaking their word. That is pretty shameful, and it is why my colleagues have been saying: Don't do it--because it is wrong, and it has a huge impact going forward. Once somebody you have made an agreement with breaks their end of the bargain, are you going to make a second bargain with that same individual, knowing that they bailed on the first deal? The answer is probably not.

So how will we come together and continue what we did a year ago--11 out of 12 bills passing out of the Senate committee in a hugely bipartisan fashion--if one side comes back and breaks the deal? I would invite my Republican colleagues: Come to the floor and explain to me how breaking the deal that you were participating in a year ago is an honorable thing to do, and explain to me how we are going to do future deals if you are breaking the existing deal.

Now, never in the history of the Senate has there been a partisan repeal--never. This is the first time. Why? Because we understood together that a deal is a deal.

That doesn't mean the President doesn't have influence. Hey, that was just about last year's bill. The President lays out a budget for the next year and has a huge influence. The President can veto the next set of spending bills or any one of them.

But once it is locked into law--passed by the House, passed by the Senate, signed by a President--to come back and undo that in this partisan fashion, you are breaking the honor code that has made bipartisan collaboration so successful. That is why you shouldn't do it. That is why you should vote no.

Now, this question of how this affects our Constitution is significant because, as I cited, the Constitution assigns the responsibility of the power of the purse to Congress in article I, section 9. But there have been occasions before when Presidents said: We would like to actually have that power of the purse. And the President who really pursued that aggressively was President Nixon, in the 1970s. President Nixon signed a law about how money would be spent but then decided not to spend it and withheld the money from being spent on housing, on education, on highways, on agriculture, and on pollution prevention programs.

Well, of course, this was appealed on a constitutional basis because the Constitution doesn't give the President the power to impound funds. Congress, by law--and by law signed by a President--had said: Here is what must be spent on these programs. And the President came along, and President Nixon said: I don't want to do it. I am not going to do it. Take me to court.

So they went to court. And it didn't actually make it to the Supreme Court until after President Nixon was out of office, after having resigned because of the Watergate scandal. But, in a way, this was really almost a bigger scandal. This was an attack on the Constitution.

So what did the Court say in Train v. New York? And the piece of spending that made it to the Supreme Court was related to spending on water treatment systems, of all things. And the Court said: You cannot do this. You cannot impound funds. It is unconstitutional because the Constitution assigns that responsibility to Congress.

Now, if the law had been written by Congress to say the President has flexibility between here and here, maybe a modest amount of flexibility may have survived the constitutional test. But the idea that the President could just simply ignore the law? No. The Court said no.

Then there was a second test. The second test had to do, in 1996, with Congress, where Republicans controlled the House and they controlled the Senate. They decided: You know how we will tackle the deficit now--now that we have destroyed the 1974 law that said the fast track can only be used for reducing the deficit and how we switched that and said it could be used for increasing the deficit--now we have destroyed that, and we have a new plan, and we will just simply say to the President: You can line-item veto.

Again, the court weighed in, and the court said: Hell no, no you can't, because the Constitution does not say you can delegate to the President powers the Constitution assigns to you.

It assigns it to us. That is our responsibility.

So, again, the core concept here is that bipartisan work in forging a spending bill should not be done by one partner bailing on the deal that was agreed to the previous year.

Now, there is a formal way to go about doing this in a bipartisan fashion, and that is, each spending bill, in addition to saying what we will spend next year, can contain agreements on undoing the spending from the previous year because it is the same set of people saying: We assigned funds last year, but now we see they are not needed.

Maybe the President pointed out that they are not needed.

We will undo it, but we will undo it in a bipartisan fashion in the Appropriations Committee in that same sense of a partnership working together.

So rescissions, yes. We do them all the time. But they are done on a bipartisan basis in the spending committee, not in a partisan special bill, one-sided, basically bailing on the deal struck last year-- because this strategy is a recipe for disaster, destroying the bond of trust on a deal made with each side having its priorities in a bill and then one side bailing on it--because of that, it has never happened before, and it should never happen now.

Mr. President, let's step back from the immediate loyalty test the President of the United States has put forward. The President said: It is a loyalty test. I want you to do this because I want you to bend the knee to me.

That is not the responsibility of a Senator of the United States of America, to bend the knee to the executive branch. The Constitution gives us the responsibility to design how the executive branch functions. It gives us, the Senate, the responsibility to fund the programs and the services.

The way you lose government of, by, and for the people is to have an acquiescent legislature that stops doing its job and just says ``We will respond; we will just do what the President asks'' and a deferential court. Right now, we have both.

But we took an oath to the Constitution, each one of us, to honor that oath. Do not engage for the first time ever in creating this recipe for disaster of our bipartisan responsibilities.

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