Government Funding

Floor Speech

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Mrs. BLACKBURN. Mr. President, SNAP benefits have been in the news and a topic of much discussion, and those benefits for over 40 million Americans lapsed over the weekend because the Democrats have chosen to hold government funding hostage for political ``leverage''--their word--at the American people's expense. In other words, they are using the American people as pawns. Because of that, their constituents and, indeed, nearly 700,000 Tennesseans are without their SNAP benefits.

Border Patrol agents, our air traffic controllers, and Federal law enforcement have been working a month now without pay. This is why you have the AFGE and the controllers union saying: End the Schumer shutdown now.

We also know that critical Federal assistance--from rural development programs to small business loans--is in jeopardy.

Across the country, people and small businesses are all suffering because of Chuck Schumer and his Schumer shutdown.

And for Democrats--I think they have wanted this. They planned for it, and they wanted to see it happen, so they got it.

Now, over on the House side, the Democratic whip made it very clear during a recent interview--and I will quote her. She said:

Shutdowns are terrible, and of course there will be families that are going to suffer. . . . But it is one of the few leverage times we have.

So to the American people, realize that the Democrats you have elected see you as pawns and leverage and pieces that they can move around a chessboard.

As the Senate Democrat leader said at the beginning of the shutdown, and I quote him:

Every day gets better for [Democrats].

They see this as improving their political chances.

Over the last month, his party has voted more than a dozen times to keep the government shut down. At the heart of their demands is the permanent extension of President Biden's COVID credits under ObamaCare. This would be a $450 billion expense to the U.S. taxpayer.

Last week, I was on the floor talking about this and about how Democrats are peddling falsehoods to try to justify their Schumer shutdown. They claim that ObamaCare subsidies are going to expire. In reality, it is only the Biden COVID credit bonus that will expire.

What happened during COVID for the ObamaCare subsidies--they took off the income caps, and a lot of people had zero-dollar premiums. If you were making over half a million dollars a year, you, too, could get a Biden COVID credit bonus and subsidy from the ObamaCare exchange and you, too, could have the U.S. taxpayer picking up the tab for 80 to 90 percent of your health insurance because they plussed up the credit, and they removed the income caps.

Now, the original ObamaCare subsidies--which, by the way, do not expire. These are permanent. They are in law. The original subsidies continue for people who are at 100 to 400 percent of the Federal poverty level.

Our colleagues across the aisle claim that the Biden COVID credits are needed to keep the cost of health insurance premiums down. In reality, ObamaCare is too expensive to afford without the subsidy. So what they are doing is propping up a broken system.

In fact, since 2013, the ObamaCare benchmark plan premium has increased by 237 percent--more than three times the rate for employer- sponsored healthcare plans that most Americans get through their work and from their employer. As these premiums go up, taxpayers are on the hook to subsidize not the individual but, guess what, the insurance company. The subsidy doesn't go to the individual; it goes directly to the insurance company.

Our colleagues on the other side of the aisle need to understand that their fight for government-run healthcare, which is really what this entire Schumer shutdown is all about, is going to fail. It is time for them to put the American people over and before far-left politics. It is time to reopen the Federal Government. Artificial Intelligence

Mr. President, we all are hearing quite a bit about AI and the potential of AI to transform entire industries for the better, to make them more efficient.

In Tennessee alone, our advanced manufacturers are using it to become more efficient, to lower costs, and to increase productivity. Healthcare providers are using it to strengthen care, and researchers are using it to discover new treatments. These are all things that are worth celebrating. They are good, and they are yielding good results, but we also know that this emerging technology can be used for harm.

In the case of Google, its AI models have targeted conservatives with defamation for years. During a Senate Commerce Committee hearing last week, I presented evidence to Google's vice president for government affairs and public policy that his company's AI models have repeatedly--repeatedly--fabricated malicious stories about conservative activist Robby Starbuck. He is a Tennessean, and he is a conservative leader in our State.

In one instance, Google's large language model, Gemma, falsely claimed that Starbuck was accused of child rape and that I publicly defended him. Google's AI models have also falsely accused him of being a former adult film star, of facing criminal drug charges, and of shooting a man in Nashville in an argument over a parking spot.

In response, Google's VP claimed that ``hallucinations'' among their AI models are a common problem and that the company is working on it-- as if this harmful defamation is merely a technical glitch. And they refer to it as a hallucination.

In fact, there seems to be a pattern of malicious lying and fiction when it comes to conservatives. So I asked the AI model ``Has Marsha Blackburn been accused of rape?'' The answer to this question, of course, is an unequivocal no. I never have. Yet, Gemma fabricated an entire outlandish criminal allegation against me. It had a massive story about a rape in 1987, which didn't happen, and accusations of improper conduct, which did not happen. It also came forward with an alleged victim. It was all malicious. It was all made up. It was all a lie. Yet Gemma even generated fake links to fabricated news articles to support the defamatory claim, and, of course, the links didn't work.

This marks a catastrophic failure of oversight of an AI model that has been downloaded by more than 200 million people. So last week, I sent a letter over to Google's CEO Sundar Pichai demanding an explanation as to why Gemma was creating these false allegations, criminal allegations, against conservatives and also against me. I also asked for a list of steps the company is taking to eliminate political bias and defamatory content from its models. Google has not responded to my letter. What they did do was take Gemma down over the weekend.

Despite the AI model's serious flaws, the big tech giant said in a statement that it is going to continue to work to make Gemma available to their developers.

And the message on this is clear: You need to shut it down. You need to shut it down completely. You need to shut the Gemini system down completely.

The American public deserves to know that, with these AI models, the information is going to be accurate. It is going to be transparent. It is going to be fair, and it is not going to be a tool that is going to be used to fabricate and to smear conservatives.

In the meantime, Google has until tomorrow to respond to the letter demanding answers. And it is important to keep in mind that this is the same Google that operated a Gmail blacklist that suppressed Republican fundraising emails as spam, and it is the same Google that manipulated search results about the 2024 election to benefit Kamala Harris and to harm President Trump, and it is the same Google that suppressed search results of the attempted assassination of President Trump in Butler, PA.

Big Tech has waged a war on conservatives for too long. It is time that the American people see accountability out of these platforms.

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