Senators Urge Action To Break Through Confirmation Backlog & Avoid Last-Minute Funding Battles

Senators Urge Action To Break Through Confirmation Backlog & Avoid Last-Minute Funding Battles

WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senator David Perdue (R-GA) leads an event with U.S. Senators Bill Cassidy (R-LA), Steve Daines (R-MT), Joni Ernst (R-IA), Mike Lee (R-UT), Mike Rounds (R-SD), and Dan Sullivan (R-AK) urging the Senate to confirm President Trump’s nominees and avoid last-minute funding battles, even if this requires working nights, weekends, and through the August state work period to get it done.

Senator Perdue and 15 other U.S. Senators are asking Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to expedite floor consideration of funding bills and nominees in order to make substantial progress before the end of the fiscal year, September 30.

Highlights:

U.S. Senator Perdue: “President Trump tweeted over the weekend that if we get to August and haven’t funded the government, then we need to stay here and get this done. He said a few weeks ago that he never wants to sign another bill like the omnibus again. I think that comment speaks for itself loud and clear. This is nothing more than an effort to make our government work again.”

U.S. Senator Ernst: “Our constituents deserve better than this cycle of governing from crisis to crisis. If Congress hasn’t passed a budget and regular appropriations bills by August, we shouldn’t be able to go home. We should be working nights. We should be working weekends. We should be working through August, and any other state work period to pass these appropriations bills and get our nominations done in a timely manner…We have made a commitment to our constituents, and we need to see that through.”

U.S. Senator Lee: “At the rate were going right now, some have said it would take a decade for this administration to be fully staffed. We have to be willing to stay for the weekends and not adjourn for the week, or for much longer periods of time… I think the American people can expect more, and they can expect much better.”

U.S. Senator Cassidy: “We think we’ve been successful, but we can go from success to greater success…This will allow us more time to review [a spending bill] as opposed to it being dropped in our laps and saying we are voting tomorrow.”

U.S. Senator Daines: “Congress is not getting the people’s business done and not getting it done on time. This is because great obstruction is going on right now in this Congress. It is time to move beyond that and finish the work that the people sent us here to do. It’s time to cancel the August recess, keep members here, get the spending bills passed, get President Trump’s nominees through the Senate, and work on behalf of the American people.”

U.S. Senator Rounds: “We’re $20 trillion in debt. When we go home and ask people what they think about it, they want to know why we’re not doing our job…I want to thank Senator Perdue for taking the lead on this again this year, two years in a row. You see a lot of the same faces up here, but our team is growing in size and saying to leadership ‘we want to be a tool that you can use to push the issue of getting things done.’”

U.S. Senator Sullivan: “By any measure, what’s going on with the Democrats is historic obstructionism… There’s another story here, and that’s the budget. The budget process is clearly broken. We want to build on the process and break the logjam on nominees. If we need more time to get the nominees done and get the budget done in the right way, which it hasn’t been done for decades, then we can create more time.”