To watch the floor speech click here

WASHINGTON, D.C.— U.S. Senator Angus King (I-ME) today spoke on the Senate floor to share his growing concerns over the Trump Administration’s largely unconstitutional and unprecedented overreach – sharing the usurpation of Congressional Authority that has now reached the constitutionally-directed ‘power of the purse.’  In the speech, King also shared the detrimental impacts of reckless, indiscriminate government cuts on critical federal functions like management of the national parks and care for our veterans:

The news is coming so hard and fast these days, that it's hard to sort it all out. Every day seems to be something new that captures our attention, our concern, our interest. And what I'd like to do today is try to put some of it in perspective and what's going on in our governing of this country. I don't believe what I'm going to be talking about today is partisan. It should not be partisan because what I'm really talking about is competent government and constitutional government.  Really two categories -- competent government and constitutional government. That should not be a controversial issue. Neither of those are something that we should be arguing about. It's what we have a responsibility to carry through in terms of our jobs here in the U.S. Senate. So the two categories I want to talk about -- my headings are thoughtless and dangerous. 

First I want to talk about thoughtless. The hiring freeze. A hiring freeze can be an effective tool if it's used thoughtfully and systematically. But to do it across the board without a process for exceptions that's built into it, you end up with all kinds of unintended and negative consequences. Firefighters, parks, losses elsewhere by attrition. There should be a systematic exemption process. Now it's haphazard and random. Park seasonal employees first were under the hiring freeze, now they're not. It's sort of like, oh, oh, or, we're going to be okay without park seasonal employees. VA frontline health workers were at first subject to the hiring freeze then people said, oh, no, we didn't mean doctors and nurses, so that's okay. You can hire them. My point is it's not a rational process. It's ready, fire, aim. Literally, ready, fire, aim is what we're talking about and people aren't doing this in a thoughtful and systematic way. And, by the way, the difference between frontline deliverers of care at the V.A. and the people who answer the phone who are categorized as bureaucrats, I don't think there's a stark difference there. If you're a veteran and are seeking care and an appointment at a V.A. health facility and nobody answers the phone, that's a denial of benefits. That's a denial of benefits, just as if they close the door in your face. That's what we're talking about, is weakening the systems that are serving our public. 

The hiring freeze, it's possible to do a hiring freeze. When I was governor of Maine, I instituted a hiring freeze, but we did it in a systematic and thoughtful way. We had a process for dealing with exemptions and without destroying the morale and throwing the entire operation of government into chaos. And, by the way, why do we have the government? To serve the people. To serve the people. 

So let's talk about the next step: the firings. The famous fork in the road letter is a perfect example of a thoughtless way to approach a problem. The letter went to everybody. The letter wasn't selective. It went to everybody -- all civilians in the CIA, in the National Security Agency, in the Defense Department. Also, of course, all the other civilian agencies. But it wasn't targeted in a way. If you want to leave federal service, we'll pay you through September, but it hit everybody. Again, it's not a rational or thoughtful way to trim the federal workforce. You should be talking about where are we do we have too many people, do we have overstock in terms of public servants and where do we need more, for example. But instead it went to everybody. By definition, that's not a rational process. Firing -- let me just put this in perspective, by the way. On the fork in the road letter, the estimate is as of today 75,000 people have taken that option and left. And I suppose the people who are behind this think that's a great victory. The dollars saved from those 75,000 people represent one tenth of one percent of the federal budget. So people out who are seeing, we're cutting the budget, we're cutting, we're saving, we're saving the taxpayers money. One tenth of one percent. Given the chaos and the uncertainty and the deletion of services to our American people, I would argue that's not worth it. One tenth of one percent. Everyone got these letters. People are being fired now in the CIA, FBI, the V.A., and on this letter, what if only the best people take the option to leave? Then you've really shot yourself in the foot. You've encouraged people who were going to retire anyway or who could get a better job in the private sector. So it's an anti-intelligent way to handle this. 

And then you got situations like at the Department of Energy, the first weekend they fired 350 people in the National Nuclear Security Administration, the people who handle nuclear materials and are responsible for our nuclear stockpile. They fired I think it was something like 20% of the personnel. Three or four days later, they realized, uh oh that was a mistake. A good, solid, thoughtful process wouldn't have made a mistake like that. They would have realized from the outset that these are jobs that we aren't going to be firing, we aren't going to be eliminating. It seemed to be based on some kind of quota. I don't know what it is. And then -- okay, now we're seeing everybody being fired who's on probation. Probationary people, people who work for the government for less than a year or two. Okay, again that's arbitrary -- that's arbitrary. Being on probation doesn't mean you're an effective or not an effective employee. You could be one of the best employees in the whole federal government and you just came on and yet you're going to be fired. It has nothing to do with the productivity or skill of the worker. It has nothing to do with the importance of the position. It has nothing to do with the effectiveness of the agency in question, serving the people of Maine. If you're probationary, you're gone. Here's another thing about probation. It turns out in the federal government, if you're promoted, you're on probation in the new position. You may have worked in the department for five or ten years. You're on probation. You're fired. Even though you have five or ten years of experience. And people did get these ridiculous letters saying your performance has not been adequate. There was no basis for those letters. It was arbitrary. And that's remember I said my categories are thoughtless and dangerous. This is thoughtless -- probation. 

Oh, by the way, about 30% of the federal workforce are veterans. Now, we don't know the exact figures. That's one of the problems. We have no transparency about what's going on here and who's actually being let go and who isn't, but a reasonable extrapolation is, 30% of the people being fired are veterans. People who put their lives on the line for this country. And then they went into public service and they're being fired. That's outrageous. Again, was no one thinking about this? A thousand people were fired at the V.A. Just a couple of days ago. We learned that people supporting the V.A. crisis line were fired. What genius thought that was a good idea? Last Friday, immigration judges were fired. We're talking about immigration and border and control of immigration, and we're firing immigration judges? What possible sense does that make? Here's one. We've had -- I think three curious aircraft incidents in the last month, and they just fired I think 300 people at the FAA. Great, including people who are in the business of maintaining the systems that keep our airplanes safe. In the wake of three serious airplane crashes, including one here in Washington that killed 67 people, we're firing people at the FAA? Give me a break! What kind of sense does that make? What kind of service is that to the people of the United States? Here's one that's not life or death, but the National Park Service. 1,000 people were fired last weekend at the National Park Service. I suspect they were probationary, that means okay they'd only been there a year or to. But that doesn't mean they weren't in jobs that were important. The headline in this morning's paper, chaos at the national parks. The lines are twice as long. If there's chaos at the national parks in February, lord knows what it's going to be in June or July. In Yosemite, in Acadia in my state of Maine. And here's a beauty, some of these people that are be fired are people who collect fees at the park. So to save a buck, we're going to lose $5 from fees not being collected. Genius. Come on. Five percent of the workforce at the national park service are being fired, and I can tell you, I'm the co-chair of the National Park Subcommittee, the Energy & Natural Resources Committee, we need more people at the national parks, not less. We've had a staffing shortage going back half a dozen or ten years where visitation is way up and staff is flat or declining. Now it's really declining. And this is a direct hands-on experience for the American people. Gettysburg -- they've been laying off people at the battlefield. Last night apparently something called the Presidential Management Fellowship Program, a training program that's decades' old that brings talented people into the federal government, eliminated. No explanation, no rational. Eliminated. 

Okay, that's the thoughtless part. Let me give you a little personal experience. When I was elected governor of Maine, we had a serious deficit. We were in the middle of a recession. We went through a process very similar to the impetus for what's going on now. We looked at the entire workforce of the state of Maine. But we did it in a thoughtful and transparent way. We developed a task force that included private citizens, legislators, and members of the administration, and we took eight months, Mr. President, eight months, not eight weeks, and we looked at the entire structure of the state of Maine government and reduced our workforce by about 10%, a significant reduction. But we did it in a thoughtful way and in a way that made sense in terms of the ongoing service to the people of Maine. 

So it can be done, and I'm not unsympathetic with the idea of making things more efficient. And even possibly downsizing the government where it's called for and where additional people aren't necessary. So, I'm not here to say we shouldn't be looking for efficiency and saying everything in the federal government is perfect. I don't believe that for a minute. But I think if we're going to take on this exercise, it ought to be done in a sensible way by people who know what they're doing. 

And that brings me to DOGE. I don't know what they're doing. Nobody does. I don't know who these 25-year-olds in the IRS, rummaging around in the IRS I.T. System. We learned the last couple days Social Security. What are they doing? Who are they? What are their qualifications? Do they have security clearances? Do they have conflicts of interest? All of the rules designed to protect us from people making arbitrary decisions that aren't accountable, you talk about bureaucrats being unaccountable, these are the ultimate unaccountable people. We don't know what their relationship is to the federal government, what authority they have, up what law they're operating. It's clear from mistakes like firing 350 people at the Nuclear Security Agency, they don't know what they're doing. They're firing people who we need. Okay, that's the thoughtless part. It's inexcusable. That's just pure efficiency of government of doing the right thing, and it can be done, but these people aren't doing it. 

The second part of what's going on is the dangerous part, and this is where I call on my colleagues on the other side of the aisle who are standing by and watching our government be attacked with no response. Elimination of entire congressionally created agencies. USAID was established by statute and over a weekend these people fired everybody, closed the agency, took the name off the door, and threw the rest of the world into chaos, where these people were working on important projects all over the world, that were part of our outreach to the world. You know what? As soon as we went out of business at A.I.D., China is right in the market. It's like walking away from engagement with the world. It couldn't be a more self-defeating piece of work. By the way, it's a tiny part of the federal budget. And James Mattis famously said, when he was a general, if you cut the foreign aid budget, you're going to have to buy me more bullets. Foreign aid is part of the national security of this country, and to demolish this agency without any input from congress, without any relationship to the Foreign Affairs Committee or anybody else up here in the congress, is grossly unconstitutional. It's grossly unconstitutional. 

Here's the problem, Mr. President, this isn't just a battle between the Senate and the House and the President and they're fighting about powers. No, the reason the framers designed our Constitution the way they did was that they were afraid of concentrated power. They had just fought a brutal eight-year war with a king. They didn't want a king. They wanted a constitutional republic, where power was divided between the Congress and the President and the courts, and we are collapsing that structure. And the structure wasn't there for fun. It wasn't, hey, we'll design this complicated system. It was there to protect our freedom. Because the people that wrote our Constitution understood human nature, and they understood a very important thousand-year-old principle -- power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

The whole idea was to divide power, and to the extent we allow this assault on our Constitution, this collapsing and excessive power being granted to the executive to ignore the laws passed by congress, and by the way, appropriations bills are laws passed by congress, which the administration is also ignoring by freezing funding for programs authorized and funded by congress, to the extent we do that, we're not only making a mistake now, but we're altering the essential structure of our Constitution that's there for a reason, that's there to protect our freedom. And the people cheering this on I fear, in a reasonably short period of time, are going to say where did this go? How did this happen? How did we make our president into a monarch? How did this happen? How it happened is we gave it up! James Madison thought we would fight for our power, but no. Right now, we're just sitting back and watching it happen. Article 2 of the Constitution, the President said, oh, article 2 gives me a lot of power. No, it doesn't. It makes the president commander in chief. That's true. Here's the key sentence in Article 2 of the constitution, which defines the president's power, the key sentence is not the power of the president, the responsibility of the president is to take care that the laws being faithfully executed. Not write the laws. Not deny the laws. Not ignore the laws. Not pick which laws he or she To take care that the laws are faithfully executed. That's the responsibility of the President. 

Right now, those laws are being ignored. Impoundment. Impoundment. The President trying to say Congress appropriated this money through appropriation bill signed by president, but I'm not going to spend it because I don't like it, I don't like that purpose, whatever it is. I'm sorry. It's absolutely straight up unconstitutional, and it's illegal. President Nixon tried to do that in 1973, and the Congress, virtually unanimously, passed the impoundment control act which said no, presidents can’t do that. They can't ignore the will of congress because Article 1 of the Constitution gives the congress the power of the purse. We're giving it away this week. We're standing by and watching it, watching the essential power of this body evaporate. Not evaporate, migrate down the street to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. 

The power was divided for a reason. There's criticism in the press saying people are talking about a constitutional crisis, they're crying wolf. This is a constitutional crisis. It's the most serious assault on our Constitution in the history of this country. It's the most serious assault on the very structure of our Constitution, which is designed to protect our freedoms and liberty, in the history of this country. It is a constitutional crisis, and I'll tell you what makes it worse, the President and the Vice President are already hinting that they're not going to obey decisions of the courts. Many of my friends in this body say it will be hard, we don't want to buck the President, we'll let the courts take care of it. Number one, that's a copout. It's our responsibility to protect the Constitution. That's what we swear to when we enter this body. To stand back and say we're going to watch all this happen, and the courts will take care of it, that's an abdication of our responsibility. 

If you look at history, yes, it's true, presidents have gained power. In my reading of history usually it wasn't because presidents usurped power, but the congress abdicated it. We haven't declared war, for example, since 1942, yet that's a clear responsibility of congress and we sure have been in some scrapes since 1942. We've abdicated that power, and we're now in the process of abdicating the power to control the appropriations process. I mention about DOGE, no authority, no accountability, no transparency, we literally don't know what they're doing, we can't find out what they're doing. Just this week, the destruction of the independent agencies, created by congress. They were created as independent agencies for a reason, because they didn't want them to be dominated by the vicissitudes of politics. The president gets to appoint members of the board, and they're very carefully balanced, not firing someone at the National Labor Relations Board so there's no quorum so they can't act. That's a direct violation of congressionally established policy. These independent agencies were created for a reason. Again, oh, I forgot to mention, illegal firing of inspector generals. The Senator from Iowa is a champion of inspector generals. In the first few days, something like 18 inspector generals were fired, completely contrary to the law. The law is the congress must be given 30 days’ notice of the firing of an inspector general, and reasons therefore. Not done! Not a peep. 

What's it going to take for us to wake up, when I say us, I mean this entire body, to wake up to what's going on here? Is it going to be too late? Is it going to be when the President has secreted all this power and the congress is an afterthought? What's it going to take? The offenses keep piling up. As I said, leaving it to the courts, number one, is a copout, and number two, when the Vice President said something, I can't remember exactly what he said, but ‘the courts should not have the power to do this.’ Of course, the President over the weekend famously quoted Napoleon, ‘when you're saving your country, you don't have to obey any law.’ Wow, a President of the United States quoting Napoleon about not having to obey the law. 

So, I intended to talk about Ukraine, but Senator Tillis and Senator Shaheen did it so articulately, I think I'll let that pass, except to say it's shameful we've suddenly pivoted from the support of a democracy that was grossly and illegally invaded, from the support of that country to the support of a murderous dictator. I heard something about Zelenskyy is a dictator. The only dictator in this game, Mr. President, is Vladimir Putin. He's the dictator. To argue that somehow Ukraine started the war? What universe is that -- is somebody in that would say something like that? Again, I won't pursue, but I can tell you Putin's happy, XI Jinping is happy, Iran is happy, North Korea is happy. They love what's going on, to see us retreating from the world, whether it's A.I.D. or Ukraine. They love to see us retreating from the world, looking weak and looking unreliable. 

Finally, on this point, we seem to be systematically alienating our allies. I've been on Armed Services for 12 years and have learned that the key asymmetric advantage this country has in the world is allies. China has customers. We have allies. Well, we're giving that away. If I wasn't on the floor of the U.S. Senate, I'd use a slightly different term, but we're giving away our asymmetric advantage in the world by what looks like systematically alienating allies, whether it’s threats of tariffs or speeches in Europe telling them what their problems are, basically saying we're going to abandon Europe. What a great idea, abandon Europe at a time there's a murderous dictator with his eyes on the Baltics, Poland, and said he would like to reestablish the Soviet Empire. The worst possible geopolitical thing we could do would be to abandon Ukraine.

So, Mr. President, this is a constitutional crisis, and we've got to respond to it. I'm just waiting for this whole body to stand up and say no, no, we don't do it this way. We don't do it this way. We do things constitutionally. Yes, it's more cumbersome, it's slower, that's what the framers intended. They didn't intend to have an efficient dictatorship, and that's what we're headed for. Mr. President, this is a very dangerous moment. We've got to wake up, protect this institution, but much more importantly protect the people of the United States of America. Thank you, Mr. President. 

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