Ranking Member DeLauro Floor Remarks on Republicans’ Rescissions Package

WASHINGTON — House Appropriations Committee Ranking Member Rosa DeLauro (D-CT-03) delivered the following remarks on the House Floor in opposition to Republicans' rescissions package:

I remain strongly opposed to this rescissions bill which is a rubberstamp on the Trump Administration’s stealing from the American people.

Since taking office, the Trump Administration has stolen funds appropriated by the Congress, passed by Republicans and Democrats in the House and Senate and signed into law by the President of the United States, upending the separation of powers and our Constitutional order. 

This rescissions bill is another effort to subvert the Congresss’ power of the purse. That is precisely what they are trying to do. And for what ends?

To hand billionaires and the biggest corporations – who already pay little or no taxes – a massive tax break. And ultimately, to embrace privatization; to give the biggest companies unchecked power; to rig the economy against the middle class, working class, and vulnerable people; and ensure the American people have no faith in their government.

This bill will shut down rural television and radio stations—cutting off coverage of local news, eliminating emergency information like severe weather alerts, jeopardizing access to PBS KIDS children’s programming, like Sesame Street. Yes, Sesame Street.

This bill rips life-saving support away from hungry, displaced, and sick people in developing countries and conflict zones, and to end programs prevent conflict and pandemics. 

This bill abandons the people of Ukraine while they resist Putin’s tyranny. This bill puts America last. 

When we retreat from the world, diplomatically, and through our assistance to vulnerable people, America will be alone – without allies, in a less stable world, without the support of the international community – and do you know who will come out ahead? China. Russia. Iran. 

All of this is being done in the name of combatting waste. I will tell you what waste is: 500 tons of food grown by American farmers destroyed, at a cost of $130,000 to American taxpayers, because the chaos caused by the dismantling of USAID left it to expire. 

This is a bill to help Republicans claim they are practicing fiscal responsibility while concealing that what they are doing is ripping health insurance away from at least 17 million Americans in order to make billionaires even more rich, increases the debt by $4 trillion. How dare they talk about the deficit when they have just increased it.

They are not addressing the cost of living in this country, the single biggest issue. They are making it worse.

This bill codifies the right of the Trump Administration to steal from rural and vulnerable American communities, children, and the global poor, for the sake of handing even more money to billionaires.

Congress needs to reassert its role, fight for the middle-class, working-class, the vulnerable, not protect the interests of billionaires and big corporations.

I strongly oppose this bill. It forfeits our global leadership, undermines national security, and steals from the American people, and I urge my colleagues to vote no.

I yield back.

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