I don't have any illusions that I'm naively going to go down and Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell are going to say, "Angus, tell us how to do this." I … - Angus King

My approach to the job can be summed up pretty simply — I never viewed politics as my career. Important, yes, worthy of intense commitment, of course — but it was not my whole life. … I saw politics as a way to make a contribution and satisfy my penchant for public policy, but not as something I couldn't live without.

I picked a few examples, but my final example is the power seemingly assumed by DOGE to burrow into the treasury's payment system, and now CMS for undefined purposes, zero oversight and raises questions up to and including threats to national security. Do these people have clearance? Are the doors closed? Are they going to leave open doors into these? What are the opportunities for our adversaries to hack into the systems? We're already under unprecedented cyberattack and we're opening doors, although it's impossible to determine what they're taking. Remember there's no transparency or oversight. Access to social security numbers seem to be in the mix. All the government's personnel files, personal financial data, potentially everyone's tax returns and medical records. That can't be good. That can't be good. That's data that should be protected with the highest level of security and consideration of Americans' privacy. And we don't know who these people are. We don't know what they're taking out with them. We don't know whether they're walking out with laptops or thumb drives. We don't know whether they're leaving back doors into the system. There is literally no oversight. The government of the United States is not a private company. It is fundamentally at odds with how this system is supposed to work. Shouldn't this be an easy redline?

We have to understand, we are an anomaly in history. The historical norm is pharaohs, kings, dictators, emperors, presidents for life. But the fact that we're such an anomaly, and we've seen in our lifetimes other governments, other systems based upon ours slip into authoritarianism and dictatorship tells us how fragile what we have is. What we have in this country is an anomaly in history and it's fragile, and it needs to be, must be, protected from generation to generation. This makes this moment all the more urgent and portentous.