WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senator Angus King (I-Maine) today urged his colleagues in Congress to focus their legislative priorities on essential programs and services that have expired or are set to expire before the end of the year. During his speech, Senator King highlighted the misguided decision to force through tax reform based on an arbitrary deadline instead of addressing funding for some of the nation’s most pressing issues. Essential programs and services ranging from the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) to FEMA Disaster Relief have gone unfunded or have not been reauthorized this fall, with many more programs in jeopardy if they are not addressed by the end of 2017.

“I want to talk about deadlines missed, and deadlines that don’t exist…,” Senator King said. “I don't know where else, other than in this body, where deadlines, which have enormous implications and enormous importance, are simply ignored. Now, I just sat in the last day or so and put together some real deadlines that we have in the law right now. What are they? Well, the Children's Health Insurance Program, deadline September 30, 2017. That's gone. That's passed. I can give you 23,000 reasons that we should have met that deadline. That's the number of young people in Maine that are covered by the Children's Health Insurance Program. Nine million nationwide. But we missed the deadline. Why? I can't find any reason. We don't know anything now that we didn't know in the middle of September or in August when we could have passed this program, but we just blew right by it. Maybe it's because none of our kids are in this program. I venture to say if the children of the members of the United States Senate were in the CHIP program, we would have met that deadline. But we didn't…

“Now at the bottom of my chart of priorities is tax reform. Boy, are we going to make that deadline. The only problem is it doesn't exist. There's no deadline for that. There was no deadline. It's not December 22. It's not Christmas. It's not New Year's. It's a self-imposed deadline that's not in law anywhere. And I agree, we need to do tax reform, but we have been doing it on an unprecedented scale and speed that's unnecessary. We have missed and ignored all these real deadlines in exchange for focusing all of our attention on a fake deadline. Sure, it would be nice to get it done. We could have gotten it done. It could have been done on a bipartisan basis. We could have started last summer, and we would have had a bill just like the bill that emerged from the HELP Committee with regard to health care on a bipartisan basis. But instead, it was a closed process done with unprecedented speed with virtually no hearings, no real hearings on the bill, no serious outside experts, no analysis of what's in it. We have been given a 500-page bill that we're going to vote on probably in a day or so. And yet, we're racing to meet a deadline that didn't exist.”

Senator King’s floor speech follows his outreach this past Friday to health professionals, parents, and advocates at Greater Portland Health in Portland to discuss the importance of reauthorizing the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) and funding for Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs). The authorization for CHIP expired at the end of September, putting millions of low-income children across the country at risk of losing their health coverage. Funding for FQHCs is also currently in jeopardy, as Congress has not acted to reauthorize the Community Health Centers Fund, which provides 70 percent of all federal funding for FQHCs across the country.

In his speech, Senator King also focused on the failure of Congress to appropriately address discretionary spending levels for Fiscal Year 2018; the uncertainty of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program; the National Flood Insurance Program, due to lapse at the end of this week; Medicare Extenders, set to expire at the end of 2017; and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Amendments Reauthorization Act. FISA Section 702, a critical part of U.S. national security policy will sunset on December 31, 2017 without Congressional action. 

Chart 1: List of deadlines awaiting Congressional action

###