Patty Murray

Madam President, Procedure · 20 wordswe have our work cut out for us as we work to fund the government for the coming fiscal year.Procedure Claims · 33 wordsAs costs for our families go up and up and up, the President wants a $1\1/2\ trillion war budget, ¹and he wants to cut programs working people depend on to pay for it. Positioning · 3 wordsNo. No way.Positioning Claims · 54 wordsAnd as his disastrous war with Iran rages on, Trump is even asking for another $70 billion on top of that to bankroll the war.² It is really hard to imagine more backward funding priorities, especially as so many families today are struggling and being hurt by the cuts to healthcare and food aid. Positioning · 11 wordsCongress is not an ATM to fund Trump’s disastrous wars abroad, PositioningPromise · 20 wordsso, as I have said many times, we need to rip up the President’s budget and write a new one. Procedure · 8 wordsI have been very clear from the start: ProcedurePromise · 42 wordsWe absolutely must prioritize helping families and lowering costs as we do that, and that means rejecting the President’s astronomical defense request and instead delivering significantly more funding for our nondefense budget so we can invest in helping people here at home. Claims · 109 wordsIt is clear that we will definitely need more time to get this done and reach bipartisan agreement on the funding levels, just as we have done in the Senate for the last 3 years, Vague promisewhich then allows us to draft bipartisan bills for fiscal year 2027. So I am very glad we were able to craft a bipartisan CR to keep the government funded and to make sure we can avert a shutdown that no one wants, while giving us time to reach a bipartisan agreement on a top line in our funding bills. Two weeks ago, House Republicans sent us an incomplete CR with several major issues.³ Reasoning · 11 wordsIt is critical that we address those issues in any CR, Claims · 37 wordsand that is exactly what we have done. Perhaps most important, we closed a loophole in the House Republican CR that would have allowed the Trump administration to transfer funding provided for other programs to Border Patrol.⁴ Positioning · 4 wordsThat was a nonstarter.Positioning Promise · 21 wordsUntil Republicans finally agree to enact desperately needed reforms to ICE and Border Patrol, we cannot approve another cent for them.No reason given Claims · 151 wordsThis new CR that we have written includes some really important extensions and language that House Republicans did not, and that includes extensions of authorizations for important health, veterans, and infrastructure programs and language to make sure that key housing programs and a program to help feed low-income seniors can continue serving Americans. This bill also rejects requests from President Trump for even more flexibility and funding for the Pentagon, including $1 billion for Trump-class battleships.⁵ My Democratic colleagues and I pushed very hard and secured an important provision to prevent the Office of Management and Budget from implementing its corrupt new grants rule, ⁶which would have required a Trump political appointee to sign off on every last Federal grant and empowered them to terminate any grant at any point for any reason.⁷ That disastrous rule would put politics above science when determining, for example, what cancer research grants to fund. Promise · 19 wordsI am going to keep working to kill that rule outright as our spending talks continue later this year. Claims · 55 wordsUnfortunately, Republicans would not take action in this bill to protect our constitutional power of the purse and prevent Russ Vought from attempting another illegal pocket rescission, nor would they agree to our efforts to extend critical advanced appropriations for infrastructure, which were provided by the bipartisan infrastructure law.⁸ That runs out on October 1.⁹ Promise · 17 wordsMake no mistake--we will keep fighting to get those priorities done in the negotiations in the fall.Vague promise Procedure · 8 wordsWe do have a lot of work ahead, ProcedureClaims · 12 wordsand this CR provides us a reasonable runway to get it done. Reasoning · 31 wordsSo I hope this CR sets us up to roll up our sleeves and focus on getting to a bipartisan top line so we can then write good, bipartisan spending bills. Promise · 16 wordsFor all of those reasons, I will be voting yes tonight to advance this bipartisan bill.