Government Funding
Floor Speech
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. UDALL. Mr. President, I rise to call on the President to stop holding the government hostage and trying to force taxpayers to pay for his border wall--a wall that would be ineffective and wasteful and that is rejected by the American people.
President Trump said he is ``proud''--that is his word that he used-- to shut down the government. He is proud to force hundreds of thousands of people across this country to miss their hard-earned paychecks. He is proud to shutter critical services. He is proud to try and extort the American people into paying for a wall they don't support. This Trump shutdown is nothing to be proud of. It is a national disgrace, and it is time to end this recklessness.
I join with my Democratic colleagues today in calling on the Republican leaders to do their jobs and reopen the government right now. The American people don't support Trump's border wall, and they don't support this Trump shutdown. The funding bills that are being held up and used by the President as a bargaining chip have broad bipartisan support. The Democrats in both Chambers want to pass these appropriations bills now. Yet, as the Democrats stand ready to reopen the government, President Trump plans to address the Nation tonight to tell us again why he is proud to keep the government shut down.
We will likely hear more bizarre talk tonight about what we need at the border from a President who doesn't know the first thing about the border. Once again, we will likely hear blatant lies about immigrants, about our border, and about our border communities. The American people are tired of this President's assault on the truth. They are tired of having their lives and livelihoods caught up in this President's inability to rise to the office he holds. No address from the Oval Office will change that.
We need the Republican leadership in this Chamber to muster the political will to stand up to the President and get Federal employees back to work and critical services restored. We are now on day 18 of this shutdown--the second longest period that the government has been shuttered since 1980. We have already begun to see real-life consequences for families all across the Nation, and my home State of New Mexico is one of the States that is being hit the hardest by the President's temper tantrum, by his act of political extortion.
In New Mexico, roughly 5,800 Federal workers are either furloughed or are working without pay. These aren't just numbers, these are real people. They are real people who are wondering how they will make their mortgages or rent payments or will feed their families. A Federal employee in Albuquerque wrote to my office to tell me how this shutdown is affecting her and her family.
She wrote to me to ``go on the record that I am not one of the Federal employees the President is touting . . . as wanting to be out of work, without a paycheck, until he gets his wall.''
She had an important message for the Republican leadership of the Senate:
The Senate does not work for the President--it is supposed to represent the citizens of the United States . . . . Federal employees do not want to stay out of work; we want to go back to work and get paid.
She ended:
This is not our fight--just his.
Economic anxiety is pervasive in all corners of the State. In fact, New Mexico was recently ranked as the most vulnerable to the impacts of the shutdown because of our significant Federal workforce and the importance of the Federal Government to our economy. As the ranking member of the Subcommittee on the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies, I am acutely aware of how the lapse in appropriations is affecting the Agencies that are funded in our bill and the services they provide. These include the Department of the Interior, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Indian Health Service.
As the ranking member of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, I am especially cognizant of how this shutdown is hurting Native communities. For Tribes across Indian Country, the shutdown's consequences are particularly dire after their going more than 2 weeks without Federal funds. Simply put, Tribes report that Federal programs that are critical to health and public safety are grinding to a halt and that lives are in danger.
In New Mexico, the shutdown has left the Mescalero Apache Tribe's reservation--larger in size than the entire city of Houston, TX--with only one on-duty police officer, which would be unacceptable even under normal circumstances. Yet, due to a huge winter storm that left my State under heavy snowfall and subfreezing temperatures, that lone officer is responsible for not only responding to domestic violence and child welfare but also to snow-related accidents and emergencies across 720 square miles--all because furloughed road crews aren't clearing the snow and ice from the reservation's roads. One elder already died because he was unable to make it to dialysis. Sadly, Mescalero's experiences are not uncommon.
The Yurok Tribe of California will soon have to close its courts, curtailing the Tribe's efforts to rein in the opioid epidemic. Urban Indian Health Programs in Baltimore and Boston are days away from closing completely, leaving Native families in these cities without support. The Yankton Sioux Tribe in South Dakota was just informed that its Indian Health Service unit must begin reducing services.
The 276 Tribes that depend on the USDA's Food Distribution Programs on Indian reservations--a program that feeds nearly 100,000 American Indians and Alaska Natives--are also faced with reliving the 2013 shutdown crisis, when food rotted in locked warehouses while hungry families gathered outside--all because the President and some extreme Members of his party refuse to do their jobs and keep the government open.
It is disgraceful, and it is dangerous. Every day that the President continues to treat Tribal health and public safety programs like hostages for political gain, it endangers families across Indian Country. The United States has trust and treaty obligations that Tribes obtained in exchange for ceding millions of acres of land. The consequences of the President's outright disregard for treaty obligations are real. The consequences of the Senate majority leader's inaction are real. The consequences of the Republicans' unwillingness to stand up for Tribes in their States--to stand up for basic humanity and common sense--are also real.
We are talking about people's lives and the fundamental obligation of our Nation to honor its commitment to Native Americans. It is really that simple. We all know how pressing these problems are. The impacts of the Trump shutdown are far and wide. There are thousands of stories across the Nation. Let me tell you another from my home State of New Mexico.
A local Santa Fe small business--a construction company, Sarcon Construction Corporation--is ready to begin an $8.4 million project to build two new hangars at the Santa Fe Municipal Airport. This 32,000- square-foot project will generate $650,000 in local tax revenue and will employ 75 to 100 people. Many of those people are literally unemployed now while waiting for this project to begin. This project is a big deal for my home city of Santa Fe.
Do you know why the project is stalled? Sarcon can't get the necessary approval from the Federal Aviation Administration because of the Trump shutdown, as the FAA personnel who are responsible for its approval are furloughed.
This shutdown has real consequences for real people, especially for people like those unemployed New Mexicans who are ready and eager to work but who are unable to because of our President's tantrum. The President says he can ``relate'' to Federal workers who can't pay bills during the shutdown, but in the next breath, he blithely assumes they will ``make adjustments'' and be fine.
As he has demonstrated time and again, this President cannot and does not relate to the struggles of everyday Americans who are hurt by his policies. He cannot and does not relate to Federal employees who live paycheck to paycheck or to Santa Fe construction workers who wait anxiously to get back to work. He has shown us time and again that his policies and behavior are heartless and that he is unfit for the office he holds. I will say it again. The President told the American people on camera that he is ``proud to shut down the government.'' The responsibility falls squarely on him and now on his Republican collaborators in the Senate.
The impacts reach every corner of our Nation. His shutdown has already had real impacts on our Nation's public lands, including our most iconic national parks.
Many national parks, such as Bandelier National Monument and Valles Caldera National Preserve in New Mexico, remain closed. Restrooms have been closed for 2 weeks, trash has accumulated, and roads have not been plowed. For 2 weeks, we have heard horror stories of poor sanitation and public safety issues at national parks because of the shutdown, including overflowing toilets, vandalism, and other resource damage. In Big Bend National Park, because of the lack of emergency services, Good Samaritans had to rescue a hiker who fell and broke his leg while hiking on Christmas Eve.
In fact, the effects have been so devastating that, in a legally questionable move, this administration just made the unprecedented decision to dip into the park's entrance fees to fund basic services at a handful of parks across the country. These are fees that Congress authorizes the Park Service to collect to pay for deferred maintenance projects and other critical needs, not to take the place of appropriated funds. We still don't know which parks will be affected by the administration's decision, but I fully expect this bandaid approach to fall far short of protecting our treasured national resources or restoring services to the public in a meaningful way. It is merely a cynical attempt to get the problems caused by the President's shutdown off the front page of the newspaper.
If we want to reopen the parks, there is a simple solution: Pass the Interior appropriations bill without delay, and we can reopen the entire National Park System. In the meantime, reopening some park sites but not others will not help many gateway communities that depend on parks and public lands to provide needed revenue and that are facing economic crisis as this shutdown wears on.
The National Parks Conservation Association estimates that in January, visitors spent an average of $20 million per day in nearby communities. That is real and vital revenue. In New Mexico alone, national parks generated more than 1,700 jobs in 2017 and created more than $140 million in economic output for my State. I can tell you that New Mexico can't afford for these sites to be closed.
It is not just the parks that are at risk. Fire prevention programs funded by the U.S. Forest Service are being deferred during the shutdown, despite a recordbreaking fire season. Environmental protection programs are suffering. EPA has halted most activities related to hazardous waste cleanups under its national Superfund Program. Enforcement activities against polluters have ground to a halt, as have Federal permitting efforts. States aren't receiving funds to operate their regulatory programs.
Even our Nation's cherished national museums are shuttered. On January 2, the Smithsonian ran out of funds and closed its doors, preventing more than 110,000 visitors a day from accessing its prized collections. Its next-door neighbor, the National Gallery of Art, is also closed, leaving school groups, families, and everyday citizens out in the cold.
Again, there is a simple solution to stop this damage. All we have to do is pass an appropriations bill and reopen the government.
I want to end where I began. The President has nothing to be ``proud'' of here. President Trump needs to stop holding Federal programs hostage to his demands for a wasteful, ineffective, and destructive wall and end this shutdown now. We can do it easily. The Senate can immediately take up and pass H.R. 21--the appropriations bill passed by the House last week. This should cause no controversy. These are bills drafted by Republicans with broad bipartisan support. In fact, the Interior bill is the exact same legislation that was passed by this Chamber by a vote of 92 to 6 last August--a margin that would override a veto of the bill, I might add.
I call on Leader McConnell and Members of his party to let us get to work. We need to do what is right and immediately take up and pass the House bill today. There is no reason this shutdown must go on one day longer. The lives and livelihoods of everyday Americans hang in the balance.
As a final comment, I will say that I so much appreciate working with Senator Leahy, who is vice chairman of the Appropriations Committee and who I know feels, sees, and hears from all of his Appropriations members how concerning this situation is.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Source