National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2026

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, I am going to speak in just a moment about the border, but just to kind of set the stage a little bit on sort of where things stand, you just heard the Democrat leader talk about their willingness to fund the government--something he said repeatedly in the past. In fact, in the past, as I used quotes on the floor yesterday, he said that he likes clean CRs--clean CRs--and that we need to keep the government open for all kinds of reasons, including people who are served by the VA hospitals, for example.

I agree with him. I think that is important. I don't think anybody benefits from a government shutdown, which is why we are trying to advance a clean CR--a CR that incorporates anomalies that have been requested by his side of the aisle, some on ours, things that we normally incorporate into a continuing resolution.

But the objective in all this would be to fund the government into the foreseeable future. What is being talked about is somewhere in the November timeframe--pre-Thanksgiving, perhaps--which would give us, after the end of the fiscal year on September 30, another 6 to 7 weeks to consider individual appropriations bills and to fund the government the way it is supposed to be funded: under regular order, where the committees are doing their work and where we are doing our work on the floor.

As the Chair knows, earlier this year, we already passed three appropriations bills across the floor of the Senate--something that hadn't been done before the August recess going back as far as 2018, I believe. So it has been a long time since we have enacted under regular order appropriations bills, and that ought to be the goal. The goal here should be to fund the government the way it was intended to be funded--through the normal appropriations process.

Now, I realize that is a little out of the ordinary, given the past few years under the Democrat leadership or the Democrat leader's leadership here in the Senate, where these issues, a lot of times, got decided behind closed doors in his office. That seems to be what he wants to have happen again.

He is suggesting that he would like to have conversations about this. Well, he knows my office is right down the hall. He knows my phone number. I haven't heard from him.

All we are simply doing is asking for the very thing that in the past he has said he wants, and that is a clean funding resolution to fund the government. That is what we are proposing here. That is what I hope we will have the votes to pick up later this week.

If the Democrat leader chooses to oppose it, that is his prerogative, but I would hope there would be Democrat Senators who would give us the requisite number of votes to get to 60 in order to keep the government open. That is my objective in all of this.

I would say that we have, I think, a process whereby the Appropriations Committee and our chair Senator Collins have been working with the ranking Democrat, Senator Murray, and with their House counterparts on funding the government in this way, in this fashion. Those discussions, to the degree that they are occurring, are occurring because we allow them to have those conversations and don't get in the way of that.

I think what the Democrat leader is suggesting is that he wants to interject himself into those discussions and perhaps even instruct his ranking member not to participate. I hope that isn't the case.

But my expectation is that we will proceed to fund the government in a way that keeps it open for that foreseeable time period. I think right now what they are talking about in the House of Representatives is somewhere in the November 21 timeframe. That would give us an additional 6 to 7 weeks in which to move individual appropriations bills, which is the way we should be funding the government and which is the way historically, prior to the Democrat leader's term as majority leader, we used to do it. Now, he moved that behind closed doors into his office. Frankly, I don't think that is in the best interest of this institution and certainly not in the best interest of Members on my side or on his side, who, frankly, want an open process and have requested that.

That was one of the issues, when I was running for this job, that Senators on our side of the aisle had suggested--that we want to do this in the light of day; we want an open process; we want regular order to work; we want the chairs to be empowered and individual members of the committees to be empowered and, just as importantly, individual Senators to be empowered to be able to have their voices heard in that appropriations process.

So that is where we are right now. Now, what is being suggested by the Democrat leader is that they are willing--he is willing--I hope they aren't--he is willing to shut the government down over a clean CR--something that last year and the year before he said he wanted because that is the way to do this, not with all kinds of things attached to it and poison pills but clean, straight-up fund the government. That is what he has wanted.

I hope his Members are smart enough to know that it is a really bad idea, for lots of reasons, to shut the government down over a clean funding resolution extended to a foreseeable date in the future that would enable the Appropriations Committee and this institution, the Senate, working with our colleagues in the House, to fund the government the way it was intended to be funded--through the normal appropriations process. I sincerely hope we can do that.

That is what we are advocating: a clean funding resolution--not with all kinds of ornaments and attachments to it but a handful of anomalies that both sides agree to--that would fund the government into November, until such time as we have the opportunity here to debate and hopefully report out and actually move annual appropriations bills so the Senate's voice--Senators' voices--can be heard in that process.

That is a very, I know, foreign concept to the Democrat leader and certainly something--at least right now--that it doesn't sound like he is open to. But the alternative is a government shutdown.

If you refuse to move a clean CR so the Appropriations committees can do their work and we can do our work here in the Senate, essentially, you are advocating for a government shutdown, and I don't know how that doesn't fall on you.

He is suggesting that is going to fall on Republicans, but if, in fact, the House of Representatives can act on this, the President is prepared to sign a continuing resolution that funds the government--a clean resolution--for the foreseeable future, and we have the number of votes here in the Senate to pass it, then it will be only the Democrat leader who is standing between this country and a government shutdown and all that means. So I would hope he will come to a different conclusion.

To the question of whether or not he would like to sit down with me, my office is right down here, and he has my cell phone number. At any time, we can do that. It doesn't seem necessary given the fact that if we hand the ball to the appropriators, which is where this should be decided, and they negotiate this and then we have a clean CR to fund the government for the next 7 weeks, that, to me, seems like a very straightforward solution to this, at least in the near term, and one which in past Congresses the Democrat leader has supported.

That is what we are trending toward, and if the Democrat leader wants to chat about that or any other subject, he knows where to find me. By the way, as many of his colleagues were out here trying to negotiate the bipartisan compromise of nominations last week, he was nowhere to be found. So this is time if you want to actually engage and try and come up with some bipartisan solutions to some of these problems, I certainly welcome that.

I look forward to those conversations in the future. Border Security

Mr. President, if there is one thing for sure, it is that things look very different at the southern border these days than they did a year ago. Encounters at the southern border have dropped precipitously to as low as just 7,832 encounters in July.

Now compare that to the southern border under the Biden administration when U.S. Customs and Border Protection was encountering more than 100,000 illegal immigrants per month and sometimes many more. In a number of months, that number was up over 200,000. And in one memorable month in 2023, the number of encounters at the southern border exceeded 300,000--300,000 in just one month. Many of those individuals were processed and then allowed to take up residence in the United States.

Well, no longer.

Under President Trump, illegal border crossings have slowed to a trickle, and border communities that were once overwhelmed are quiet. Border Patrol's El Paso sector, which covers 268 miles in western Texas and all of New Mexico, is emblematic of the progress that has been made.

The sector chief says agents there are currently encountering about 40 to 50 people per day. Now, compare that to the 2,700 per day that they would see not that long ago.

Then there is the known ``got-aways.'' These are individuals that Border Patrol saw but was unable to apprehend. The current daily average in the El Paso sector is nine--nine; nine known ``got-aways'' per day. Last summer, it was 400 per day in that sector--400.

One has to wonder just how dangerous some of these individuals were who were avoiding law enforcement, considering that a lot of illegal immigrants encouraged by catch-and-release policies actually sought out Border Patrol during the Biden years.

Under President Trump, the situation at the southern border has been turned around. Our laws are being enforced. The wall is being built, and criminal illegal immigrants who had taken up residence in our country are being arrested, detained, and deported. Thanks to President Trump's leadership, we have made an incredible amount of progress, and we need to sustain that progress for long term.

That is why Republicans made the generational investment in border security in the One Big Beautiful Bill. That includes funding to finish the border wall and hire more Border Patrol and ICE agents, plus additional detention space and deportation capacity.

We also included funding for the Department of Justice to hire more immigration judges to address the massive backlog of immigration cases, a backlog made exponentially worse by the Biden administration's policies.

The open border policies of the past were a danger for everyone. The chaos at our southern border under the Biden administration was an invitation to terrorists, criminals, and other dangerous individuals to enter our country.

It placed an incredible burden on our Border Patrol agents, many of whom were pulled off the essential work of guarding the border to process the flood of illegal immigrants. And it placed a big burden on border cities, and nonborder cities as well, who struggled to deal with an influx of migrants.

Then there were the dangers to illegal immigrants themselves who were encouraged by President Biden's policies to put themselves at the mercy of human smugglers and the cartels, criminals who profited off of the open southern border.

In fact, the New York Times reported in 2022 that human smuggling had become a $13 billion business for the cartels--ballooning from $500 million just a few years earlier. New border security measures, however, have cost the cartels an estimated $1 billion since the start of this year.

Now law enforcement has the bandwidth to go after these criminals and disrupt the networks whose activities endanger immigrants and Americans alike. We have a responsibility to keep America safe, and that starts with security at our borders. President Trump takes that responsibility seriously.

He has acted swiftly to turn the disaster at the southern border around, and Congress has acted to support that mission and make the success we have seen these last few months the new normal. That work continues.

I am grateful to the men and women on the frontlines carrying out the important work enforcing the law and making America safer.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source