See below for video and highlights from Sen. Mark Warner’s weekly press availability, held earlier this afternoon. Bolding added by me for emphasis…
- “Well, good afternoon everybody and welcome to a fairly downbeat assessment. We had another almost all-nighter. I think I got home at 3:00, where yesterday all the Democrats along with two Republicans fought against the so-called rescission package. And now to refresh people, Congress based upon the Constitution is the sole entity that has the power of the purse, the ability to decide where we spend federal dollars. We had put a bipartisan budget together that this administration basically was trying to say, ‘No, we want to override the budget and rescind certain dollars that Congress had already approved.'”
- “About $9 billion was the total. It broke down into two categories. One was it took around eight billion dollars away from foreign assistance. This is a very small percentage, way less than 1% of our overall spend. This has been supported by the military, the intelligence community. And in many ways, what you’ve seen Donald Trump do in six months is destroy 75 years of American soft power. Our strength comes not only from our economy and our military, but it comes from the fact that we’ve been viewed as the good guys around the world. And we’ve been able to help, whether it’s for example on cutting back on the spread of AIDS, on helping nations rebuild particularly in Africa, on making sure that those Afghans who worked with our forces were protected. Well, most of that has now been eliminated – dramatic cutbacks on faith-based organizations that do assistance for, you know, starving kids. All of the federal support gone. Support for those Afghan veterans who served with our military. That support gone…You’ve heard me talk about the war in Sudan. Support for making sure that people are fed there in a war where more people every day than in Ukraine and Gaza combined. Gone. And this is not only morally wrong, but it’s completely counter to our national security interest…I had an amendment last night to replace some of the Africa funding…Africa will have 25% of the world’s population by 2050, virtually of the critical rare-earth minerals that we need so much are mined in Africa. And all of our soft power support is being taken away. This is a gift to China, because China can come in behind us and literally for pennies on the dollar say, ‘We will now help you. We will help build your new road with Chinese labor by the way.’ And that again sets us back in a lot of these countries. And as these countries buy Chinese technology and Chinese equipment, we wonder why. Well, these countries no longer believe they can count on America. Matter of fact, I read this morning of, I think there’s a poll done in 25 nations, 23 of which now believe that China, not the United States, is the world’s preeminent economic power. And whether it is the up and down on the tariff policy or this kind of retreat from soft power, this is making America less safe and it is a long-term catastrophic decision.”
- “The other part of the rescission was over a billion dollars cut from public broadcasting. That means a hunded million less to Virginia’s, you know, NPR stations, to Virginia’s public TV stations, and many communities. It is that public TV broadcast or the public radio broadcast that puts out emergency notification. You would think after the tragedy in Texas and after we saw the the destruction by Hurricane Helene, that folks wouldn’t have walked away from this commitment to public broadcasting. But that was all cut out. So, if folks wonder what happened to Sesame Street or what happened to Masterpiece Theater, depending on where your age cohort is, that was due to this again, I think ill-fated, cheap effort by all but two Republicans to basically decimate public broadcasting. And in rural communities, it is going to be particularly difficult where there’s not a lot of other options. So you combine the awful bill that’s cutting rural hospitals now, the means for public emergency notification, this is a double whammy to rural Virginia. And rural Virginia voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump. So people wonder who brought them this. Donald Trump and a group of feckless Republicans who quietly had said, ‘Oh my gosh, we don’t think it makes sense to override the appropriations process’, that when push came to shove last night late in the evening, all but two Republicans fell in line and supported Donald Trump, who basically had threatened to withdraw his support from anybody who didn’t go along with this process. What happened to an independent Republican Party that was actually based in some level of conservative principles? Now, it is entirely a bend the knee to Donald Trump, who frankly dismisses Congress and more often than not is willing to dismiss the Constitution.”
- “Salt Typhoon was the Chinese effort that hacked into all of our telecommunication companies, basically allowing them, the Chinese, to listen in on any phone number they go after and literally even read your non-encrypted texts. I’ve been amazed that Americans haven’t gotten more upset about this. We still don’t know if the Chinese penetration has been eradicated and kicked out of the networks. So, we were able to put in my piece of legislation that would require minimum cyber standards for telecom companies. We have that already for our utilities. We have it already for our financial sector. It’s time as well that we have minimum standards for our telecom industry as well.”
- “…one of the things that does concern me though is we have seen a gross politicization of the intelligence community. And when we see the intelligence community politicized, I’ve called repeatedly for Director Gabbard to be fired. I think she is not honoring her commitment to not politicize the intelligence community. We saw earlier in the year where long-term intelligence professionals were told to change their conclusion. This was on a report that was about a bad guy gang, Tren del Aragua, in Venezuela and their ties to the Venezuelan government. This is a bad group. But the intelligence community did not feel like they were directly tied or controlled entirely by the Maduro regime in Venezuela, which are also bad guys. And the intelligence professionals who who reached that conclusion were said, you know, this might embarrass the president, so change your conclusion. They refused to, and they were fired. When you start monkeying and changing and altering intelligence, you get a corrupt product. That was what led us into the war in Iraq. Nobody wants to repeat that mistake. But we’ve now got a political leadership at the director of national intelligence that’s basically demanding loyalty to Trump rather than speaking truth to power. We saw more evidence of this literally as recently as Sunday when Director Gabbard appeared at the Turning Point political conference by the right-wing zealot Charlie Kirk. And appearing at that conference, she basically trashed the whole intelligence workforce, saying that she’s trying to root out anybody that is not loyal to the Trump regime. That is the opposite of what our intelligence professionals, they like our military take an oath of office to protect the constitution, not protect or simply pay curry to an individual president, in this case Donald Trump. So we’re going to continue to fight and call out this politization. I’ve been hugely disappointed that Republican senators who all say to me privately, gosh we hate this, have not been willing to raise their voice. But I’m going to stay on this; politization of the intelligence community will be a disaster for our national security and again make our nation less safe.”
- “Russell Vought is a tyrant. He should not be in the job. He is someone who basically said in his Project 2025 writings that he wants to traumatize the federal workforce and make them feel so bad about their job that they quit. And you know, the awful thing is he’s been relatively successful. We’ve seen senior federal employees leave at a record rate. And now we’ve seen again, driven by Vought, this effort to have mass firings at the Department of Education, the Department of State. The whole notion – and one of the reasons why I was for keeping the filibuster – is that you need to get 60 votes to pass a budget. That means both political parties need to participate. And Vought, sanctioned by Donald Trump, his willingness to arbitrarily pick and choose which programs he wants to fund. Nobody voted for Russell Vought. And the idea that he wants to make this a totally partisan process is awful for any kind of notion that we could get back to any norms. Why go through the whole process of forming a bipartisan budget if then this bureaucrat who’s got frankly no real background other than being hating federal employees and hating the federal government, to allow him to arbitrarily pick and choose programs after a bipartisan deal is reached. Congress has the power of the purse. If this guy is allowed to continue to have his way, the only way we can stop it is if more Republican Senators join Lisa Marowski and say they will step up and stand up against this kind of arbitrary tyrant.”
- [Question: “So today is the last day there are LGBTQ youth specific services with the National Suicide Hotline. Tens of millions of dollars kept that program up and running. What are your thoughts on the Trump administration’s decision to eliminate those services to use those dollars elsewhere?”] “I think it is cruel. I think it’s heartless. We’ve spent years in a bipartisan fashion trying to get a national suicide hotline prevention, I believe 988. And it saved lives. I’ve sat with the folks who are on the other end of those calls. Heartbreaking stories. But without that suicide prevention hotline, particularly young people, the rates of suicide will go up dramatically. We all know that young people are under enormous mental health strains these days, particularly people who lived through COVID, who are are kind of consumed by social media. And now as we see some of these AI agents basically replace real friendships with friendships with AI related agents, the idea that you would take the literally pennies that are spent out of the federal budget to fund this these national suicide hotline lines, it’s wrong, it’s cruel, it will lead to additional deaths. And again, you don’t wish ill on anyone, but god forbid when families wonder or or people who would rely on this kind of service find that it’s not there, there’s one guy, Donald Trump, along with a bunch of Republicans who had privately again said it’s bad to get rid of this, who went along, that destroyed that service.”
- “Well, in terms of the health care resignation [at UVA], I’m not familiar with all the background. I do know this – that Jim Ryan was pushed out for political reasons. The university was threatened with additional budget cuts and cutting researchers. That’s wrong. I thought this crowd was supposed to say they didn’t want federal bureaucrats interfering. We have great universities in Virginia. They are well governed by boards of visitors that are appointed by the governor. And all of the members of the current board are appointees of a Republican governor. And the fact that you’ve got bureaucrats in Washington overriding that leadership and pushing President Ryan out, I think it undermines our worldclass universities. There’s now some indication they may be coming after President Greg Washington at George Mason University. Senator Kaine and I are pushing back against that. I wish the governor and the General Assembly would also raise their voices. We don’t need federal bureaucrats for political reasons trying to destroy Virginia universities. And if we don’t stop it, I’m afraid university after university will be subject to this arbitrary, politically motivated, basically threat that threatens federal funding unless you again bend the knee to this administration. It’s wrong. It needs to stop. And we need to see and hear more from Richmond on this subject.”
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