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Floor Speech

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Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, I want to thank my colleagues Senator Murphy and Senator Kaine for very strong speeches, and I look forward very much to working with them in this fight.

My colleagues have raised a host of important issues that I want to touch on, and I am going to start with the big picture of what is going on in America as the Senate careens toward a budget showdown.

Donald Trump, as of today, seems to consider himself royalty. Elon Musk seems to believe he calls the shots. They are trampling over the Constitution and violating laws as they try to rip apart so much of what makes America special, and they are clearing the way for financial predators and financial scammers to steal from innocent Americans.

They are gutting medical research. Days after the deadliest airplane crash on American soil in decades and when more plane crashes seem to be happening by the hour, they fire hundreds of people who work on airline safety.

They are slashing the university system, which is the envy of the world and a huge source of economic growth and opportunity in America. They fired hundreds of people who manage our nuclear arsenal because whomever in DOGE ordered those fired didn't seem to have any idea what the Department of Energy does.

The national parks closed because they don't have enough staff, and that is going to be a disaster for rural communities that depend on tourism. Farmers missed payments they are owed. Nobody I know voted for this chaos.

Now, I heard firsthand from Oregonians this past weekend at townhall meetings. Thousands of Oregonians, according to the press, were in attendance. They shared their real fears and legitimate concerns about how this slash-and-burn approach we are seeing from Trump and Musk is a recipe for a lower quality of life in America and people will lose their lives as a result of these attacks on healthcare and medical research.

Unfortunately, there has barely been a peep from Republicans. In fact, I have heard more support for Trump than criticism of this lawlessness from the other side, and it is business as usual here in the Senate.

What is so important to my colleagues on the other side that they are letting Trump and Musk get away with this destruction? It is another round of breaks for billionaires and big corporations. That, colleagues, is the Republican prize at the end of this process. That is Trump's plan to pay back his supporters who bought the election for him.

Now for some specifics. The centerpiece of the plan is extending his 2017 tax law at a cost of more than $4 trillion. Ultrawealthy individuals who rake in millions each year would get tax breaks of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Families who live paycheck to paycheck, as my colleagues have been talking about this afternoon, would be lucky to get enough to cover groceries for a week. What an outrageous imbalance.

Trump and Republicans want typical Americans to be satisfied with peanuts compared to the growing fortunes of Elon Musk and Trump's other billionaire donors, and it is not just a bunch of extensions. Trump wants even more breaks for big, profitable corporations. Senate Republicans want new giveaways to the ultrawealthy.

How would it be paid for? By booting tens of millions of Americans off their health insurance, increasing child hunger, laying off hundreds of thousands of manufacturing workers, and raising the cost of living here.

The Republican chair of the House Budget Committee had a whole list of destructive proposals a few weeks ago. Dozens of pages long, item after item, it looked like the kind of plan you would design if your goal was to wipe out the middle class in America and push tens of millions of families into poverty.

But this was a real document from a Republican committee chair. A couple of lowlights stuck out to us on the Senate Finance Committee. Trump and Republicans want to take a wrecking ball to the Medicaid Program. It is a devastating prospect for tens of millions of Americans, and I heard about it in Oregon all this weekend.

Medicaid pays for two out of three nursing home beds. Where do American families turn when nursing homes no longer accept Medicaid due to these Republican cuts? What my colleagues are saying is who is going to take care of our parents and our grandparents?

Medicaid covers 30 million kids. That includes half of all American kids with special needs. Cuts to Medicaid will set these kids back for the rest of their lives. Hospitals, nursing homes, other providers in rural communities all over America barely hang on. They depend on Medicaid. If the Republican cuts go through, rural America is going to become a healthcare desert.

The clean energy tax cuts, which I worked on for a full decade, are another disaster in the making. Republicans are looking at wiping out a host of tax incentives for clean energy to pay for a big chunk of their handouts to the top.

Nobody is rooting harder for Republicans to succeed on this than the Chinese Government. That is because if Republicans follow through and gut the clean energy tax credits that we passed in 2022, it will be a total surrender to China on clean energy. Hundreds of thousands of American jobs would be destroyed. Energy prices will jump, and that will hurt working families and small businesses.

The jobs and investment we have attracted to America over the last few years, that goes to China and other countries that win the clean energy arms race at our expense.

If you look at that document from the House Budget Committee chair, it is one item after another that is going to clobber typical families and communities across the land. They are looking at a tax increase on single moms. They are considering a tax increase that will raise the cost of owning a home. They are considering cuts to infrastructure that will hurt local economies. They are even considering taxing scholarships for kids looking to go to college.

The only people who won't feel the pain of these hardships are the ultrawealthy, people like Donald Trump and Elon Musk. There is a game of hide the ball happening here in the Senate, with this first resolution that hides all the unpopular plans in the second bill that comes down the pike.

Over in the House of Representatives, they are trying to cram it all into one bill. In the end, the process here in Congress won't really matter to the people whose lives are made worse by the painful cuts Republicans are preparing to inflict on the country.

The reality is, this agenda goes hand in hand with the lawlessness we are seeing from Elon Musk and Donald Trump. My view is, this amounts to pillaging the government. They are breaking vital programs at Agencies, and there is no sign they care about the people who are hurt so greatly along the way.

Donald Trump even admits out in the open that it is causing pain--his words, not mine. And here in the Senate, Republicans are getting ready to add to the cuts, and they are getting ready to give even more tax handouts to the top: Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and the billionaire donors who support them.

As my colleagues have said this afternoon so eloquently, we are going to shine a light on this floor on the destructive agenda of the Republicans as the debate continues. The American people do not support what is happening here in the Senate or what Donald Trump and Elon Musk are doing to their government. We are going to do everything we can to stop that.

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