WASHINGTON — Emerging from a Wednesday markup session in which they voted to trim another $340 million from the World Trade Center Health Program, sixty-three members of Congress reportedly took a moment Thursday morning to lower their heads, fold their hands, and post a black-and-white photograph of the Twin Towers with the caption ‘Never Forget.’
The tributes, scheduled in advance through three separate social media management vendors, went live at 8:46 a.m. Eastern with the precision of a missile test, briefly overwhelming bandwidth in several Senate office buildings as staffers rushed to confirm their boss’s flag emoji had rendered correctly.
‘It’s important, on a day like today, that we honor the heroes who ran toward the danger,’ said Sen. Brent Hollings (R-OK), who in March co-sponsored an amendment redirecting responder cancer-screening funds toward a border drone pilot program. ‘Their sacrifice must never be forgotten, particularly not by me, in public, between now and around 11 a.m.’
According to a press release issued without a single human quote, the Senate Appropriations subcommittee will reconvene at 2 p.m. to continue marking up cuts to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and a small Department of Justice line item dedicated to monitoring domestic extremist networks.
A staffer in the Russell Building, eating a granola bar in a stairwell, said the office had been ‘absolutely slammed’ coordinating the morning’s remembrance posts. ‘We had to flag-emoji forty-seven different versions because the boss wanted it to look organic,’ she said. ‘He hasn’t logged into Twitter himself in nine years. He calls it the Tweeter.’
By 10:15 a.m., several members had already pivoted to afternoon content, including a fundraising email from Rep. Calvin Mosby (R-FL) using the subject line ‘Today We Remember — Chip In $24’ and a floor statement from Sen. Marjorie Penn (R-WY) demanding to know why the FBI hadn’t done more to prevent radicalization, delivered roughly four hours after she voted to cut the FBI’s counterterrorism budget by eighteen percent.
John Vasquez, a retired FDNY lieutenant who has testified before Congress eleven times in support of permanent responder funding, said he had stopped reading the annual posts around 2018. ‘They tag me sometimes,’ he said. ‘Last year a senator’s intern DM’d me asking if I had any high-resolution photos of myself looking sad. For the carousel.’
Devra Holst, who tracks congressional rhetoric at the nonprofit Civic Memory Project, noted that this year’s remembrance posts contained, on average, 14 percent more references to ‘sacred ground’ than 2024, despite a 22 percent decrease in actual votes supporting first-responder health benefits over the same period. ‘The ratio is the story,’ she said. ‘It’s always the ratio.’
At press time, Sen. Hollings had cleared his afternoon for a fundraiser at a Tysons Corner steakhouse, where attendees were asked to wear red, white, and blue, and where the menu reportedly included a $90 wagyu flight named, without apparent irony, the Patriot Cut.