Government Funding

Floor Speech

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Mr. LANKFORD. Madam President, we are in day 20 of a government shutdown. It is exceptionally avoidable, but it is also exceptionally painful and distracting to the American people.

At the USDA, the Farm Service Agency loans have stopped.

TSA employees are working without pay. If we can't get this resolved by tomorrow, they will miss a paycheck, but they will still be at work.

Home lending programs have halted.

For the FAA, new air traffic controllers are not being trained. We still have air traffic controllers in the tower who are working now--by tomorrow, without pay coming in--but new training has stopped. That means a year from now, when we need to have those new air traffic controllers take their spot in that tower, there won't be someone in that tower because we have halted the training at this point.

IRS taxpayer advocate services are closed.

Indian Health Service is being stretched.

At the Bureau of Indian Affairs, most employees have been furloughed.

The Department of Commerce and many others have been affected.

While this doesn't affect most Agencies in the Federal Government, it affects a lot, and it affects real lives and real people. Let me give some examples from just my State of Oklahoma.

There is a technology company in Tulsa that will have to begin furloughing employees because it is a contractor for the Federal workforce.

Those folks who are selling their cattle right now and who have a relationship with Farm Service can't cash that check because they can't get a second cosigner for the check, and that definitely affects them.

A Federal worker contacted us and said that she is a contractor, and as of a couple days from now, she is not going to be able to pay her son's tuition so he can go back to college, because it will be too far a stretch.

The food banks in my State have already started stocking up and reaching out to Federal employees who may not get a check starting tomorrow and may be stretched and need some additional assistance, many of them for the first time ever.

We have a family in the Norman area, south of Oklahoma City, who typically handles the contract for housing for students who are coming to the FAA, to the academy. Well, obviously those academy students have all gone home, and they are losing $5,000 a week due to the shutdown and the lack of housing for those folks. And it is not just empty facilities; employees who are contractors there are now being furloughed.

See, this affects real lives and real people. This was an exceptionally avoidable shutdown. Months and months ago, the President of the United States announced publicly and repetitively that he was not going to sign a funding bill at the end of the year that does not add additional border security. Over and over again, in public speeches and in private conversations on this Hill, the President repeated over and over: I am not going to sign a funding bill unless it adds additional border security.

For some reason, half of this Hill ignored it and said: He is just kidding. He is not just kidding. He sees the issue of border security-- as I do, by the way, as well--as being a serious issue that has been talked about for decades but has not been addressed. Now all of these families are being impacted because half of this Hill said they thought the President was kidding.

We should be able to do basic border security. This used to not be a partisan issue. It was just a decade ago that this body voted to add 650 miles of additional fencing along the border between Mexico and the United States because at that time, a decade ago, this body said: There is a serious issue with border security. We should add fencing to the border.

Outspoken liberals like Senator Clinton and Senator Obama voted to add fencing to the border in 2006 and said that is the right thing to do. But suddenly now, a decade and a couple years later, it is a partisan issue and we can't allow President Trump to have additional fencing. It seems very odd to me. This seems like a personal attack on the President rather than a realization of where we have been as a country for a long time. We should have basic border security.

For the President to be actually very malleable on this--shockingly so, to some people--he stepped out and said: I want $5.7 billion for a wall or for fencing or for steel barriers or whatever you want to call it. We need some additional barriers on it.

To negotiate during the Christmas time period and to be stuck because the White House makes an offer to Senator Schumer, and Senator Schumer's response apparently was, we will wait to negotiate this after Nancy Pelosi becomes speaker--so for 10 days we sat with no negotiations going because we had to wait until there was a Speaker Pelosi.

Now Speaker Pelosi steps up and says: We are going to do nothing on this. And the President says: No, we need to do something. And suddenly something that the American people saw as obvious--why wouldn't we do basic things for border security--has suddenly become political and controversial.

The President, even in his speaking earlier this week from the Oval Office, started by saying we should do additional technology at the border. I fully agree. In fact, just in the last 2 years, the Department of Homeland Security has added 31 new fixed surveillance tower units to the southern border, has added 50 mobile surveillance systems to the southern border, and has added ground sensors and tunnel detection capabilities to the southern border. Those are all technology aspects of helping the southern border. The President stepped up and said we need to do more in that area.

He said we need to add additional agents, which, again, has not been a partisan issue in the past.

He said we need to add additional immigration judges, which, again, has not been controversial. We have 800,000 people waiting in immigration courts to get due process right now. Many of them will wait 3 years or more just to get to a court. That is because we have too few judges handling the many immigration cases that are out there. It should be common sense to say ``Let's add additional judges so people can get to due process faster,'' but suddenly that has become controversial.

The President said we need to add a steel barrier. Now, I am fully aware he has talked about a wall in the past, and he said wall, wall, wall over and over, and some people have this picture that it is going to be the Berlin Wall, complete with graffiti on the side of it. That is not what DHS is putting up, nor what they have put up. They put up these big steel slats because the Customs and Border Patrol folks don't want a solid wall. They need to be able to see through it to see whether there is a threat coming to them.

Has it made a difference? It has absolutely made a difference. Some of my team were down at the border in San Diego just a month ago. They visited with the Customs and Border Patrol folks there. They stated that the old fencing that is there--and there is some very old fencing in that area--that old fencing had more than a dozen penetrations through it a day--a day. It was meaningless. But the new fencing that they are putting up, these big steel slats, that steel barrier has one person a month. So it moved from 10 to 12 a day to 1 a month. That is a pretty big difference. That is helping manage our border. That is why fencing actually does work.

I am fully aware of folks saying, if you put up a 30-foot fence you get a 31-foot ladder, but what happens is, when you have to climb a 31- foot ladder, you have to slow down in the process, and it gives time for the Border Patrol to be able to interdict. That is what a fence is about, to say: You can't cross here easily. You have to slow down through the process--and we can interdict folks.

This is a completely avoidable and, quite frankly, very recognizable problem. We should not have a government shutdown happening right now. Interestingly enough, some of my Democratic colleagues I have spoken with over the last 2 days were quietly whispering in these hallways: I hope the President will just declare a national emergency so the fencing can get built, and we can say we fought it, rather than actually bringing a piece of legislation here to solve it.

There are real families and real lives getting affected by this. Let's resolve this. This is not a big number. This is not a complicated issue. We can come to common agreement on basic border security to protect our communities and our cities. We should have the ability for individuals to come into the United States to work. We have always been that way.

Interestingly enough, I remind people all the time that the 5,000 people coming from the migrant caravan from Honduras are camped out 250 yards from the largest legal border crossing in the world, the San Ysidro crossing. We have 5,000 people who are trying to illegally cross the border literally 250 yards from where 100,000 people a day cross legally every single day, but the cameras are all focused on the 5,000 people trying to cross illegally, not turning the camera 90 degrees to focus in on the 100,000 people a day who filled out the forms and did it right and are coming into our country. We are still a country with open immigration, and we should be; we just ask people to do it the right way. I don't think it is that unreasonable.

So how do we get out of this? The most basic way to get out of this is just to do what we talked about for months--let's sit down and figure out how to do border security--just the simple process of that. Some of my colleagues have said the President needs to open the government, and then we will talk about border security. That will be the same argument we have had for a couple of years now, where they say: Some other time, some another time. The President said, after months and months, this is the time to talk about this. So let's resolve it as quickly as we possibly can.

Let's not complicate it. I have heard people say: Let's add all these additional things to the conversation and make the deal bigger. Making the deal bigger just slows down the process even more. Federal employees and all these families need answers right now. Let's not continue to try to make this a bigger and bigger argument that stretches out longer and longer in debate. Let's solve the issue we have in front of us right now and keep debating the other issues.

Finally, let's get a permanent resolution to this issue of government shutdowns. It has been interesting to me to see the media comparing this shutdown to the one that happened during the Jimmy Carter Presidency or the Clinton Presidency or the three that happened during the Reagan Presidency or those that happened in the Bush Presidency. This is a bad habit Congress is in. There were 16 of us who met this last year, from April all the way through December--eight Democrats and eight Republicans, half from the House and half from the Senate--to try to resolve the budget process. Many of us spoke up, myself included, over and over again, saying that this is a broken budgeting process, saying we have to end the government shutdowns. By the time we got to the middle of December, that group of 16 could not come to a resolution to address this problem. Well, how about now? Are we willing to admit now that there is a problem with budgeting?

Here was one of the solutions I brought to that committee. I think it is straightforward. The simple solution is, if you get to the end of the budget year and if we don't have things resolved at that point, go into a continuing resolution; that is, continue to fund the government, hold the Agencies and employees harmless, but Members of Congress have to stay in Washington, DC, and the Cabinet and the White House have to stay in Washington, DC--no travel for anyone. We have to be here.

If you want to hit Members of Congress where it hurts, don't let anyone go home for the weekend to see their families. We have families we want to see, too, but we shouldn't be able to walk away when there is still work to be done. The greatest pressure point we can have in this body is that we would have to stay in continuous session until the negotiations are finished. Make everyone stay here.

That may sound overly simplistic, but when I bring that up to other Members of Congress, they are like: Whoa. That is too much. Really? Everyone needs to stay here, keep the negotiations--from the House, the Senate, the Cabinet of the White House, and the White House staff itself.

The second measure we can take is, each week, through any kind of fight that goes on to get the budgeting done, cut everyone's budget in the House, Senate, and White House's operating budget 5 percent that week. Now, again, holding all the Agencies harmless, but for those who are doing the negotiations, they start feeling the pressure. Not only can you not travel, you can't see your families. You have to stay in continuous session, but your budget is getting cut every week by 5 percent, each week until it gets resolved. Again, the pressure is on the people it should be on, holding harmless the American people who aren't in the middle of this fight in the process. There are ways to solve this--simple, commonsense ways--and I will continue to bring those up again and again because when this shutdown is complete, there will be a fight over another one coming. In the meantime, we need to try to end this loop we are in that destabilizes our system.

Let's do border security. Let's not fight over, ``OK. Let's open up the government, and we will talk about it later.'' Everyone knows that really will not happen. Everyone knows that game. Let's resolve what all the American people know needs to be resolved--basic, functional, real commonsense security, not putting up a big wall across the whole border. No one wants to see a 2,000-mile-long wall. It is not even needed, but in areas where there is a city on both sides of the border, and you literally cross the border within seconds unless there is a barrier there, it makes sense to have a barrier in those locations. It makes sense to put technology in other areas to be able to monitor folks who are illegally crossing the border in other areas. We can do this in a commonsense way. We can do this quickly. Let's get it resolved.

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