Xavier Becerra: “we hear in this debate that we are being told that some programs have to be trimmed, we have to trim this tree; Head…”

“we hear in this debate that we are being told that some programs have to be trimmed, we have to trim this tree; Head Start, for example, is being penalized because some programs apparently did not run or were not managed as well as they should have been. Yet I remember $500 toilet seats. I remember $100 screw drivers. I remember the costly travel junkets, and I remember the heavy cost overruns in the Department of Defense, and I see that they do not get penalized. In fact, they are rewarded. They are rewarded with $8 billion more in funding than they even requested. Tree trimming? I call it butchering. When we go out there and tell our children in our schools that their programs will not be there, those are being hacked; when we tell our workers that safety for all of our middle-income workers has been axed; when we tell our senior citizens section 8 housing subsidies will not be there to help them pay for their high cost of living and their rent, that is being sacrificed, what we are telling people is that the dream Americans have for their children is just that, it is just a dream. Let us be serious. We are not putting money into deficit reduction when we make these cuts. You could save every single penny we are cutting out of education by just cutting a fraction of the tax cuts that are going to go to the wealthiest of Americans in this country in this House's tax bill.”