Sen. Tammy Baldwin has received an average of 1,000 calls daily from worried constituents since Donald Trump’s return to the White House and a flurry of executive orders that has many of them worried about cuts to Medicaid, immigration raids, rollbacks to LGBTQ rights and more.
Baldwin announced this during a virtual town hall meeting Feb. 27. She said she would have preferred to discuss the issues face to face, but the U.S. Senate is currently in the eighth week of a 10-week floor session.
“That is a clear sign to me,” Baldwin said. “We don’t usually get 1,000 calls a day. I want to tell you that, by reaching out to me by email, by phone, by regular email, I hear you and I understand how chaotic this feels.”
Baldwin said the executive order in the early days of the president’s return to power regarding freezing federal funding resulted in a lot of Head Start directors contacting her. They were worried they wouldn’t be able to pay their employees or that the freeze would impact their ability to care for children.
She said it’s the role of Congress to determine where funding goes, not the president.
“This freeze was real. It wasn’t misinformation,” Baldwin said. “We had others like community health clinics that rely on Medicaid for a portion of their operating reimbursements, and they couldn’t access their reimbursements. We had a week or more of chaos where Head Start programs temporarily shut down, but we were able to help constituents navigate all that.”
Medicaid being a target for cuts is troublesome to Baldwin, who noted that one-third of Wisconsin’s children, along with adults with disabilities and more than 8 million elders are impacted by actions taken. She said those funds help pay for nurses’ salaries, community health clinic and hospital operations, and nursing homes, and any cuts could cause some facilities to close their doors.
“This affects our local economies and especially our rural economies in significant ways,” Baldwin said.
Baldwin also attacked the across-the-board layoffs for hurting U.S. veterans, criticizing the administration’s “lip service” claims of supporting Americans. Most of the terminations in the effort come from probationary employees who are mostly in their first or second year with the U.S. government, but Baldwin pointed out that a program called the Veterans Preference Program has some veterans who have worked at the federal level for longer than one or two years being served their walking papers.
“We saw when this mass discharge started taking place, veterans who had been working at the VA for well over a decade or more get fired,” Baldwin said. “What we need to do, first of all, is demand transparency. This week, we learned of nearly 2,500 VA employees, including folks here in the state of Wisconsin, who were fired. These are people who work on the 988 suicide and crisis lifeline. These are people who are serving veterans everyday.”
Addressing the immigration issue, Baldwin admitted that Congress has not done its job in coming up with comprehensive reform that addresses undocumented immigrants, and that she and her colleagues must come together to develop a solution. She added that Trump’s raids does not constitute a solution.
“What I have been so heartbroken to see in the early weeks of this administration are unannounced raids and the places that we all have thought were so safe were the focal points of those raids,” Baldwin said. “Church services where they know that the services are being offered in a language other than English — Don’t you think churches should be a safe place for people to worship?”
She added that health clinics and schools have also been the sites for immigrant raids, and she believes it’s important to address health and education needs without violating those sanctuaries for all people.
On the subject of tariffs, Baldwin said that, when used sparingly and in a targeted fashion, they can be a good tool in negotiating prices of foreign goods. However, she claimed that the blanket tariffs planned for friends and foes of the U.S. alike will be particularly damaging for Wisconsin farmers and manufacturers.
“We need to see our prices at the grocery store go down,” Baldwin said. “Eggs are the highest they’ve ever been, but when I go to the grocery store in Wisconsin and get some fresh produce, I look at how much of that is grown in Mexico, especially at this time of the year. I think those tariffs are going to result in prices going up at a time when people are having trouble making ends meet.”
Baldwin noted at the beginning she’s taken every opportunity she can on the Senate floor to share Wisconsin residents’ concerns through their communiques with her.
“I have spent a lot of time on the Senate floor lately reading letters that I have received from constituents about how some of the Trump plans and proposals would impact Wisconsinites — not just statistics, but your stories,” Baldwin said. “I think that makes a difference.”
lpulaski@newmedia-wi.com
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