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Floor Speech

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Mr. WELCH. Mr. President, I totally support the comments of the minority whip.

It is 100 days, and it is time to assess. Whatever you may say about President Trump and the stated goals, there is an obligation to act functionally to achieve those goals. Stating you want an outcome is a long way from implementing a plan and executing a plan to achieve it. And there is no plan. There is absolutely no plan.

Let's talk first about DOGE. DOGE is about, supposedly, getting rid of waste, fraud, and abuse. Now, there is not a single Member of this Congress who is in favor of waste, fraud, and abuse, but if you are going to do that, you look at a Department: What is its goal? How is it achieving it? Where is it coming up short? You do an assessment, and you do a plan.

What DOGE did was essentially get the personnel list and then send out emails to every fifth or sixth person saying: You are fired because you did a lousy job.

So it is not at all on the level. It is not at all on the level. And as a result, the real goal becomes revealed. It is not to eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse. It is, say, to eliminate USAID. It is to eliminate the Department of Education. It is to eliminate the Social Security response team. That is what is going on.

And the challenge for us--and this is bipartisan--is whether we, as an independent branch of government, want to look at what is before our very eyes and address it or simply ignore it.

Let's take the other so-called plan that is going to make us rich, more revenue than we can ever deal with. And that, of course, is the tariffs. The tariffs are going to be seen by historians as the absolute worst economic blunder in the last 100 years.

Whether you are a farmer in Vermont or in Utah or in the Dakotas, these tariffs are hammering you. Most of our farmers in the northern part of the country, we import our fertilizer and we import, in many cases, grain to feed our animals from Canada. This tariff is going to hammer farmers who are already contending with what farmers every year have to contend with: very tight margins, the will of the weather. This is having a real impact on them.

In Vermont, we had roundtables with people from various industries and asked: How are these tariffs going to affect you?

No. 1, what tariffs? What are they today? Supposedly they were 25 percent yesterday. Then they are suspended. Then they are back on. They apply to this part but not that part. No possibility of anybody making a plan in order to run their business.

But across the board--and, by the way, these are folks who came in and are affected by the tariffs. They are not Republicans or Democrats or Independents; they are really folks just trying to make a living. And they may have their political preferences, but what they are talking about is the real-world impact of these crackpot tariffs that are on again and off again with the President.

But some of the folks who spoke: Small business owner Jason Levinthal, founder of J Skis, said:

This is essentially a tax on the consumer.

Something the administration won't acknowledge itself.

Mimi Buttenheim, President of Mad River Distillers:

Tariffs radically affect our manufacturing arm by raising the price of raw materials.

Jen Kimmich, cofounder of The Alchemist Brewery:

We don't know how they're going to affect us, we just know they're going to affect us.

John Lacy, CEO of Burton Snowboards, one of the global enterprises founded in Vermont by Jake Burton and Donna Carpenter:

How can you navigate the playbook if you don't know what the rules of the [road] are?

It is a fair question, and it is a question that the administration, President Trump, feels he has no obligation to answer.

So this goes on and on. You have got the economic issues, the tariffs. You have the attack on the institutions. USAID is a good example, and it is a vulnerable target because there is a lot of misinformation about USAID. A lot of folks think it is about 25 percent of our budget. And I see we have the ranking member of the Foreign Affairs Committee here who knows this better than anyone else. It is like 1 percent of our budget.

It creates, first of all, the alleviation of enormous suffering among many people who are absolutely starving, among many people who need medicine, among many people who need water to help with agriculture, to be able to feed themselves. It is something that had bipartisan support in this Senate Chamber, with many of my Republican colleagues--your colleagues--leading the way for America to make a contribution as the greatest and most wealthy Nation in the world.

That was just shut down, literally. Notices went out: You are fired. Notices went out: Your program is terminated. Notices went out: Turn the ship around and bring the food back.

And the impact of this on these USAID workers who have dedicated their lives to being a representative of our country, doing something beneficial in other countries? They just got the termination notice that they haven't been doing a good job. Obviously, not on the level.

But when I think about the cruelty of the way in which this was done; that in those warehouses where food is stored, the local population who is hired and paid to take the food from the warehouse and deliver it to where those starving children needed the food were fired. And we literally have food rotting in warehouses rather than nourishing families' children.

The same is true with medicine. We won't deliver it. It is over there. It is where it is needed. It can be delivered. But the way in which the Trump administration, with Mr. Musk, is proceeding is to literally take that food away and take that medicine away rather than deliver it. So that is not at all on the level.

There is not, here, an effort to deal with waste, fraud, and abuse. There is an effort here, essentially, to destroy these institutions that have served this country. And I just want to state very clearly that those of us who are appalled by this conduct are all in favor of looking at every program, from SNAP to the Pentagon: How can we do it better? How can we get more for less? How can we get the most out of the folks who are serving in those organizations? But that is not what is going on.

Then there is the next step: the overreach of power; a lawless, in my view--absolutely lawless--abuse of Executive authority. You know, what business is it of Donald Trump what the hiring practices are of an individual private corporation or firm? It is the business to enforce the law, but it is not his business to be able to tell a law firm: We will take contracts away. It is not his business to be able to tell a law firm: Since you had somebody who represented the government in a case against Trump or some Trump person or ally, we are going to punish you and not allow you, in fact, into a court building or to get access to the secure information that is necessary to defend somebody who is in court.

This is a complete overreach and extension by the President, essentially to impose his own will--not enforce the law--but to enforce his will as he arbitrarily wishes.

What sense does it make that because of his vendetta about higher education, that instead of addressing those concerns and having discussions, he literally takes away billions of dollars of research that has gone not just to Harvard, our oldest institution, but the University of Alabama, the University of North Carolina where you have people who, to our benefit, have dedicated their lives to scientific research; that because the United States Government has provided support for research and development--we have had cures for terrible diseases--but if they don't do what Donald Trump says, he will take away grants that actually have legally been transferred to these academic institutions--destroying research--destroying research and development.

It is this arbitrary use of power beyond enforcing the law but having the Trump vision of what he wants be the law. And this brings me to the point that the Minority Whip was making: You know, this is not just a question for each of us as a Member of the U.S. Senate to decide, When has the Executive overreached? It is about the obligation we have in both parties to uphold the constitutional system of checks and balances.

As many people have said, James Madison made the clear point that absolute power is the biggest threat. And if it is in any single branch, it has the capacity to bring down the entire structure of democracy.

Now why is that important? It is important not just because democracy is a form of government we are taught as young people to revere and to be proud of, that we have this oldest democracy in the world; it is because democracy is the tool by which the citizens in Utah and the citizens in Vermont who may have very different points of view on a whole number of important issues have that right to have a seat at the table to have a discussion about, How do you resolve these differences?

And if we don't stand up for that, it means there is going to be a small circle of well-connected people around President Trump who make all those decisions and make it from the framework of what is best for them as opposed to what is best for all of us. That is the real threat here. That is happening.

You know, the fact that the President won't acknowledge so many failures of just--for beginning the tariff policy, and what we are seeing in this economy that is now revolving around this question of tariffs and on whom will they be imposed--what you are seeing is that if you are Apple computer and you are at the inauguration, you can call up the Treasury Secretary, you can call up the President, and you can point out that these tariffs are going to have an enormously negative impact on Apple.

But if you are a farmer in Vermont, if you are a snowboard manufacturer in Vermont and you don't have Secretary Bessent's telephone number on speed dial or the President's, you don't get to make that call, and you will have to live with that enormous impact on your cost structure and on what you have to charge customers and see your market evaporate.

It is as though the President is transforming the economy we have had that has been based on competition--you succeed if you have the best product and the best service--into an economy that is based on access.

Do you have the Treasury Secretary's telephone number so you can make your case? Do you have the President's number so you can make your case? And who knows what conditions the President imposes on whoever it is he is going to give the benefit of his capacity to make an exception for you or for your business.

That is called corruption. And the worst thing that we can do is to inject, as a material factor in the way the economy works, a corruption that is based on your ability to get special treatment because you have made campaign contributions, because you have made certain other concessions, because you looked the other way. That is what is happening right now.

You have got an administration that, in the name of waste, fraud, and abuse, is destroying institutions. You have got an administration that, based on an assertion that tariffs will make us rich, is causing inflation, causing enormous business uncertainty, and is, ultimately, going to lead us into a recession.

You have got an administration that has now weaponized the Justice Department, the FCC, governmental entities where, yes, they have a very important responsibility to enforce the rules and regulations but where their targets are cherry-picked for political reasons. And that is very damaging to the long-term well-being of our country and our democracy.

It is time for this Congress to make an assessment of our obligation to the citizens we represent. When is enough enough? When has the Executive gone too far? When is it that all of us should heed the pleas of the businesses, the enterprises in each of our States about this chaotic, very destructive tariff policy?

When is it we will say ``no more'' to an Executive pushing his weight around with private law firms, private employers, with our universities, and telling them unless they do it his way, they will pay an enormous price in lost governmental funding or access to things that they need?

Mr. President, in my view, 100 days of giving a lot of rope and a lot of license to the Executive is 100 days too many, but it is not too late for us, as Congress, to stand up for the separation of powers, the balance of powers, and the prerogatives of the United States Senate and the United States Congress.

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