Appropriations

Floor Speech

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Mrs. MURRAY. Mr. President, earlier tonight, we voted to pass five crucial funding bills while splitting off the DHS bill so that Congress is forced to reckon with the horrific killings we have all witnessed. And negotiations can continue to secure the reforms that Americans are demanding. This is the commonsense path forward the Democrats have been laying out all week. We have a lot more work to do on DHS, and I will have a lot more to say as those negotiations now continue.

I want to focus right now on the 5 bills we just passed, which fund 95 percent of the remaining Federal budget. From the start of this process, I made clear we needed to tear up Trump's budget and reassert Congress' power of the purse to make the voices of our constituents heard.

These are not the bills I would write on my own. There is much more I would want to do to rein in Trump, and there is much more I want to do invest in our communities.

There is always more work to do. And that is especially true when Republicans control the House, the Senate, and the White House. But these bills show that when Democrats roll up their sleeves and demand a seat at the table and drive the hardest bargain we can, we do have the power to reject devastating cuts proposed by President Trump, protect programs that families rely on, and take power back from this out-of- control administration.

Truly, the difference between the bills we have in front of us and President Trump's absurd budget request or the House Republican budget that cuts like there is no tomorrow or another yearlong CR that enables all kinds of misuse and corruption by Trump is night and day. Because Democrats were at the table, there are real meaningful wins that we secured in this package, real funding that will help families who are struggling to get by, real progress to reject some of the sabotage Trump has done to our economy and our standing in the world, and real accountability that will help stop Trump and Vought from stealing from our States.

Take a look at the Labor-H bill. Last year, Trump did everything he could to sabotage lifesaving medical research that was happening across the country. He fired thousands of Federal researchers. He froze critical research midstudy, and he held up billions of dollars that should have been going to researchers nationwide, including in Washington State. Work on cancer treatments, Alzheimer's, diabetes, heart disease, and much more, all of that was put in grave jeopardy.

If that weren't enough, Trump proposed taking an ax to medical research with a whopping 40-percent cut.

Now, the bill that we just passed, we said: No. We are not going to do that. Instead of slashing medical research funding by 40 percent, we are going to invest nearly half a billion dollars more. It rejects Trump's plan to gut NIH funding. It, once again, rejects his illegal plan to set a cap that would devastate biomedical research institutes across the country, and it rejects Russ Vought's scheme to have NIH reward all its multiyear grants in one lump sum, something that would mean thousands of fewer grants that were rewarded and thousands of fewer chances to discover medical breakthroughs.

Protecting NIH funding is a huge deal for researchers across the country, including in my home State of Washington where places like UW, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, and so many others are leading the way on medical research that save lives.

Now the Trump administration has also attacked our public health infrastructure in all kinds of ways. Earlier this month, his administration came this close to outright canceling billions in funding for mental healthcare and substance use prevention and treatment before the outcry forced them to reverse course.

Well, our bill rejects President Trump's asks to rubberstamp his public health sabotage. Instead, it doubles down on lifesaving public health investments. It rejects Trump's efforts to slash opioid response funds. It rejects his proposal to chop the CDC in half. It rejects his call to end programs like title X, the teen pregnancy program, essential HIV initiatives, and more.

In another sign of just how out of touch Trump is, we have seen him attack childcare, trying to rip out a cornerstone of our economy regardless of how many kids and working parents it would hurt and regardless of how many small businesses it would send spiraling. Trump also tried to eliminate preschool development grants. Our bill sustains this funding, and it increases funding for programs like Head Start and the child care and development block grant.

Make no mistake, this was an uphill battle given the really tough funding constraints we faced this year, but I fought hard, and we got this done.

This bill also rejects Trump's dream of slashing public education funding and instead provides a bit more for our K-through-12 schools.

All told, we rejected $12 billion in proposed cuts at the Department of Education and President Trump's request to abolish the Department. President Trump wanted to slash the maximum Pell grant by over $1,000, and we said: Absolutely not.

Right now, we are still learning new details about how Trump and his DOGE flunkies misused Americans' Social Security information and did untold damage to the Social Security Administration. Every American should be outraged by the way this administration has tried to sabotage Social Security, and I made sure that our bill increases funding so SSA can start to repair some of the damage--and that is just in the L-HHS bill.

In the T-HUD bill, Democrats refused to go along with Trump's deep cuts to rental assistance programs. Instead of letting our billionaire President kick millions of Americans out of their homes, in this bill, we are investing over $4 billion more in rental assistance to help families keep a roof over their heads.

Instead of Trump's plan to saw the Department of Housing and Urban Development in half, we secured a historic $7.2 billion increase that will help our families stay in their homes and build more affordable housing and address homelessness across the country. This bill provides $366 million more for homeless assistance grants.

We rejected Trump's push to zero out programs that help our low- income families with legal assistance when they face eviction and give people a hand up by helping them improve their financial security and job skills. Trump even wanted to eliminate several programs that support affordable housing and community development.

This bill says no to all of that. It says that we are not going to stop making progress, and we are not going to stop building affordable housing and critical infrastructure in our communities.

It also includes tens of millions of dollars I worked hard to secure for affordable housing projects in communities across Washington State.

Make no mistake, there is way more we need to do to tackle the affordable housing and homelessness crisis. This is an issue that is always top of mind for me as a Senator from the State of Washington. But every bit of progress we can get is progress we must take.

When it comes to transportation, we were able to increase funding for air safety. We secured crucial investments for highways and bridges, ports, and more. We rejected the House Republicans' plan to zero out funding for Amtrak, making sure to meet the full Amtrak funding request so our trains could keep running safely and on time.

We also rejected the House Republicans' proposal to slash funding for capital investment grants by an unthinkable 98 percent. Washington State and many States rely on these capital investment grants to fund many of their transit projects that really matter to their communities.

Decimate our Federal investment in public transit? Not on my watch. Instead, we secured $1.7 billion for CIG, and we took new steps to specify which projects to fund at which amounts. For example, this bill sets aside $100 million for light rail on the I-5 bridge for the Interstate Bridge Replacement Program and $82 million for bus rapid transit in Spokane. Both projects, I have been fighting for, for a very long time.

The guardrails that we secured for CIG are one of several updates we fought for throughout these bills, to protect those funds from political interference if Trump and Vought were to try to rob our communities again.

The FSGG bill protects some crucial investments in our communities. We rejected Trump's plan to slash funding for the Small Business Administration by 40 percent. We rejected Trump's dream of eliminating election security grants. We rejected his proposal to decimate the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund. That is the CDFI Fund, and it helps our communities take on all sorts of challenges, like opening childcare centers or providing health services or building affordable housing or growing small businesses. If Trump had his way, that would have been cut by 60 percent, but he didn't have his way. We worked to maintain the CDFI Fund at the current level, and we made sure it would be adequately staffed so Trump can't try to sabotage that work with mass firings again.

We also took an important step to prevent Washington, DC, from not being able to spend its own taxpayer dollars again after House Republicans completely shortchanged our Capital last year.

The Defense bill continues crucial investments and rejects President Trump's dangerous proposal to further alienate our closest allies and defund important programs that keep our country safe.

We refused Trump's pitch to abandon our allies and eliminate funding for Ukraine and the Baltic Security Initiative. We rejected the House Republicans' cuts to the Taiwan Security Cooperation Initiative. We rejected a proposal from Trump to cut defense medical research by 40 percent. We refused Trump's request for hundreds of millions of dollars to support his dangerous efforts to deploy our military against our citizens.

This bill also includes a much-needed pay boost for our servicemembers and vets. It invests in critical infrastructure and repairs at bases across our country, including at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard.

Lastly, the S-FOPS bill is a compromise piece of legislation that rejects Trump's decimation of our foreign assistance Agencies and programs. It includes some tough cuts that I don't support, but it does protect essential investments and reaffirms that there is, in fact, a large, bipartisan majority in Congress that continues to believe our investments abroad are smart and make America safer.

This bill rebuffs Trump's vision for a smaller America in a more chaotic world. It provides $19 billion more in funding than President Trump requested and includes $9.4 billion for global health programs, more than double what Trump requested.

It protects investments in nutrition programs, in reproductive health programs, for global vaccination efforts that Trump sought to outright eliminate, and to combat HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria.

It restores funding Trump canceled for economic and development assistance projects tackling issues like education, water and sanitation, food security, including through university partnerships in red States and blue States that Trump had eliminated, and more.

It rejects his efforts to eliminate all funding for the United States to have a seat at the table at the U.N. and many other international organizations.

It rejects the closure of USAID, the U.S. Agency for Global Media and its grantees, and other independent entities.

Critically, this bill includes new transparency and oversight requirements to close loopholes that were abused by the Trump administration and to help ensure these funds are used as Congress intended.

All told, these five bills we passed reject President Trump's and House Republicans' worst ideas to defund programs that Americans actually count on, and they reject every single new and extreme far- right policy rider that was put on the table.

But, as I mentioned at the top, these bills also do one other critical thing that is really important: They reassert Congress' power over spending. That is really important, and it is something that has guided my thinking at every step of these negotiations.

We have now passed 11 of the 12 funding bills for the year here in the Senate, and the enactment of each of these bills takes power back from this corrupt President. Unlike the yearlong CR that passed last March, these bills provide literally hundreds upon hundreds of specific funding levels and directives that this administration must now, by law, follow. Is that the answer to all of this administration's corruption? No. But it is meaningful--and, boy, does it matter. That means that President Trump and his Cabinet Secretaries will not have the legal authority again to cut or entirely defund programs Congress-- all of us--funded just to free up taxpayer dollars for their own priorities. It means Russ Vought does not again have the legal authority to pick and choose what projects to fund, robbing blue States of funding and using Federal dollars for political retribution.

No doubt, there is a lot more I would have liked to do in these bills to rein in an out-of-control administration. While I wish Republicans would have been willing to do more on that front, these bills do take a big step forward to ensure that Congress, not Trump and not any President, decides how our taxpayer dollars get spent.

Now, I said earlier that these bills are not what I would have written on my own, but I do want to underscore that they are not even close to what the President wanted if he had his way. But in this country--in this country--our budgets are not written by Presidents, and we are not governed by Kings. We are governed by people like the moms and dads back home in my State whom I hear from every day and whom I fight for. Thanks to article I of our Constitution, it was those families and this former preschool teacher--someone you might refer to as just a mom in tennis shoes--who had the final say on how these taxpayer dollars got spent.

That is the beauty of America. The people elect this Congress and their representatives--preschool teachers, doctors, farmers, lawyers, and even astronauts. We all come together, and we--Congress--decide how to fund America's budget, not the guy in the White House. Now, before I wrap up, I would like to again acknowledge my colleagues across the Capitol who came to the table with us to do the hard work of hammering these bills out.

Getting these funding bills written and passed is not simple, even under the best of conditions. But it is important that we were able to come together and write full-year bills that reassert our congressional power of the purse and protect many investments that your families rely on.

So I want to thank my counterparts: Chair Collins, Chair Cole, Ranking Member DeLauro, and all of their staff for the endless work on all of these packages.

And I also want to thank our subcommittee leaders: Senators Baldwin and Capito on L-HHS, Senator Gillibrand and Senator Hyde-Smith on T- HUD, Senator Reed and Senator Hagerty on FSGG, Senator Coons and Senator McConnell on Defense, and Senator Schatz and Senator Graham on S-FOPS.

And I want to thank their counterparts in the House as well: Representatives DeLauro and Aderholt, Clyburn and Womack, Hoyer and Joyce, McCollum and Calvert, and Frankel and Diaz-Balart.

Of course, our work is not done. There is always more work to do to hold this administration accountable, including the work Democrats have been demanding to be part of the DHS funding bill.

We pushed hard to force Republicans to join us at the table on this because it is plain as day to Americans across the country that ICE and CBP have gotten out of control. We have seen with our own eyes how citizens and peaceful protestors and legal observers are being not just harassed but assaulted and detained and even killed by Trump's agents.

The killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti really shock the conscience. They demand action. They demand accountability and justice. Democrats are insisting that happens.

And it is a good thing that at least some Republicans are finally listening to the American people who are outraged by what we are all seeing, and we are fed up with the insane lies we have heard from this administration.

Now they need to join with us to finalize a serious deal that holds DHS accountable. I will be pushing very hard to make sure we secure commonsense solutions that actually meet this moment and take the reins away from Stephen Miller and Secretary Noem.

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