Providing for Consideration of H.R. Financial Services and General Government and National Security, Department of State, and Related Programs Appropriations Act, 2026

Floor Speech

Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to the rule.

Let me begin by acknowledging the hard work of our colleagues on the Appropriations Committee who, despite deep divisions and really difficult political conditions, have assembled a bipartisan compromise to fund additional portions of the Federal Government for the current fiscal year.

The bill before us containing the Financial Services and General Government Appropriations Act and the National Security, Department of State, and Related Programs Appropriations Act, includes hard-fought Democratic priorities, despite our minority position in the House and Senate. These Democratic priorities will help working families and small businesses safeguard our elections and protect American values and interests abroad.

Democratic appropriators secured funding for vital government programs that the White House sought to cut, including the CDFI fund, which promotes economic development in low-income communities; the Small Business Administration, which provides invaluable financing that allows people to start or grow their businesses; and the Election Assistance Commission, which supports State and Federal election integrity across the country. The package also provides a long overdue increase in funding for the Federal Defender Services, which gives access to justice to those who cannot afford it.

Importantly, the bill restores funding, with meaningful safeguards, for humanitarian and democracy building programs at the Department of State, programs that were illegally shut down earlier this year by the Trump administration.

This bill ensures that the U.S. will continue to provide economic and humanitarian assistance. Specifically, it will support women and women's health in developing countries and will combat HIV and AIDS worldwide.

These are victories, and they matter. They matter for small business owners struggling to secure a loan. They matter for low-income neighborhoods that are essentially red-lined by big banks and that rely upon Community Development Financial Institutions. These victories matter for women and girls around the globe seeking safety, education, and healthcare.

The restoration of State Department funding matters for all of us who still believe in the promise of American leadership in advancing a safe and prosperous global community.

Ultimately, we cannot afford to let funding lapse for those agencies, and given that we are 4 months into the current fiscal year, I commend our appropriators for crafting these bipartisan bills to address fiscal year 2026 so that we can immediately start working on appropriations for next year, fiscal year 2027.

However, Mr. Speaker, commendable as this package is and as much as I respect the work of our colleagues on the Appropriations Committee, I also believe this package reveals the limits of what we can achieve to meet the needs of the American people under Republican control.

Let's be clear: This bill isn't some compromise where both sides get a little of what they want. It is the most Democrats could get from a Republican Party that continues to knuckle under to the whims of the Trump administration and turn a blind eye to its worst abuses. That is why our Republican colleagues have rejected multiple provisions to rein in the unconstitutional power grabs by this President and his administration.

Republicans control the Senate, the House, and the White House. Under unified Republican control, we have seen the Federal Government used not to help the American people but to punish the President's enemies and to enrich and protect the rich and well-connected at the expense of the American people.

We have seen it when the Republican trifecta passed a partisan bill that gave huge tax cuts to big business and billionaires but refused to extend the ACA tax credits that helped millions of Americans afford their health coverage.

In their main legislative accomplishment so far, Trump and congressional Republicans blew a massive hole in the deficit with their tax cuts for the rich and then tried to pay for it with cuts to Medicaid, SNAP, and public health programs that Americans rely upon.

We are seeing it play out after a masked Federal agent shot and killed Renee Good, an American citizen in Minnesota. In the wake of that killing, we learned that Department of Justice leadership blocked the decades-long practice of initiating an investigation of an officer- involved shooting by the Office of Civil Rights. Having blocked that investigation, they instead opened a politically motivated criminal investigation of Ms. Good's widow as it tries to brand protected speech by Americans as domestic terrorism.

The failure to investigate the lawfulness of the officer's use of force and the weaponization of the investigation to attack the widow are so beyond the pale that it has sparked a mass resignation by career prosecutors at the Department of Justice.

It goes on. Last weekend, the Trump White House launched a criminal investigation against Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, not because he broke the law, but apparently because he refused to surrender the independence of the Fed and submit to the President's demand that he lower interest rates. This is an unprecedented attack on the independence of the Federal Reserve, an institution that is critical to the stability of our economy because it is above partisan politics. Yet, under Republican rule, the independence of the Fed and other nonpartisan agencies is being destroyed before our eyes because this President cannot tolerate dissent, and his party will not restrain him.

Just last week, the administration blocked $10 billion in social services funding to States with Democratic leadership. Yesterday, President Trump went even further, announcing his intent to withhold Federal funds from any State that does not embrace his toxic immigration priorities. This is extortion, plain and simple, directed against the American people he was elected to serve, and the House Republican majority is letting him get away with it.

Of course, we cannot forget the continued coverup of the Epstein files. The Department of Justice was mandated by law to release the Epstein files last month, last year now, but the vast majority of the files are still being kept secret, leading us to ask again: Whom is Trump trying to protect, and why is it the Republicans refuse to hold him responsible for this blatant coverup? What possible justification could there be for this secrecy, except to protect the wealthy and powerful men implicated in those documents.

A suggestion of the answers have come from an unlikely source. According to former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the President yelled at her in a phone call that he didn't want to release the Epstein files because ``my friends will get hurt.''

The list goes on and on, and the Republican agenda is clear. They abuse the powers of the Federal Government to protect the elite and punish the vulnerable.

While I will support the appropriations minibus this week, I call on my Republican colleagues in the House and the Senate to take seriously their obligations to this institution under Article I of the Constitution. We cannot sit by and watch as the executive branch grabs more and more power at the expense of Congress and at the expense of the Constitution.

Congress' power of the purse is not just a budgetary tool. It is one of the last real checks we have on a President who believes that he is above the law and only constrained by his own morality.

I know my Democratic colleagues fought for everything they could in this bill under deeply constrained circumstances, so the failures in this bill are a reflection of the Republican majority, which continues to look the other way as the President dismantles our Federal institutions and subverts our democracy.

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Ms. SCANLON. Mr. Speaker, just to be clear, I didn't say these were good bills. I said they were the best bills we could get under the circumstances, and certainly we would craft very different bills.

Mr. Speaker, nobody is questioning that the Federal Government has the duty and authority to arrest and detain and deport these so-called worst of the worst, rapists, drug dealers, people who have been convicted, but that is not what is happening across the country. That is not what ICE is doing.

Eighty percent of the people that they have picked up and that they are detaining have no criminal record. What we are seeing in Minnesota, this door-to-door, stopping people in parking lots, and asking if they are citizens, that is not targeted enforcement. That is putting masked and armed agents on the streets and causing chaos, as we have repeatedly seen.

The Rules chairwoman mentioned one of the people who has been picked up is absolutely someone who probably deserves to be picked up. However, they have had over 2,000 ICE agents in Minneapolis for about 6 weeks, and they have arrested about 20 people who fit that profile.

In addition, of course, they have killed Renee Good. They have arrested American citizens. They have tackled kids outside their high school. They have tackled teenagers working at Target. They have terrorized an entire community. That does appear to be part of the point here is to create propaganda and videos to scare Americans to project this military power in our streets, which, for any student of American history, that is why we left the U.K.

I think that the objection here is to the lawfulness of what has been happening in Minnesota, in Chicago, in L.A., across the country, and the need to really change how things are being done there.

If we defeat the previous question, I will offer an amendment to the rule to make in order Mr. Hoyer's amendment to the FSGG appropriations bill, which restricts obligating any remaining unobligated balances for the new FBI consolidated headquarters facility until GSA, in consultation with the FBI, submits the contracted and completed architectural and engineering plan for review.

Mr. Speaker, our colleague, Mr. Hoyer, has served with honor for over four decades and has ushered countless pieces of bipartisan legislation through this House.

Now, in this case, all he is asking for is a vote, that the Members of this body vote on an amendment to make sure that before an extremely consequential and expensive decision is made with respect to the location of the FBI headquarters, we receive the architectural and engineering plan that the General Services Administration is supposed to complete. That seems like the least we could do.

Regardless of one's position on Mr. Hoyer's amendment, it deserves a vote on the House floor.

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Ms. SCANLON. Mr. Speaker, to discuss our proposal, I yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer), the sponsor of the amendment.

Mr. Speaker, yesterday in the Rules Committee, Republicans rejected over 70 amendments submitted by Members of both parties. This included a handful of amendments that I have submitted, which if adopted, I obviously think would have improved the bill.

I will highlight those amendments in light of the reporting about the chaos at the Department of Justice after its leadership quashed a transparent investigation into the fatal shooting of Renee Good by an ICE agent and instead insisted on opening a criminal investigation into her widow. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and other Trump officials and conservative commentators have tried to brand Renee Good as a domestic terrorist in gross contradiction to known facts, but that is not the key issue here.

Putting aside the refusal to investigate the lawfulness of the agent's use of deadly force under those circumstances, and the heinous implication that Renee Good somehow deserved to die because she objected to the presence of armed and masked Federal agents in her neighborhood and that she was disrespectful, the President's characterization, this investigation, and these comments from Secretary Noem, are the direct result of an underreported and underappreciated effort by the Trump administration to criminalize constitutionally protected speech.

Earlier this year, President Trump issued a sweeping memo, directing Federal agencies to target Americans with criminal and civil investigations on the explicit basis of constitutionally protected speech.

The memo literally defines specific categories of political opinions and beliefs that law enforcement must now treat as instances of domestic terrorism.

Following this directive, the Department of Justice then changed its policies to direct Federal law enforcement agents to target Americans with criminal investigations for expressing these sanctioned political views or for participating in protests against the Trump administration.

This is the kind of political oppression you would expect to see from authoritarian states like Russia or China, but no, it is here. It is happening at home.

Our Republican colleagues, who are often so quick to complain about censorship or the weaponization of the Federal Government, have remained silent while President Trump has turned the Department of Justice into a tool of political suppression.

Last night, I proposed an amendment to prohibit the use of any Federal taxpayer dollars to investigate or prosecute Americans on the basis of their lawful and constitutionally protected speech.

Mr. Speaker, every single Republican on the Rules Committee voted against my amendment, blocking it from coming to the House floor so our entire body could vote on it.

The First Amendment protects everyone's speech. There are no carve- outs for those we disagree with. Apparently, as we saw in last night's vote, House Republicans do not agree with that fundamental American value.

While Rules Republicans voted down my amendment to protect Americans' right to free speech, they did make in order a questionable amendment from our Rules colleague, Representative Roy, that would defund the D.C. Federal courts and specifically withdraw the salaries for the staff of two Federal judges.

These two judges have been targeted by President Trump and congressional Republicans because they have done their job. They have not bent to the President's will. They have interpreted the law as written. Therefore, House Republicans are taking the extreme position of zeroing out the salaries of their staff. It is a cruel and un- American attack on the judiciary that completely subverts our constitutional order.

Mr. Speaker, I am prepared to close, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, underneath this debate about the appropriations minibus is the difficult reality that House Republicans have abdicated their responsibilities to this Chamber, to the Congress, and to the Constitution. We are not just debating a budget bill. We are debating whether Congress will continue to function not just as a coequal branch of government but as the Article I source of the laws that run our country.

Under Republican leadership, we have seen Congress turned into a rubber stamp. Republicans have surrendered to the whims of a President who sees laws as optional and power as personal.

These two appropriations bills, while necessary for the continued operation of essential government functions, are the limit of how far the Republican Party is willing to go in defying the President.

Unfortunately, Republicans are more interested in protecting power than in responsibly governing for the benefit of the American people. Our job isn't to protect the President. Our job is to fund the government responsibly and to serve as a check on executive overreach.

As masked agents roam our streets, terrorizing our communities, as Trump entertains starting another forever war, and as the Epstein files remain covered up, now is the time for Congress to stand up for the American people.

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' on the previous question and rule, and I yield back the balance of my time.

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Ms. SCANLON. Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

The yeas and nays were ordered.

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