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Floor Speech

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Mr. WYDEN.
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Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President and colleagues, the Senate will soon take a vote on the nomination of Michael Faulkender to serve as Deputy Treasury Secretary. I urge my colleagues to oppose the nomination.

I am going to take just a few minutes to explain why he got zero support from Democrats in the Finance Committee, and I am going to start with the big picture.

For the last 2 months, Elon Musk and Donald Trump have let loose a pack of cronies who, in my view, are looting the United States of America. They are violating laws, they are blocking accountability, and they are breaking key programs in ways that are going to hurt a lot of Americans.

All the while, there has been a parade of Trump nominees marching through the Senate, and one after the other they pretend that they know nothing about what I just said. They all swear up and down that they follow the law. Under their watch, everything will be on the level.

The reality is, in nearly every case, it is just not true.

Just yesterday, in the Finance Committee, the nominee to head up Social Security told me that he was not involved in any discussions regarding DOGE personnel at Social Security. I asked him directly. That was his response, and his response was a lie.

The committee had received whistleblower testimony from a senior official who worked at Social Security and has recently left. The whistleblower said this nominee had personally intervened to get key DOGE officials installed at Social Security.

This is happening again and again. Trump nominees show up in the Senate, and they always say: I am a choir boy.

But they are directly involved in the ransacking of the country, and Americans are outraged from coast to coast.

Dr. Faulkender is another example. He has been in the building at Treasury since January 21, working in an unofficial capacity. So he knows what is going on there. He knows that DOGE personnel showed up at Treasury with the intent of violating our constitutional authority over Federal funding. Yet, when he was asked about DOGE's activity at Treasury and at the IRS, he, too, had nothing to say--just a bunch of dodging and ducking.

I asked him, as well, directly whether the President has the authority to impound funds, which is a constitutional breach.

His answer was:

I do not know the legal authority of the President when it comes to impoundment.

However, during a television interview last year, he actually said he supported impoundment and talked about how the President should use it to trample over congressional appropriations and our article I authority.

If confirmed, he will be the No. 2 official at the Department that oversees the IRS, but he had nothing to say about the fact that the administration is intent on violating taxpayer privacy laws and weaponizing the IRS against American taxpayers.

But it wasn't all bobbing and weaving during the hearing. In fact, the most telling moment was when Dr. Faulkender decided to give an awfully revealing answer to a question he probably could have avoided.

Here is what happened.

Everybody understands that the Treasury Department's big job under Donald Trump is giving huge handouts to billionaires and corporations. They plan to pay for it, in part, by slashing Medicaid and kicking tens of millions of Americans off their healthcare.

Senator Warnock, our colleague, asked Dr. Faulkender a pretty simple question.

He asked:

Do you think that it's a good idea to take families off of Medicaid?

The funny thing is nobody would have blamed him for saying that the Treasury doesn't have jurisdiction over Medicaid so he wouldn't have to take a position, but that is not what he said.

Dr. Faulkender went out of his way to defend the Republican plan to slash Medicaid and kick tens of millions of Americans off their healthcare. He answered with the same traditional Republican spin--that it was all about ``self-sufficiency and getting off of government dependency.''

We are talking about a program that covers nearly 40 million kids, half of all kids with special needs, and two-thirds of all nursing home beds in America. Without Medicaid, rural America would become even more of a healthcare desert.

Dr. Faulkender's nonsense about self-sufficiency is basically what I call trickle-down economics for healthcare. It is a talking point that papers over an agenda that benefits the very affluent at the expense of everybody else.

So, colleagues, this is another case of a nominee dodging nearly all the tough questions and misrepresenting his role in what is going on in the Trump administration. The most forthcoming answer we got during his nomination indicated that he is totally on board with the agenda that is going to put people's lives in danger by kicking tens of millions of Americans off their health insurance so that those at the very top, like Elon Musk, can afford bigger yachts and probably some kind of island.

Dr. Faulkender has been at Treasury since January 21. He is already tied up with DOGE. He has already made himself a part of the harm that the Trump administration, through DOGE, is inflicting on the American people. That is why he got zero support from Democrats in committee.

I urge my colleagues to oppose this nomination when the Senate votes on it in a little bit.

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