Daines on Fox Business: Schumer’s Plan is Nonsense

• November 7, 2025

"Democrats Are Shutting Down the Entire Government Because of Subsidies That Were Always Meant to Expire"

U.S. SENATE - U.S. Senator Steve Daines today joined Fox Business to discuss how Chuck Schumer is using Obamacare as political leverage to hold the government hostage.

Watch the full interview HERE.

Daines on how Schumer is using Obamacare to hold the government hostage:

We want the shutdown to end immediately. It should've ended weeks ago. You look at the Fox charts at the moment- they are showing flights delayed, flights cancelled. This is only going to get worse. Secretary Duffy is having to take extraordinary action to protect the flying public. You saw what Schumer just offered on the floor- it's nonsense. It's a nonstarter. Let me just step back for a moment and define the problem. Obamacare premiums have gone up 220 percent since it was implemented in 2014. Remember Barack Obama said Obamacare is going to lower health care costs by $2,500. That was the promise. It's up 221 percent. These now-subsidies that were put in place temporarily by the Democrats during COVID are set to expire. They were never meant to be permanent. What Chuck Schumer's asking is to now extend these temporary subsidies that are paid to Americans for like a family of two that make over $100,000 a year. But where do these subsidies go? They go directly to the insurance companies. So, it's doing nothing to address the issue of the unaffordability of Obamacare and health care. Their stock prices, Larry, if you look at the major health care insurance companies over that same period of time, going back to 2014, are up 500 percent to over 1,000 percent. So, the insurance companies are making out like bandits, while the American people are feeling the pain of Obamacare. And remember, when you think about how many Americans receive Obamacare, it's seven percent. So, 93 percent of the American people receive their health care through Medicare, through Medicaid, through private health care. It's seven percent that receive it through Obamacare. And it's a much smaller subset of that seven percent that actually get this subsidy paid to the insurance company, not even to the consumer. And so, the Democrats, bottom line, are shutting down the entire government, disrupting air travel, not paying the troops, because of these subsidies that were always meant to expire. That's the fight. So, what did Chuck Schumer just do? He says, let's extend them another year. We're not going to do that without significant reforms at best. Twenty percent of these subsidies are fraudulent. This is a terrible, $50 billion a year fraudulent subsidy program that we have got to stop or dramatically reform. We're not going to let Chuck Schumer extend another year. That's what he proposed here about an hour ago, and its nonsense.

Daines on how the shutdown could end:

We've given the Democrats now 14 or15 times the opportunity to have a vote for what they call a clean CR [continuing resolution]. And by the way, they voted for a clean CR 11 times when Joe Biden was President. But now that President Trump is in charge, they vote against it. Chuck Schumer voted for it back in March and nearly had his head handed to him, politically speaking, and so he's got to show this fight to save his political career with AOC and so forth in New York. This is political gamesmanship, and sadly, the American people are suffering. We're suffering in many, many ways. It's got to stop. So how do we get out of this mess? We've got to first agree, like we've always done in Washington for a long time, for many, many years, on a short-term extension of the CR. Now, November 21^st is not enough time. Punt it out to January. By the way, we have serious discussions with a handful of Democrats. Let's call them the Common Sense Caucus. They want to end this thing as bad as we want to end it. They are willing to push back against Chuck Schumer's iron fist and do the right thing for this nation. I'm hoping, Larry, that this weekend there'll be time for the temperature to come down and that by perhaps next week we could get something accomplished here, having a handful of Democrats join us, do the right thing, buy the time needed to do the negotiations for these final spending bills. That's the right answer, Larry. That's what we've always done here in Washington, and they're not agreeing to that because of Chuck Schumer's iron fist.

Daines on federal employees who aren't getting paid:

Ron Johnson has a bill on the floor that simply says this, let's pay the federal employees, giving their back pay to the first of November. Air traffic controllers, anybody else who is going to work every day in the federal government and not getting a paycheck. Let's just pay them for now and not have them suffer, not be able to make the rent payments, pay for their groceries. I'll tell you what, we're going to test the Democrats to see if they'll at least do that to take care of these civil servants who are serving us every day. I'll bet you that they will vote against this, which just shows you again, frankly, the bad state of mind they're at the moment and why they're yielding to Schumer's political gainsmanship doing the right thing instead of the right thing for the American people.

Daines on withholding his paycheck during the shutdown:

It's terrible. Many of us, including myself, have just asked to withhold our paychecks. So, I'm in that camp. So, I ask them to do that. You know when I walk by the Capitol Police who protect us here every day, every morning, they got smiles on their face, they're doing their jobs. They're not getting paid right now. And I think it's important that we stand at least in solidarity and say even though you're right, legally we do get paid, that's wrong. We should tell them to hold.

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Contact: Matt Lloyd, Gabby Wiggins