Trump's First 100 Days

Floor Speech

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Mr. IVEY. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman from California, my colleague from Ohio, and the previous speakers. It is an honor to be here, not just as a Member of Congress, but to be here as a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, especially at a time like this.

I rise today not just with concern, but with alarm. In his first 100 days back in the White House, Donald Trump has unleashed a full-blown assault on America, on our institutions, on our workers, on the rule of law, and on democracy itself. This is not leadership. This is a broken promise.

I will talk a little bit as we go forward about the promises that now President Trump made during the campaign, especially with respect to the economy. He said he was going to put money back in people's pockets, but as we have seen dramatically in the first 100 days, it has been quite the opposite.

I had one friend tell me that his 401(k) had turned into a 101(K) after Trump put his destructive tariffs in place. It has been damaging not just for people who own stocks, not just for people who are small business owners, but for every American across the country. Unfortunately, it looks like it is going to get worse in short order.

I will start first with government workers. The President promised to tackle government waste, but it has been anything but that, as we have seen his administration systematically targeted the Federal workforce, gutting critical agencies, sidelining career professionals, and pushing out civil servants not for failing to do their jobs, but for doing them too well.

I will talk about the waste piece for just a moment here, too. I know they said he is out here trying to cut waste, fraud, and abuse, but we know that is not right because one of the first things he did was fire the investigators who were in charge of ferreting out waste, fraud, and abuse. They are called inspectors general. He fired 18 of them all at once almost on his first day in office, so you know he is not trying to cut back on waste, fraud, and abuse.

What he is trying to do actually is eliminate nonpolitical Federal workers, people who have gotten their positions based on merit, people who are distinguished in their careers, have outstanding experience, great credentials, but he is trying to force them out so he can replace them with people who are politically loyal to him.

I just want to chat a little bit about the firing of these people because I know a lot of folks across the country are not in love with government workers. They think maybe it is a good thing to get rid of government workers, but I am asking people to keep in mind the dire consequences of these terminations.

For example, he terminated people who were running clinical trials at NIH, clinical trials on things like Alzheimer's, cancer, and measles. Take the measles one, for example. I ran into a woman at a church I was attending a few weeks ago. She had a Ph.D., and she was working on a clinical trial in measles. The idea was to figure out how to address the measles outbreak that has just been happening.

On that front, think about this: Basically, measles had been eradicated in the United States. At this point, though, last I heard a few days ago, we have 2,000 people in the United States who are now suffering from measles, and we have actually had two people die--one of them a child--from measles, something that has been eradicated, and we have been addressing for decades now, but it is catching its steam again and starting to kill more people.

The Alzheimer's piece is especially of concern to me. My father died from Alzheimer's, and watching that happen is like ripping your heart out. They had clinical trials going on Alzheimer's which were shut down based on the terminations of the Trump administration.

The thing about clinical trials that you need to remember is it is not like a light switch. You don't just switch it right back on again. When you shut down a clinical trial, some of which have been running for years and have cost thousands, potentially even millions of dollars, you can't just start it right back up again. You have to start over with those. The decision he made to shut down these clinical trials will push back the ability to have cures for some of the most debilitating and dangerous diseases facing humanity today.

Cuts to hospitals is another one. Now, closures of rural and urban hospitals in many instances are going to be a result of the Medicaid cuts that they are talking about making right now, and that is not just President Trump, that is some of my House Republican colleagues here, too.

Make no mistake: That is going to lead to hospitals closing in the places where they are needed most. I just read an op-ed over the weekend about a doctor who was working in a rural area, and his hospital was dead center between hospitals that are 200 miles apart, so if his hospital has to shut down, you would have to drive 100 miles each way to get to another hospital. He talked about the emergency surgery that they had performed once when there was an accident near where his hospital was located. If they hadn't had the hospital there and been able to provide the emergency treatment that they provided, those people would have died. He is talking about closing these hospitals down.

Make sure you understand, too, for many areas, this is the only access to medical care that those communities have. Not only that, those hospitals are economic engines for those communities because for many of them, those are the jobs in those communities that the people turn to and need the most.

Schools. Terminating title I funding or cutting it back to the extent they have talked about I have been told could lead to the shutdown of a number of schools, not just in urban areas, but in rural areas, as well because the title I funding goes to teachers who are teaching at low- income schools, based on the formulas that they use to make those determinations.

You are going to have teachers being lost, teachers who were terminated in the schools and districts where they are the most needed. In many of these areas, those are the schools that are still trying to catch up from the losses that were caused during the COVID outbreak. We shouldn't be shutting these down. We should be expanding the resources that they have, but those title I schools are at risk.

Firing veterans. When they fire these government workers, one thing they don't seem to remember is that 30 percent of all government workers across the country are veterans. Keep in mind, too, these aren't just people in the D.C. metropolitan area. Eighty percent of government workers live outside of the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area. There are jurisdictions and States and communities across the country, providing services that those communities need. They won't miss the water until the well runs dry.

Mr. Speaker, I will stop with this one, just on the government cuts piece. There have been cuts for victims of crime. There are VOCA cuts and VAWA cuts. VOCA stands for Victims of Crime Act, VAWA stands for Violence Against Women Act. These are the type of funds, grants that have been making a difference in law enforcement across the country and in fights against things like domestic violence and sexual abuse, and he is making the cuts there, too.

It is not just there. I will chat a little bit about the rule of law issue here, too. The President promised to uphold the law, as he must do. All of us take an oath when we are sworn in--the President, all of us in Congress, I even took one when I was elevated to become a Federal prosecutor. He is not following that oath, though.

As a matter of fact, we have seen this administration illegally deny due process rights despite a Supreme Court order to return my constituent, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, back to the United States.

Just a moment on that. Kilmar was deported from the United States even though a judge had given an order saying that he could not be sent to El Salvador until another determination was made. Not only did they send him to El Salvador in violation of that order, they sent him to one of the worst jails in the world, which houses MS-13, which is the exact group that that judge said he was supposed to be kept away from. That is where they sent him.

The Supreme Court said: You need to facilitate his return. The Trump administration has made no efforts whatsoever to do that. As a matter of fact, President Trump was sitting in the Oval Office with President Bukele, the President of El Salvador, and they were joking about it.

Last week, when President Trump did an interview, he said, yeah, he could just pick up the phone and have him brought back, but he is not going to do it, despite the Supreme Court order. There have been other orders, too, that they are ignoring and not following.

This isn't just a problem for Mr. Garcia. Think about that 4-year-old child who was deported last week, the one with stage IV cancer who was sent out of the United States with no medicine, no chance to talk to his doctor. Is that what America has become? Apparently that is what Donald Trump thinks the people want.

I have to tell you, that is absolutely the wrong path for this Nation to be taking. I know we want to deal with the immigration issue, but we can't do it at the expense of children, and we can't do it at the expense of violating basic due process rights.

Guess what, Mr. Speaker? The judges who have told him that are not just the Supreme Court but sometimes conservative Republican judges like Judge Wilkinson in the Fourth Circuit based in Richmond. He is one of the most conservative judges in the country and a Reagan appointee. He chastised the Trump administration for violating basic due process. Basically, he said it could not be more obvious than this, that a person should have a chance to have his day in court before something as drastic as deportation happens to him.

Not only did Trump ignore that but he talked about deporting American citizens when he was sitting there with the President of El Salvador. I raised concerns about that. I had Republican friends who got on me about it. Guess what? The House Committee on the Judiciary and the Committee on Homeland Security had votes. The Democrats proposed amendments that said let's make it illegal, let's make a ban on deporting American citizens. Every Republican on both committees voted against that ban. That is where we are right now.

Let me talk a little bit about tariffs. The President promised to make our lives more affordable. He said America was too expensive. Yet, his tariffs have sent the Nation into a tailspin. Mr. Speaker, I guess you could say there are times when tariffs might make sense, but he did it the exact worst way possible that it could be done. He did tariffs on all countries and on all products at the exact same time.

There is no way that can work, and there is no reason to do it because sometimes tariffs are placed on things that we don't even make in the United States. We don't grow bananas. We don't grow coffee. We don't grow chocolate. Why is he imposing tariffs on those items?

Then, the tariffs he imposed on some of our best allies, like Canada, disrupted the automobile market. They are still struggling to try to get their way. He backed off of the giant tariffs that he put in, but he left 10 percent tariffs in place.

We are still in the middle of one of the worst trade wars we have ever seen in human history based on--what is it?--140 percent now with China. At some point, it is going to be zillions, I suppose, with those sorts of tariffs.

The bottom line is it is going to take the country into a recession, and we know it.

I hope that we get a sense of how to pull this back together. I saw the President making comments, and he doubled down on them the other day. This is the one about maybe kids will have to get just two dolls instead of 30 dolls or something. Maybe it will cost a little bit more. I guess that was his best ``bah, humbug'' imitation to sort of make light of the fact that these tariffs that he has put in place are going to make things more expensive for the American people.

That is in contrast and the exact opposite of what he promised to do when he ran for office and was elected. That is not right.

President Trump, Elon Musk, and their billionaire buddies have pushed a budget that is nothing short of a war on working families. While Trump and House Republicans push for new handouts for the wealthy, we have massive cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and SNAP. The same man who claims to champion the forgotten American is cutting healthcare for the disabled, for children, and for seniors.

This is an administration that rules not with hope but with fear, and it is using the machinery of government not to serve the people but to punish the President's perceived enemies, including those who brought January 6 rioters to justice. I will take just a moment on that.

He actually forced out the Department of Justice prosecutors who did nothing but handle cases that they were supposed to handle. I guess he is going to say that they were mishandled in some way. Guess what? The prosecution of the January 6 rioters resulted in more than 1,000 convictions. My recollection is there might have been two or three acquittals during that period, but everything else was a conviction.

Let's say even more people have been acquitted. That doesn't mean these prosecutors did anything wrong. It certainly doesn't mean that they should be forced out of their positions.

It is the same thing with the FBI agents. They sent over a list of 5,000 FBI agents to the Department of Justice. Guess what the common denominator was? They had all worked on January 6 investigations. Instead of our FBI agents focusing on terrorism or organized crime, they have to look over their shoulders because they know the President is coming after them.

He has the Department of Justice weaponized not to go after the criminals but to go after career FBI agents who have done nothing but serve the public and fight crime for the American people.

Mr. Speaker, let me be clear. As we move past 100 days, I will never stop fighting for those I represent against the abuses of this administration. We are not just battling over budgets. We are battling over the future of the country we wish to have--not a government for the wealthy and well-connected but a government that works for all people.

This is not business as usual. House Democrats are standing up and fighting back.

Mr. Speaker, I commend my colleagues for tonight and for pulling this together and doing such an outstanding job in moving this forward. I am thankful for the people out there, the people in communities across the country who have come to rallies. Some are Democrats; some aren't. Some are Republicans; some aren't. They are coming out to express their concerns about the direction this Nation is taking.

Mr. Speaker, I thank them for doing that and for making sure they remember that they have the ultimate power. They are the ones who determine what happens with this democracy, and now is the time for them to stand up and for us to stand with them.

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