Commerce, Justice, Science; Energy and Water Development; and Interior

Floor Speech

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Mrs. MURRAY. Madam President, the spending bills that we write are not just numbers on a page; they affect the daily lives of Americans across the country in very real ways, like whether or not they can afford their electric bill or whether families have clean drinking water at home, whether communities have infrastructure to prevent flooding and respond to devastating weather events like the ones we saw in my home State of Washington last month, and whether they have the resources they need to keep people safe.

These are the issues at stake, the issues that are in my mind each year as I work to negotiate our appropriations bills. It is a responsibility I take extremely seriously, and it is why from day one I have vowed to rip up President Trump's budget and write a new one, because this President and his budget director, Project 2025 author Russ Vought, want to slash over $160 billion in essential investments for American communities and working families. They actually tried to cut our entire nondefense budget by over one-fifth. But even that number disguises the much deeper cuts that have been pushed for key programs. In some cases, House Republicans adopted those in their own bills alongside hundreds of extreme poison pill provisions.

Democrats said: No way. Absolutely not. And we made clear that our conferenced bills had to be closer to the bipartisan Senate levels that ensured our bills cleared our committee with overwhelming support. Throughout these negotiations, our ranking members and I focused on protecting funding that our communities rely on, rejecting sweeping, devastating cuts, and eliminating far-right, poison pill riders.

Now, this week, the Senate is taking up the package that the House cleared last week in an overwhelming vote, which contains the CJS, Energy and Water, and Interior funding bills. In each of these bills, I am very happy that we protected critical funding and fought off poison pill riders.

In the CJS bill, we rejected Trump's plan to slash funding for scientific research and the National Science Foundation's budget by 57 percent, cut NASA's science budget in half, and devastate NOAA and climate research that all of us rely on for accurate weather forecasting, whether we know it or not.

Trump also wanted to cut funding to prevent violence against women by $215 million, which was truly heartless. Democrats protected that funding and increased it by $7 million.

We shot down Trump's proposals to merge and weaken important Federal Agencies--Agencies like the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Office on Violence Against Women and COPS Office under the Office of Justice Programs.

Similarly, the Interior bill protects the Forest Service from over $1 billion in Trump cuts. It protects clean water programs from those massive cuts. It protects air and pollution grants from outright elimination. It protects the pay of our Federal wildland firefighters. It rejects nearly $1 billion in Trump cuts to Tribal programs for school and safety and self-governance.

As ranking member of Energy and Water, I worked hard to make sure these bills definitively rejected Trump's damaging proposals and made major investments that are absolutely critical both to my home State of Washington and our entire Nation.

President Trump's proposal would have raised Americans' energy bills by cutting energy and grid programs, including eliminating the Weatherization Assistance Program, but Democrats saved those and in fact procured more assistance to help lower families' energy bills.

Not only did we reject Trump's $2 billion cut to the Army Corps of Engineers, we actually increased funding and spelled out in line item after line item exactly how that funding is to be spent because last year, Trump and Russ Vought blatantly defunded Army Corps construction projects in blue States like Washington and California and steered hundreds of millions of dollars to red States instead. I called that out for what it was--a politically motivated abuse of power that was only possible because we were operating under a slush fund, full-year CR.

This year, we made sure that Trump and Russ Vought cannot muck around again and turn crucial flood prevention projects like the Howard Hanson Dam in Washington State into political hostages. I am very proud that we were able to write in much needed funding for the Howard Hanson Dam bill, alongside crucial funding for many of our Nation's ports and harbors.

The Energy and Water bill protects investments in water infrastructure, hydroelectric power, and scientific discovery so our National Labs can keep doing the cutting-edge work that we all rely on. It rejects Trump's proposal to gut clean energy funding; zero out solar, wind, and hydrogen research programs; and eliminate several independent Agencies that support economic development in the country.

Now, throughout these bills, I was very happy to work with Chair Collins and address indirect costs to ensure that our scientific research can continue without drastic interference and disruption.

I want to thank everyone--some of my fellow leaders on the Appropriations Committee who came to the table for very serious, hard negotiations to put these bills together. This was not easy work, and it was done under a very challenging timeline, but we are showing what can still get done when both sides work together.

I want to start by acknowledging and thanking very much Chair Collins and her staff, who have worked extraordinarily hard with my staff throughout this process, and we are continuing to work.

I also want to thank House Chairman Tom Cole and Ranking Member Rosa DeLauro and all their staffs.

I want to thank Senator Kennedy, who is my counterpart on the Energy and Water Subcommittee; Senator Moran and Senator Van Hollen, our leaders on the CJS Subcommittee; and Senator Murkowski and Senator Merkley, our Interior Subcommittee leads; and, of course, their counterparts in the House: Representatives Fleischmann and Kaptur on Energy and Water, Rogers and Meng on CJS, and Simpson and Pingree on Interior.

Our ranking members, along with the chairs in both the House and Senate, did a tremendous job working together to get these bills done. These bills reassert Congress's power over key spending decisions, and that cannot be more important.

These bills will put an end to some of the truly unacceptable and partisan retaliation we have seen from the Office of Management and Budget by telling this administration exactly how Congress has decided funding must get spent. That is a huge improvement from the status quo we have with Republicans' yearlong slush fund CR that gave Trump and Vought way more power to decide how to spend our taxpayer dollars and which projects and priorities to fund.

Over the last year, we have seen them abuse the power that terrible slush fund CR gave them to rob our communities and completely remake Federal spending priorities without so much as talking to Congress. That is why right now it is so important that we end that slush fund authority and reassert our power as lawmakers by passing these full- year spending bills that specify exactly how funds are to be spent, just as we had always done until last year.

So with the next funding deadline coming up, it is crucial that we pass these bills, protect the funding that our families count on, reject Trump's heartless cuts, and put power back in the hands of the American people and their elected representatives where it belongs. That is what this package does and what I am intent on doing with the rest of our bills as well.

My North Star is always, what can I do that does the most for folks back home in Washington State, how can I protect the programs that hard-working people count on, and how can I deliver real wins that make families' lives better?

So to all of my colleagues who share my outrage over how Trump has trampled over our spending laws and my grave concerns over his damaging cuts and harmful budget proposals, I will continue to join you in pushing back against his agenda on the Senate floor. These are not the bills we would have written on our own. I know that. These are not the bills I would write on my own. But they do mark significant improvement over the status quo where Trump and his Agency heads can rewrite parts of the budget without Congress, and they are vastly better than the Trump budget plan, which was full of cuts and extreme policies.

So I will continue to work with my colleagues to make sure that the programs that protect our communities and save families money don't get axed.

Passing funding bills that we shape and write is one of the most important ways that we wield our power and make the voice of our constituents heard. It is one of the most fundamental jobs of Congress to write these bills, to decide how our taxpayer funds get spent.

So I urge all of our colleagues to join me this week in voting to pass this next package of bills and reassert our power so that we can put forward and pass into law bills that aren't only bipartisan but that make sure all of our constituents come first.

In fact, just yesterday, we put out a bipartisan package for S-FOPS and FSGG funding bills, and it is a package that once again saves crucial investments in our communities, in our small businesses, and in America's global leadership.

I will have more to say on that soon, but I see that our chairman Senator Collins has joined me on the floor, and I do again want to thank her personally for all of her hard work to get this done.

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