Click here to view video of Murphy’s remarks.

WASHINGTON — Eight days before Congress must pass a new spending deal to keep the government open, U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) called on his colleagues to pass a long-term budget that adequately funds defense as well as the other critical programs that make Connecticut communities secure. Murphy used real-world examples from Connecticut to highlight the consequences of Congress’s failure to reach agreement on federal spending levels, reauthorizing the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), or disaster relief for communities still recovering from hurricanes and wildfires. 

This isn't about political headlines. This isn't about numbers on a page. This is about real-world impact for businesses, for families and for schools. Let's write a budget. Let's fund the Children's Health Insurance Program. Let's get Puerto Rico and Florida and Texas everything that they need. We need to increase funding for national security… but we should also make sure that our schools have teachers. We should also make sure we have cops on the street. We should also make sure that our bridges aren't falling down,” said Murphy. “Newsflash, that's our job.”

The full text of Murphy’s remarks is below:

Thank you very much, Mr. President. I would have joined you in a round of applause, Senator Sullivan. Thank you for sharing that inspiring story.

Colleagues, I wanted to come to the floor this afternoon to just talk very briefly about the real world impacts of the decisions we're going to make in the next week or so regarding the future of the budget. And I really implore my Republican colleagues here, most especially Republican leadership, to get this job done and not put us on another continuing resolution (C.R.). Because this isn't a theoretical or rhetorical exercise. This is about people's lives. And our failure to do our job, our failure to pass a budget and to extend life-saving programs like the Children’s Health Insurance Program, it's not about politics. It's not about headlines. It's not about point scoring. It's about making people's lives better.

So I just want to really share with you three stories from Connecticut to talk about the impact of the decisions that we're going to make with respect to the federal budget.

Let me first talk about this often esoteric sounding concept of parity. One of the most important things we're discussing is how much additional dollars are going to be in the budget for 2017 and 2018 versus the prior fiscal year. There seems to be, you know, fairly widespread agreement that we are under-resourced when it comes to the Department of Defense. We've got a multitude of kinetic challenges that are presented to the United States. A group of us just got briefed once again today by our military leadership on the scope and extent of the North Korean threat. I agree with many of my Republican colleagues that we need to increase funding for national security. But national security is not just housed in the Department of Defense.

National security is also about making sure that our families are secure, that our communities are secure. And so we believe that we should increase funding for the Department of Defense, but we should also make sure that our schools have teachers. We should also make sure we have cops on the street. We should also make sure that our bridges aren't falling down. That's national security as well. And it's not too much to ask to make sure that our security is taken care of internationally and domestically as well.

Let me give you a perfect example of how you can't just plus up defense spending and leave the rest of the budget unattended to. Okay, we love defense spending in Connecticut. Why? Because we make a lot of big-ticket items for the Department of Defense. We make the helicopters at Sikorsky. We make the submarines. We're proud of all of that. Let me tell you what happens at Electric Boat if you plus up the Defense Department at the expense of all the other discretionary accounts.

We're going to be building a lot more submarines over the next ten years. We're now building two fast attack submarines a year. We're going to start building the new ballistic missile submarines, the Columbia class. And Electric Boat needs to hire 14,000 employees over the next ten years. Much of that is because their workforce is older and so they're going to have a lot of retirements. But they've got to find 14,000 new employees over the next ten years. And if they can't, we cannot make the submarines in the United States or we cannot make the parts that go into the submarines in the united States. Either the job won't get done or the work will happen somewhere else, in another country. You can't assemble the submarines anywhere other than Electric Boat, but those parts will go to foreign companies rather than American companies.

The way in which we are going to fill the 14,000 jobs is through the Department of Labor. So the Department of Labor has a partnership with an organization called the Eastern Connecticut Manufacturing Pipeline. That is a public-private partnership that seeks to train hundreds of individuals in the skills necessary to build the submarines. They got 4,500 applications over the past year. They can't place all those people because they only get a certain amount of funding from the Department of Labor. But they were able to train 500 new workers for Electric Boat, putting them right into those jobs that are necessary to build these submarines.

The problem is, the money for that program is running out. And with another C.R., they can't get renewed funding for that program. And so if you plus up the Defense Department without increasing funding for the Department of Labor, you can't get the stuff that you want to build in the Department of Defense because you can't get the workers in order to fill the contracts. If you don't renew this contract, if you don't renew this funding agreement with the Eastern Connecticut Manufacturing Pipeline, the work won't get done or the jobs will go overseas. 

So I just want my colleagues to understand that this isn't some philosophical belief that we need the same amount of money in the Department of Defense as we need in the rest of the budget. It's practical. It's practical because we need domestic economic security, but you also can't execute the Department of Defense contracts without funding in the rest of the budget. 

Second, let me talk to you about the real-world implications of not funding the Children’s Health Insurance Program. Health care, more than any other issue, has just become a political football. Democrats toss it to Republicans. Republicans toss it back to Democrats. And yet, there is no other issue that's more personal than this. If you don't have health care for you and your family, nothing else in your life can happen. And so I just want to share one story. And these letters, these e-mails are flooding into our offices with respect to the real-world impact of not funding the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP).

In Connecticut, letters have gone out to families whose children are insured through CHIP telling them that by the end of this month – that is 20 days away – they lose their insurance.

And so, here's what Tara from Washington, Connecticut, writes to me. She says, “despite our full-time employment as a couple” – she works as a small business manager, her husband is a full-time electrical apprentice. “Despite our full time employment, my husband and I do not make enough money to buy health insurance for our children in addition to our other mandatory expenses.” She explains that her kids go to day care which costs $1,800 per month, which she says is more than their mortgage plus taxes plus insurance. Back to her letter, she says,

“This is where the Children’s Health Insurance Program comes into our lives. I can't even begin to tell you the anxiety I faced when I was pregnant with my daughter crying every day because I didn't know how we were going to make ends meet. Thank god for a family friend who happened to be an insurance agent. She told us about CHIP. And suddenly some of that anxiety was quelled. We've been blessed to have CHIP in our lives...” 

I'm saying CHIP. She actually writes in this letter Husky. Husky is the name of the CHIP program in Connecticut.

“We've been blessed to have CHIP in our lives. Last month our daughter was prescribed a nebulizer. Two months ago my son caught it from her and it required two medications. Co-pays and premiums are manageable and they got the care that they needed. I read in the local paper this weekend that letters were going out to us telling us that our coverage is going to end on January 31.” 

She's writing this in December. She says,

“We're a week away from Christmas and what should be a happy time of year has now turned into stress and depression. How am I going to get insurance for my kids? My daughter turns two on February 10. How am I going to pay for her well visit? I can't just skip it. They won't allow her back into day care. I can't believe the dysfunction going on in this country. I cannot believe tax cuts for the wealthy have taken precedent over the health of my kids. What is Congress doing to ensure their continued health care?”

This story can be repeated literally millions of times over all across this country. People who went through the holiday anxious and depressed because they were convinced that we weren't taking seriously the health care of their kids. When we debate the budget, it has to have attached to it a long-term, if not permanent extension of the children's health care insurance program because there are families out there just like Tara who are doing everything we ask them to do. She's full time employed. Her husband is full time employed and they can't afford health insurance for their kids, if not for this program.

Finally, let me talk to you about the importance of making sure that we get the right amount of disaster funding to Texas, Florida, and in particular, to Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico matters to us in Connecticut because we have the largest percentage of our population with Puerto Rican roots than any state in the country. We're so proud of that. The Puerto Rican community in Connecticut is vibrant, economically, culturally, powerful politically, involved in our cities and our towns and our state government. The governor of Puerto Rico has requested $94 billion for Maria recovery and rebuilding. And I'm just back from Puerto Rico. I can report to you that that island is still in crisis. 100 days after the hurricane hit, more than half of the island, half of the households still don't have electricity. If that was happening in Connecticut or Alaska or Louisiana, there would be riots in the street.

But for some reason it's acceptable in Puerto Rico. We are 100 days after the hurricane and we still haven't approved a disaster assistance package and the Trump administration is nickel and diming the island on the money we have already authorized. I walked through the poorest, most densely populated neighborhood in San Juan, in the capital of the commonwealth – they have no power. Mold is growing in these homes because you can't dry out the moisture without electricity. Kids are enduring more frequent and more intense bouts of asthma. People are dying because they can't refrigerate their medication or keep their ventilation equipment running. This is what's happening in the United States of America. And so we need to authorize significant robust funding for Puerto Rico and for Texas and for Florida. We need to do it now.

We need to do it now because the day that I arrived, I think January 2, on the island, it was reported to us that it was the highest volume of people leaving Puerto Rico since the hurricane, on that day, January 2. The exodus is getting more intense. More people are leaving, not less. Why? Because they don't think that we are committed to rebuilding the island. Those in Puerto Rico don't think Congress is serious about putting back on the electricity. They waited a month, they waited two months, they waited three months, and then they said enough. We can't put our kids in these conditions, and they started leaving in record numbers. They were leaving right off the bat, but they are now leaving in record numbers. And while most of them are coming to places like Florida, many of them are coming to Connecticut. Why? Because when they make that move, they often go first to stay with friends. And because we have such a compassionate, large Puerto Rican community in Connecticut, many of these families are coming to Connecticut.

So let me just give you a couple of the numbers here. We've asked our school systems to try to keep a rough track of how many new students from Puerto Rico are showing up. Our cities are small in Connecticut. We don't have a city that's much bigger than 100,000. And so in Hartford, they have 388 new Puerto Rican students – new, meaning, have come since the hurricane from the island. Waterbury, Connecticut has 268. New Britain, a really small city, has 213. Bridgeport has 179. And these are kids that, they're glad to have shelter and schooling in Connecticut, but they don't want to be in Connecticut. They came in under duress. They came to Connecticut as refugees. They want to be back in Puerto Rico. And the stress that it's putting on our schools is serious.

We're in a budget crisis in Connecticut. Schools have already been, had their funding cut from Hartford. And yet these schools are now having to staff up to deal with this influx of students from Puerto Rico. We're glad to do it. We see it as our obligation and we know these kids will be part of Connecticut's strength. But it's not easy to do when we haven't authorized any money to help states like Connecticut deal with this influx of students. At McDonough  Middle School in Hartford, these kids are thriving but they had to set up a new immersion lab to handle these kids coming in. They had to hire new staff to teach English as a second language. And these are schools that already were seeing their funding hemorrhage from the state government. 

The impact is real on McDonough Middle School. The impact is real on Tara and her family from Washington, Connecticut. The impact is real from an important supplier in our industrial base, Electric Boat. And if we just continue to push C.R. after C.R., these families, these schools and these companies will not succeed.

This isn't about political headlines. This isn't about numbers on a page. This is about real-world impact for businesses, for families and for schools. So let's get the job done. Let's write a budget. Let's at least agree to the overall budget numbers. Let's fund the Children's Health Insurance Program. Let's get Puerto Rico and Florida and Texas everything that they need. Newsflash, that's our job. I yield the floor.

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