Senator Jack Reed shares insights on the election and the future

"We have to fight back," said Senator Reed, "and it’s going to be a tough fight."

On Monday morning, Senator Jack Reed (D-RI) spoke at the LISC¹ Leadership Forum for about 45 minutes, sharing his “insights on the impact of the election on community development, including programs in affordable housing, climate change, workforce development, child care, and health equity.”

The Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) is dedicated to helping local partners transform neighborhoods into resilient and sustainable communities of choice and opportunity — good places to work, do business, and raise children.

The forum was held in the cafeteria of Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island’s headquarters, a place not conducive to a public forum due to a poor speaker system and loud air conditioning. Senator Reed’s voice was, at times, difficult to hear, and my recording was not great. The transcription below is, therefore, heavily edited.

---

Senator Jack Reed: The American people have given [former] President Donald Trump a second term - not the outcome I wanted, and it was not how the majority of Rhode Islanders voted, but the country has spoken, and we must respect the electoral process. Republicans also took control of the Senate and the House, giving them total control of the federal government. In the Senate, Republicans will hold a four-seat majority - that includes the Vice President - so they’ll be able to confirm all of President-elect Trump’s nominations on their own, even if two or three Republicans oppose. With a unified government, they will also have the tool of budget reconciliation that will force through tax and spending cuts without the threat of a filibuster. As my colleague Senator Sheldon Whitehouse has highlighted, judges confirmed during President Trump’s first term will have considerable influence during his second term.

How will the President-elect govern? That’s a good question. His first term gives a strong indication. He will put himself at the center of debates and flood the zone with his Tweets and rhetoric. He’ll take extreme positions and double down when he’s challenged. He will push the executive powers of the Presidency to the limits. Meanwhile, his appointees will have great play over policy, creating additional perils as well as opportunities to make problems. The track record of Trump’s first term in office provided a blueprint for Project 2025, which his allies wrote as a roadmap for his first six months back in August. Project 2025 points to an agenda that will gut the public safety net and harm vulnerable communities.

Housing costs, the largest monthly expense for families, have skyrocketed across the country. Researchers at Harvard have found that half of all renters are cost-burdened, meaning they spend 30% of their income or more on housing.

I think President Trump will go after every environmental program.

We clearly need greater public investment in our federal housing program, something President Trump is unlikely to support. Indeed, President Trump’s last United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) budget request, fiscal year 2021, would have cut HUD by 15% and eliminated the Community Development Block Grant program, the Home Investment Partnership program, and the Housing Trust Fund. It also would have cut housing vouchers and public housing funding, which would likely force more households into homelessness. The President’s allies were explicit in Project 2025, calling for discarding the Housing First homeless assistance policy, which was pioneered by the George W. Bush Administration, and capping the amount of time low-income households can use section eight housing, penalizing struggling families, seniors, and individual disabilities who cannot afford to house.

Many of these proposals have been sold as cost-cutting measures that will lower the deficit or reduce so-called government waste. In reality, these cuts will punish lower-income Americans and exacerbate inequality. Eliminating the Housing Trust Fund, a program I created that targets assistance to the lowest-income households, will have no impact on the deficit whatsoever. Housing First is a proven homeless assistance model that successfully helps individuals and families. So you’re taking away good programs, and in many cases, you’re not getting any deficit cuts. And this has been, in many cases, a willful upsetting of our best housing programs.

Our housing programs are not the only federal supports under threat from President Trump’s second term. The so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, has an agenda to cut government spending by $2 trillion - including the wholesale elimination of government agencies and regulations. The legal authority that Musk and Ramaswamy have to carry out these policies is unclear, but they have written that they hope Trump-appointed judges will uphold their actions. The plan is to go in, destroy, and then go to court to have the judges essentially kick the ball around for three or four years until they hopefully get the answer they want. That’s not a program of progress for the American people.

They’ve already announced that they want block grant Medicaid which will be a disaster.

And, as we all know, President Trump plans to scale up the mass deportation of immigrants utilizing the National Emergencies Act in another test of executive power.

Trump has said that he will impose tariffs on adversaries and allies alike. In fact, he's proposed stiffer tariffs on Canada and Mexico than China.

Those are some of the headlines. If you dig deeper, you see that Project 2025 also calls for eliminating the United States Department of Education, cutting federal investment in public education, and replacing public schools with unaccountable voucher schemes that will put our children, communities, and future competitiveness at risk.

Trump seeks to undermine the right to join a union and collectively bargain for fair wages is on their agenda.

President-elect Trump also wants to repeal the climate provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act, which delivered hundreds of millions of dollars to Rhode Island and accelerated the development of clean energy, lower household energy costs, and make our country more energy independent.

President-elect Trump seeks to:

• defund federal law enforcement agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) and others;

• make it hard for struggling households to qualify for SNAP benefits;

• break up the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; and

• end state FEMA preparedness grants. By the way, these grants are innovative and clever. Rather than waiting for a flood to destroy the property, they go out and raise barriers and raise houses to higher levels, et cetera.

It will be a difficult four years. Whereas during President Trump’s first term Congress consistently rejected the worst of President Trump’s proposed budget cuts. As a ranking member of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Transportation and Housing between 2017 and 2021, I worked with then-Chair Susan Collins of Maine to expand funding for homelessness assistance grants, the Homes program and tenant-based assistance programs.

Everything they do is going to be contested.

The job will be much harder under a second Trump Administration. With the new Congress under Republican control, all the President’s priorities are on the table. However, as Republicans decide which policies to pursue, they are almost certain to consider three items over the next two years: the debt ceiling, the expiring tax cuts, and the Farm Bill, which includes the SNAP Program.

One of my priorities will be housing. It is long past the time that we recognize housing as infrastructure and that homes are just as essential to our economy as roads and bridges.

Finally, the Republican’s major priority next year will be a tax cut. President Trump has called for extending his 2017 tax bill’s expiring provisions and dropping the corporate tax to 15%. Nonpartisan experts expect these proposals to cost more than $5 trillion. Most Americans and small businesses won’t see any benefits since these cuts will favor corporations and wealthy taxpayers.

I’m concerned that the President will politicize and fire common generals because they don’t fit their idea of the military. A lot of that will include women and men of color.

While the new administration will be focused on tax cuts, I will be looking, as I always have, on ways to address the housing crisis. My priority will be my Affordable Housing and Home Ownership Protection Act, which would provide $50 billion over a decade for the Housing Trust Fund. We will build three million deeply affordable units fully paid for by a new tax on investors that purchase single-family homes for rent. Private equity is buying up a significant chunk of rental units and, in many cases, beginning to operate effectively as monopolists.

There are a host of other smart proposals around housing construction to close our supply gap that could be included in this legislation. At a minimum, I’m confident that some existing bipartisan ideas can be included, like restoring the 12.5% increase in low-income housing tax credit allocations and reducing bond requirements. Small Low-Income Housing Tax Credits like these are a positive step forward, but if they represent the sum of housing investment in the tax bill, they would a very small step.

Closer to home, my colleagues in the congressional delegation and I have secured $221 million to replace the Washington Bridge. Now, the state needs to keep the people informed with a clear timetable of progress.

Finally, on to some good news: the Rhode Island economy remains remarkably resilient. Most notably, labor force participation is well above 65%. There are more people working today than during any recent period.

Of course, the global geopolitical dynamic—the outbreak of violence in the Mideast, the Ukraine's fight against the Russian invaders, and China insisting on its right to Taiwan—makes for a very difficult, very trying time. But we've been there before, and what will get us through the night is common sense. Our job is to continue to fight hard and ensure that we provide opportunity for all.

---

1. “The Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) is dedicated to helping local partners transform neighborhoods into resilient and sustainable communities of choice and opportunity — good places to work, do business, and raise children.”