Schatz: Instead Of Making Life More Affordable For Americans, Republicans Are Spending $70 Billion On Rogue Agency

WASHINGTON - U.S. Senator Brian Schatz (D-Hawai'i) today spoke on the Senate floor about Republicans' efforts to provide $70 billion in new funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) - on top of the tens of billions in funding the agency already has - while Americans across the country struggle to afford basic necessities including groceries and gas because of Donald Trump's tariffs and war in Iran.

"People are paying more for gas, for utilities, for food, for housing, for health care - for every single aspect of their lives. And you would think these guys - they have the trifecta - would go charging up the mountain and try to reduce the cost of living. And instead, they are spending $70 billion on this rogue agency," said Senator Schatz.

Senator Schatz added, "Don't let anybody tell you there's not enough money. What there is not enough of is moral clarity. People are going broke. And we are lighting money on fire in the government. It's just for all the wrong things."

A transcript of Senator Schatz's remarks is below. Video is available here.

There's a lot going on in the country and in the world. Gas is at four bucks a gallon nationwide, and it's $5.65 at my corner Shell station in Honolulu. Groceries are expensive. Electricity bills are rising at double the rate of inflation, and millions of Americans have lost their health insurance this year. People really are struggling just to get by, and we in the United States Congress have got to be focused on helping them.

We have this very limited tool called reconciliation, and it's a way to circumvent the filibuster. It's a way to do things on just a purely partizan basis. And both parties have used this tool. It's really only available once every fiscal year. And without getting into the terribly boring details, it's basically spending or tax cuts. And that's the tool that we can use without having to compromise with the other side.

Now, when [Democrats] had the House and the Senate and the presidency, we used that tool for the American Rescue Plan in the middle of COVID. Mass unemployment - we decided to stabilize everybody's salaries so they wouldn't be unable to make their rent or their mortgage or put food on the table. And then we did the Inflation Reduction Act, which focused on reducing the cost of prescription medicine and attacking the climate crisis and providing tax credits for those who are working - but not wealthy, but not poor enough to qualify for an array of government programs.

And so the most important thing to understand about what's happening today and tomorrow is not that Republicans are about to spend $70 billion to fund an agency that already has seven years of prefunding. Not that they're trying to make ICE, and will make ICE, more well-funded than the United States Marine Corps. It's not that Republicans refuse to make even the most reasonable reforms to hold ICE to the same standard that every local police department is held to. That you have to get a warrant before you conduct a search. That you have to introduce yourself. That you have to have a name and badge number. That there are very, very rare circumstances under which an officer should be permitted to wear a mask and conceal their face. And that there should be training in excess of 47 days. I want everybody to understand the reason ICE trainees were given 47 days of training is to match up with the fact that this is the 47th president of the United States. It used to be a many months training. There used to be use of force training. They used to be treated like a normal law enforcement agency.

Now, we can have a disagreement about the degree and extent of immigration policy and who should be in this country and who shouldn't. But I think what happened was, they mistook people's dissatisfaction with the Biden border policy for a license to go and terrorize communities. Everybody now agrees: get the bad guys who don't belong here out of the country. Deport people who are committing violent crimes or dangerous crimes. Get them out of here.

But everybody also understands that what ICE has done over the last year has been inhumane and made all of us less safe. And so we were in a negotiation about - again, these are not like some progressive wish list full of reforms. These are literally the things that the Honolulu Police Department, that the New York City Police Department, that any police department in a rural state or an urban state or anywhere across the country has to adhere to. And most law enforcement officers - federal, state, county - are perfectly fine being well-trained. Are perfectly fine having to get a warrant. Are perfectly fine when there is an officer involved shooting to have an independent investigation. All of that is normal. And most law enforcement officers say, yeah, these guys are unusually poorly trained.

And so we were in a negotiation to provide funding with reforms. But the Republicans ran out of patience. And so what we said was, why don't we just go ahead and fund the agencies that we all agree on. FEMA, the cybersecurity function, the Coast Guard. So we passed this on a bipartisan - not just a bipartisan basis, a unanimous basis out of this chamber. And then the House killed it.

And so they are stuck now trying to figure out how they're going to fund this agency. And so they're using their one legislative opportunity that comes only once every fiscal year to fund ICE and CBP for three years going forward. Why does that matter so much?

First, it's a failure of just like basic legislating to solve a problem that everybody saw with their own eyes. When Alex Pretti and Renee Goode were killed by federal employees, it transcended politics. It transcended immigration policy, that's for sure. Nobody wanted to see that. But they didn't have the appetite to enact the most basic reforms. And so here we are.

But that's not the most important part. The most important part is this: people are paying more for gas, for utilities, for food, for lumber, for housing, for health care, for every single aspect of their lives. And you would think - and if I'm not accusing anybody of anything. But even if you didn't care about the actual material condition of your constituents, you would care that they were mad at you, that everything was up. You would care that everything has gotten more expensive during Donald Trump's second term, especially since by most accounts, he was elected because everything was too expensive.

And so you would think these guys - they have the trifecta, they have the House, they have the Senate, they have the presidency. And so they're going to go charging up the mountain and try to reduce the cost of living. That's what you should do with this reconciliation opportunity. That's what you should do. And instead, they are spending $70 billion on this rogue agency.

And so over the next couple of days, we're going to give them opportunities to enact good policy that would reduce the cost of living. And there are a number of ways we could do that. We could restore the tax credits for the Affordable Care Act. We could reverse the tariffs that are a tax on every consumer across the United States of America. We could end this preposterous war, which is costing about $2 billion a day and raising the price, by the way, not just of gasoline, but of diesel, and not just of diesel, but of fertilizer, which is an input for our agricultural industry. So everything is getting more expensive at the same time that we're spending $2 billion a day.

Just to give you context, last year, when the government was shut down over a health care fight, the amount in question was $23 billion for a year's worth of the Affordable Care Act's tax credits. That's about 11 days' worth of this war. And so don't let anybody tell you that there's not enough money. There is enough money. They're spending $2 billion a day on this war that nobody asked for, nobody expected. It's not even working out - $2 billion a day, no end in sight. And then $70 billion pre-funding a federal agency that's already been prefunded.

And so don't let anybody tell you there's not enough money. What there is not enough of is moral clarity. People are going broke. And we are, in fact, lighting money on fire in the government. It's just for all the wrong things.

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