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."
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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.