Tag: fitchburg

LOWELL — For U.S. Rep. Lori Trahan, 2025 went about as she expected with the return of the Trump administration, which she thinks has been much like the first term, but with things moving much faster than before.

That expectation was set, she said, by documents like Project 2025, a 900-page document compiled by the Heritage Foundation outlining a blueprint for a dramatic shakeup of the U.S. government under the next conservative president, which ended up again being President Donald Trump.

“I think we were all sort of ready for a different cadence in this term, but it certainly started before the inauguration. We had a bipartisan package of health care bills, of all this legislation on its way to passage at the end of the year,” Trahan told The Sun Tuesday.

“Elon Musk basically in a tweet said ‘it’s way too complicated, legislation shouldn’t be this long,’ and he killed it.”

Despite the tumultuousness that followed in the federal government for the rest of 2025, Trahan once again closed out the year with a report from her office on what she sees as her biggest accomplishments of the year, even within a Congress she said took on “irrelevance” rather quickly.

Those highlights included the more than $200 million in federal funding for the long-awaited Rourke Bridge project in Lowell, her support for online privacy protections through the reintroduction of the DELETE Act and the fight to restore Affordable Care Act premiums that expired at the end of the year.

On Tuesday, Trahan sat down with The Sun to talk about her hopes for 2026, the upcoming midterm elections and what ways Democrats can counter President Trump with a slim minority in Congress.

Trahan remarked that she was shocked how quickly Congress was pushed to the side in 2025 as Trump issued a record number of executive orders, but expressed confidence Democrats can reassert that authority in the coming midterms in November.

“I think people want a check and balance on this administration, especially after living through this year, (having) Republicans in charge has really just meant chaos, it has meant higher prices, no checks on tariff policy, no checks on changes to children’s vaccine schedules, no checks on a potential war with Venezuela,” said Trahan. “The president has bombed seven countries since he has been in office and he ran on ending forever-wars (and not) getting the United States involved in foreign wars. People are tired, they are exhausted. They are really trying to make ends meet, trying to establish a better life for their families and themselves, and they are facing higher prices everywhere.”

Trahan noted her support for a war powers resolution which had yet to be taken up by the Senate and would prohibit the president from waging war in Venezuela. The bill has since been passed in the Senate 53-47, and has yet to be taken up in the House of Representatives. The Senate margin would not be enough to overcome a veto by Trump, which would require a two-thirds majority in both chambers.

Given the challenges her party faces in getting legislation through without control of any branch of government, Trahan said her aims in 2026 are centered around things like the stabilization of our local health care system after the Nashoba Valley Medical Center closure in 2024.

“No Plan B until the governor stepped in, working with UMass to come up with a path forward there, but there is anxiety in that region around not having a full community hospital operation,” said Trahan. “What the Big Beautiful Bill did … was really undermine and destabilize our entire hospital system. Without those Medicaid payments, we are absolutely going to see a loss of vital hospital services. We have already seen some of the less profitable services close … that is going to continue.”

On top of that, Trahan said, the Affordable Care Act premiums expired on Jan. 1, and her office has heard from constituents whose health insurance premiums have since risen to as high as an extra $11,000 a year.

“It is just incredible to see how beneficial those tax credits were for people, and how unaffordable it is without them,” said Trahan.

“When you have young, healthy people … who say ‘this is unaffordable for me, I am going to roll the dice,’ one: something catastrophic can happen to them and they are not even going to be able to afford the ambulance bill, never mind what it will take to treat them in the hospital,” said Trahan. “But two: it increases everybody’s premiums because then the insurance pool is older and sicker, people who can’t not have insurance.”

Trahan and the rest of the House Democrats got the support of nine Republicans to sign a discharge petition to force a vote on a clean three-year extension of the ACA tax credits. The subsequent vote passed the House 230-196 with 17 Republicans joining all Democrats to vote in favor. That bill faces a questionable future in the Senate as of Friday.

Trahan currently does not have an opponent for this year’s midterm elections, which would be the second straight election she goes uncontested if that remains true. While Trahan could have little to worry about her own seat, Democrats are currently facing a historic popularity crisis according to a number of polls over the past year.

“We have to reconcile a lot of polls. The institution that has the lowest approval rating is Congress, but there is a difference when you ask how people feel about their own congressperson,” said Trahan. “I have a lot of humility around the state of favorability for the Democrats.”

Despite the polling challenge, after the off-year 2025 elections across the country showed promising signs for Democrats, the party has expressed confidence it will take back seats from what is currently a very narrow Republican majority. Trahan said that can happen by the Democrats “making the case for a check and balance on this administration.”

“On any administration, but this administration in particular. Congress has to reassert their authority so the questions people have back home we are actually asking in the halls of Congress and committee rooms,” said Trahan.

Points of contention for voters who subscribe to Trump’s “America First” messaging might be the military’s intervention in foreign countries, Trahan said, or things like the $40 billion bailout given to Argentina.

“I think that is why you are seeing some disruption and questions in the Republican Party … My hope is that pressure people feel at home will start to come to Congress with them, and people will start surfacing those questions and having hearings, and forcing the president to not bypass Congress, but instead to work with us,” said Trahan.

Despite the division, Trahan said she has still been able to find common ground with her Republican colleagues on certain issues. She pointed to two bills, the reauthorization of the Creating Hope for Kids Act  and there is the Accelerating Care for Kids Act, on which she has worked for four years with Republicans in the House and she feels confident will pass this year.

Just a bit into 2026, and closing in on one year since a new administration and new session of Congress, Trahan said the midterms come down to how “people don’t feel like they are better off right now.”

“People do feel betrayed … they thought [Trump] was going to make a concerted effort to bring their prices down. That is not happening. That is where Democrats know people expect the government to do something,” said Trahan.

Trahan and all but one member of the House voted in November in favor of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, a bill to compel the Department of Justice to release all documents related to the investigation into deceased sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and his clients. The DOJ had a Dec. 19 deadline to release the trove of documents, but those that were released by that time were heavily redacted, and the DOJ said there are millions more documents that needed to be processed for release.

Trahan said with the DOJ missing deadlines compelled by the law, the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees are “spending a lion’s share of their time just watching the DOJ and making sure they are following the letter of the law.”

“This was incredibly bipartisan, it was the result of victims coming to Washington and demanding that these files be released, which by the way, this president promised he would make transparent. It shouldn’t have even gotten to the point where that was forced upon his Department of Justice,” said Trahan.

One of the biggest changes of 2025, which is poised to continue to be a flashpoint in 2026, has been the federal policies surround immigration and its enforcement. Trahan’s office has been tracking 15 cases within her district where immigration enforcement agents have arrested immigrants who in some cases had legal status.

“We work with legal services … we work with [U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services] on where they are if they are in Burlington or if they have already gone to Maine, or in horrible cases to Louisiana or somewhere else,” said Trahan.

Another way her office helps is by advising all immigrants facing these issues to sign a privacy consent release form.

“It is just one of those things people would never know to ask for, but we can’t be helpful until that piece of paper has been signed, and there has been a lot of obstruction of a detainee getting that piece of paper, getting it signed and getting that communication to us, but once we have all that in place we can work on someone’s behalf in a myriad of ways,” said Trahan.

Growing up, Trahan said, her family only wanted was to know “that if we worked hard we could get ahead.”

“Right now that is not the reality,” said Trahan, calling health care and the high cost of living the biggest challenges facing Americans right now. “Families like the one I grew up in are really struggling … they are not seeing their government acknowledge they cannot afford health care coverage.”

Seven years into her congressional tenure, Trahan said she still sees the job similarly to what she expected going into her first term, which she credits to her decade of experience as a congressional staffer.

“I started in the second half of Trump’s first term. I am now going to serve, hopefully if I win my reelection, through another Trump term, and I think what has changed has been the abdication by the Republican majority’s authority to the president,” said Trahan. “In 2018 we were part of this blue wave that was part of the backlash of the first two years of President Trump being in office. I got to see a Congress that exerted its authority on a rogue presidency. I have also lived through this first year where we did not have that check and balance. That is really dangerous for our country.”