Majority Leader Schumer Floor Remarks On The Need To Pass Bipartisan Appropriations Legislation To Preserve Critical Investments In The American People

Washington, D.C. – Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) today spoke on the Senate floor regarding the importance of passing bipartisan appropriations bills and avoiding a government shutdown on Friday. Below are Senator Schumer’s remarks, which can also be viewed here:

It is the start of a busy and consequential week in Congress. Thursday evening, President Biden will deliver his annual State of the Union Address to the American people, where he will share the immense progress we’ve made as a country to bring down costs, strengthen our economy, and protect our country from threats around the world.

On Friday, Congress will then face another funding deadline, whereupon the government will begin shutting down unless both chambers work quickly, decisively, and with bipartisanship cooperation.

On that front, we are thankfully off to a very, very good start. Sunday evening, negotiators reached a long-sought, bipartisan and bicameral funding deal on the first six appropriations bills. And we passed these bills without devastating cuts or poison pill riders pushed by the MAGA right.

It’s not been easy to complete the appropriations process in a divided government, but after a lot of persistence we now have six bills that will preserve significant investments for American families, for moms and children, for America’s clean energy, for America’s veterans, and more. It took a lot of work to make it happen – appropriators worked through the entire weekend. So did my staff, so did I, in fact, and we’ve been working on this every day for months.

The important thing now is for both chambers to move quickly. The House is set to take up these appropriations bills tomorrow, where hopefully they will pass.

And as soon as the House sends these appropriations bills over to the Senate, I will put these bills on the floor so we can have them on President Biden’s desk before Friday’s deadline.

But the clock is ticking, and because of the State of the Union on Thursday we need to cooperate to move extra fast to get these bills through. Between now and Friday, the watchwords for the Senate will be cooperation and speed.

Now, let me take a moment to highlight some of the ways these appropriations bills will make a big difference for the American people. This appropriations process – this appropriations agreement – is a success in at least two ways: we protected almost all of the good investments for the American people, and we resisted practically all of the nasty riders from the MAGA right.

To moms and kids who rely on nutrition programs: you will be taken care of.

Despite immense opposition from the other side, this agreement fully funds the WIC program, meaning no mom or kid will be denied the nutrition assistance that they qualify for. It is exceedingly good news that in divided government we were able to keep WIC whole, and I thank Senator Murray for her good hard work on this issue, as well as Congressmember DeLauro.

Through this agreement, we will also protect funding to help Americans, especially rural Americans, keep a roof over their head and afford the rent. We will increase funding for programs that support our veteran’s health and wellbeing. Child nutrition, including school lunch programs, school breakfast programs, and summer EBT programs remain fully funded. That means we’ll be able to provide nearly 5 billion school lunches and 2-and-a-half billion breakfasts to kids across America next year.

America’s roads, bridges, and highways will get the funds they need for repairs and updates. We’ll be able to hire more air traffic controllers, food inspectors, and rail safety inspectors to keep Americans safe. We will preserve pay raises for our federal firefighters. And we’ll strengthen funding for cutting edge scientific research.

I am also happy that we prevented the hard-right from tainting these appropriations bills with devastating cuts and highly partisan policy riders. Again, we fought hard to protect funding to build more affordable housing and provide nutrition assistance to low income Americans and defeated the hard-right’s attempts to add even more restrictions to women’s health care. And even though the hard-right tried repeatedly to undermine Democrats’ clean energy agenda, we preserved practically all the progress we’ve made to fight climate change while protecting critical jobs at the EPA.

So, I am very glad and proud we’ve been able to reach such a strong agreement under divided government. I thank Speaker Johnson, Leader Jeffries, Leader McConnell, Appropriations Committee Chair and Vice Chair Susan Collins, and all the staff who have dedicated so much work to get us to this point.

This agreement gives us much needed momentum to finish the next package of spending bills by the March 22 deadline. Once again, it will only be bipartisanship – only bipartisanship – that will get us across the finish line, as has been proven in the past. We will keep working – keep working – until we finish the job.

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