At her town hall event in Queens, New York, on Friday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) slammed the Trump Administration.
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00:00In with respect to what we will be covering today, I want to talk a little bit about the Trump and Doge impacts in our neighborhood and community specifically.
00:10Yeah, not great. It's terrible, but that's the preview.
00:17But I want us to also know with some detail what are some of the things that we're going to be seeing and experiencing so that we know where to direct our energy and our attention.
00:26I'm going to talk about something known as reconciliation. These are all the budget cuts that we've been talking about when they're going after Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security.
00:37Those budget cuts are done through a legislative process known as reconciliation.
00:43And so I'm going to talk a little bit about what that means and how that intersects with my my new assignment in this Congress on the Committee on Energy and Commerce.
00:52I'm a little bit of a preview. All of the Medicaid work and all of the Medicaid fight is going to go through the Energy and Commerce Committee, which is the committee that was just assigned to this Congress.
01:03And we're going to fight for that. And I feel like we're going to win. I feel like we're going to win on that.
01:16But it will not be without a lot of work. So we'll talk about that.
01:20Then we'll talk about some immigration updates that we have in the district, as well as some additional district updates.
01:26I'm going to try to breeze through that as quickly as I can so that we can then get to the Q&A at the very end.
01:31So we'll just get started right that. Let's go to our first slide in terms of Trump and Doge's impacts on New York 14.
01:40So right now, let me see. Can we get the slide to move? Do I need to do that? Is there a clicker here?
01:44OK, here we go. So we've heard about Doge going in and cutting and slashing and burning on all sorts of federal programs across the country.
01:54We've seen many federal workers that have been fired and summarily dismissed.
01:59And this has been tremendously concerning for overall things across the country, from medical researchers to folks who are giving our veterans care at the VA.
02:09People have been impacted across the board. But in terms of our neighborhood right here in our backyard, in Jackson Heights, in the Bronx, in other areas of Queens,
02:19this is what we're seeing in terms of our immediate community. We've got we've got funding that is now under threat.
02:26And then we have funding that has officially been terminated. And so in New York 14 and our district,
02:34a lot of people don't know that the that huge amounts of the Montefiore Hospital Network is in our community,
02:41our congressional district. And of course, we have New York hospitals, H&H.
02:47Elmhurst Hospital is just outside the district. But of course, so many of us rely on Elmhurst Hospital and Jacoby Hospital as well.
02:56And so we actually have a lot of health care workers, health care providers and hospital networks in our congressional district.
03:04And that includes health care research. So right now we have about two hundred and fifty five million dollars of health care research in our community.
03:14That is under threat. It has not been canceled yet. And I've been working very hard to defend and.