Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2026
Floor Speech
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Mr. LEE. I call up my amendment No. 4236 and ask that it be reported by number.
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Mr. LEE. Mr. President, this amendment would strike the earmarks from this bill. In this bill package, there is about $7 billion in earmark spending.
Now, a lot of people like to say: I don't like those other earmarks, but I like my own. So I am going to vote for all of it so they can all stay in there.
Remember, the Republican conference, back in 2010, adopted an earmark moratorium. This was converted into a permanent earmark ban, in 2019, that is still in effect, which shouldn't be ignored.
What do these $7 billion do? Well, among other things, they do a lot, including a whole lot of them in spending on ``woke, wasteful, and unjustified'' spending: for recipients to fund housing and legal aid for illegal aliens; puberty blockers for kids; building EV charging stations, part of the ``green new scam''; subsidize California's disaster rail system; fund infrastructure and renovation projects at the wealthy Met Museum and the Michigan AFL-CIO; a dance festival in Massachusetts; DEI initiatives.
Look, we don't need this. We don't want this. This is what is driving the train toward the $38.5 trillion debt that we are adding to at a rate of $2 trillion a year. It is unacceptable. It must end.
Support my amendment.
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Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I call up my amendment No. 4286 and ask that it be reported by number.
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Mr. LEE. Mr. President, something happened very significant this morning. This morning, it was announced that the Chief Financial Officer of this Agency, USADF, has been charged and simultaneously pled guilty to corruption charges this morning. The Department of Justice just announced it.
Also, we have received word from the Acting Chairman and CEO of USADF a request that we defund this entity because, as he put it, it is trash and, as he put it, it is a corrupt culture of waste, fraud, and abuse. So when the Acting Chairman and CEO of an entity that is getting all this public funding--all these millions of dollars--says defund it because we have a problem here--meanwhile, the DOGE office at the Department of War, today, echoed that and agreed with his assessment-- please, colleagues, join me. This one is not an earmark. This is spending within the bill--spending within the bill where the head of the entity asked us to defund it because the culture within that entity is impossibly corrupt. We must end it. Please support my amendment.
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Mr. LEE. Mr. President, the fact that the acting president and CEO is a DOGE individual doesn't disqualify him from making this statement. It is corruption. Sure, it has been going on since the eighties, but so have a lot of things that are corrupt. We must defund this now. Vote on Motion
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