On February 14, 2025, less than a month into Donald Trump's second term, Claudia Tenney introduced a bill.

Not a bill about the price of groceries in Utica. Not a bill about the tens of thousands of people in her district who were about to lose their health insurance.

A bill to give Donald Trump a national holiday for his birthday.

What the bill actually does

It's called the Trump's Birthday and Flag Day Holiday Establishment Act, and it is exactly what the name says. It would add June 14 — Trump's birthday, which also happens to be Flag Day — to the list of federal holidays, permanently, by law.

Tenney's own explanation of why:

"No modern president has been more pivotal for our country than Donald J. Trump... recognizing him as the founder of America's Golden Age."

She said the point was to make sure "President Trump's contributions to American greatness... are forever enshrined into law."

Worth pausing on one line in that statement. Tenney credited Trump with "championing the largest tax relief package in American history." That is not true, and it has been checked over and over. The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget found the 2017 Trump tax law was the 8th largest tax cut as a share of the economy since 1918 — smaller than Reagan's, smaller than two passed under Obama. She put the false version in the press release anyway.

Nobody joined her. Not one person.

Here is the part that tells you the most.

A bill in Congress gets cosponsors — other members who add their names to say they support it. It costs a member nothing. It is the easiest thing in Washington to say yes to.

Eighteen months after Tenney filed this bill, the official cosponsor count on Congress.gov is zero. "No cosponsors," the page reads. Not one Democrat. Not one Republican. Not a single one of her colleagues in a House her own party controls was willing to put their name next to hers on this.

The bill was referred to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on the day she filed it. That committee is run by Republicans. In eighteen months it has never given the bill a hearing, a markup, or a vote. The last thing that happened to it was being handed to a committee that then ignored it.

So the thing she promised would be "forever enshrined into law" has, in a year and a half, moved exactly nowhere.

A new federal holiday is not free — and she knows that

Tenney has built her brand on cutting government spending.

She sponsored the Implementing DOGE Act, her own bill to automatically cancel any growth in non-defense government spending above 1% a year, starting in 2026 and every year after. She introduced separate legislation to force all 50 states to create their own DOGE commissions by holding their federal funding hostage, announcing that "it's time for state governments to follow suit." She voted for the package that clawed back $9.4 billion Congress had already approved for foreign aid and public broadcasting.

Now put a new federal holiday next to that.

A federal holiday means the entire federal civilian workforce gets a paid day off. That costs real money. When Congress added Juneteenth, the National Taxpayers Union Foundation put the price of one additional federal holiday at $918 million — $858 million in base pay for one day across the federal civilian workforce, plus about $60 million in extra pay for the people who still have to work it.

That is close to a billion dollars, every single year, forever, so that the calendar says Donald Trump's name on it.

The same member of Congress who wants an automatic cap on government spending growth, who wants every state to stand up a DOGE office, who voted to cancel money Congress had already promised — proposed that as a birthday present. And she proposed it in the same stretch of 2025 when DOGE was emptying out the federal workforce: more than two million workers were offered a buyout, close to 140,000 took it, and the firings came on top. Her bill would have handed whoever was left a paid day off named after the man doing the firing.

No living person has ever gotten this

There is a reason this has never been done before, and it isn't partisan.

Federal law currently recognizes eleven federal holidays. Only a few are named for a specific person, and as the Fulcrum's Congress Bill Spotlight laid out, every single one of them was created after that person had died — Washington's Birthday in 1885, Columbus Day by presidential decree in 1937 and by Congress in 1968, and Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 1983.

Trump was 78 years old and sitting in the Oval Office when Tenney filed this.

That same piece points out something else. Back in 1983, a Republican senator, Pete Wilson of California, tried to go the other direction — capping the number of federal holidays at ten, so a new one could only be added if an old one was dropped. The Senate passed it 86 to 2. Even most Republicans of that era thought the list should stop growing.

Tenney's answer, forty-odd years later, was to try to grow it by one, for a man who was still alive to enjoy it.

Trump got the birthday party anyway

Here's the coda. The bill went nowhere, but June 14, 2025 came around regardless, and the country got a military parade through the streets of Washington on Trump's birthday.

The Army later said the parade and festival cost $30 million.

So the holiday didn't happen. The spending did.

What her district got instead

While Tenney was working on the calendar, here is what was happening to the people who sent her to Washington.

• The nonpartisan Joint Economic Committee estimates the health care cuts in Trump's budget bill will cost more than 30,000 people in her district their health insurance.
• More than 43,000 households in her Upstate New York district — about one in eight — rely on SNAP to afford groceries.
• When constituents in Sackets Harbor organized a town hall and invited her, she didn't show. Well over 200 people turned out to address an empty chair with her name on it.

She had time to write legislation honoring a president's birthday. She did not have time to sit in a room with the people whose insurance she voted to cut.

She is not the only one doing this

If this feels familiar, it should. This is a whole genre now.

Eight days into Trump's second term, Florida's Anna Paulina Luna filed a bill to carve Trump's face into Mount Rushmore — also zero cosponsors, also zero action. Greg Steube filed bills to rename 4.3 million square miles of ocean after Trump and to starve DC's subway until it's called the "Trump Train". Idaho's Mike Simpson used his appropriations gavel to put Melania Trump's name on a Kennedy Center theater in the same bill that cut arts funding by 35%.

None of these bills help anyone. That's not really what they're for. They're for getting noticed by one man.

Tenney has a job. It comes with the power to write laws that change what people pay for health coverage, what they pay at the register, whether they can afford groceries at the end of the month. She used a piece of that power to propose a day off in honor of a birthday.

Eighteen months later, not one other person in Congress thought it was worth signing.

Source

Congresswoman Tenney Moves to Make President Trump's Birthday a Federal Holiday — Office of Rep. Claudia Tenney, February 14, 2025. Photo: official portrait, tenney.house.gov.