Leader Schumer Floor Remarks On Republican Rescissions Gutting Critical Programs
Washington, D.C. – Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) today spoke on the Senate floor to denounce the Republican rescissions package, warning that it is only one step in the playbook that Republicans will use to gut funding for healthcare, education, housing, and more—all to pay for tax breaks for billionaires. Below are Senator Schumer’s remarks:
Just days after handing billionaires their largest tax break in modern history – and fresh off passing the most devastating cuts to healthcare and jobs ever – Republicans want to keep this going.
They want to gut funding for local news stations and radio.
They want to reward communist China, Putin, and eviscerate US foreign aid.
Why? All to give tax breaks to billionaires.
They say these cuts are necessary in the false guise of eliminating waste. But anyone can see that’s not true, it’s just to pay for their cut taxes for billionaires.
Americans are done listening to Republican lectures about wasteful spending after they added $4 trillion to the debt to cut taxes for billionaires.
For Republicans to turn around and slash local news and public radio in the name of fiscal responsibility is a vindictive swipe at rural America, where these stations are needed so badly. It’ll leave rural communities twisting in the wind.
The Republican credo seems to be cut and cut, and cut now, and ask questions later.
Cut healthcare for sixteen million Americans.
Cut food assistance to hungry kids.
Cut good-paying energy jobs, and let the CCP get ahead of us.
Never mind the destruction these cuts will have.
Never mind the trillions Republicans just added to the debt to finance their billionaire giveaways.
Never mind the kids who will go hungry, or the families that will lose insurance, or the people who will get sick and die.
It’s all worth it, Republicans seem to think, so long as billionaires and special interests pay less in taxes.
And now, with this rescissions package, Republicans want to keep going: cut local radio stations, cut local TV stations, cut key national security funding, cut funding for some of the most beloved programs in America.
These cuts are just a piece of a larger Republicans puzzle, where they’ll use rescissions, impoundment, and pocket rescissions, and that will pave the way for deeper and more serious spending cuts on things like healthcare, food assistance, energy, and so many other areas – and other democratic safeguards will no longer be around.
They are eliminating Democrats from the process – there’s no discussion, no argument, and there’s no safeguards to help the average American. It’s just the billionaires running rampant and we’re getting what they want.
You want to understand the Republican playbook? Take a look at how they've attacked foreign aid.
At the very beginning of this administration, Donald Trump and Elon Musk illegally shut down billions in foreign aid. When they were criticized for it, they hemmed, they hawed, they lied about their actions. The courts had to step in.
Now that these programs have fiscal year 2025 dollars, Republicans are trying to do it all over again – this time through a cynical rescissions package. They’re passing this law to get the outcome they wanted in the first place: gutting U.S. foreign assistance.
And let me be clear, this is not just about foreign assistance, important as that is.
This is the playbook that Republicans will use across the board.
They will do it with healthcare. They will do it with the Department of Education. They will do it with our schools, our veterans, our housing. They will do it to research dollars.
I’ve heard of more great research projects that could have saved lives now on hold, that can never be brought back again, because of the greed of the billionaires and the obeisance of Republicans to go along.
It’s amazing – cutting medical research where America has always led the world. But now we’re going to give that lead to China with what Republicans are doing.
They are already using impoundment, they are using rescissions.
They are using pocket rescissions to poison the bipartisan appropriations process, to break the law to steal funds that Congress appropriated, and they're doing it at a party-line vote.
Worse, they're letting Donald Trump decide for himself which programs to defund, and that puts everything at risk – healthcare, education, food assistance, public health. Everything – everything – becomes at risk. That is what happens if a package like this is allowed to become law.
Now, returning to this week’s bill, what do this weeks’ cuts mean for families back home?
Well, tens of millions of Americans rely on public broadcast for weather alerts, local news, keeping track of City Hall, educational programming, and so much more. This affects most badly rural America, including native communities.
And these cuts couldn’t come at a worse time: the floods in Texas remind us that speedy alerts and up-to-the-minute forecasts can mean the difference between life and death.
And for millions, public radio and local TV are sometimes the only way to stay up to date.
So, why the hell is this administration so obsessed with gutting those funds that save lives? It’s probably because of some whim of Donald Trump’s. He often governs by whim.
But then it has disastrous consequences because Republicans just bow to those whims – even though without factual basis.
They don’t look at the facts. They don’t care about the facts.
If Donald Trump wants it, they do it.
Donald Trump may not appreciate the vital role of public media, but people back home know public broadcast is indispensable.
And it’s not just local TV stations and public radio in danger.
These ill-conceived Republican cuts also threaten our national security.
These cuts indiscriminately slash billions in critical aid that prevents the spread of disease, fosters economic development, and expands America’s cultural impact on the world stage.
And believe me: when we fight, with foreign aid programs, diseases in other countries, in Africa or Asia, it benefits us. Fighting those diseases – in this world, where people fly from one place to the other all the time – benefits us because it will prevent them from coming here.
Removing PEPFAR from the list of cuts was good, but nowhere near enough. And we are not fooled by a small tweak to this package – these cuts will still leave America weaker and our adversaries more emboldened.
After all, foreign aid isn’t just about good will. It’s about our security.
And cutting foreign aid will have terrible consequences for our security:
It increases the exposure of Americans to global health risks, as I mentioned.
These cuts harm funding that directly benefits U.S. farmers and researchers.
They’ll damage United States’ companies market access abroad.
They’ll make communities around the world more susceptible to terrorist recruitment efforts.
China and Russia, meanwhile, will look on with glee.
I thought Republicans cared about being strong on national security.
I thought they understood the role that America’s soft power has in keeping the world a safer place for our values. This bill gravely undermines Republicans commitments to U.S. leadership around the world.
If Republicans slash more American aid, it will create a dangerous vacuum that the Chinese Communist Party will continue to eagerly fill.
It is a fact it is happening already – in Myanmar, in sub-Saharan Africa, in the race for access to precious minerals. These are places where the CCP is taking advantage of America’s absence.
And it will have terrible consequences in the long term for our safety and for our security.
And these rescissions cuts are only the beginning.
We know Donald Trump and Russell Vought want to send even more rescissions packages down the line, as soon as next month.
Remember, Donald Trump and Republican leaders reportedly struck up a crooked bargain: if the hard-right members of the House Freedom Caucus agreed to support the “Big, Ugly Betrayal,” Donald Trump would reward them with even deeper cuts to healthcare and other things that the hard right despises.
Republicans will pursue these cuts by any means necessary – through rescissions, impoundment, or pocket rescissions, even if that means taking a wrecking ball to the bipartisan appropriations process to pave the way for future cuts.
It could pave the way for more cuts to Medicaid, to education, to nutrition services, to agencies like the VA, and more.
All of this translates to working people paying more out of pocket while billionaires pay less in taxes.
When people's health care are taken away, when people's local services are taken away, it adds to a family's expenses.
It makes life more expensive for people who live paycheck to paycheck. It makes it harder to see a doctor. It makes it harder to afford medications. It makes it more difficult to choose between providing for healthcare or providing for groceries.
And making things even worse, Donald Trump’s tariffs, coming in at the worst possible time, is making inflation go up, jacking up grocery prices, and eating away at family budgets.
The tariffs have gone up more than people expected in June, but because so many of those who buy overseas front-loaded their purchases in the first and second quarters, it's very likely the tariffs will go up much more in the next quarter.
Republicans say they fight for the middle class. They say they fight for working people. Then they turn around and take investments away from Middle America and rural America, and make them pay, pay, more out of pocket.
Billionaires, meanwhile, have never had it so good thanks to Donald Trump and his Republican loyalists.
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