For Immediate Release
Friday, March 14, 2025
Patriotic Millionaires to Senate Democrats: The country will pay the price for your cowardice
“The only acceptable course of action that Senate Democrats could have taken here was to use the unique power that they had at this moment to reject this funding bill in its entirety. But instead, they handed our democracy to Trump and company on a silver platter, and we will all pay the price for their cowardice for years to come.”
WASHINGTON, DC – In a vote 54-46, the Senate passed the Republican continuing resolution to fund the government that will, among other things, cut the last $20 billion in enforcement funding that the IRS received through the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act and empower Musk and DOGE to continue to wreak havoc across the government. The spending bill will fund the government for the next six months and pave the way for Trump’s tax agenda, which will overwhelmingly benefit the ultra-wealthy and corporations.
In response, Morris Pearl, Chair of the Patriotic Millionaires and a former managing director at BlackRock, Inc., said:
“With the Republican spending-gap legislation now on its way to the president’s desk, Republicans have exposed Senate Democrats as they gave away the very small amount of power they have. This deal, which guts the IRS’s enforcement budget, will further erode our nation’s tax laws and allow for bad actors to exploit our broken system.
The Republicans presumably brought forth this bill, which they called a ‘continuing resolution’ but is really a law to discontinue government programs, because they figured out that their threat to shut down the government would get the Democrats to cave to essentially anything. And shamefully, Senate Democrats were all too willing to give up the little power they had to Republicans without getting something real in return, like a ‘clean’ continuing resolution, without cuts to the IRS or further distribution of power to Musk and DOGE.
The budget would have never made it to a vote without ten Senate Democrats giving Senate Republicans the votes they needed to override the filibuster. And, most frustratingly, they should not have supported it in the first place. Once again, Senate Democrats concede what little they have only to get themselves nowhere while seriously hurting working people in the process.”
In response, Erica Payne, Founder and President of Patriotic Millionaires, said:
“By providing the votes that Republicans needed to pass their disastrous funding bill, Senate Democrats cemented their place in history as sellouts to the American people and enablers of Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and their DOGE Musketeers. In this historic game of political chicken, they just blinked. Shame on them. Weakness never wins and appeasement is never the answer. Senate Democrats had power and refused to use it. Now the country will pay the price.
It is increasingly obvious that none of this was ever actually about government efficiency. Elon Musk bought X in 2022 because he wanted to ultimately shut down the government to stop it from auditing him. Trump ran for the presidency in order to shut down the government’s ability to prosecute him. And now, through today’s bill, they got everything they wanted – and then some. They’ll have more power to completely raze the federal government, and agencies like the IRS will no longer have the resources to check them in any way.
Make no mistake about it: Trump, Musk, and Republicans are after power and control, and do not want to be audited by the IRS in their quest to get it. And for this reason, the only acceptable course of action that Senate Democrats could have taken here was to use the unique power that they had at this moment to reject this funding bill in its entirety. But instead, they handed our democracy to Trump and company on a silver platter, and we will all pay the price for their cowardice for years to come.”
For interview requests with Morris Pearl, Erica Payne, or other members of the Patriotic Millionaires, please contact Emily McCloskey at emily@patrioticmillionaires.org.
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