Senate Democrats are attacking President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” which was voted down by the House Budget Committee on Friday.
Today, on NBC News’ Meet the Press, Democratic Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) referred to the bill — which he says will kick more than 10 million Americans off their health insurance — as “outright theft.”
Fellow Democrat Senator Patty Murray (D-WA), Vice Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee and Ranking Member of the Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development, also criticized the bill.
As seen in the video below, Murray said: “The Trump administration released a plan to blatantly rob blue states and completely politicize federal funding of crucial projects,” including “critical Army Corps projects to maintain and build foundational water infrastructure.”
Trump’s budget includes a 44 percent cut ($1.4 billion) in construction funding which, according to Murray, “will halt progress on some ongoing projects that mitigate the impacts of hurricanes, flooding, and more.”
Yesterday, Trump released a plan to rob blue states of Army Corps funding.
His partisan plan cuts off blue states like mine from HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS for water infrastructure we need.
This is historic thuggery straight from the White House, & we’ve got to speak out. pic.twitter.com/2XnIfTuJrb
— Senator Patty Murray (@PattyMurray) May 16, 2025
Murray also pointed out in a statement that Trump’s plan would completely eliminate the $500 million in federal funding for the Army Corps to repair the Howard Hanson Dam fish passage facility in Washington state. It’s money Murray secured in the fiscal year 2025 appropriations bill she wrote as Chair and passed through committee in August 2024, as well as in House Republicans’ fiscal year 2025 bill.
According to Engineering-News Record, the Trump budget “targets another $2.5 billion from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency clean and drinking water State Revolving Fund (SRF) formula programs. White House officials wrote in budget documents that ‘states should be responsible for funding their own water infrastructure projects,’ and claimed SRFs are duplicative of other programs like the Water Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act (WIFIA). Another $1 billion would be cut from 16 EPA categorical grants for states and local governments.”
Murray added, “President Trump’s Army Corps construction plan utterly tramples all the careful, painstaking negotiations we did in Congress,” and “cuts off blue states like mine from hundreds of millions of dollars for water infrastructure we need. This is historic thuggery straight from the White House, and we’ve got to speak out.”
Note: On Wednesday, Trump’s nominee to head the Army Corps of Engineers, Adam Telle, committed to uphold a presidential executive order that the agency “rescind, revoke, revise, amend, defer, or grant exemptions” any Biden administration policy that runs counter to the president’s priorities in Alaska.
At a confirmation hearing last week, Telle — who worked for the past four years as the chief of staff for Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-TN) — told Senator Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) that he “tattooed the executive order that the president issued to Alaska on my heart.”