May 20, 2025 – The USA Potato

Today was a rough day for administration officials on Capitol Hill as Senate committees held hearings on the 2026 budget requests for the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Department of State. The Senate Finance Committee also held a hearing for Trump’s nominee to be Commissioner of Internal Revenue, former Missouri representative William “Billy” Long. Democrats came prepared and demanded answers that the department secretaries and nominee were either unable or unwilling to give.

Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem was testifying before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee about the Department of Homeland Security’s budget for fiscal year 2026. When Senator Maggie Hassan (D-NH) asked her to define “habeas corpus,” Noem’s response indicated she has no understanding of the nation’s fundamental law.

“Habeas corpus is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country,” Noem said. Hassan corrected her: “Habeas corpus is the legal principle that requires that the government provide a public reason for detaining and imprisoning people. If not for that protection, the government could simply arrest people, including American citizens, and hold them indefinitely for no reason. Habeas corpus is the foundational right that separates free societies like America from police states like North Korea.”

Noem’s habit in these hearings is simply to ignore questions and to attack, and she tried that with Hassan, suggesting that the president has the right to suspend habeas corpus if circumstances require it. Her position echoes that of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, with whom she appears to be working to render immigrants to prisons in third countries, but it is dead wrong. The Constitution permits Congress to suspend habeas corpus; not the president.

While Republicans were generally supportive of the Republican officials in the hearings, Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) used his time to beg Noem for help for Missouri. The state has suffered a number of natural disasters, including a deadly tornado last Friday, but the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has not shown up.

“The state has pending three requests for major disaster declarations from earlier storms,” Hawley told Noem. “[W]e’ve lost almost 20 people now in major storms just in the last two months in Missouri.” The Department of Homeland Security oversees FEMA, and Hawley asked Noem to expedite the requests and get them in front of Trump. “We are desperate for… assistance in Missouri,” he said.

When Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) asked Noem how she planned to meet the needs of American people when the administration is cutting 20% of FEMA employees and the agency has lost most of its leadership, Noem talked over him and said the problem was that the Biden administration had failed the American people.

Over in the Appropriations Subcommittee on Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, and Related Agencies, things didn’t go much better.

Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. exploded when Senator Patti Murray (D-WA) asked him whose decision it was to withhold childcare and development block grant funding. Kennedy immediately pivoted to former president Biden’s 2021 budget. When she tried to get him back on track, he continued to talk over her, accusing her of “presiding over the destruction of the health of the American people” and of not doing her job. Murray repeatedly tried to recall him to appropriate behavior, finally appealing to the Republican chair of the committee, who asked Kennedy to stop.

When Murray repeated her question, he simply said the decision was made “by my department.” While he refused to take responsibility for the cuts himself, Murray did get him to admit that the department has blocked billions of dollars in federal child care funding.

Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) spelled out for Kennedy his concern about cuts to research funding for the neurodegenerative disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), sometimes called Lou Gehrig’s disease. “On April 1, ten laboratory heads at National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Strokes received their layoff notices,” he said. “They were all PhDs and senior investigators. They’re not administrators, whatever that might be. They were running intramural labs at NIH. If you have your way, they’ll all be gone on June 2nd. Science magazine reported 25 of 320 physician researchers at NIH’s Internal Clinical Center are leaving, and the number of patients treated in the hospital has been reduced by 30%. Three grants involving ALS and dementia work at Northwestern University [in] Illinois have been paused…. Just last week, an ALS researcher at Harvard had his grant cut.” Durbin asked: “How can we possibly…give hope to people across the country who are suffering from so many diseases when our government is cutting back on that research?”

Kennedy replied: “I do not know about any cuts to ALS research.” When Durbin responded, “I just read them to you,” Kennedy reiterated that he didn’t “know about them until you told…me about them at this moment.”

Brenda Goodman of CNN noted that when Senator Jack Reed (D-RI) asked Kennedy about ending the childhood lead poisoning prevention program of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Kennedy assured Reed that “[w]e are continuing to fund the program.” Goodman notes that CNN reported in April that officials in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, had asked the CDC for help addressing lead hazards in Milwaukee Public Schools after the agency’s lead experts were fired. The CDC refused, possibly because Kennedy has said lead poisoning prevention would be moving from the CDC to his new “Administration for a Healthy America.”

Kennedy told Reed the federal government has “a team in Milwaukee, and we’re giving laboratory support to that, to the analytics in Milwaukee, and we’re working with the health department in Milwaukee.”

Officials in Milwaukee said that was untrue. “The City of Milwaukee Health Department is not receiving any federal epidemiological or analytical support related to the MPS lead hazard crisis. Our formal Epi Aid request was denied by the CDC,” spokesperson for the City of Milwaukee Health Department Caroline Reinwald told CNN. Earlier this month, Milwaukee’s health commissioner expressed dismay that the CDC’s entire team working on childhood lead exposure had been laid off. “These are the best and brightest minds in these areas around lead poisoning, and now they’re gone,” he said.

At the end of today’s hearing, Senator Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) corrected the record, saying to Kennedy: “There are no staff on the ground deployed to Milwaukee to address the lead exposure of children in schools, and there are no staff left in that office at CDC, because they have all been fired.”

Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee took Secretary of State Marco Rubio to task for abandoning the principles they believed he held when they voted to confirm him.

The administration rendered Maryland senator Chris Van Hollen’s constituent Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the notorious CECOT terrorist prison in El Salvador through what the administration said was “administrative error,” and yet officials are refusing to bring him back despite court orders to do so. Van Hollen reminded Rubio that they had served together in Congress for 15 years and that while they didn’t always agree, “I believe we shared some common values: a belief in defending democracy and human rights abroad and honoring the Constitution at home. That’s why I voted to confirm you. I believed you would stand up for those principles. You haven’t. You’ve done the opposite.”

Senator Jacky Rosen (D-NV) spoke to him “as a mother, a senator, and a fellow human being,” saying, “I’m not even mad anymore about your complicity in this administration’s destruction of U.S. global leadership. I’m simply disappointed. And I wonder if you’re proud of yourself in this moment when you go home to your family?” She noted how he appeared to have abandoned all his past principles, and said she no longer recognized him.

When Van Hollen told Rubio he regretted voting to confirm him as secretary of state, Rubio retorted: “Your regret for voting for me confirms I’m doing a good job.”

Billy Long had his own problems. In an opening statement, Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) pointed out that Long was neither “an independent tax professional or somebody with extensive management experience.” He was simply a fierce Trump loyalist who would help Trump “use the IRS as a cudgel to beat his adversaries into submission.” Wyden also noted serious accusations against Long’s involvement with fraudulent tax schemes.

In his questioning, Wyden asked, “Did you promise any tax promoter you would help them if you got confirmed?” Long said no. Wyden followed up, asking if he had met with anyone when he was in Washington, D.C., for the inauguration and promised to help them. Long again said no, that he had been in his room for “about 50 hours” with food poisoning.

Wyden noted that staff investigators had tapes of a tax promoter saying he had met with Long at the inauguration and that Long had promised him favorable treatment. They also have another tape of a chief financial officer who had donated to Long after he was nominated for the IRS post, also saying he expected favorable treatment. Senators Wyden, Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts are currently investigating these tapes.

Warren took up Trump’s misuse of the IRS to hurt his opponents. Trump has threatened to revoke Harvard University’s tax-exempt status, although federal law expressly prohibits any official from using the IRS to punish any individual taxpayers. Warren tried to get Long to say it would be illegal for the president to direct the IRS to revoke a taxpayer’s nonprofit status, but he refused to. Warren concluded: “[T]he fact that you want to sit there and dance around about this tells me that you shouldn’t be within 1,000 miles of the directorship of the IRS.”

The House was also a troubled place today, as Representative Nancy Mace (R-SC) used a hearing of the House Cybersecurity, Information Technology, and Government Innovation Subcommittee, which she chairs, to accuse her ex-fiancé and other men of sexual abuse. She showed what she claimed were naked photos of herself and other women, taken without their consent. These accusations echo those she made in a speech in the House on February 10th. The men deny the allegations, and one is suing her for defamation. She is taking the position that her attacks on them in Congress are legally protected by the Constitution’s speech and debate clause.

If Republican lawmakers didn’t seem up to their jobs today, neither did the president. He announced a “Golden Dome” missile shield defense system—a U.S. version of Israel’s “Iron Dome”—that he claims will be operational in 3 years and cost $175 billion. Experts say it is not yet possible to construct such a defense system for intercontinental ballistic missiles and that such a project could cost as much as $542 billion.

When a reporter asked Trump about the cost, Trump claimed “we can afford to do it…we took in $5.1 trillion in the last four days in the Middle East,” a wildly made-up number. Such a system would likely benefit at least one person: it would depend on thousands of satellites, a requirement that seems likely to benefit billionaire Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

Administration officials today seemed to illustrate their utter disregard for the work their jobs require and their refusal to govern for Americans. Instead, they seem to see their offices as ways to get access to large amounts of money and power they can use to impose their will on the country.

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Notes:

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/josh-hawley-begs-trump-administration-fema-aid-missouri-1235343815/

https://www.senate

no.gov/committees/hearings_meetings.htm

https://www.cnn.com/2025u/05/20/health/kennedy-lead-contamination-milwaukee

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/05/20/rubio-senate-hearing-trump-foreign-policy/

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-noem-fumbles-definition-of-habeas-corpus

https://www.finance.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/05202025_wyden_statement.pdf

https://www.levernews.com/ceo-says-trumps-irs-pick-promised-big-benefits/

https://www.warren.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/letters_to_seven_companies_rebillylong.pdf

https://www.npr.org/2025/05/02/nx-s1-5384897/trump-harvard-tax-irs-antisemitism