Senate Minority Leader Says Trump's Funding Freeze is Causing 'Chaos', While GOP Says Its Working

TIME

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer says the president's funding freeze is causing "chaos" across the country, but Republicans say the pause is a good thing and "it's working."

Transcript

00:00Last night, President Trump plunged the country into chaos, a cruel, nasty, and illegal chaos.

00:08Without a shred of warning, the Trump administration announced a halt to virtually

00:15all federal grants and loans across the country. In an instant, with no precedent, no justification,

00:22no legal grounds, Donald Trump has shut off billions, perhaps trillions, of dollars.

00:29That help American families every single day. It's cruel. It's reckless. And in all these things,

00:38we will not stand idly by. The blast radius of this terrible, unconstitutional, and illegal

00:47decision is virtually limitless. Its impacts are going to be felt over and over and over again by

00:54families. And we are already in touch with families and people throughout the country

01:00to mobilize them against this cruelty, this blatant assault on Americans. And American

01:08families should make no mistake, the money's been taken from them will be spent. That money

01:14will be spent, but not on them, on the people at the very top who want tax cuts. They are clarifying

01:21it. And I think this is not unusual for an administration to pause funding and to take a

01:27hard look and scrub of how these programs, how they're being spent, and how they interact with

01:34a lot of the executive orders that the President signed. And I think that's the main criteria

01:38they're using, is does this implicate, do the executive orders implicate funding in this

01:44particular way? They have taken certain things, I think, off the table. Some of you have asked

01:49specifically about programs, any program that directly benefits an individual, Medicaid, SNAP,

01:56those types of programs are unimpacted by this. What is impacted, obviously, is DEI,

02:02you know, the Green New Deal, things like that. And so those are in direct contradiction with

02:07the EOs the President signed earlier this week. For all of you who haven't noticed,

02:11this is a different day in Washington, D.C. The President of the United States

02:15wants to do something about inflation. Where does inflation start? It starts at government

02:20overspending, and particularly when it's deficit spending. We're going in debt a trillion dollars

02:26every 100 days. The best way to start going after inflation is to ratchet that back. What he has

02:32said is, let's pause for 90 days. This is a work in progress. Everybody take a deep breath, stay

02:39calm. Every one of these programs is going to be looked at. He didn't say, well, we're going to do

02:43a two-year study, blah, blah, blah. He said, 90 days, we're going to look at it. I think our

02:48Republican senators and congressmen are going to hear from their constituents from one end of the

02:53country to the other. They're going to hear from police departments and schools and cancer research

02:58clinics and fire departments and police officers. Everyone is really upset about this, and we're

03:03going to continue to put heat on them so that they will not vote for vote, plain and simple.

03:10They're going to bear the consequences on their backs.

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