April 29, 2023

Dear Friends,

For many weeks—ever since President Biden released his proposed budget for Fiscal Year 2024 in early March—we have been waiting for House Republicans to present their own plan to prevent a catastrophic default on our nation’s debt.

The President’s budget not only ensures that the full faith and credit of the United States is maintained, it also invests in America’s future while reducing deficits by $3 trillion over the next decade. Republicans denounced this commonsense proposal, and after much delay and infighting, they finally responded this week with their Default on America Act, a bill that would slash overwhelmingly popular benefits, hurt working families, and roll back urgently needed climate action. To say that this Republican debt limit bill puts America between a rock and a hard place is an understatement.

Make no mistake: raising the debt limit is essential to the functioning of our government and the stability of our economy. Defaulting on our nation’s debts would have dire consequences, including a shakeup of the global financial system and irreparable harm to the financial security of every American. In our district alone, a default on our debt would:

• Eliminate 7,700 local jobs.
• Put Medicare, Medicaid, and veterans’ health benefits at risk for 292,000 residents.
• Jeopardize Social Security payments for 107,000 seniors.

This is not a matter to be used as a bargaining chip by those more interested in scoring cheap political points than in governing responsibly.

But House Republicans’ latest bill does exactly that, threatening devastating economic consequences unless their demands for draconian spending cuts are met. Their proposal would roll back investments in clean energy jobs delivered by the historic Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and slash critical programs that working families rely on, all while letting big corporations and the wealthiest among us off the hook. Just in New York State, the extreme House Republican scheme would:

• Put nearly 1.3 million people at risk of losing Medicaid coverage.
• Eliminate preschool and childcare for a minimum of 17,000 children.
• Threaten access to food assistance for 54,000 people aged 50-55.
• Make college more expensive for nearly 400,000 students.

We cannot continue down the path of cutting essential programs that support our most vulnerable citizens. We need to invest in the American people if we want to build a better future for ourselves and our children.

But instead of helping our communities transition to a cleaner, greener future, House Republicans are proposing to devastate those very communities by eliminating billions in IRA clean energy investments and drying up the job markets they’ve created. In less than a year since the passage of the IRA, we’ve seen our federal investments spur massive amounts of private investment flowing into our communities to help build that clean energy future. These public-private partnerships are already creating millions of jobs and reducing energy prices for all Americans. By voting to slash federal clean energy investments, House Republicans are voting to wipe out millions of new, good-paying jobs in their own states.

We cannot cut our way to prosperity. We must prioritize investments in renewable energy, energy efficiency, and clean transportation to combat the climate crisis and create good-paying jobs in the process. We must invest in infrastructure projects that will modernize our energy grid, expand broadband access, and revitalize our communities. And at the same time, we must make sure that working families have access to essential resources like childcare, health care, and affordable housing as they work to better their lives and the lives of their children.

In short, we must invest in our people and our communities if we want to build a brighter, cleaner future for all Americans. Our path toward that future must not be held hostage by demands to return to the same damaging policies that have held our country back for decades. I urge my Republican colleagues to join us in good faith to ensure we can meet our government’s financial obligations and do right by the American people.

As always, thank you for reading.

Your friend,

DID YOU KNOW?

My office and I are working to make sure you remain informed with the latest updates and recommendations from federal agencies. With that in mind, here is some information that may be of interest to you:

• The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has created a new website with advice in a dozen languages on spotting, avoiding, and reporting scams.
• Fraud affects every community, and it’s not unusual for scammers to run their scams in multiple languages.
• FTC.gov/languages features advice on how to avoid a scam, what to do if you paid a scammer, and how to report fraud, in twelve of the most spoken languages in the United States.
  • It also includes information to specifically help recent immigrants and refugees spot scams, including job scams and scams targeting immigrants.
• These resources are available in: Amharic, Arabic, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), French, Hmong, Korean, Russian, Somali, Spanish, Tagalog, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese.
• You can click HERE to find more consumer education resources from the FTC.