Keystone XL Pipeline Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, I rise to urge my Republican colleagues to pass a clean bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security for the remainder of the fiscal year.

We are now only 1 month away from a shutdown of the principal Federal agency charged with keeping Americans safe from terrorism and prepared for natural disasters.

The President has said he will veto any funding bill that repeals or rolls back his Executive order on immigration, so anything but a clean bill to fund DHS means one thing and one thing alone. Republicans are unilaterally shutting down the agency.

No matter what your grievance is, we shouldn't be playing politics with national security. It is alarming that even as we can now count the days, 30, until a Republican security shutdown, so many on the hard right are ready to just dismiss the consequences.

Compared to their obsession with President Obama's immigration action and their desire to appease the tea party with radical and practical ideas that would not fix our system, to Republicans shutting down DHS is ``not the end of the world.''

So I will use my time to spell out what a DHS shutdown would mean for our country in the hopes that our Republican colleagues will be jolted back to reality and to common sense. Since this isn't the first time Republicans have put us through a shutdown, we actually have a very good idea as to what a DHS shutdown would look like.

Here are just some of the functions that would cease if Republicans failed to put a clean bill on the floor: The bulk of DHS management and headquarter administrative support activities would cease, including much of the homeland security infrastructure that was built during the 9/11 terrorist attacks to improve command, control, and coordination of disparate frontline activities. Securing the Cities, a critical post-9/11 funding program that helps pay for nuclear detection capabilities in New York City, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC, could not be awarded in fiscal year 2015. The DHS Nuclear Detection Office, which since 9/11 coordinates on a daily or weekly basis with local law enforcement, will stop operating.

FEMA's disaster preparedness unit would cease coordinating regular training activities for law enforcement for weapons of mass destruction events. FEMA employees in Washington and across the country who provide critical preparedness resources to local first responders would be sent home. Twenty-five percent of FEMA's headquarters and regional staff would be furloughed.

FEMA personnel working on grants programs, such as funds for intelligence analysts or firefighter needs, would be furloughed, and even those personnel deemed essential would be denied paychecks until a funding bill is passed. This means we are not paying the Coast Guard, we are not paying the TSA, we are not paying the Border Patrol, the Secret Service or FEMA aid workers.

So make no mistake, a DHS shutdown would hamstring our ability to combat threats to the homeland and to keep our citizens safe. The irony of course is that one of the programs that shutdown would close completely is E-Verify, which stops unscrupulous employers from hiring undocumented workers and cutting everyone's wages.

So in order to make a point on immigration, our Republican colleagues are actually going to stop the program which prevents employers from hiring undocumented workers. Essentially to make a point about needing more immigration enforcement, Republicans are willing to shut down immigration enforcement.

In short, I am perplexed as to why Republicans are playing this game of chicken with DHS funding because the only possible outcome that could come from withholding of a clean DHS bill is the shutdown of several critical post-Ð9/11 programs within the DHS and the furlough of thousands of workers paramount to our Nation's security and disaster preparedness.

At a time when we need all hands on deck to keep America safe, Republican efforts to politicize our security would tie DHS's hands behind their back. So I urge my Republican colleagues in the House and Senate to drop this fool's errand and put a clean DHS funding bill on the floor as soon as possible.

I yield the floor.

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