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05Deletions of Sponsors From Public Bills and Resolutions
Daily Digest
Public Bills and Resolutions Introduced
77 public bills, H.R. 6833- 6909; and 11 resolutions, H.J. Res. 135; and H. Res. 959-968, were introduced.
Pages H6112-16
Reports Filed
Reports were filed today as follows: H.R. 2270, to amend the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 to exclude child and dependent care services and payments from the rate used to compute overtime compensation, with an amendment (H. Rept. 119-413); and H.R. 4054, to amend the Higher Education Act of 1965 to reform accreditation, with an amendment (H. Rept. 119-414).
Page H6112
Speaker
Read a letter from the Speaker wherein he appointed Representative Carol Miller (WV) to act as Speaker pro tempore for today.
Page H6027
Standardizing Permitting and Expediting Economic Development Act
The House passed H.R. 4776, to amend the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 to clarify ambiguous provisions and facilitate a more efficient, effective, and timely environmental review process, by a yea-and-nay vote of 221 yeas to 196 nays, Roll No. 356.
Pages H6029-33, H6033-44, H6065-69
Rejected the Lee (NV) motion to recommit the bill to the Committee on Natural Resources by a yea-and-nay vote of 206 yeas to 211 nays, Roll No. 355.
Page H6068
Pursuant to the rule, the amendment in the nature of a substitute recommended by the Committee on Natural Resources now printed in the bill shall be considered as adopted in the House and in the Committee of the Whole.
Pages H6037-40
Rejected
Clyde amendment (No. 1 printed in H. Rept. 119-410) that sought to clarify that direct harm does not include emotional, aesthetic, or recreational harm unaccompanied by a material physical or property harm (by a recorded vote of 205 ayes to 220 noes, Roll No. 352);
Pages H6040-41, H6066
Roy amendment (No. 5 printed in H. Rept. 119-410) that sought to revise the scope of review clause so the bill clarifies that NEPA review only applies to environmental impacts that the lead agency or cooperating federal agencies have the legal authority to regulate (by a recorded vote of 208 ayes to 214 noes, Roll No. 353); and
Pages H6041-42, H6066-67
Roy amendment (No. 6 printed in H. Rept. 119-410) that sought to define further what significant effects will trigger an Environmental Impact Statement (by a recorded vote of 204 ayes to 217 noes, Roll No. 354).
Pages H6042-44, H6067
H. Res. 951, the rule providing for consideration of the bills (H.R. 4776), (H.R. 1366), (H.R. 845), (H.R. 3616), (H.R. 3632), and (H.R. 4371) was agreed to Tuesday, December 16th. Mining Regulatory Clarity Act: The House passed H.R. 1366, to provide for the location of multiple hardrock mining mill sites, to establish the Abandoned Hardrock Mine Fund. by a yea-and-nay vote of 219 yeas to 198 nays, Roll No. 358.
Pages H6044-49, H6069-70
Rejected the Leger Fernandez motion to recommit the bill to the Committee on Natural Resources by a yea-and-nay vote of 205 yeas to 213 nays, Roll No. 357.
Pages H6069-70
Pursuant to the Rule, the amendment in the nature of a substitute recommended by the Committee on Natural Resources now printed in the bill shall be considered as adopted.
Page H6044
H. Res. 951, the rule providing for consideration of the bills (H.R. 4776), (H.R. 1366), (H.R. 845), (H.R. 3616), (H.R. 3632), and (H.R. 4371) was agreed to Tuesday, December 16th. Pet and Livestock Protection Act: The House passed H.R. 845, to require the Secretary of the Interior to reissue regulations removing the gray wolf from the list of endangered and threatened wildlife under the Endangered Species Act of 1973, by a yea-and-nay vote of 211 yeas to 204 nays, Roll No. 360.
Pages H6049-56, H6070-72
Rejected the Huffman motion to recommit the bill to the Committee on Natural Resources by a yea-and-nay vote of 204 yeas to 213 nays, Roll No. 359.
Pages H6056, H6070-71
Pursuant to the Rule, the amendment in the nature of a substitute recommended by the Committee on Natural Resources now printed in the bill shall be considered as adopted.
Pages H6049-50
H. Res. 951, the rule providing for consideration of the bills (H.R. 4776), (H.R. 1366), (H.R. 845), (H.R. 3616), (H.R. 3632), and (H.R. 4371) was agreed to Tuesday, December 16th. Do No Harm in Medicaid Act: The House passed H.R. 498, to amend title XIX of the Social Security Act to prohibit Federal Medicaid funding for gender transition procedures for minors, by a yea-and-nay vote of 215 yeas to 201 nays, Roll No. 362.
Pages H6057-65, H6072-73
Rejected the Soto motion to recommit the bill to the Committee on Energy and Commerce by a yea-and-nay vote of 204 yeas to 212 nays, Roll No. 361. H. Res. 953, the rule providing for consideration of the bills (H.R. 6703), (H.R. 498), and (H.R. 3492) was agreed to yesterday, December 17th.
Page H6072
Work Period Designation
Read a letter from the Speaker wherein he designated the period from Thursday, December 18, 2025, through Monday, January 5, 2026 as a ``district work period'' under clause 13 of rule 1.
Page H6073
Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure: Communication
Read a letter from Chairman Graves wherein he transmitted copies of three resolutions included in the General Services Administration's Capital Investment and Leasing Programs. The resolutions were adopted by the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure on December 18, 2025.
Pages H6073-94
Senate Referrals
S. 2393 was held at the desk. S. 2503 was held at the desk. S. 3436 was held at the desk.
Page H6033
Senate Message
Message received from the Senate appears on page H6033. Quorum Calls--Votes: Eight yea-and-nay votes and three recorded votes developed during the proceedings of today and appearss on pages H6066, H6066-67, H6067, H6068, H6068-69, H6069-70, H6070, H6070-71, H6071-72, H6072, and H6072-73. Adjournment: The House met at 9 a.m. and adjourned at 5:56 p.m.
Every speech and line is the Congressional Record's own text, read from GovInfo. Speakers are matched to members by GPO's own metadata. Referandom places each turn on the Clerk's video by matching its words: 162 of 397 spoken turns were found. Turns without a time are still listed; they just can't seek.
Madam Speaker, I rise today to recognize Union County West End Fire Company for 75 years of dedicated service to the community.
Founded in 1950, the Union County West End Fire Company has been answering the call to serve the community and protect their neighbors in times of need. Our volunteer firefighters provide fire, rescue, and EMS services, often balancing it with day jobs and family commitments.
These professionally trained volunteers are the backbone of fire protection and emergency response, especially in our rural communities. They are there in emergency situations like fires, car accidents, medical calls, and disaster response. Their commitment to service and teamwork is second to none.
The Union County West End Fire Company gives back throughout the year, whether it is delivering turkeys to families during the holidays, escorting local sports teams to the final round of playoff games, or celebrating championship wins. They truly are the heart of the community.
Madam Speaker, I congratulate the Union County West End Fire Company on 75 years of outstanding service.
Madam Speaker, I rise today to honor Carl Rosen, one of the legendary architects of working-class power in Chicago.
As president of the United Electrical Workers, Carl has always understood that power is never given. It is organized, disciplined, and won.
From the shop floor to the ballot box, he has been instrumental in building real power for working-class communities. A master tactician and negotiator, he knows when to apply pressure, when to build alliances, and when to move decisively.
From the Republic Windows fight to other moments that shaped Chicago's political order, Carl has been a steady
I am proud to call Carl a friend and one of my closest and most trusted advisers. To some, he is a strategist, and to others, he is an organizer. I think he is a faithful interpreter of working-class power and a whisperer of the proletariat. To Carl, here is to our legacy years.
Madam Speaker, I rise today with a profound sense of loss.
Sergeant William Nathaniel Howard of Marshalltown and Sergeant Edgar Brian Torres-Tovar of Des Moines were killed in action by ISIS terrorists while serving on a counterterrorism mission in Syria.
Yesterday, I had the solemn honor of attending the dignified transfer of these fallen heroes. No words can fully capture the weight of that moment or the depth of gratitude that we owe these heroes and their families.
Mothers and fathers should never have to bury their children. Our hearts are broken for these Gold Star families.
My husband, Matt, and I are mourning alongside you, and we join Americans across the country asking our Lord to hold close the families of the fallen. Watch over our troops, and bless our military families.
Sergeant Howard and Sergeant Torres-Tovar represent the very best of Iowa, and they will forever be remembered as heroes.
Madam Speaker, it is with a heavy heart that I rise to pay tribute to my dear friend and south Florida icon, the legendary John ``Footy'' Kross, who we lost on December 13, 2025.
Footy helped wake up south Florida for more than 30 years on the Y100 Morning Show, and his commitment to community was second to none.
Footy was a mainstay in the south Florida community, a passionate anti-drug crusader, and an incurable chicken wing junkie.
Originally, he created Footy's Wing Ding, a chicken wing eating competition, as a fundraiser to aid Here's Help, a not-for-profit organization that assists adults and children with substance abuse addictions.
Although the event began mainly as a competition to crown the maker of south Florida's best chicken wings, it evolved over the years into a popular spot for pop music's hottest stars.
Each year, Footy's Wing Ding brought a host of celebrities to south Florida to raise thousands of dollars for charity, from Here's Help to the Sun Sentinel-WB Television Channel 39 Children's Fund, and many others.
Madam Speaker, it is my privilege to honor his life and service to our community. There was no one with better humor or good nature than Footy. I know I speak for countless south Floridians when I say I will miss his friendship, voice, and advocacy. May his memory be for a blessing.
Madam Speaker, throughout history, Vikings were known as fearless explorers and warriors who never backed down from a challenge. That same spirit lives on in Jacksonville, Florida, where Raines High School Vikings have written their own chapter of triumph by capturing Florida's Class 3A State football championship in dramatic fashion.
In a thrilling 23-22 comeback victory over Miami Northwestern, the Vikings showed resilience, sealing the win--get this, Madam Speaker-- with a touchdown pass with just 10 seconds to spare.
This remarkable finish marks the fourth State title in the proud history of the Raines football program. This victory is a testament to the hard work and fighting spirit of these student athletes. Unlike the Vikings of old, they emerged triumphant through teamwork, preparation, and heart.
Madam Speaker, I congratulate Raines High School. Jacksonville is very proud.
Madam Speaker, I rise today to warn my colleagues of the pending healthcare crisis that Congress is allowing to happen. As Sergeant Friday used to say: ``Just the facts, ma'am.''
I am speaking on behalf of the facts that are impacting the people of the San Joaquin Vallen in California, the bread basket that puts food on America's dinner table every night.
Yesterday, my colleagues on the other side passed a partisan bill that fails to renew the Affordable Care Act's enhanced premium tax credits that help over 24 million American families afford coverage.
In my district, over 65,000 families risk losing Medicaid. Another 22,000 families face higher premiums and out-of-pocket costs. This also impacts the hospitals and healthcare clinics which provide that important care, especially in rural areas. By the way, that is also jobs.
Congress has a responsibility to prevent families from being priced out of the healthcare market. That is the bottom line. There is a bipartisan solution ready to go. Instead, we are going home for the holidays. We are not addressing the issue.
Madam Speaker, I will not be leaving town until we bring this measure to the floor. Every American deserves reliable and afford healthcare.
Madam Speaker, today we remember Coach Dan Hooks, a legend in Texas high school football and a man who just meant so much more to his community than just wins and trophies.
For nearly 30 years at West Orange-Stark High School, Coach Hooks showed up every single day for his players. He pushed them. He believed in them. He held them to a higher standard.
Yes, there were championships and unforgettable Friday night lights. What really mattered happened beyond the scoreboard: the lessons about teamwork, discipline, and doing things the right way.
Coach Hooks wasn't just preparing young men for football games. He was preparing them for life. Long after the cheers faded and the stadium lights went dark, those lessons stayed with them and carried on for generations to come.
Madam Speaker, his influence reached far beyond the field. It is why this community will always carry his name with pride. Coach Dan Hooks built men, built a program, and built a legacy that will live on in West Orange for generations.
Madam Speaker, this week I introduced the FEMA Administrative Reform Act to accelerate the delivery of Federal disaster recovery aid to western North Carolina.
All year, President Trump and his administration have continued to withhold aid and politicize disaster relief. In June, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem implemented a policy requiring her personal approval of any contract above $100,000, including FEMA disaster aid reimbursements. This result
Madam Speaker, my bill would reverse this disastrous policy and speed up the flow of Federal dollars to western North Carolina and communities across the country. It is clear that Congress needs to take action. Our people need the relief that Congress approved over a year ago.
Madam Speaker, I rise today to recognize Sharon Murphy of Horseheads, New York, a truly special public servant from New York's southern tier. For more than 15 years, Sharon served the people of New York's 23rd Congressional District with professionalism, compassion, and a genuine heart for service.
She was a steady presence in our community, serving three consecutive Members of Congress, and always putting the people first. Known for her kindness and reliability, Sharon often worked behind the scenes to help families through their most difficult moments. She took great pride in managing our service academy nominations, helping young men and women take their first steps toward a career serving this Nation.
As Sharon Murphy enters her retirement, I will miss having her on my staff. I will miss her. My staff will miss her. My community will miss her
Madam Speaker, I ask my colleagues to join me in thanking Sharon Murphy for her outstanding service and in wishing her every happiness in this next chapter of her life.
Madam Speaker, I try to slow down at this time of the year, a season of giving thanks, coming together, and counting blessings. It is a season, regardless of one's faith--maybe really because of all of our faith traditions--to celebrate light, light over darkness.
For 75 years, my community of Abington, Pennsylvania, has hosted an interfaith Thanksgiving service. This year, hundreds gathered at Temple-Beth Am, warmly welcomed by Rabbi Robert Leib.
Pastors and priests, rabbis and imams, we were young and old, faith leaders and civic leaders, and what was clear from the readings and beautiful song is our different faiths have so much more in common. It is a common call to lift one another, welcome the stranger, feed the hungry, mourn with those who mourn, to love one another, price peache over conflict, and recognize our common humanity. It is ``Tikkun olam''; ``repair the world.''
This season, as we have come by a way we did not know to the end of another year, I am counting blessings and focusing on the light.
Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor a member of the Grijalva team who has served this great institution since 2003.
Glenn Miller was a trusted source of wisdom, institutional knowledge, and a sounding board to my father, Congressman Raul Grijalva.
Throughout his more than two decades of public service in Washington, Glenn brought a mix that is hard to find: brutal honesty and unrelenting compassion.
His frank insight was instrumental for the House Natural Resources Committee, including flagship efforts such as the Donald McEachin Environmental Justice for All Act and the Baaj Nwaavjo I'tah Kukveni- Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument.
During complex negotiations, Glenn was the reason that every voice was heard. His leadership produced enduring reforms that will impact generations and continue to inspire Federal policies that promise a cleaner, fairer future where every community enjoys clean air, clean water, open space, and economic opportunity.
I thank Glenn for standing by my dad's side for 37 years and for all he has done for me and my entire family. We love Glenn.
Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days in which to revise and extend their remarks and include extraneous material on H.R. 4776.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Is there objection to the request of the gentleman from Arkansas?
There was no objection.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to House Resolution 951 and rule XVIII, the Chair declares the House in the Committee of the Whole House on the state of the Union for the consideration of the bill, H.R. 4776.
The Chair appoints the gentlewoman from West Virginia (Mrs. Miller) to preside over the Committee of the Whole.
Accordingly, the House resolved itself into the Committee of the Whole House on the state of the Union for the consideration of the bill (H.R. 4776) to amend the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 to clarify ambiguous provisions and facilitate a more efficient, effective, and timely environmental review process, with Mrs. Miller of West Virginia in the chair.
The Clerk read the title of the bill.
The CHAIR. Pursuant to the rule, the bill is considered read the first time.
General debate shall be confined to the bill and shall not exceed 1 hour equally divided and controlled by the chair and ranking minority member of the Committee on Natural Resources or their respective designees.
The gentleman from Arkansas (Mr. Westerman) and the gentleman from California (Mr. Huffman) each will control 30 minutes.
Madam Chair, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
Madam Chair, I rise today in support of H.R. 4776, the Standardizing Permitting and Expediting Economic Development Act.
The SPEED Act is a focused, bipartisan effort to restore common sense and accountability to Federal permitting by reforming the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA.
When Congress passed NEPA in 1969, it did so with the best of intentions. It directed Federal agencies to consider the environmental impacts of major Federal actions.
Unfortunately, what was meant to facilitate responsible development has been twisted into a bureaucratic bottleneck that delays investments in the infrastructure and technologies that make our country run.
The first Trump administration found that the average NEPA environmental impact statement between 2013 and 2018 totaled 575 pages and took 4.7 years to complete. A quarter of them took 6 years or more, a glacial pace that costs the economy more than $100 billion a year.
Madam Chair, what reward do project sponsors get for persevering through this slog? Too often, a gauntlet of premeditated, predatory lawsuits. Nationally, NEPA is the most litigated environmental statute. According to the Breakthrough Institute, just 10 environmental organizations are responsible for 35 percent of all NEPA lawsuits. On average, it takes over 4 years to resolve NEPA-related litigation on environmental impact statements. I doubt there is a single Member of the House who has not heard of a NEPA horror story from a family construction company or a local official back home. Today, the word ``NEPA'' is more synonymous with red tape and waste than genuine environmental protection. The SPEED Act would restore
The legislation fixes three major problems that, over the decades, have turned NEPA into a bureaucratic black hole.
First, it restricts NEPA lawsuits to parties who are actually impacted by a project, aligning judicial remedies with the procedural nature of NEPA, while establishing reasonable filing deadlines to prevent litigation from being used as an indefinite delay tactic.
Second, it clarifies what projects must go through NEPA, ensuring that only projects with significant Federal involvement trigger review.
Third, it codifies and strengthens key aspects of the Supreme Court's Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County decision from this past May, clarifying the scope of environmental review under NEPA.
The SPEED Act is project neutral. Its reforms will ensure a fair, predictable process and a level playing field for Federal projects across all agencies and industries.
It is also timely. The United States' energy demand is projected to rise by 35 to 50 percent by 2040. Data centers alone could see their energy consumption triple in the next 5 years. The electricity that we will need to power AI computing for civilian and military use is a national imperative. Every day, NEPA red tape is becoming more and more of an obstacle to American security and prosperity.
By restoring NEPA to its original intent, the SPEED Act will expedite infrastructure projects, bring down prices, and help Americans realize the energy dominance and mineral abundance that our natural resources promise.
That is why a coalition of more than 300 industry associations, businesses, and trade groups from all 50 States and Puerto Rico support this legislation. They know the SPEED Act means jobs, fairness, growth, and a safer, more affordable future.
Madam Chair, I thank the gentleman from Maine (Mr. Golden) for his partnership in this effort. I also thank the many Members from across the aisle who have engaged in a productive manner to develop and improve this legislation.
Madam Chair, the SPEED Act will deliver the energy and infrastructure that Americans need. I urge my colleagues to support the bill, and I reserve the balance of my time.
Madam Chair, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
This is our last day in session before Republicans close up shop and send everyone home for a couple of weeks.
The majority could be using this time to do something, such as provide actual solutions to the healthcare cliff that the country is about to go off of, address the affordable cost of all manner of goods and utilities that have been set in motion by their wrongheaded policies, but no. Instead of doing anything to help Americans make ends meet, we are here on the floor giving more gifts to Big Oil, multibillion-dollar foreign mining corporations, and specialty interests like the NRA.
I guess merry Christmas to all of them and a big lump of coal for everyone else.
To no one's surprise, Republicans have been working all year on handouts to Big Oil that were written for and by the oil and gas industry. The first bill up on our Christmas list is for polluters. It has been at the top of their wish list for as long as I have been in this Congress. It is the SPEED Act, which is being sold to us as permitting reform, and a spoiler alert: It is not permitting reform.
The bill takes a sledgehammer to the National Environmental Policy Act, one of our foundational environmental laws.
NEPA was enacted in 1970 on a bipartisan basis to require Federal agencies to do something that seems very basic: to understand the consequences of their actions and to listen to the affected American communities before approving major proposed projects. It is often described as telling agencies that they need to look before they leap.
Madam Chair, I am not opposed to reforms to make NEPA and other laws work better and to make it more efficient, especially for the build-out of the stuff we need: clean energy and essential infrastructure. However, we can do that while maintaining appropriate environmental protections, respecting Tribal consultation, and protecting community input. The SPEED Act does great damage to all of those things.
Instead, it abandons transparency and accountability, while ignoring the single biggest permitting problem facing the energy sector right now: the Trump administration's all-out war against wind and solar, which includes a total refusal to permit these projects.
From the beginning, Democrats across Capitol Hill have expressed a willingness to negotiate on permitting reform, including changes to NEPA, but the first thing we needed to see was an end to the crazy, arbitrary war on clean energy that is needlessly driving up energy costs for millions of Americans.
I hope you will just take a look at the spaghetti mess behind me because this is what Republicans have done to the permitting process for wind and solar projects.
On July 15, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum signed a memo listing 69 individual actions that require his personal sign-off. Of course, this requirement only applies to wind and solar projects, not to fossil fuels.
However, I will name just a few of the things that now require Secretary Burgum to pause his global tour promoting fossil fuels all over the world and give personal sign-off. If you need a temporary use permit for anything, if you need a national trail system impact evaluation, or if you need visual impact analysis, the Secretary of the Interior himself has to take a look at what you are proposing and sign off--69 times if you want to actually get a permit for a wind and solar project.
This is madness. Since the memo's enactment, there has been only one single solar project all year long that has been approved. It was just yesterday, and it happened only after heavy lobbying from the Republican Governor of Nevada, who told the Department of the Interior that it wasn't just that project, that there are actually 33 gigawatts of solar and storage projects that are in limbo right now because of this logjam that they have created, and that they are going to be key to supporting affordable, reliable energy to meet increased load growth.
To be clear, this is just one project that has made it through the gauntlet. It was fully approved, by the way, under the Biden administration, but then the Trump folks came along and put the brakes on that project.
That is where we are. That is the context for this conversation, where my friends across the aisle claim to care so much about an efficient permitting process.
I think most Republicans would agree, at least privately I think they would agree, that wind and solar are essential parts of the energy mix, despite the President's war against them.
That is why, at markup, Chair Westerman did incorporate a few Democratic ideas that at least attempted to provide some permitting certainty for projects of all kinds. Now, those amendments didn't come anywhere close to actually providing certainty for wind and solar projects in the face of the administration's crazy war on clean energy. The amendment would not get clean energy permits moving again, and it did nothing to help projects that the administration had already pulled the plug on.
Even that largely cosmetic step was too much for the Freedom Caucus, and so they struck again. They demanded that the Committee on Rules attach language to further stall clean energy permitting and to make it even easier for the Trump administration to continue blocking wind and solar projects in order to bring the SPEED Act to the floor today. That was the condition for our being here, debating this bill on the floor right now.
A bad bill got worse, so bad that the American Clean Power Association pulled its support, joining the Solar Energy Industries Association in opposing the bill. For months, we heard from Chair Westerman exhibit A for why Democrats should feel comfortable supporting this bill: The American Clean Power Association supports it. That support has now curdled into opposition.
Mr. Chair, do you know who still supports it? The American Petroleum Institute and the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity, which put out a statement immediately after the Freedom Caucus made the bill worse to announce their great affection and support for this bill.
The bill has lost any claim for advancing tech-neutral energy policy, if it ever had one. Trust me when I say that even if the House passes this bill today, it is going nowhere in the Senate. What a missed opportunity to tackle a serious issue that Democrats were very interested in working on in good faith to find some solutions for.
Mr. Chair, I strongly oppose this bill, and I reserve the balance of my time.
Mr. Chair, I am glad my colleague across the aisle is so good at reading the mind of the Senate, but I know this legislation has bipartisan support in the House and the Senate. We have over 375 organizations from all industries in all 50 States that support this legislation.
Also, I think my friend made the case for why we need the SPEED Act. If we want to stop administrative ping-pong, then Congress has to act. The SPEED Act is the bill to give us permit certainty so that we can build all across our country in all different segments.
One area of the country that has been adversely affected by bad permitting is in northern Minnesota, the home of my friend, Mr. Stauber, whose district has a lot of mining resources that can't be tapped because of permitting restraints and administrative ping-pong.
Mr. Chair, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Stauber), who is the chair of the Subcommittee on Energy and Minerals.
Mr. Chair, I rise in strong support of H.R. 4776, which I am proud to cosponsor.
I want to begin by commending two of my good friends, Republican Chairman Bruce Westerman of the Committee on Natural Resources and Democratic Representative Jared Golden, for their work in developing a sensible, bipartisan, and balanced permitting reform package that will allow us to build all kinds of important projects around this great country.
Our permitting system is broken and has been broken for a long while. It is almost as if our current permitting system is designed to block projects rather than build them. This is something that all of us on both sides of the aisle should be able to agree on.
The bill before us today is not designed to cut corners or weaken our permitting system. It doesn't weaken environmental standards like the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, or Endangered Species Act, which are the bases of our environmental protection here in the United States. This legislation is simply meant to address NEPA, which I would like to remind my colleagues is a process statute.
NEPA has been weaponized for over half a century, virtually from day one. In fact, the first lawsuit utilized to block a project under NEPA was filed mere weeks after the statute was signed into law. Since then, NEPA has created a cottage industry for attorneys who have made a living suing to block good projects.
The bill before us today is meant to streamline the NEPA process and close the loopholes that are constantly used to block good projects-- projects that we need to modernize our infrastructure, ensure we have clean water, generate the energy that drives our economy, access critical minerals we need to compete on the world stage, and so much more.
Thanks to NEPA and our broken permitting system, it takes 29 years, on average, to permit and build a new mine in the United States. That is not okay.
I don't think a day goes by that I don't hear from a constituent about their permitting woes, and I figure that is probably the case for most of my colleagues in this Chamber on both sides of the aisle.
In northern Minnesota, the issue of permitting is particularly acute. Not only is our broken permitting system used to block important critical mining projects like Twin Metals, NewRange, and Talon, but it is also used to block simple core infrastructure projects that we can all agree on, like water infrastructure or roads and bridges.
In northern Minnesota, our cold winters lead us to having a short construction window, much shorter than the rest of the country. When a water infrastructure project or a road or bridge project gets delayed, and they miss that construction window, it delays the project months and adds hundreds of thousands of dollars to the project.
Mr. Chair, do you know who pays those costs? The local taxpayer, not those who are weaponizing loopholes in our permitting system to block necessary projects.
Our constituents have had to deal with the shortfalls of our broken permitting system for far too long, and it is about time we address it.
Mr. Chair, I urge my colleagues to address this bill.
Mr. Chairman, I need to provide some translation services for those who may not be fluent in Orwellian distortion.
When my colleague says that this legislation only deals with NEPA, that it doesn't touch the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, or Endangered Species Act, what that really means is that within the four corners of this particular bill, they are not gutting those other laws. Rest assured, they are working separately to gut those other laws.
In fact, just last week, Republicans attacked longstanding Clean Water Act protections, and just yesterday, the Committee on Natural Resources had a markup that advanced their legislation to gut the Endangered Species Act.
For those who want to see a complete annihilation of environmental protections across the board, rest assured, our Republican friends are doing that, just not all of it within the four corners of this bill.
There is another translation that I think is needed. We heard from my friend from Arkansas that they want to end the administrative ping-pong process. What they really mean by that, if we actually read this bill, is that they want the 69 individual steps that Secretary Burgum has imposed on all solar and wind projects to remain in place. I guess that is not administrative ping-pong, but I think it is an important part of the translation.
Then, finally, we heard that this legislation is about restoring NEPA's original intent, to just be a procedure bill. It is important to understand that NEPA does require procedure, but it requires meaningful procedure for a very important purpose: making sure that government actions consider the impacts of what they are doing and, with transparency and accountability, include communities so we can protect the environment, human health, and other values.
When you strip all of that out and leave NEPA as a box-checking exercise, which is what this bill is, that is not preserving the original intent of NEPA.
Mr. Chair, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Washington (Ms. Randall).
Mr. Chair, because of the Trump administration's policies, families in my district and districts across the country are struggling to afford their heating and electricity bills. Yes, we need more transmission and clean energy projects, and it is true that the permitting process is making that more difficult.
But how can anyone think that this administration, the Trump administration, is a good-faith partner in permitting reform? They have fired Federal workers and illegally canceled funding Congress already approved, including over $1 billion for clean energy projects in Washington State that had strong community support: a long-anticipated hydrogen hub in the south sound, solar projects across the State and the country, and freight and drayage improvements in the trucking industry that would lower the cost of goods and decrease our environmental impact.
We could have been lowering costs, and we could have done it in partnership with environmental leaders, community leaders, and the leaders of Tribal nations. Tribes deserve to be meaningfully consulted on projects that affect their lands, water, and resources, no exceptions.
That is why I offered two amendments: one, to give Tribes sufficient time to engage in the permitting process, and then another to ensure the offshore oil and gas drilling projects, rubber-stamped by H.R. 1, July's big, ugly
Republicans blocked my amendments, which is why I am voting ``no'' on the SPEED Act, a bill that doesn't address the challenges my neighbors are experiencing.
Mr. Chair, the purpose of process is to create a predictable sequence of steps to achieve an outcome consistent with substantive law. When process is allowed to intrude, the purpose of the law itself is perverted.
As philosopher Franz Kafka described it, the process becomes punishment. You aren't guilty or innocent yet. You are simply processed until you run out of money, time, or sanity.
Procedure exists to serve substantive rights, not to supplant them. As the Supreme Court stated in the Seven County case: NEPA is a purely procedural statute, not a mandate for a particular result.
This bill, H.R. 4776, is designed to create sideboards on process so that rote compliance is no longer the purpose of what we are about but instead we focus on progress for this Nation.
Mr. Chair, I rise today in opposition to H.R. 4776, the SPEED Act.
For more than 50 years, the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, as it is called, has been the bedrock of conservation law and preserved the environment, human health, and the people's voice in policy decisions.
The SPEED Act would limit the public review process and, quite frankly, would undermine the original intent of NEPA. I do understand the need to complete permitting and the Federal decisionmaking process more quickly than is happening, but we cannot do so at the cost of public input and transparency.
I happen to know. I happen to have lived with the original author of NEPA. What he did when this was passed--and this is called the Magna Carta of environmental laws around the world--is make sure that when something is going into someone's community, the public has a right to input.
Now, I said yesterday, I told my chair: This isn't the Ten Commandments. We should work together and try to make it better, but not at the expense of the public.
One of the most significant causes of permitting delays is limited capacity at the agencies that handle NEPA reviews. The SPEED Act does nothing to address recent cuts to staffing and funding at these agencies, which is going to further slow down project permitting.
I remain open to working on a bipartisan permitting reform, but it must be done to protect the original intent of NEPA.
I strongly urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' on H.R. 4776.
Mr. Chair, I rise in strong support of the SPEED Act and the work that Chairman Westerman and a bipartisan coalition of Members of Congress have done to bring a bill to the floor that actually focuses on letting us build things in America again, and, by the way, to lower the cost of those projects that we want to bring.
In the past, you would see years. Recently, it takes 10 years or longer to build things that used to take only 2 years. Why? Not because of trying to push things to the side.
This bill still requires, Mr. Chair, that we comply with all the State and local laws that are in place. We still would have to comply with Federal laws that are in place. But what it does is it finally brings common sense by cutting red tape, Mr. Chair, red tape that dramatically increases the costs and, in some cases, just makes it economically unfeasible to do projects, to build roads, to build bridges, to build pipelines to move energy, to lower costs for families, to build housing. This bill will allow us to bring more affordable housing to the marketplace in an environmentally protected way, by the way. Those laws are still in place, but they just can't be abused as has been the case over decades.
When the law was created in the 1960s, the intent was never that NEPA would be used to stop projects. It would be that you would review these projects like you review any other laws, like the Endangered Species Act, which unfortunately has been heavily abused, too--we are going to reform that as well--and all of the other laws that are so abused to stop projects from being built in America.
Some people say why can some of these other countries build a road or a bridge in 16 months and it takes us 10 years to do it in America? It is because we have allowed these laws like NEPA to become so heavily abused, where people who have no relation to the project can file lawsuit after lawsuit that have nothing to do with the project. They just want to slow down and stop the project. How about we bring common sense back into permitting. That is what the SPEED Act does.
Again, do these people not trust the States that still have to permit at the local and State level, along with all of the other Federal permits that need to take place?
We used to build things in America at rapid speed. We can do it again, and we will do it again with the SPEED Act. Let's allow America to do all the great innovative things it used to do.
Look at AI, what artificial intelligence is allowing us to bring. But we need to upgrade our electricity system. We need to build more power plants, not just for families but for innovation. It is almost impossible to do if we don't reform some of these outdated regulations that have been abused. Everybody knows they have been abused. Until we update our laws, we are not going to be able to build things again in America in a timely way.
Let's get things done in 2 years, not 10 years or never. Many of these projects get shelved, just never get built. Really, they do get built. They get built in other countries because our laws haven't been updated the way they need to be, to allow us to build things again in an economical way.
Lower the cost of building houses in America. Lower the cost of building roads and bridges in America. Lower the cost of building energy projects in America while still respecting environmental laws but just removing the red tape that is killing our ability to innovate.
This is a great bill that needs to happen. I am so glad Chairman Westerman did the work to build a bipartisan coalition to get things done in America again. Let's get the SPEED Act passed, Mr. Chair.
Mr. Chairman, for nearly 20 years, electricity demand in the U.S. has barely moved, but that era is over.
Today, we are facing a potential for electricity demand to grow up to fivefold. Meeting this energy demand will be a challenge. The environmental laws of the 1970s were built for defense, but the environmental imperative of today is to build, and that is why we need permitting reform.
However, that doesn't just mean building pipelines and gas plants but also wind, utility-scale solar, and interregional high voltage electric transmission, all of the above. Like President Obama used to say, all of the above and like my Republican colleagues used to openly say at least before November of last year.
I was glad to see Chair Westerman introduce and advance the SPEED Act. Reforming NEPA, the most litigated environmental law on the books, is necessary if we are going to make America competitive and if we are going to protect our environment.
There are many important reforms in this bill, and I want to note that. That is why earlier this month I led a letter with 30 of my Democratic colleagues, outnumbering the members of the Freedom Caucus we saw on the floor this week, but explaining our support for reform and exactly what we needed to get more Democrats to ``yes'' on SPEED.
At the top of that list is permitting certainty, which the ranking member has already mentioned. Mr. Chair, if
Thoughtful permitting reforms, many of which are in the SPEED Act, are meaningless if the executive branch is allowed to revoke issued permits for no good reason, or if the permitting process can be subjected to political gamesmanship.
The language added to the SPEED Act at markup would have restricted some of the political interference with issued permits, and that was a great start to solving the problem. It wasn't everything we needed, but it was a lot. I was confident that a bipartisan bill was well within reach.
I was really disappointed this week that some of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, after seeing that good bipartisan progress, decided to force this bill in the other direction this week to satisfy grievances and score political points instead of doing what is best for the country. An all-of-the-above energy strategy is what we were after. That took a big hit this week.
Giving Donald Trump, or any President, the ability to decide what gets permitting reform, which would be the effect of the partisan amendment added to the SPEED Act behind closed doors, significantly reduces certainty for investment in America.
That provision codifies a broken permitting status quo, instead of setting a level playing for everyone. Energy producers, investors, and communities want to know that investment in America, regardless of the electrons powering that investment, is safe from the swing of the political pendulum, and, unfortunately, that goal has not yet been achieved.
We need to get permitting reform done in this Congress. I look forward to working with my colleagues across the aisle in the Senate to craft a bipartisan product that could become law. This is not the final draft. I think there is more we can do.
Mr. Chair, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Walberg), who is on the Natural Resources Committee and is also the chair of the Education and Workforce Committee.
Mr. Chairman, as the Member who represents one-half of NEPA's original author's district, I rise in strong support of the SPEED Act. This bipartisan, commonsense legislation will streamline our permitting process, making it faster, more predictable, and more accountable.
Currently, our broken permitting process delays critical energy, infrastructure, and manufacturing projects for years. This not only hurts workers but raises costs for hardworking families and makes us more dependent on foreign countries, including our adversaries.
In Michigan, we need access to reliable energy to meet our growing demands, increase affordability, and help us compete. However, these essential projects can't move forward if our permitting process is holding us back.
The SPEED Act addresses these issues by streamlining reviews, setting clear timelines, and improving coordination across agencies.
Mr. Chair, this legislation helps us build again in this country, from energy projects to manufacturing facilities. America is entering a golden age of energy dominance thanks to President Trump's policies and the Working Families Tax Cuts that Republicans passed earlier this year.
The SPEED Act builds on this progress by cutting bureaucratic red tape, bringing back good-paying jobs and revitalizing our infrastructure and energy sectors.
We must restore common sense to our permitting process so we can unleash American energy and lower costs for hardworking Michiganders.
For all those reasons, Mr. Chairman, I urge my colleagues to vote ``yes.'' Michigan will thank you.
Mr. Chairman, I am a strong proponent of elimination of unnecessary regulations and of permitting reform, but this bill doesn't streamline permitting. It blindfolds the agencies meant to protect us and our natural resources.
Under this legislation, the agencies could not consider new science, even from the project applicant; conduct new environmental reviews; or assess indirect, let alone cumulative, impacts.
This anti-fact, anti-science administration would rather live in denial than understand the full impact that these projects could have on our health.
Earlier this year, the Supreme Court ruled on a case in my home State of Colorado. A 100-mile crude oil train route along the Colorado River was approved despite local objections and Federal estimates that spills would occur once every 5 years. The court said that agencies did not need to consider these downstream impacts.
This ruling alone is alarming, but the bill goes farther by outright preventing agencies from considering those factors.
This law says that ignorance is bliss. That is why I offered an amendment to widen the scope of review to ensure that agencies weigh all relevant facts and subsequent consequences. If we have information, then we should use it. Republicans refused to accept that amendment in the Rules Committee.
Rather than supporting agencies with the funding and staffing they need to process applications faster, Republicans just want them to look the other way.
Most Americans believe any job worth doing is worth doing right, even if it takes a little more time. However, cutting corners today means that we are going to have to clean up disasters tomorrow, and those costs won't fall on us, Mr. Chairman. They will fall on the communities we are supposed to protect.
Mr. Chairman, I urge my colleagues to vote ``no.''
The Acting CHAIR. The Committee will rise informally.
The Speaker pro tempore (Mr. Bentz) assumed the chair.
Mr. Chairman, I rise today in strong support of H.R. 4776, the Standardizing Permitting and Expediting Economic Development Act, known as the SPEED Act, introduced by my colleague from Arkansas, Chairman Westerman.
Federal permitting under NEPA has strangled economic development and delayed critical projects. What should take months takes years, and what should be straightforward becomes bureaucratic maze.
The core purpose of this bill is to restore NEPA to its original purpose as a procedural statute intended to ensure agencies look at alternatives and focus on real proximate environmental effects rather than speculative, politically motivated hypotheticals.
The key reforms that will help bring that about are that it prevents completed environmental reports from being undone without a court order. It creates litigation timelines and requires substantive public comment in order to establish standing for litigation.
The way NEPA is being implemented now and has been implemented for the last several years wastes taxpayer time and money. What was intended to make sure Federal agencies are being thoughtful and looking at multiple alternatives before they make important decisions on behalf of the American people has turned into a bureaucratic boondoggle that isn't serving the American people.
These reforms are especially critical for rural States with a large Federal footprint like Utah. It rebalances the scales in favor of local voices, working families, and economic opportunities.
These changes help all Americans. All Americans are going to be benefited by upgraded infrastructure, increased energy production, and less wasted time and money.
This isn't about lowering environmental standards, but it is about eliminating redundancy and bureaucratic paralysis. It represents reforms Americans have been demanding: practical solutions that cut red tape while maintaining environmental protections that we all appreciate.
It is time for some predictability, consistency, and efficiency in government decisions. I thank Chairman Westerman for meeting the need of our time which is a need for speed.
Mr. Chair, I urge my colleagues to support this important legislation. The time for action is now, and we must give the American people the effective government that we all deserve.
Mr. Chairman, I support the SPEED Act because it fixes something that people back home understand instinctively: It takes too long to build anything in this country--water infrastructure, roads, power lines, housing, or energy projects. When it takes just a decade to get a permit, families pay more, and America falls behind.
NEPA was meant to ensure that agencies look before they act, not to function as a litigation strategy to stop reasonable projects. Today, it too often stalls projects and advantages competitors like China.
The SPEED Act restores common sense. It focuses on real impacts, ends endless delays, and brings predictability back to permitting. Just as important for me as chairman of the Subcommittee on Indian and Insular Affairs, it respects Tribal reviews and was developed with Tribal consultation to ensure that NEPA does not block Tribal economic development.
This isn't about weakening environmental protections. It is about ending unreasonable delays so America can build again and so we can lower energy costs, build reliable infrastructure, and compete globally.
The SPEED Act is balanced reform, and it is long overdue. I urge my colleagues to support it.
Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
Mr. Chairman, we have heard over and over again in this debate that this bill is not about lowering environmental standards. This is another one of those rather remarkable inversions, when you actually look at what the bill does.
Entire classes of projects are simply eliminated from environmental review. Entire classes of impacts no longer count in an environmental review under this proposed legislation. Certain types of comments that allow people to take part in the public review process and potentially challenge a project are no longer qualifying for them to be part of the public review and legal challenge process. If that is not lowering environmental standards, I don't know what is.
Another aspect of this bill should be considered specifically: allowing broad exemptions for grants, loans, and other financial assistance, which this bill does. It means that large, federally backed projects could avoid triggering a NEPA review, even when those impacts could be very significant.
This includes projects like many Federal highways, which were one of the original reasons that NEPA was passed, because they often ran right through disadvantaged communities. Those communities didn't even know about the proposed projects, let alone have the ability to require consideration of environmental impacts.
If you just take a look at this image here, this is what happens to transportation projects without NEPA. When we hear that this is not about lowering environmental standards, I think it is important to bring it back to the reality of what this bill would do. This is what this bill would do: no environmental review process at all for many of these projects.
Mr. Chairman, I rise today in strong support of modernizing our permitting system through the SPEED Act.
While other nations are rushing to win the AI race, build out energy generation, and modernize infrastructure, America is stuck in the 20th century.
Our Nation's permitting process has been corrupted, morphing from what NEPA was crafted to do into a leviathan designed to do what activists and courts want it to do, transforming from a procedural statute into a hammer to block development and innovation.
The resulting lawlessness in the permitting system finally culminated in the Seven County Supreme Court decision, which provided much-needed relief. Simply stated, and as the Court found, there is no reason a rail project should fail because project opponents don't like the commodity that will be shipped on that rail line.
An examination of other lawsuits filed under NEPA confirms the frivolous nature of many of them. In the last decade, circuit courts witnessed a 56 percent increase in NEPA appeals. NGOs instigated over 70 percent of these challenges, with just 10 organizations filing many of those cases. In these cases, agencies won roughly 80 percent of the challenges to both environmental assessments and environmental impact statements.
In other words, agencies are seldom faulted for inadequate environmental review, yet NGOs capitalize on the 6-year statute of limitations to file a lawsuit, slow projects down, increase costs, and finance their organizations through EAJA funds.
In recognition of this reality, and in line with the Seven County decision, this bill clarifies the role of the court over this purely procedural statute, and places shot clocks on when lawsuits must be filed and decided.
The SPEED Act is project agnostic, which I believe is well reflected in its bipartisan nature, and I am proud to be one of its cosponsors.
Permitting impacts every aspect of our economy. When the system is broken, it is broken for everyone. The SPEED Act will provide the certainty that the system currently lacks and which American industries need.
Mr. Chair, I thank Chairman Westerman for his strong leadership on this crucial piece of legislation. I urge all of my colleagues to support it.
Mr. Chair, in Nevada, the Sun shines more than 300 days a year, and solar is among the cheapest and most abundant sources of energy, not only in my State but across the country. That is why I am leading 30 of my colleagues in championing the most supported amendment to the SPEED Act by far to save solar and wind from this administration's war on clean energy.
On July 15, President Trump's Interior Department actively chose to wrap the biggest piece of permitting red tape around the neck of the renewable energy sector that we have ever seen, directing the Interior Secretary to personally sign off on every permit to solar and wind energy.
In just one example from my State, what would have been the largest solar facility in North America, the administration is making that project jump through 69 hoops seven times. That is the opposite of efficient.
Even my State's Republican Governor has said that these actions have ``not only stopped solar development on Federal lands in Nevada, but also on private land where Federal approvals . . . are required.''
More broadly, this administration's attacks on America's solar and storage industry are threatening over 500 projects that could be powering 16 million homes. Together, these projects represent half of all new planned capacity in the United States.
For this reason, at the appropriate time, I will offer a motion to recommit this bill back to the committee.
If the House rules permitted, I would have offered the motion with my important amendment to this bill.
Quite simply, my amendment to the SPEED Act would put an end to this nonsensical political tit for tat and ensure equal treatment for all energy sources as part of the DOI permitting process moving forward.
If we are going to bring down energy bills for everyone, the path forward is obvious. Solar and wind are the clear cheapest choice.
Republicans in Congress are more interested in getting retribution for their corporate donors than bringing down the costs for American families. Let's be clear: They know this isn't right. Even my colleagues who represent States like Texas and Arizona, where energy projects are being held up, are refusing to speak up. They would rather let this reckless administration put its finger on the scale and jack up prices for their constituents than stand up to this President.
Already, families across the country are seeing their electric bills increase by an average of 13 percent. In States like Florida, that is an average annual increase of about $400.
The Acting CHAIR. The time of the gentlewoman has expired.
Mr. Chair, every day, more Americans are concerned about huge data centers causing their electric prices to spiral even further out of control. It doesn't have to be this way.
We need to provide real permitting certainty and permitting fairness and let investors, not Washington, pick winners and losers. Under this approach, Americans paying their electric bills each month are the ones who are really losing.
Mr. Chair, I include in the Record the text of my amendment.
Mr. Chair, I rise in strong support of the SPEED Act.
America's permitting system is broken. Today, an estimated $1.5 trillion in economic value is tied up in projects waiting for approval, costing our economy roughly $140 billion every year in lost growth.
Instead of encouraging responsible development, our system too often rewards bad actors driven by ideology rather than legitimate concerns.
Endless litigation has become the single biggest obstacle to building energy, infrastructure, and critical projects in this country. At the same time, energy demand is projected to grow by 50 percent by 2050.
The question is simple: Will we rise to meet that demand? We won't, not with our current permitting process.
The SPEED Act brings commonsense reform. It limits judicial review under NEPA to 150 days. It directs stakeholders to engage during the public comment process and tightens the scope of review, so agencies take a hard look at expected impacts.
The Acting CHAIR. The time of the gentleman has expired.
The bill allows America to build again, produce energy again, and stop being held hostage by litigious groups content to see jobs and investment move overseas. Permitting reform unleashes American energy and the American economy.
Mr. Chair, I urge my colleagues to support the SPEED Act.
Mr. Chair, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
Mr. Chair, I am glad to hear the gentleman's concern for projects that are awaiting approval, but for the past year, we have seen huge projects that were already approved that were under construction.
In one case, the Revolution Wind project in Rhode Island was 80 percent complete, with thousands of jobs and some of the cheapest electricity that New England would see to bring down these soaring utility bills, and President Trump stepped in and stopped it. They had to get a court to release the hostage, to allow this already approved project to simply move forward. I am always grateful to hear concern for projects awaiting approval.
What this bill does, though, unfortunately, is nothing at all to end the crazy war on clean energy that is killing off projects that have already been approved. Our colleagues really should care about that, too.
Mr. Chair, if we want to talk about projects that have been killed by an administration, let's go back to the Biden administration and the Obama administration. Let's
Let's look at the Twin Metals project in northern Minnesota, where we have one of the largest deposits of copper, nickel, cobalt, platinum, and palladium, all things we need. That has been going back and forth from one administration to the next.
Let's look at the Keystone XL pipeline that was stopped after billions of dollars were spent, and not one drop of oil went through it.
My colleagues are making the case for permitting reform. It just happens to be that we are in a Republican administration now, when they turned a blind eye to what was happening during a Democratic administration.
This is why we need permitting reform.
Mr. Chair, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Carter).
Mr. Chair, I rise today in support of H.R. 4776, the SPEED Act.
Mr. Chair, regardless of which sector of our economy you are talking about, whether it be healthcare, technology, or energy, it is always the same when groups come into my office: Permitting and regulations are crushing us.
The SPEED Act is a critical step toward unleashing American energy dominance, bringing supply chains home, and much more. The National Environmental Policy Act is a well-intentioned piece of legislation, but it has created a costly, cumbersome process that has crippled our permitting system.
The SPEED Act will modernize NEPA, and it will help permitting in the U.S. return to what it was originally intended to be. The SPEED Act will establish permitting timelines, and it will cut down on frivolous litigation that is simply meant to delay projects.
Under SPEED, American development will no longer be held hostage by activists and environmental groups simply seeking to profit off of lawsuits.
America needs to update its infrastructure, create new sources of energy, and deploy more broadband and transmission lines. The SPEED Act will help power a new generation of growth in our Nation.
Mr. Chair, I urge the passage of this legislation.
Mr. Chair, we just heard a list of projects that were allegedly halted by frivolous litigation, a case study for the SPEED Act.
In fact, many of these are really bad projects, and the examples are often examples of the environmental review process working to protect the environment and protect people.
The Dakota Access Pipeline decision was challenged by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, which won in court because the Army Corps of Engineers had failed to consider the impact of catastrophic oil spills on the Tribe's water supply and culturally sacred sites.
The Resolution Copper mine was delayed because the proposed mine would, in fact, destroy Oak Flat, the most sacred site for the San Carlos Apache Tribe.
Micron chose to build its semiconductor manufacturing facility near federally regulated wetlands and endangered habitat.
I think what we are hearing, unfortunately, is that permitting reform to my friends across the aisle means a green light even for bad and destructive projects. That is not something the American people want to see.
Mr. Chair, how about the last runway that was built at the Atlanta airport? It only took 11 years to build it. Actually, it only took 18 months. It took 9.5 years to go through the NEPA permitting process.
These are the kinds of projects we are talking about all across the country that are being adversely affected by a cumbersome permitting process. It is not doing anything extra to help the environment or protect our resources. It is simply a way to stop progress and stop projects from happening.
Mr. Chair, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Evans).
Mr. Chair, I am proud to support the bipartisan SPEED Act today, of which I am a cosponsor, because, in part, my home State of Colorado is the sixth most heavily regulated State in the country. From affordable housing to affordable energy, it has become virtually impossible to build anything.
The overburdensome Federal permitting process, layered with State regulations, passes on extraordinary costs to Coloradans by adding years of unnecessary delays and millions of dollars to new projects that communities need. In fact, many of the projects require more money to navigate the bureaucratic permitting process than they do for actual construction.
Today, the House will change that and take a significant step toward comprehensive permitting reform by passing this bill. Americans who are worried about the high cost of living should pay attention.
If my colleagues are serious about lowering costs for their constituents, they should support the SPEED Act.
Mr. Chair, what about the $12 billion we put in the reconciliation bill to upgrade our air traffic control system? We are not talking about just permitting energy. We are talking about permitting safety.
Look at how long it takes to build interstate highways and bridges, and the safety effects that happen because those projects are dragged out for so long. It costs so much more money, and it creates congestion. It creates all kinds of problems.
If we could just move the permitting process more quickly, we could benefit not only from the cost of energy, the cost of transmission, and the cost of raw materials that we can be mining, but we could also improve the safety of our country.
Mr. Chair, we allocated $12 billion to upgrade the air traffic control system. The Department of Transportation tells me the problem is they can't get a NEPA permit to put fiber-optic cables in air traffic control towers. That is insane when something like an outdated air traffic control system that has funding can't be implemented because we can't get through the NEPA process to run a fiber-optic cable.
Mr. Chair, a lot of numbers have been thrown around on how NEPA takes so very, very long.
Much of this is looking deep into the past and extrapolating from that. I want to correct the Record because, as of January 2025, $1 billion in the Inflation Reduction Act for permitting was actually doing its job quite well. It had helped reduce the median time it takes to complete an Environmental Impact Statement, the most complex environmental review, by 28 percent. That is compared to times under the first Trump administration.
The time was down a little over 2 years in 2024 compared to over 3\1/ 2\ in 2019. That is 1\1/2\ years of improvement. Unfortunately, these steps forward have been taken away by our friends across the aisle. We are going in the wrong direction.
Mr. Chair, in closing, the majority had a great opportunity here. Democrats were ready to work with them on meaningful and bipartisan permitting reform. They chose to reject our efforts to engage in good faith. Instead, what we have here is another Christmas giveaway to the wealthiest, most powerful people and companies in the country.
I guess this is the golden age. These are wonderful times. A person can throw Great Gatsby parties if they are a billionaire, if they are one of these very, very rich interest groups.
We should be thinking about everyday Americans right now. Many overburdened communities are saddled with significant pollution. We should think about helping them instead of making it harder for them to challenge projects that threaten the health and environmental damage visited upon their community.
We should also think about rising utility bills, something we hear more and more about in this affordability crisis driven by Republican policies. Yet, our friends across the aisle look the other way as President Trump's crazy war on clean energy drives utility bills higher and higher.
We should work toward a level playing field for clean energy instead of another handout for Big Oil. The American Clean Power Association has pulled its support for this legislation. The bill is opposed by the Solar Energy Industries Association and, of course, countless environmental justice organizations who know this bill will take a wrecking ball to government transparency, to community engagement, and to health and environmental protections.
It didn't have to be this way. This was a terrible missed opportunity, but a bad bill has actually gotten worse through the process and not better.
I strongly oppose the SPEED Act. I urge all of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle, regardless of whether they may have supported this in the past--the bill has gotten worse--to vote ``no.''
Mr. Chair, permitting reform in the SPEED Act will help every American by lowering costs and increasing affordability. That is a word that is talked about a lot today, but I think we sometimes forget the question: Why are things not affordable?
When we have to import all of our products, when we can't build new energy plants, and when we can't build public infrastructure projects on budget and on time, things become unaffordable. Now is the time for Congress not just to talk about how we need permitting reform but to actually walk the walk when it comes to helping the families in their districts keep the lights on.
An analysis by Common Good shows that a 6-year delay in construction on public projects like building roads, something I think we all can agree on, costs the U.S. economy $3.7 trillion.
The SPEED Act is supported by over 375 industry leaders ranging from utility companies and energy producers to homebuilders and domestic manufacturers. These are the industries that will lower everyday costs if we simply allow them to build here in America again. A vote for the SPEED Act is a vote for affordability.
As I close, I want to return to the core principle at the heart of this debate and this legislation. The Federal permitting process should serve our national interests and not obstruct them. Let me say this again. Permitting should serve our national interests and not obstruct our national interests.
NEPA no longer passes the test. It is currently a source of waste, abuse, and predatory litigation. Its unpredictability is fundamentally unfair to the local communities, to working families, and to taxpayers who depend on the infrastructure projects that NEPA obstructs. This has never been more true than today when demand for energy is dramatically spiking.
America is blessed with resources we need for a future of energy dominance and critical mineral abundance. God has blessed America with minerals and with energy, we are just refusing to use them.
Mr. Chair, we are dependent on China for 90 percent of our rare earth and critical minerals. That is not just economic insecurity. That is a national defense issue. They mine 70 percent of those around the world and process and control 90 percent of them.
We have all of them here in America. We refuse to do the permitting, not just to build mines but to build refineries that will create jobs for Americans.
When we mine the materials out of the ground and we process them and put them into manufactured goods, there is a multiplier effect by 28. That is what the USGS and Department of Commerce says. We multiply that value by 28. Think of the good-paying jobs Americans could have if we not only mined here in America but if we refined and manufactured products from those things that we mined.
The SPEED Act is a targeted, bipartisan solution that will restore balance and accountability to the Federal permitting process. It will streamline administrative review and curtail open-ended and dilatory litigation. These are practical, commonsense reforms that, again, I will say have garnered the support of more than 375 business, labor, and nonprofit groups from across the country, from all 50 States and Puerto Rico.
Mr. Chair, we are at a critical point in our country. America has always been a place where we have a can-do attitude. We have always been able to succeed. I like to say we are ``Ameri-cans.'' We are not ``Ameri-can'ts.''
The current permitting laws are telling Americans they can't. We can't be innovative. We can't develop. We can't build here. We have to be dependent on somebody else, somewhere else. We can't have the jobs to earn good wages. We can't grow our rural communities because we can't get through the bureaucratic red tape and permitting. The SPEED Act is the first step in doing that.
Mr. Chair, we have to pass this bill. We have to get it to the Senate. We have to work with our Senate colleagues because this is an important time in our country, and this is an important piece of legislation. It is an important issue that affects every American, and today is the day to pass the SPEED Act. I urge my colleagues to support the SPEED Act to get ourselves building again.
Mr. Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.
The Acting CHAIR. All time for general debate has expired.
Pursuant to the rule, the bill shall be considered for amendment under the 5-minute rule.
The amendment in the nature of a substitute recommended by the Committee on Natural Resources, and the further amendment specified in section 5 of House Resolution 953, printed in the bill, shall be considered as adopted. The bill, as amended, shall be considered as the original bill for the purpose of further amendment and shall be considered as read.
The text of the bill, as amended, is as follows:
The Acting CHAIR. No further amendment to the bill, as amended, shall be in order except those printed in House Report 119-410. Each such further amendment may be offered only in the order printed in the report, may be offered only by a Member designated in the report, shall be considered as read, shall be debatable for the time specified in the report equally divided and controlled by the proponent and an opponent, shall not be subject to amendment, and shall not be subject to a demand for division of the question.
The Acting CHAIR. It is now in order to consider amendment No. 1 printed in House Report 119-410.
Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of my amendment to H.R. 4776, the SPEED Act, which will improve the bill's judicial standing provision to limit frivolous lawsuits and ensure that projects are not delayed by radical activist groups without actual material harm to themselves.
This amendment makes a simple but important clarification. It ensures that only material physical or property harm, not purely aesthetic, recreational, or emotional interests, qualifies someone to challenge a Federal agency action under NEPA.
As established by the bill we are considering today, NEPA is a procedural statute. Its purpose is to require Federal agencies to disclose and consider environmental effects before taking major actions, not to confer substantive environmental rights, or to serve as a tool for endless litigation.
The amendment aligns NEPA's judicial review provisions with that core purpose by anchoring standing in concrete, legally cognizant harms, rather than subjective or generalized interests.
By focusing standing on tangible harms, this amendment helps prevent NEPA from being used as a delay tactic in every dispute over administrative decisions, a tactic that too often slows necessary infrastructure and energy projects without materially improving environmental protection.
It ensures that courts remain a venue for adjudicating real disputes, where plaintiffs have demonstrable stakes, while preserving agency and judicial resources for the most serious and legally grounded claims.
At the same time, this amendment does not eliminate judicial review or impede legitimate challenges where there are real impacts. Stakeholders with substantive claims under existing environmental and land management statutes will continue to have full recourse to the courts under those laws.
What this amendment does is reinforce NEPA's role as a procedural check that it was intended to be.
For these reasons, I urge my colleagues to support my amendment to bring greater clarity and balance to NEPA's standing and to promote a more efficient and predictable permitting process, consistent with both environmental disclosure and responsible development.
Mr. Chairman, this is a perfect example of how, even when team extreme puts together the most dramatic rollback of America's most important bedrock environmental law, it is not enough for some factions within the Republican Conference.
Mr. Chair, I do oppose this amendment because, at its core, it is built on a tired trope--the trope that NEPA litigation is some huge driver of frivolous litigation and an argument that we hear all too often to justify more and more limits on judicial review to make it harder and harder for the public to participate in the review process and to help oil and gas and other polluting projects.
However, the facts do not back up the story that we keep hearing. One recent study from the University of Utah found that only 1 out of every 450 actions subject to NEPA are ever even litigated. That amounts to 0.23 percent. According to a recent Congressional Research Service report: ``Historically, fewer than 1 percent of Federal actions subject to NEPA have been litigated.'' That is important context.
Mr. Chair, the idea behind this amendment, that we need to keep layering on more and more restrictions to shut out the public, to eliminate legal challenges, and to stop frivolous litigation is overblown, especially in the context of an underlying bill which already imposes dramatic new barriers that make it almost impossible to bring a case to court.
Among other hurdles, the underlying bill says that you have to have commented during a comment period, even as the Trump administration is restricting the opportunity to comment.
It also requires that your comment has to be ``unique.'' This is a new term of art. It doesn't exist in current law. We don't even know what it really means, but, presumably, if anyone else has submitted the same comment or has flagged the same problem with a Federal action, you are out because your comment is no longer unique.
To add a cherry on top of all of that, even if you get into court, the SPEED Act would bind judges, forcing them to allow even dangerous and illegal projects to proceed, making the judicial review process extremely hollow.
Mr. Chairman, judicial review is a cornerstone of democracy. When the government makes a bad decision or an illegal decision, I would hope we could all agree that there are times, since the government doesn't get everything just right, that citizens need to be able to challenge that action and hold the government accountable to make sure the law is followed.
Access to the courts is a backstop for communities, who are left out of the
Though we have heard a lot of fear-mongering about frivolous lawsuits, there are already effective safeguards in place. All plaintiffs have to demonstrate that they have actually been harmed by a project to have standing, and NEPA will be meaningless unless there is a way to enforce it when the government does something harmful or illegal.
That is what this is all about.
Mr. Chairman, I urge a ``no'' on this amendment, and I reserve the balance of my time.
Mr. Chairman, any frivolous lawsuit is one frivolous lawsuit too many. It is just not appropriate when we have legitimate actions to improve our economy and to make sure that America moves forward.
Chairman Westerman mentioned the 11 years that it took to build the Atlanta airport in my home State. Really, it took 18 months to actually break ground and build the airfield, but 9\1/2\ years for permitting. That is just not acceptable.
The Pentagon was built in just a little over a year. That could never happen today simply because of the permitting process.
Mr. Chairman, I think we have found some common ground. I hear that any frivolous lawsuit is one too many, so I just want to remind the gentleman that maybe one of the most prolific frivolous litigators in history is in the White House right now.
I remind the gentleman about the raft of frivolous lawsuits challenging the 2020 election results, resulting, in many cases, not just in losses in court but in the disbarment of some of the Republican luminary lawyers like Rudy Giuliani.
If we pretend to care about frivolous lawsuits, I know consistency is out of fashion these days, but we should really mean it.
Mr. Chairman, I think the Keystone XL Pipeline is another example of frivolous lawsuits and the years it took. Yet that pipeline still is not functional in its entirety.
Mr. Chairman, I am prepared to close, and I simply want to read what my amendment says:
``Page 26, line 8, insert `, which shall not include aesthetic, recreational, or emotional interests unaccompanied by material physical or property harm' after `final agency action'.''
Mr. Chairman, that is concrete, and, therefore, I encourage all of my colleagues to vote for my amendment, and I yield back the balance of my time.
Mr. Chairman, we should be against all truly frivolous things--not just frivolous lawsuits but frivolous legislation masquerading as permitting reform, frivolous amendments, frivolous distractions at the end of probably the most unproductive Congress in American history this year at a time when the American people are struggling. That is what is truly frivolous.
Mr. Chairman, I oppose this amendment. I urge a ``no'' vote, and I yield back the balance of my time.
The Acting CHAIR. The question is on the amendment offered by the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Clyde).
The question was taken; and the Acting Chair announced that the ayes appeared to have it.
Mr. Chair, this amendment revises the scope of review clause within the bill and strengthens the codification of the Supreme Court's Seven County decision issued earlier this year.
Now, my friend from Pennsylvania (Mr. Perry) is the author of this amendment, and I am offering it for him because he is in committee business. He was offering this amendment to further improve the bill and limit agencies from taking into consideration factors which are not within their authority to regulate. This is the core issue at the heart of what was going on in the Seven County decision.
Congress should continue to build upon that unanimous decision. Let me be very clear that the Seven County decision was unanimous and further improved NEPA. This bill that the chairman has brought here to the floor takes significant strides in improving NEPA, and improves upon it by limiting what agencies can regulate to what they already can by law. By ensuring that the scope of review is conducted within the sole legal purview of each Federal agency, we can drastically improve the current landscape of drawn-out, ineffective permitting.
Mr. Chairman, the majority has suggested that the underlying bill's changes to NEPA on the scope of review simply codify the Supreme Court's Seven County decision, but the SPEED Act actually goes much further than that Court decision. The Court left broad discretion for agencies to determine what impacts are relevant and how far the environmental analysis should go.
The Seven County decision allows agencies to analyze environmental impacts when those impacts are reasonably foreseeable, although the Court did limit what agencies are required to review. The underlying bill and this amendment do something entirely different. They strip agencies of their discretion to consider a broad range of environmental impacts.
This could have far-reaching consequences for communities, the environment, and public health, even when the science is clear and the consequences are very real.
The bill would prevent agencies from examining the harms that communities across the country are living with right now. A perfect example is Louisiana's Cancer Alley, where predominantly Black neighborhoods face some of the highest pollution-related cancer risks in the Nation, and those risks come from cumulative emissions from many facilities that have been built over decades and impacts that are well documented and directly tied to Federal permitting decisions.
Under this bill, agencies would largely be prohibited from considering any cumulative effects, anything that worsens that preexisting problem. That is not streamlining. That is telling Federal agencies to look the other way in the face of obvious, foreseeable harm.
NEPA's strength has always been its requirement that agencies take a hard look at the real-world consequences of their actions. That is how agencies avoid unintended harm. It is how the public stays informed, and it is how Federal decisions remain accountable and transparent.
The language in this bill dismantles that approach, and this amendment takes it even further by continuing to strip away what courts have left in terms of discretion for agencies to consider. This will result in more harm to
Mr. Chair, I oppose the amendment and reserve the balance of my time.
Mr. Chair, this amendment would insert that Federal agencies ``may consider only those effects over which the lead agency or cooperating Federal agencies have jurisdiction by law and share a reasonably close causal relationship to, and are proximately caused by, the immediate project or action under consideration.''
There shouldn't be anything objectionable in that commonsense application, that commonsense phrasing. It is a commonsense change that strengthens the bill by narrowing the scope of NEPA to impacts that Federal agencies have the legal authority to regulate.
It is pretty simple. It avoids time-consuming reviews of impacts from paleontology to traffic patterns that agencies cannot even control.
By ensuring that the scope of review is conducted within the sole legal purview of each Federal agency, we can drastically improve the current landscape of drawn-out and ineffective permitting.
Mr. Chairman, I think common sense is that if an agency is proposing or is considering a project that would be the tipping point for a community that is already overburdened by pollution, and that would dramatically increase a problem like Cancer Alley in Louisiana, they ought to be able to consider those cumulative impacts. I would call that common sense.
Mr. Chair, the goal of this amendment is in keeping with the unanimous Supreme Court decision in which the Court jumped in and reversed the D.C. Circuit. The D.C. Circuit had said, well, we are not going to allow this to proceed, despite you having this 3,600-page report, this environmental impact statement, gone through public comments, et cetera.
Everything had been approved, and then the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals invalidated that approval, finding that the environmental review overlooked a number of various impacts. The Supreme Court came in and said, No, let's reverse that. You have gone through the process, and what we are trying to do is codify that which would enable us to avoid the kinds of delays that have been hampering our ability to have energy projects.
There is a reason everybody's utility bills are up and energy costs are high. It is because we have constrained the ability of our States, communities, and businesses to be able to create and provide the ability for us to have power without getting hamstrung into decades- long disputes and fights going through all the back channels of a maze of bureaucracy. This is a simple, commonsense amendment to try to streamline that.
Mr. Chairman, if this amendment is simply about codifying the Supreme Court's decision, why doesn't it say what the Supreme Court said?
The Supreme Court said that agencies would be able to have discretion to consider cumulative impacts, traffic patterns, and other things in circumstances where those were very compelling factors. This amendment says, No, you can't consider any of that.
Let's not kid ourselves. This is not codifying the Supreme Court's decision. This is taking it much, much further.
Mr. Chair, of course, they maintain discretion. Agencies will have full discretion if we adopt this language, the discretion to consider the effects over which that agency or the cooperating Federal agencies have jurisdiction. That is it.
What we are saying is that we shouldn't have courts making stuff up, and we shouldn't have agencies making stuff up. That is all we are trying to say. Let's get everybody in their lanes. Let's get the agencies in their lanes, and then, let's allow the American people to do what they do best.
Mr. Chair, my amendment shores up and strengthens the definition of what triggers an environmental impact statement.
I offer this amendment to further improve the bill and prevent agencies from keeping projects in permitting limbo.
Again, the driving force here is to try to free up the American people and free up free enterprise to be able to produce adequate and abundant energy for the American people, to be able to produce and create and develop projects that create and provide jobs and to be able to make sure the American people can prosper without being hamstrung by the bureaucracy of a Federal Government that has been limiting our ability to keep up and produce.
While the base text of the bill makes a great effort to reduce the length of NEPA review by placing caps on all parts of the process, further defining what constitutes a significant effect that triggers an environmental impact statement will make the bill stronger.
Performing an environmental impact statement is the lengthiest and most expensive part of the permitting process. The Government Accountability Office estimates the lengthy EIS process costs between $250,000 and $2 million every time there is a project.
My amendment inserts commonsense language that requires at least one significant effect be triggered before an agency subjects a project to the lengthy EIS process.
Specifically, my amendment defines a significant effect as: having a proximate and concrete harm that is directly caused by the proposed agency action and that materially impairs human health or property.
By adopting this amendment, House Republicans can actually demonstrate their promise to get Washington's bureaucracies out of the way of progress and fulfill, I think, the great intent of this legislation that the chairman has put together and my colleagues on the committee have brought to the floor.
Mr. Chair, I strongly oppose this amendment. It is one more attempt to restrict what the government can consider in an environmental review and turn NEPA into nothing more than a box- checking exercise. You get all of the bureaucracy but none of the benefits under this approach.
The amendment would add a narrow definition of significant effects on the human environment in order to limit which projects get a closer look under NEPA.
It is important to recognize that we already have a high standard for which projects get that closer look. Only proposed actions that are anticipated to have a significant effect on the environment undergo an environmental impact statement, or EIS, which is the most thorough form of NEPA review.
Agencies don't do environmental impact statements willy-nilly. Only about 1 percent of all projects go through this process. These are the types of large-scale, complex projects that can have serious, long- lasting impacts on the environment, things like mines that remove entire mountaintops, things like the construction of a new nuclear power plant, exactly the types of things that should get close scrutiny and that the public deserves to have a chance to weigh in on.
This amendment redefines significant effect on the environment to mean only concrete harms that are directly caused by the proposed agency action and materially impair human health or property. That is a drastic narrowing of how we think about the impacts of Federal actions.
To use a public lands example, I will just quote from the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976. It says: The policy of the United States is to manage public lands in a manner that will protect the quality of scientific, scenic, historic, ecological, environmental, air and atmospheric, water resource, and archaeological values.
Now the courts have backed up this spectrum of values for decades. The Supreme Court has held that NEPA should analyze a broad range of harms, including recreational and esthetic enjoyment of the environment.
Who here really thinks that there is no significant effect on the environment of a proposed refinery that would only light up a protected dark sky all night, every night next to a neighborhood? Or is there really no significant effect on the environment if a pipeline would disrupt big game migrations that hunters depend on to feed their families?
Of course, this definition means no amount of climate-changing emissions that could be considered to have had a significant effect on the environment would ever be considered.
The American people deserve the full picture of a proposed action and its significant effects on the environment. This amendment puts the blinders on even more than the underlying bill, which already goes too far in that direction.
Mr. Chair, I urge a ``no'' on the amendment, and I reserve the balance of my time.
Mr. Chair, the reason we are here, the reason that we have this legislation on the floor, is that NEPA is egregiously broken. The SPEED Act, which has been brought to the floor by the chairman, places commonsense caps on how long an EIS can take, and this amendment goes further to restrict what triggers this lengthy, onerous process.
Under the current runaway practice, NEPA reviews delay reliable energy projects by 3.9 years. Think about that. Want to know why we have difficulty getting affordable energy? All of these reviews, all of this cumbersome process, has delayed the ability for people to come together and produce energy for themselves, the energy that allows us to be in a heated facility and lit and living and having the benefits of modern life and having hospitals powered and having cars that function and homes that are heated and cooled.
You add this 4-year lengthy addition with an EIS, environmental impact statement, and you make it more difficult.
America must be able to get energy projects up and running and on the grid if we are going to compete on the global stage and continue to be able to live the benefits of modern life. This amendment addresses the most onerous part of the currently bloated NEPA process.
Mr. Chair, we have a major disagreement on what ``common sense'' means in this Congress.
To me, and I think really to most Americans, it is just common sense that if you have a project that would destroy hunting access to some vital part of our public lands that generations have depended on, if you have a project that would cause a sacred Tribal site to no longer be enjoyed by folks who have depended on it for millennia, that that should undergo an environmental review. That seems like common sense to most people. But in this strange Congress, I guess common sense just means just do those projects anyway and don't even consider alternatives and don't even consider the impacts. That is why I oppose this amendment, and I reserve the balance of my time.
Mr. Chair, I will remind my colleagues that what this amendment does is defines a significant effect as having ``a proximate and concrete harm that is directly caused by the proposed agency action and that materially impairs human health or property,'' fairly common sense.
Mr. Chair, in closing, I am going to take 30 seconds, a point of personal privilege here, to respond to something that the gentleman alluded to earlier in another exchange with another Member talking about so-called frivolous litigation by our current President.
I find it absolutely extraordinary that in the same week that we found out that the FBI literally told higher-ups at the Department of Justice and the White House that there was not probable cause to engage in a raid at Mar-a-Lago on the former President of the United States, that we are somehow going to enter that fray and not acknowledge the extent to which the abuse of power and the abuse of authority by the Biden administration and by his Department of Justice was extraordinary, historic, corrupt, and worthy of note.
If my colleagues want to venture into a debate about lawfare, then we will be happy to talk about the Manhattan DA. We will be able to talk about Fani Willis. We will be happy to talk about Jack Smith. We will be happy to talk about Arctic Frost, not because we are happy that they occurred, but because the American people are offended about the assault on President Trump, on the Members of this body, and on the people of the United States.
Mr. Chair, I urge adoption of my amendment, and I yield back the balance of my time.
Mr. Chairman, I thought we were debating a bill that proposes a permitting reform. Of course, we have lots of disagreements about how it impacts our bedrock environmental laws, but I guess we never want to miss an opportunity to go into the fever swamp of conspiracism that is the Kash Patel FBI these days.
I will bring it back to the subject at hand.
This is a bad amendment.
Mr. Chair, I urge my colleagues to oppose it, and I yield back the balance of my time.
The Acting CHAIR. The question is on the amendment offered by the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Roy).
The question was taken; and the Acting Chair announced that the ayes appeared to have it.
Mr. Speaker, I move that the Committee do now rise.
The motion was agreed to.
Accordingly, the Committee rose; and the Speaker pro tempore (Mr. Stauber) having assumed the chair, Mr. Evans of Colorado, Acting Chair of the Committee of the Whole House on
Mr. Speaker, pursuant to House Resolution 951, I call up the bill (H.R. 1366) to provide for the location of multiple hardrock mining mill sites, to establish the Abandoned Hardrock Mine Fund, and for other purposes, and ask for its immediate consideration in the House.
The Clerk read the title of the bill.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to House Resolution 951, the amendment in the nature of a substitute recommended by the Committee on Natural Resources, printed in the bill, is adopted, and the bill, as amended, is considered read.
The text of the bill, as amended, is as follows:
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The bill, as amended, shall be debatable for 1 hour equally divided and controlled by the Chair and ranking minority member of the Committee on Natural Resources or their respective designees.
The gentleman from Arkansas (Mr. Westerman), and the gentleman from California (Mr. Huffman) each will control 30 minutes.
Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members be given 5 legislative days to revise and extend their remarks and to include extraneous material on H.R. 1366.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Is there objection to the request of the gentleman from Arkansas?
Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
Mr. Speaker, I rise today in support of H.R. 1366, to restore clarity and stability to mining operations and support reclamation of abandoned hardrock mine land.
First, I thank my colleague from Nevada, Representative Amodei, for his work on this bipartisan legislation.
In 2022, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals revoked an approved mine plan of operations for the Rosemont Copper Mine in Arizona. The ruling, known as the Rosemont decision, limited the Forest Service's ability to approve support activities necessary for conducting mining operations on Federal land. This decision upended over 40 years of regulatory and legal precedent.
Before developing a mine on Federal lands, an operator must obtain a mine plan of operations from the Forest Service or the Bureau of Land Management. This plan must detail the intended uses of the surface of the mining claim, including waste rock placement, mills, offices, and roads.
Under the Rosemont decision, however, operators must prove the existence of a commercially developable deposit on a claim before a plan of operations can be approved. This obvious problem is that the economic viability of a site cannot be determined until after the mine plan of operations is approved by the Federal Government.
The ramifications of the Ninth Circuit's decision are substantial. Although the Rosemont decision involved Forest Service lands, it has prompted multiple lawsuits targeting projects on BLM lands based on similar regulations.
If allowed to stand, the Rosemont decision will thwart hardrock mining projects across Federal lands, further jeopardizing domestic mineral supply chains, energy security, and national security.
Mr. Amodei's bill provides needed regulatory clarity by creating a new category of mill sites for activities ancillary to mining that operators can include within the boundaries of an approved plan of operations.
The legislation also creates an abandoned hardrock mine fund to support the reclamation program by using claim maintenance fees to inventory, assess, and remediate abandoned hardrock mines.
Simply put, our reliance on foreign critical minerals is one of the greatest strategic vulnerabilities facing our Nation today. America has been truly blessed with vast natural resources. This bill would create the regulatory clarity and stability that companies need to attract investment and responsibly develop these resources.
With mineral demand expected to grow exponentially in the coming decades, Congress must safeguard and defend the country's ability to access its own resources.
Again, I applaud my colleague Mr. Amodei for this commonsense but urgently needed bill.
Mr. Chairman, I ask my colleagues to join me in supporting this legislation, and I reserve the balance of my time.
Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
Mr. Speaker, I remind everyone that we are at the end of this year. We are running out of time to fix the healthcare crisis that Republicans have created. Christmas break is right around the corner, and hardworking Americans are struggling. They are being crushed under the weight of rising costs.
What do our Republican friends have us voting on?
The next bill that we have up today, H.R. 1366, the so-called Mining Regulatory Clarity Act, is just a gift for folks who really ought to be on the naughty list this time of year: foreign mining companies.
I strongly oppose this bill.
According to its sponsors, it is a legislative fix to the Rosemont court decision, a court case that determined that a mining company was not allowed to dump its toxic mine waste on public lands based on an invalid mining claim.
You see, Mr. Speaker, for years, mining companies were allowed to dump their waste wherever they wanted without paying fair market value for that land, without public land managers having any real option to say no regardless of which precious public lands might be destroyed forever.
However, in the Rosemont decision, the court held that under current law, a mining claim is only valid when it actually contains valuable minerals. That makes sense. That is common sense, if we want some common sense.
However, the mining industry didn't like that. They were not happy that they could no longer dump their toxic waste on phony, invalid claims anymore.
So here we are today passing a so-called fix for the industry.
Now, let's remember that enormous benefit is stacked on another one: Mining companies don't pay back the American people a cent in royalties for the minerals that belong to the people of the United States. The antiquated Mining Act of 1872 essentially gives away America's valuable mineral resources for free, often to foreign-owned mining companies, even companies controlled by our adversaries.
Even so, the industry calls the Rosemont decision an existential threat. Give me a break.
You know what happened to the Rosemont mine after that court decision came down? The next day, the company paid for private lands for its waste disposal. The mine wasn't stopped. It is just the industry would prefer to use the public lands, your lands, and to be able to dump for free.
Industry argues that this bill would provide certainty and clarity for mining and exploration. In practice, this fix would just allow mining companies to use a different type of claim called a mill site for unlimited mine-waste dumping. They could use it for pipelines and processing whatever else they would like, again at cut-rate prices.
For the record, I have found no evidence that any mines are currently being held up because of the Rosemont decision anywhere in America. This is a solution in search of a problem.
Time and time again, Democrats have raised legitimate concerns with this legislation, and we have offered good-faith amendments to address those concerns.
I offered an amendment to strike the broad definition of operations in the bill, which effectively means that mining operations don't need a mining claim at all.
Representative Lee from Nevada offered an amendment to clarify that mining companies should only use the public lands that are actually necessary for their operations, and to make clear that nothing in the bill limits the rights to regulate mining and related activities on Federal lands.
Representative Leger Fernandez offered an amendment to exempt companies that are owned and controlled by our adversaries from these incredible benefits under this bill.
All of these amendments were very straightforward. None of the issues raised should be a surprise to the majority. They have had time to work with us, but they chose not to. They rejected all of these amendments. I guess they would rather let foreign mining companies controlled by our adversaries pillage our public lands for cheap or even for free. Noted.
Again, I strongly oppose this legislation and reserve the balance of my time.
Mr. Speaker, I yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Stauber) the subcommittee chair on Energy and Mineral Resources of the Natural Resources Committee.
Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong support of H.R. 1366, the bipartisan, bicameral Mining Regulatory Clarity Act, offered by the gentleman from Nevada (Mr. Amodei), my good friend.
The bill before us is simple. It restores longstanding interpretation of agency regulations governing hardrock mining policy on Federal lands that were upended by the courts in May of 2022 in what is known as the Rosemont decision.
At the time, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit issued a decision that upended decades of settled law when it affirmed a lower court decision revoking an approved mine plan for the Rosemont Copper mining project. The decision limited the ability of the Forest Service to approve necessary mining support facilities and activity, known as ancillary uses, which are necessary to conduct mining operations. This decision from the Ninth Circuit puts virtually every new domestic mining project on Federal lands in jeopardy.
This decision from the Ninth Circuit puts us at odds with what we need to succeed in a 21st century economy.
During the previous administration, the Department of the Interior issued an opinion that provided a temporary fix known as the Rosemont fix. This provides a path forward for mining projects, but it can be reversed with the stroke of a pen.
Domestic mining projects are multidecade investments. Mining companies that invest hundreds of millions of dollars in a project require regulatory certainty and clarity.
Mr. Speaker, considering this, why would a mining company invest here in the United States without this certainty that they will actually be able to develop a project? That is why the bicameral, bipartisan Mining Regulatory Clarity Act is necessary. The only way to fix the 2022 court decision is to codify the fix in law.
This legislation, contrary to what some of my colleagues will argue, doesn't create new domestic mining policy. It simply builds regulatory certainty and reinstates the longstanding interpretation of the mining law and the agency regulations that were law of the land before being misinterpreted by the courts.
Mr. Speaker, if we can't mine these minerals domestically thanks in part to the Rosemont decision blocking new domestic mines, where do the opponents of this bipartisan bill expect needed minerals to come from? The only answer I can think of is from China.
Continued lack of clarity resulting from the court's decision is not a benefit to the American people, but a benefit to the Chinese Communist Party. The answer is clear: You can either support domestic mining with the strictest environmental and labor standards here in the United States of America or you can continue to export your environmental guilt and support importing minerals from countries that have zero environmental standards and utilize child and forced slave labor to mine these minerals.
Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to support the bill. When we talk about domestic mining, we are richly blessed. The good Lord has blessed this country with the natural resources that we need for our everyday lives. I want American industry, American workers, and American communities to be able to mine these minerals that we are richly blessed with.
I do not want another Biden administration supporting memorandums of understanding with Third World countries to get these minerals and then import them to the United States so we can put them in our technology, our vehicles, our phones, our cell phones, our computers, our medical instruments that we manufacture.
I would much rather mine these critical minerals here under our environmental and our labor standards. We can lead the world. By the way, Mr. Speaker, we also need to process these here in the United States. That is why our permitting reform is so important. This could be a win-win.
As long as we don't mine here, as long as we put up every single roadblock, my colleagues on the other side of the aisle are happy. They will sit in this House of Representatives and say, ``We support mining'' so long as it never happens, so long as the bureaucratic nightmare, the ``blue tape'' continues where we can't mine here.
Enough is enough. The American people have seen enough, and we are going to mine not only in Minnesota, but we are going to mine in North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Nevada, California, Arizona, and Washington. We are going to mine in Pennsylvania. We are going to mine in Texas. We have to do it.
Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend from Minnesota for listing all of those States and places because it is important for the American people to know that if this becomes law, a free toxic dump site on your public lands is on its way in all of those places. That is what this is about.
One of the cynical euphemisms we keep hearing is ``regulatory certainty,'' so let's talk about what that really means.
Mining permitting has continued after the Rosemont decision. The Rosemont mine itself proceeded. It wasn't impacted. There is no legislative fix needed to this fake problem. This bill would codify only the most industry-friendly interpretations of the mining law and introduce additional uncertainty around the government's ability to enact basic commonsense regulations on mining on public lands.
To expand on that, the bill's current definition says that mining operations include: ``All functions, work, facilities, and activities in connection with the prospecting, development, extraction, and processing of mineral deposits and all uses reasonably incident thereto, including the construction and maintenance of means of access, whether the operations take place on or off the claim.''
This is sweeping. Effectively, this means that mining operations don't need a mining claim at all to conduct operations on your public lands. While this definition is currently in regulation, the Interior Department, and the leading public land law treatise have found that offsite mining activities do not currently get the same rights and priority use as mining claims. That is what is at stake in this legislation.
Permanently codifying this into law would further put mining over other uses of our public lands, doing an end run around the multiple- use balancing requirements that are foundational to public land management.
While our land managers have limited discretion right now to deny a mine on public lands, they do at least have some authority over their roads, pipelines, and toxic waste dumping. That would all be taken away by this legislation.
This is not regulatory clarity. It is regulatory charity to an industry that has already gotten 150 years of giveaways.
Mr. Chair, I urge my colleagues to vote ``no,'' and I reserve the balance of my time.
Mr. Chair, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
Mr. Chair, the signers of this letter express their strong opposition to this bill. Specifically, they argue that it would weaken the already outdated 1872 mining law and give the mining industry even more control over our public lands.
They note that mining in the United States is already governed under a law that is 150 years old, enacted under President Ulysses S. Grant.
These organizations, Tribes, and leaders remind us that the 1872 law has no environmental guardrails, that the mining industry is already the only industry that doesn't have to pay any royalty when it extracts our minerals on public lands, and that 40 percent of headwaters and 50 percent of lakes have been polluted by mining activity.
They also raise specific concerns within the Mining Regulatory Clarity Act.
First, the bill would allow multinational companies to claim an indefinite number of mill sites to permanently dump toxic waste on our public lands for free.
Second, it could block renewable energy development, recreation, and other uses of our public lands by allowing mining companies to build roads, pipelines, and other infrastructure by right and without any permits, as long as they are connected to a plan of operation.
Finally, the bill could be read to eliminate the requirement that mining companies prove that there are even some valuable minerals to validate their claims on the vast majority of our public lands.
The letter urges us to enact real reforms to the 1872 mining law that would improve environmental safeguards for communities and ecosystems impacted by mining, give Federal land managers a say in deciding where mining is and is not appropriate, and close loopholes that allow foreign companies to exploit our public lands.
Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentlewoman from New Mexico (Ms. Leger Fernandez), who has shown great leadership on this seemingly commonsense need to put some guardrails in place to make sure that foreign-owned mining companies, including those owned and controlled by our adversaries, don't have the benefit of all these lavish giveaways.
Mr. Speaker, mining corporations, including foreign-owned, pay nothing in royalties when they take our publicly owned minerals on our Federal lands.
The American people get nada, zero, for our copper, gold, or critical minerals.
H.R. 1366, the Mining Regulatory Clarity Act, is yet another giveaway to big mining companies by making it easier for them to dump their waste on more of our public lands.
At the appropriate time, I will offer a motion to recommit this bill back to committee. If the House rules permitted, I would have offered the motion with an amendment to prevent mining projects from qualifying for the expanded public lands access if the project is owned or operated by a foreign entity of concern like China or one of its subsidiaries.
Why should we let the Chinese Communist Party take advantage of the copper, gold, and critical minerals on our Federal lands? Chairman Moolenaar of the Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party offered a similar amendment to the Rules Committee last Congress on the same bill. Republicans refused to make it in order.
I don't know why Republicans are afraid to limit China's access to America's critical minerals.
If we are not going to make international mining companies pay for our precious minerals that they take from us, the least we could do is stop foreign adversaries, like China, from dumping mine waste on our public land. We should not treat our public land like a big trash pile available to international mining corporations.
Republicans should focus on making life more affordable for Americans, not giving away more land, and not making those big international companies even richer. They should focus on bringing down costs for Americans, not giving a big giveaway to the big corporations.
Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to insert the text of my amendment into the Record immediately prior to the vote on the motion to recommit.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Is there objection to the request of the gentlewoman from New Mexico?
Mr. Speaker, I hope my colleagues will join me in voting for the motion to recommit and stop letting China and its adversaries use our public lands like their big trash dump.
Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time.
Mr. Speaker, this bill is another unnecessary giveaway to the mining industry. It lets literally anyone, including foreign mining companies controlled by our adversaries, claim as much of our Nation's public land as they want for next to nothing, extract our publicly owned minerals without paying a cent in royalties back to the American people, and then permanently bury our public lands in toxic mining waste.
Our mining laws need reform. They don't need this.
With bipartisan interest in securing our critical mineral supply chain, we actually have an opportunity to create modern mineral policies that would empower American innovators to recover the minerals we need while honoring indigenous sovereignty, protecting the environment, and making sure American workers and communities share in the benefits, as well as the American taxpayers. Instead, the majority is doubling down on the extraction above all land grab from the gold rush back when we codified this 1872 mining law.
They refuse to engage with Democrats to include even commonsense safeguards against letting foreign adversaries take our public minerals for free. They refuse to limit the industry's waste dump mill sites to only the public lands necessary for their operations. Ominously, they refuse to clarify that this bill does not affect the Federal Government's ability to regulate mining on public lands, which the unnecessary Savings Clause in this bill calls into question.
It bears repeating that the mining industry already has a sweetheart deal on our public lands. We are the only industrialized Nation that lets anyone claim whatever they want on public lands and extract public minerals for free.
This bill is no minor technical fix to overturn a court decision. It is a massive giveaway of public lands to an industry afraid that one of those many giveaways that they have had for all of this time was about to be challenged.
Mr. Speaker, I urge opposition to the bill, and I yield back the balance of my time.
Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time.
Mr. Speaker, let's talk about some of the issues that were just brought up.
First, the foreign entity of concern restrictions, I agree, and I think everybody would agree, that we should scrutinize foreign direct investment to ensure that it does not pose a threat to the United States.
We have programs to do that, programs that possibly should be strengthened. However, imposing arbitrary standards could prevent publicly traded, non-Chinese companies from mining domestically. Doing what? Forcing a continued reliance on China.
We all know that China is already doing whatever it can to prevent us from building out secure domestic supplies of critical minerals. The CCP has repeatedly used its dominant market position to strategically flood markets and make U.S. projects uneconomic.
Mr. Speaker, when they see a project announced in the United States, they dump product on the global market, lowering the prices and making our mining operations uneconomical to investors.
If we create an arbitrary standard, they will continue to play even more dirty. The CCP will simply buy shares of publicly traded companies to disqualify the companies from mining on Federal lands. We are being naive if we think that China won't use any tool and loophole at their disposal to stop mining in the U.S. In any event, this bill is about regulatory certainty so that we can start mining again in America.
I have already mentioned this, but we are blessed with resources here in America. A lot of those resources are on Federal lands. This issue has come up about royalties. It continually comes up. People say this bill would allow mining companies to extract valuable public assets without paying any royalties to Americans.
I want to remind everybody of something. U.S. mining companies already pay between 40 and 50 percent of earnings in Federal, State, and local taxes, as well as other fees. These taxes are vital to funding school systems, roads, and other infrastructure projects, especially in rural communities.
Now, thanks to the Rosemont decision, on top of paying those taxes, companies must pay millions more in litigation. The developers would be required to pay fees for any mill sites established under this bill. These fees would go toward remediating abandoned hardrock mine lands, something my Democrat colleagues have repeatedly pushed for.
If we want to encourage investment in safe, responsible, and cutting- edge mining practices that provide billions to the public's coffers and essential materials to the American people, we need to support H.R. 1366.
Mr. Speaker, I also want to call attention to a letter we received, signed by 28 organizations from A to Z. It is literally from A to Z. Starting with A, the Alaska Miners Association, American Exploration and Mining Association, Bipartisan Policy Center Action, Battery Materials and Technology Coalition, Colorado Mining Association, National Mining Association, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Women's Mining Coalition, Wyoming Mining Association, and I will round it out with Z, the Zero Emission Transportation Association.
These organizations stress the importance of Congress enacting this bipartisan legislation. They stated: This legislation will ensure the U.S. can utilize its vast domestic resources to build essential mineral supply chains. Your efforts to enhance mineral supply chain security, while upholding our leading safety and environmental standards, are crucial. The passage of H.R. 1366 will support the trajectory of innovation in the U.S. and maintain the Nation's economic leadership.
Mr. Speaker, this bill is common sense, supporting American industries that are working to bolster our domestic mineral supplies.
I also want to draw attention to a letter we received from Nevada democratic Governor Joe Lombardo in support of the Mining Regulatory Clarity Act. His letter states: Advancement of this bipartisan, bicameral legislation is indispensable to the long-term economic resilience of our rural communities and Nevada's ability to help achieve domestic mineral security.
Again, this bill is common sense. It is bipartisan, and it bicameral. It supports a key industry for States like Nevada. It should be strongly bipartisan.
Mr. Speaker, when we look at the abundant minerals that we are blessed with across the United States, I think of the claim that our colleague from Alaska (Mr. Begich) also says. He talked about the Ambler Road district. Of 50 things listed on the U.S. List of Critical Minerals, he says in the Ambler Mining District, 49 of those exist in abundant capacity to develop, process, and mine. Yet, we are yet to be able to get a road into this area to process these materials.
When I look at my home State of Arkansas, we have the largest deposit of lithium possibly in the world. At least 15 percent of the world's lithium is in brine water on public land in the great State of Arkansas.
We have all these minerals available all across the country. According to the ``2025 Mineral Commodity Summary'' from the U.S. Geological Survey, the U.S. is 100 percent dependent on imports for 14 critical minerals, many from China and Russia.
Mr. Speaker, I have met with the Navaho Nation. They have abundant deposits of uranium they could recover from former mining operations. We are so dependent on uranium imports. The last number I saw, we produced only one-half of 1 percent of the uranium we use for fuel in U.S. reactors. Do my colleagues know where most of that comes from? It comes from Russia and Kazakhstan. These are the kinds of minerals we are dependent on foreign actors for.
If my colleagues support growing our domestic supplies of critical minerals, this bill provides the regulatory certainty necessary to strengthen domestic mineral supply chains. If my colleagues support weakening China's global control over minerals, join us in voting for the Mining Regulatory Clarity Act.
Let's talk a little bit more about China. We need not only more mining here in America, but we need to do more processing and refining in the U.S. to meet our energy infrastructure and national security and defense needs. The Mining Regulatory Clarity Act will help strengthen domestic mineral supply chains.
I have a chart here that shows where we are at with China on rare earth and their monopoly. They control 70 percent of the mining in the world. It is not in China. It is all over the world.
My colleague mentioned child slave labor being used to extract cobalt in Africa. It is atrocious where they go and mine these materials and the lack of standards that they have. The environmental, human health, human safety, and human rights that are violated in the mining is also appalling.
They take that back to China, and they process 90 percent of it in China. This is all of the world's critical minerals. Then they manufacture 93 percent of the things that are manufactured with critical minerals.
If my colleagues want to help China maintain their stranglehold over our critical mineral supply chains, we should oppose this bill. Look no further than the chart behind me. We will see we can't continue to allow China to have the monopoly and the stranglehold on our economy and on our defense that they currently have through the critical mineral supply chain.
Mr. Speaker, I encourage my colleagues to support this bill. I appreciate my colleague from Nevada (Mr. Amodei) for bringing it to the floor.
Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. All time for debate has expired.
Pursuant to House Resolution 951, the previous question is ordered on the bill, as amended.
The question is on the engrossment and third reading of the bill.
The bill was ordered to be engrossed and read a third time, and was read the third time.
Mr. Speaker, pursuant to House Resolution 951, I call up the bill (H.R. 845) to require the Secretary of the Interior to reissue regulations removing the gray wolf from the list of endangered and threatened wildlife under the Endangered Species Act of 1973, and ask for its immediate consideration in the House.
The Clerk read the title of the bill.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to House Resolution 951, the amendment in the nature of a substitute recommended by the Committee on Natural Resources, printed
The text of the bill, as amended, is as follows:
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The bill, as amended, shall be debatable for 1 hour equally divided and controlled by the chair and ranking minority member of the Committee on Natural Resources or their respective designees.
The gentleman from Arkansas (Mr. Westerman) and the gentlewoman from Oregon (Ms. Hoyle) each will control 30 minutes.
Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days to revise and extend their remarks and include extraneous material on H.R. 845.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Is there objection to the request of the gentleman from Arkansas?
Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
Mr. Speaker, as we are getting close to breaking for the Christmas holiday, I am glad that this last bill that the Natural Resources Committee will offer is one that we will have a debate on that will resolve an issue that has united the Bush, Obama, Biden, and Trump administrations alike.
I am not sure there is another issue like that out there, but this is one of them because each of those administrations has agreed that the gray wolf is a recovered species and should be removed from the Endangered Species Act, or ESA, protection.
H.R. 845, the Pet and Livestock Protection Act, sponsored by Representatives Boebert and Tiffany, instructs the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to re-issue its 2020 final rule that delisted the gray wolf from the list of threatened and endangered species in the entire lower 48 States.
Recovery of the gray wolf is a true ESA success story, and there aren't a lot of them. In the 1970s, the species was at risk in the lower 48 States. Today, the gray wolf numbers in the thousands across the Great Lakes and Rocky Mountains, with each of these populations being connected to tens of thousands of wolves in Canada.
The first Trump administration recognized this successful recovery and issued a delisting rule for gray wolves in the lower 48 States. Unfortunately, this rule was vacated by a Federal judge in California in a blatant instance of judicial activism.
Mr. Speaker, don't just take my word for it. The Biden administration appealed the California judge's vacatur of the 2020 Trump rule, arguing: ``The district court misunderstood the ESA's clear mandate and compounded that error by imposing its own review of the science.''
By every sensible definition, the gray wolf is a recovered species, and that recovery should be celebrated as a success of the ESA. Gray wolf populations are healthy and thriving in every region in which they are found.
The Great Lakes region has the largest concentration of gray wolves in the lower 48 States, with approximately 4,200 wolves inhabiting Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. Moreover, this population is connected to at least 12,000 to 14,000 wolves in central Canada. The Western United States is also home to roughly 2,500 wolves, including already delisted populations in Montana, Idaho, Washington, Oregon, and Wyoming. This population is connected to over 15,000 wolves in western Canada.
The Biden administration's own science determined that wolves in the Western United States had a healthy abundance, retained genetic diversity, could respond to high-mortality events, and maintained adaptive capacity. Most of these wolves reside in States where they have already been delisted.
The science is clear. Gray wolves have recovered in the lower 48 States, and it is time to return their management to the States, which have managed and will continue to manage wolf populations responsibly.
Mr. Speaker, I encourage my colleagues to support the bill, and I reserve the balance of my time.
Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
Mr. Speaker, we are here in D.C. during the final week before the holidays. Families back home are struggling with the increasing costs of groceries, housing affordability, natural disaster recovery, and healthcare. That is what we should be working on.
Instead, what has Republican leadership scheduled this week: a bill that is routinely used in Congress to kill time on the floor and that will go nowhere in the Senate.
H.R. 845, the Pet and Livestock Protection Act, would strip Federal Endangered Species Act protection from gray wolves and block courts from reviewing that decision. This bill would force the Department of the Interior to re-issue a 2020 Trump rule to delist the gray wolves that was struck down by a Federal court in 2022.
Why was it struck down? A Republican-appointed judge found that it failed to use the best available science, didn't consider threats to wolves outside core populations, and ignored the needs across their entire range--findings all in violation of the Endangered Species Act.
Instead of accepting that decision, this bill doubles down on bad science and even prevents courts from weighing in.
If you are sure wolves have recovered, then there is no need to block judicial review. However, that is not the case here. Instead, my colleagues want to remove Endangered Species Act protections because of politics instead of science. That is not how the Endangered Species Act works.
Wolves are an Endangered Species Act success story. Their population has increased from fewer than 1,000 animals to over 6,000 today, but recovery remains fragile and incomplete. Wildlife management should be based on science and collaboration. Our natural heritage and the health of our ecosystems are worth protecting for future generations.
Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' on this bill, and I am looking forward to hearing further discussions from my colleagues.
Mr. Speaker, I thank the chairman for helping to lead on this issue. I thank my colleague, Representative Tom Tiffany, who has also been instrumental in this piece of legislation.
Mr. Speaker, Colorado is at the center of our Nation for wolf battles. That is why Congressman Tom Tiffany and I introduced H.R. 845, the Pet and Livestock Protection Act.
My bill delists the gray wolf from the Federal Endangered Species List and returns the issue of wolf management to the States and Tribal wildlife agencies.
This doesn't mean that wolves will not be managed. It just means that the Federal Government will step aside, and we will have proper State management. I think we believe in federalism here and the Tenth Amendment and trust our States to do the right thing.
Leftists want to eliminate hunting, lock up our lands, further restrict gun rights, and pander to the interests of extreme environmentalists who don't understand our rural way of life.
In 2020, in Colorado, Denver and Boulder voted to reintroduce gray wolves west of the Continental Divide. This ballot-box biology has led Colorado to rush through the importation of Canadian gray wolves and has set them loose in our State, despite numerous protests and questions about the legality of this dysfunctional and
These predators do not obey arbitrary boundaries. Sure, Colorado may say that they will be introduced west of the Continental Divide, but that doesn't keep them west, and that doesn't necessarily keep them in Colorado, either, as we have seen.
Importing foreign predators into our State has received pushback from our Tribes, energy operators, and our farmers and ranchers. ESA restrictions prohibit ranchers and pet owners from protecting their livestock and pets, as ranchers who shoot at, injure, or kill protected wolves that are stalking sheep or cattle face potential prosecution.
Unfortunately, wolves, again, don't see State lines. They don't know the difference between State, Federal, Tribal, or private land. It is in their nature to travel great distances in pursuit of prey, whether that is deer, elk, sheep, cattle, or even our pets. It has been well documented that wolves don't only hunt to satisfy their hunger. They also hunt for sport.
In March of this year, one of the Canadian wolves attacked and killed a working cattle dog in Jackson County, Colorado, neighboring one of the counties I represent in my district. Last year, a gray wolf from the Great Lakes region was found over 1,000 miles away in Elbert County, east of the Continental Divide, in Colorado's Fourth District, which I represent.
Colorado's agricultural producers have lost $580,000 in just one year from wolves already introduced. We should listen to our farmers and ranchers and finally delist the gray wolf.
Gray wolves were first listed under the ESA in 1967. That was 58 years ago. Since then, delisting the gray wolves has been supported by the Obama, Trump, and even Biden administrations.
In November 2020, scientists and nonpartisan career employees at the Department of the Interior once again found gray wolves were fully recovered and once again issued a rule that returned management of the gray wolf populations to State and Tribal wildlife agencies, as it should be.
Unfortunately, frivolous litigation was filed by environmental extremists, and an activist California judge pandered to them by vacating the 2020 rule and unilaterally relisting the gray wolf by judicial fiat.
Mr. Speaker, the science is crystal clear on this issue: Gray wolves should no longer be on the Endangered Species List. We can no longer put farmers, ranchers, and even our pets in harm's way by using taxpayer dollars to protect a species that has been fully recovered. It is time for the Federal Government to get out of the way and allow the State and Tribal wildlife agencies to manage this species.
Again, just as my colleague on the other side of the aisle agrees, this is an Endangered Species Act success story.
Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
Mr. Speaker, when my colleagues say an activist judge overturned this, it was a Republican-appointed judge who found, again, that it failed to use the best available science.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service just canceled the first-ever nationwide gray wolf recovery plan, which was due this month. This comprehensive, science-based plan would have finally provided a holistic approach to wolf recovery with all stakeholders at the table. This is the type of solution that the courts have been seeking after invalidating five of the six previous attempts to delist wolves.
Unfortunately, H.R. 845 is part of a pattern. Instead of investing time and money into supporting proven paths of success, we are voting on far-reaching and unscientific proposals that don't actually solve the problem and won't make it into law. H.R. 845 would also fragment and make wolf management harder.
Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the gentlewoman from Michigan (Mrs. Dingell).
Mr. Speaker, today, we are witnessing an unprecedented extinction crisis with 1 million species at risk of disappearing forever in coming decades.
As the co-chair of the Endangered Species Act Caucus, protecting our Nation's wildlife is one of my top priorities. I am deeply concerned that the provisions included in this bill will cause our country to backtrack on the progress we have made. That is why I have to be opposed today to the bill on the floor, the so-called Pet and Livestock Protection Act.
There has been a lot of discussion about the gray wolf. Let's talk about the listing of the gray wolf under the Endangered Species Act. While progress has been made in certain regions, the reality is clear: Gray wolves have not yet achieved full recovery, and removing Federal protections would be premature and dangerous.
Today, wolves occupy only a fraction of their historic range. Large areas of suitable habitat remain unoccupied, and many existing populations are small, isolated, and genetically vulnerable.
True recovery under the Endangered Species Act requires not just survival in a few regions, but long-term security across a significant portion of the species' range.
We also know from experience what happens when protections are lifted too soon. After previous delisting efforts, several States moved quickly to authorize aggressive hunting and trapping seasons. In some cases, wolf populations declined sharply within 1 single year. These setbacks erase decades of conservation progress and create instability, rather than sound wildlife management.
Gray wolves play a vital role in maintaining healthy ecosystems. As apex predators, they help regulate prey populations, reduce overgrazing, and promote the recovery of forests and watersheds. These ecological benefits support biodiversity and contribute to healthier landscapes that benefit hunters, farmers, outdoor recreation, and rural communities alike.
Some argue that delisting is necessary to address conflicts with livestock in local communities, but science tells a different story. Broad lethal control does not reliably reduce livestock losses and can actually increase conflicts by disrupting pack structure. Nonlethal tools, such as range riders, fladry, improved husbandry practices, and fair compensation programs have proven to be far more effective and deserve continued investment.
The Endangered Species Act is one of the most successful conservation laws in our Nation's history. It sets clear science-based standards for recovery and requires that threats be adequately addressed before protections are removed.
Delisting gray wolves without enforceable, science-based State management plans undermines both the intent of the law and public trust.
This decision is about more than one species. It is about whether we let politics override science or whether we uphold our responsibility to protect wildlife for future generations.
Until gray wolves are truly recovered, connected across the range, and protected by durable management plans, Federal protections must remain in place. That is why attempts to delist the gray wolves through congressional action are opposed by scientists, conservation groups, and the majority of Americans across the political spectrum.
For these reasons, I urge my colleagues to oppose delisting and to stand with science, conservation, and the rule of law.
Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
Mr. Speaker, I want to state again: The gray wolf is an ESA recovery success story. We should be celebrating this.
While gray wolves might not currently occupy all of their historic range, they do not meet the criteria for listing under the ESA. This was confirmed by the Biden administration, as with previous administrations before.
Most species are not found throughout their historic range. Elk and black bears, for example, are still absent from much of their historic range, but they are not listed under the ESA.
According to my colleague's argument, the wolf can't be totally recovered until it is back in its entire historic range. Mr. Speaker, the Northeast United States is part of the historic range of the gray wolf. If what I
The scientists at the Fish and Wildlife Service in the Biden administration, along with those in the Trump administration, the Obama administration, and the Bush administration, have said that the gray wolf is recovered.
This is just another push to continue a top-down Federal approach to wildlife management that does little to actually help wildlife.
Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Tiffany).
Mr. Speaker, I suggest to the gentlewoman from Michigan, if she wants to do a ride-along with me and deliver wolves to Madison, Wisconsin, part of their previous range, I would be happy to do that if she would join in that process.
I just want to address one thing in regards to the gentlewoman from Oregon. We have got really good news, what she talked about in regards to inflation. I urge her to watch CNN this morning with the inflation numbers that have come out that are the lowest since 2021. That is good news, as we end 2025, and it is really good news as we go into 2026 that the Pet and Livestock Protection Act is going to pass out of the House of Representatives today.
Federal protections were established a couple decades ago, and there are hundreds of wolves in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan. Now, there are over 4,000 wolves. Talk about inflation. It has hit the wolf population. Also, if you go back to 2015, 26 of the most eminent wildlife biologists in the upper Midwest urged these judges to delist the wolf, take them off the Endangered Species Act, because the wolf is recovered as the data has shown.
Populations have been bouncing back and forth between being listed and delisted, and this bill provides a permanent solution, returning the population management back to the States.
As everyone in Wisconsin knows, this is something we have seen far too often, most recently when the judge in Oakland, California, vacated the 2020 delisting rule and unilaterally put it back on the ESA list by judicial fiat.
Wisconsinites know best when it comes to managing Wisconsin's wolf population, and it is long past time that we empowered Wisconsinites to be able to manage the gray wolf population once again.
The chairman handled it in a very positive manner. This is a recovery success under the Endangered Species Act.
This is the graphic representation of what is happening, the carnage that is happening across our States, in rural areas, where pets and livestock are being slaughtered because the wolf is not being managed.
If you talk to any sportsman, they will tell you the wolf belongs on the landscape, but when you do not manage a wildlife population, this is what happens, the slaughter continues of people's pets and livestock.
Gray wolf delisting has been supported by four Presidents. Even the Biden administration's Fish and Wildlife Service asked the Federal appeals court last fall to reinstate the rule.
The gray wolf has been the latest recovery success, with significant populations in the Rocky Mountains and western Great Lakes.
There is something else we should all remember. When a species is removed from the ESA list, it is something we should celebrate.
From farmers to pet owners to sportsmen and -women, delisting the gray wolf is of paramount importance to rural America.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The time of the gentleman has expired.
Mr. Speaker, in order to maintain our rural way of life, the wolf needs to be delisted. It is past time to return management to the States. This is a legislative fix we can do.
Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to vote ``yes.'' I urge the United States Senate to pass this bill when it comes over to them.
Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
I appreciate the words of my good friend from Wisconsin. I invite him to come to my district where the manufacturers in my district are paying more for goods that they have to import to build things in the U.S. and my farmers and wine producers and exporters are losing their markets and have less money to pay for things where the prices have risen for their Thanksgiving, Christmas dinner, and presents. But you are welcome to come.
Also, the issue with H.R. 845, after the 2020 delisting, in Wisconsin 30 percent of its wolf population was killed in just 4 days. Idaho passed a law allowing the killing of up to 90 percent of wolves, including the pups. Montana removed wolf protections around Yellowstone raising bag limits and expanded trapping, killing many of the beloved wolves that tourists travel from around the world to see.
The ecological consequences matter. Wolves are a keystone species critical to healthy ecosystems. When reintroduced to Yellowstone in 1995, they provided benefits throughout the entire ecosystem.
Wolves changed elk behavior, allowing willows and aspens to recover. They brought back beaver, whose dams create habitats for fish, amphibians, and birds. One study found a 1,500 percent increase in the willow growth, surpassing 82 percent of trophic cascades in global analysis. Recently, we have seen evidence that wolves are helping to protect deer and elk populations from the spread of chronic wasting disease, a horrifying neurological disease rampaging through the States and causing real problems for hunters.
The State of Oregon has worked to lead the way in wolf recovery, but there is only so much we can do if neighboring wolf populations are wiped out.
We want to see recovery, get the environmental benefits, and also make sure that our ranchers are compensated for any losses that occur.
Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Beyer), my good friend.
Mr. Speaker, as co-chair of the House Endangered Species Caucus, I rise today in strong opposition to H.R. 845.
This bill, formerly called the Trust in Science Act, has gone under a rebrand since the best available science contradicts this politically motivated bill.
I am here to remind the American people of some key facts underlying this bill. First, a small reminder, people are predators, too. In fact, we are the most successful apex predator of all time.
This bill has the deeply unpopular Project 2025's name all over this. Look at page 534, part 3, section 16, where delisting the gray wolf is listed as the second highest priority for the Department of the Interior, just behind delisting the grizzly bear.
Despite the Trump administration's incompetence and chaos, we have not forgotten about the direction coming from Project 2025 and the damage already done to our country.
Second, this bill fails to recognize the status of gray wolves today, taking us back to an outdated rulemaking that didn't hold up in court.
It is important to recognize State-by-State differences in wolf recovery but also in State-sanctioned predation. What does the best available recovery science say today? That is what we should be supporting.
Gray wolf recovery goals are outdated, and they need to be updated. That is what we should be working on instead of this extinction effort. That is what this is: permission to once again reduce the wolf population in the lower 48 to zero.
We know that premature delisting hinders the ability of gray wolves to be delisted legitimately.
Today, wolves continue to face ongoing serious threats to their survival, including poaching, habitat loss, and the patchwork of inconsistent State mismanagement.
The protections of the ESA have allowed gray wolf populations across the country to stabilize and regain
If we actually wanted to trust the science, we see that the gray wolf has made progress in their recovery but also that wolves in the Northern Rocky Mountains are being killed in dramatic numbers, even the celebrated Yellowstone National Park's gray wolves.
The Biden administration recognized this and put forth a National Wolf Recovery Plan that was supposed to be released last week on December 12. This highly anticipated plan would have developed a comprehensive nationwide recovery plan that would have engaged the public to help develop a unified recovery approach based on scientific evidence. Unfortunately, the Trump administration hastily announced its cancellation last November.
By the way, the only reason Canadian wolves were necessary is because we had killed every last lower 48 wolf.
Finally, I have to address the spurious argument that protecting pets and livestock somehow is ample justification for delisting the wolves.
In Montana, Mr. Speaker, fewer than 60 livestock out of almost 3 million are killed every year by wolves. That is one loss for every 50,000 cows or sheep. That is a very tiny loss ratio compared to deaths by accident, lightning, freezing temperatures, and all of the other natural hazards that come from living outside 365 days a year, not to mention that most of these animals are being raised to be slaughtered. The numbers don't look much different in Wyoming or Idaho. Ranchers are compensated very generously for losses related to wolves, always more than market value, sometimes three times the value of the animal lost.
Mr. Speaker, State Farm reported that 93,000 dogs--not 5 or 10-- 93,000 were hit by cars in 2022, yet no one has suggested banishing automobiles.
I love dogs. Most of us do. We know how smart and complicated and ferociously loyal they are. They are just wolves we have tamed. There is abundant evidence that wolf families are more like human families than any other species. Wolves and men have evolved together over the millennia, one reason wolves show up in all our most important stories, poems, and songs.
When we kill all the wolves, we kill something in our own humanity. We deny our connection to nature and what is beautiful and glorious.
How can we proclaim the wonder of existence, the generosity of a loving God, and then hate the charismatic creatures he has also given to this world.
Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to kill this bill.
Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
The whole State of Virginia was at one time gray wolf habitat. Washington, D.C. had gray wolves. When are we going to turn them loose here on the Mall or Old Town or whatever part of Virginia?
This is a problem that seems to get exported to rural areas, and people turn a blind eye to what happens in the rural areas.
Also, there is a difference between desiring fewer wolves and desiring no wolves. States where wolves have already been delisted have a proven track record of success which has been confirmed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. This bill does not prohibit the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service from listing the wolf in the future if it determines a listing is warranted.
However, as the service has confirmed multiple times, the gray wolf currently does not meet that criteria.
Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Stauber).
Mr. Speaker, as a member of the newly formed follow the science caucus, I rise today in strong support of a bill I am proud to cosponsor, H.R. 845, the Pets and Livestock Protection Act.
It has been proven time and time again that the gray wolf is not endangered and, in fact, has fully recovered.
When the gray wolf was listed as threatened in Minnesota under the Endangered Species Act in 1978, a recovery goal of 1,250 to 1,400 wolves was set.
Today, according to data from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, we have over 2,700 wolves in Minnesota. However, as my constituents will tell you, Mr. Speaker, that is a severe undercount. It is more like 5,000 to 7,000 in Minnesota.
Over one-half of the gray wolves across the lower 48 are in Minnesota, and most of them can be found in my district.
The gray wolf might be one of the greatest success stories of the ESA, and it is one that should be celebrated. Now that the species has recovered, it is time to delist. That is not just my opinion. It is a bipartisan view that has been held by several Presidential administrations on both sides of the aisle.
In 2009, the Bush administration delisted the gray wolves. Activist groups sued to relist.
In 2013, the Obama administration delisted the gray wolves. Activist groups sued to delist.
In 2020, the Trump administration delisted gray wolves. Activist groups sued to relist.
Just last year, the Biden administration even agreed, when they chose to defend the Trump administration's 2020 delisting rule.
Presidents Bush, Obama, Trump, and even Biden, trusted the science and sought to do the right thing. It is activist groups, with the help of activist judges, who continue to choose to disregard the science and fight to keep these unnecessary protections in place.
As a result, my constituents have to face growing wolf populations in their backyards each and every day.
Mr. Speaker, look at this photo right here to my right. Just last month in Ely, Minnesota, a wolf was seen in the school parking lot in the middle of the day. It was just feet from the schoolhouse door. Mr. Speaker, because of the gray wolf's listing status, nothing could be done to protect the lives of the students there. The broken ESA is putting my constituents' lives at risk.
Simply said, it is beyond time that the gray wolf is delisted under the ESA. Unfortunately, as long as activists are willing to abuse our Federal Court system to weaponize the ESA, I am afraid an administrative delisting will never be possible. There is only one alternative, Mr. Speaker. Congress needs to act and finally vote in legislation to delist the gray wolves.
As a hunter in northern Minnesota, last year I held several townhalls on the gray wolf and the concerns of the delisting. Hunters for Hunters, Hunter Nation, and other pro-hunting groups supported this endeavor.
Mr. Speaker, if you look at trail cams, for example, you will see a nice, beautiful, in this case, 8-point buck. Ten minutes later, on the same trail, same trail cam, comes the wolf.
Who knows what happened to that big, beautiful buck.
The fact of the matter is that we should celebrate the ESA's accomplishment. The gray wolf has recovered. Let the States manage it. They can be more nimble than the Federal Government.
Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to join me in support of this important piece of legislation.
Mr. Speaker, I acknowledge that wolf-livestock conflicts do happen and that ranchers deserve support when there is a wolf problem. We already have tools that work to address these conflicts, but this bill does nothing to improve them or to help our ranchers.
H.R. 845 has no funding for conflict mitigation, no support for nonlethal deterrents, and no additional compensation for losses. If we want to delist wolves responsibly, then we need to give Fish and Wildlife Service the resources and direction it needs to work collaboratively, respond to science, and invest in conflict prevention.
Mr. Speaker, I yield such time as he may consume to the gentleman from California (Mr. Huffman), who is the ranking member.
Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman from Oregon for yielding.
Mr. Speaker, the gentlewoman is right. If we want to talk about the occasional conflicts that exist between livestock and pets and any predators, that is a legitimate conversation. However, what we are hearing from across the aisle is really jumping the shark, if you will forgive another predator metaphor, Mr. Speaker.
We are being led to believe that packs of wolves are about to descend on urban areas in New England and Madison, Wisconsin, and that they are looming outside of schools.
I think my colleagues across the aisle need to understand: The American people are a little smarter than that. They are kind of going to see through this Little Red Riding Hood meets chupacabra narrative the gentleman was trying to spin to scare people about wolves.
Mr. Speaker, let me tell you the way it actually works. The Endangered Species Act does not prevent wildlife managers from intervening any time a wolf or any other predator threatens property or human beings. In fact, just a few weeks ago in Northern California, I believe it was the Sierra Valley, a pack of wolves from one of our packs there had begun preying on cattle in an area where they are concentrated because of the way they move through the State, and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife came in and took some. I think they took five or six of them, killed them. There was no ESA lawsuit, and there was no violation of the law.
A little reality check on what we just heard from my colleague from Minnesota, that there was nothing anyone could do about this scary chupacabra wolf in the school parking lot. That is nonsense. That is not the way the ESA works.
Now, let's be clear. This bill is not about protecting pets or livestock. It is about politics overriding science, and the consequences of doing that are disastrous. The precedent set by this bill would be very troubling. It would tell wildlife scientists that their expertise doesn't matter. It tells Tribal nations that their voices can be ignored, and it tells the American people they no longer have the right to challenge unlawful government actions.
The ESA is simple and effective. It ensures decisions are grounded in science. That is the heart of it, and this bill throws that principle out the window. It mandates a nationwide delisting of gray wolves, and it explicitly blocks judicial review. It would prevent courts from doing their job to determine whether a government action even complies with the law.
Now, we don't have to speculate about what happens when protections for gray wolves are lifted because we have seen it play out.
In the State of Wisconsin where hunters like the group, Hunter Nation, which is led by Ted Nugent and Don Jr. on the board, swept in as soon as the wolf hunting season was open. Quickly they did that, despite objections from Tribes in the region. The result was devastating. Mr. Speaker, 218 wolves, about 20 percent of the State's population, were wiped out. By the end of the season, 30 percent were killed--nearly twice as many wolves as the State had authorized.
Over the course of about 60 hours, thousands of hunters, including some unlicensed hunters, participated in coordinating hunting groups, engaged in a dangerous terrorizing campaign against the wolves using bait and wolf calls. They hunted at night. They used dogs. Mr. Speaker, 188 wolves were taken by dogs. They killed 130 wolf pups that were less than 2 years old. This is not thoughtful, science-based management of the State's wolf population. This is not celebrating the recovery of the wolf as we keep hearing in this debate.
This week we received a letter from the Wisconsin Tribes who had sued to try to stop that hunt. In the letter, they object to this bill today. They point out the inadequacy of existing State-level regulatory mechanisms that led to that disaster in Wisconsin.
Mr. Speaker, I include in the Record a letter from six Wisconsin Tribes.
Mr. Speaker, Tribes support continued protection for wolves. Seventy-eight percent of Americans support continued protection for wolves. They want to see living wolf pups in Yellowstone, not news stories about tortured wolves in bars or wolf hunts with dogs. I urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' on this bill.
I would also like to just move to some additional remarks that are part of our motion to recommit.
The entire debate so far has shown why Members of Congress have no business in listing and delisting decisions. We are not scientific experts. We are not objective scientists tasked with assessing population numbers, recovery goals, and continued threats to the species.
That is why the ESA properly leaves those questions to actual experts, not politicians. For that reason, we shouldn't be passing this bill at all, but if Republicans are going to go down this road, then there should at least be some guardrails in place that are based on actual science.
For this reason, at the appropriate time, I will offer a motion to recommit this bill back to committee.
If the House rules permitted, I would have offered this motion with an important amendment to this bill. We were not allowed to do that.
My amendment is straightforward. The NRA gets to have this bill and its little hunting spree, but if Ted Nugent and Don Jr. and all the other folks who need to do this to prove their manhood actually go where scientists have warned us about and take the wolf population down below science-based recovery standards, then the Secretary of the Interior would have to issue an emergency regulation temporarily restoring Federal protection in that instance.
This would provide a necessary backstop if Congress legislatively delists the gray wolf and it careens right back toward extinction again, which we know it would.
Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to insert the text of my amendment into the Record immediately prior to the vote on the motion to recommit. I hope my colleagues will join me in voting for the motion to recommit in a few moments and keeping amodicum of actual science in the Endangered Species Act.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Is there objection to the request of the gentleman from California?
Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
Mr. Speaker, I have a question: Which will it be? What is the good science?
As I have mentioned before, the Obama administration, the Bush administration, the first Trump administration, the Biden administration all said the wolf has been recovered. The experts, the scientists at U.S. Fish and Wildlife have said it has been recovered.
Yet my friends argue it has not been recovered because there are some places where its native range is that the wolf is not there. I remind everyone, we are in gray wolf territory, historical gray wolf territory.
Mr. Speaker, like many, like you probably and myself, I have walked around D.C. at night, and this is a rat-infested city. I think there would be at least a little bit of food for the wolves if we were to turn a pack loose on The Mall. However, what happens when they eat all the rats? What do they go after next?
Now, this is a preposterous situation because I don't think anybody really wants a pack of wolves on The Mall. However, if you go down the logic trail that my colleagues are making, the wolf is not recovered until it is back in its historic range.
Why do we want to sit in a big city where wolves once were and say: We want wolves, just not in our backyard. We want them out in the Midwest or West where it is somebody else's problem, but we don't want those problems here because it makes no sense to put wolves back here in the big cities and across the Northeast.
Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. LaMalfa), where they have a lot of wolves.
Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Arkansas for yielding.
It is amazing here. I represent the northeast corner of California where the wolves are being inflicted upon the people and the wildlife of that area. The stuff I hear coming from the other side of the aisle about recovering the wolves and even the mocking, yes, it is real.
There are wolves that are encroaching on elementary schools in Siskiyou County, the Little Shasta Elementary School. This isn't some ``Little Red Riding Hood'' story. This isn't some made-up deal. It is very real, and they are coming closer and closer to town all over the northeast part of California.
My colleague from the north coast, when he mocks us like that, I am wondering if this Proposition 50 in California kicks in, and he ends up representing my constituents up there that are fighting against this, and I am their only voice in the echo chamber of California against this: Are you going to have townhalls up there? Are you going to go into Modoc County, Siskiyou County, Sierra Valley, and tell them this is a ``Red Riding Hood'' story about the wolves devouring their livestock, eating up all their wildlife?
The mocking. Why is it they can't stand the people that produce the food, the lumber that comes from my part of the State, from the West, from the rural parts of America? Is it they want all of their beef--I guess if they don't eat beef, they might be able to have this conversation--if they want their beef to be imported from somewhere else, if they don't want it produced here, under our standards, why is it they hate my constituents who are just trying to provide the urban people with what they need?
We don't need a hell of a lot, just coming from the urban area, I tell you what. If the gentleman wants to cater only to Marin County and have this population continue to devastate our people up there and rein in just a little bit the misinterpretation of the Endangered Species Act over the 50 years--yeah, it was well-intentioned when it came out. It was a temporary tool. It never was meant to be a life sentence or even a death sentence for livestock and for people's livelihoods up here in this area here or all over the West. This is a clear example of how the ESA has drifted a long ways from that end.
It is high time that people have tools, especially my home State of California, where they have no tools until the fish and game finally decides to come in.
Mr. Speaker, I rise today in strong support of H.R. 845. The bill would address at least some of the injury and injustice being inflicted on my State and my constituents by the inappropriate and unfair enforcement of the Endangered Species Act as it has been applied in the reintroduction of the gray wolf.
This injustice is apparent in the Federal Government's inability to manage and control the killing, the maiming, and the terrorizing of thousands of head of livestock across my district and the rest of the United States and in the failure of the government to properly pay for the cost of its decision to reintroduce the wolf.
I will address the lack of management first.
Let me begin my discussion of failed management by showing several pictures which are graphic illustrations of the lurking reality that many of my ranching families must deal with every single day.
As you can see, there is nothing refined about how a wolf goes about feeding itself. You can only imagine the feelings of the rancher when he or she finds their livestock torn apart or dying. You can try to imagine the anger they feel, knowing that they are legally prevented from stopping that wolf before it causes this pain and horror for their cattle and calves and stopping these wolves from doing this over and over again and again.
I have held meeting after meeting across my district listening over and over to stories about wolves attacking herds, scattering to the four winds terrified cattle and calves, and ignoring the sad hazing efforts that we heard about earlier from across the aisle that livestock owners are reduced to using under the law to try to protect their livelihoods.
The fury, the anger, the frustration, the fear that a wolf may at some point attack a child, which it came close to doing earlier last year while children in my district were waiting for a schoolbus, is totally understandable and why we are on this floor sharing the reality of the wolf in America today.
If we are to protect those who are trying their best to feed this country, to make a living, to keep their communities viable and safe, to put out range fires, to pay their taxes, and continue to be productive parts of this Nation, we must manage the wolf. This means we must delist the wolf and move management of these creatures back to the States. Remember, this is exactly what the Democratic Obama and Biden administrations and Republican Bush and Trump administrations have agreed needed to be done literally years ago. The wolf listed status continues only because of judicial fiat.
Let me turn to the actual cost of reintroduction of the wolf and the need for those who have created this cost to be responsible for paying for it.
University studies show that the annual cost of the wolf to the cattle business as of a few years ago was estimated to be $128 million. That is each year. This number is far higher now that cattle prices are higher.
Many think the only cost of the wolf is the killing of the livestock, but the impact of the primal fear and terror cattle understandably feel when a wolf is near has dramatic and serious impacts on weight gain and on pregnancy rates. These losses in production are real, and they are serious. In a time when even the President is concerned about beef prices, these losses affect everyone by causing a reduction in the size of America's cattle herd and, of course, their productivity.
In recognition of this damage caused by the wolf, laws have been enacted, some in the big, beautiful bill and some at the State level, to try to bring at least some ESA reimbursement equity into play by providing some payment to the owners for the death of cattle caused by wolves, but these programs come nowhere close to offsetting the very real loss.
Mr. Speaker, I can assure you that the rancher would be absolutely happier if he or she could completely avoid these losses that lead to asking for justice under these programs.
If we are to properly, fairly, and logically manage the wolf, we must pass Congresswoman Boebert and Congressman Tiffany's bill, H.R. 845, the Pet and Livestock Protection Act.
This bill would federally delist the wolf and allow States to actually manage wolf populations--not exterminate, manage. If we are to properly allocate responsibility for the monetary cost of the wolf-- that is, the cost of the Endangered Species Act--America itself must pay for the consequences of this law. That means Congress must manage the problem and appropriate dollars to pay for it.
Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of the Pet and Livestock Protection Act, which I am a cosponsor of, led by my friends, Representative Boebert and Representative Tiffany.
The truth is, Congress should not have to step in to delist the gray wolf, but here we are. That is because the Endangered Species Act listing process no longer works as it was intended to do.
The gray wolf has exceeded recovery goals. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, under both Republican and Democratic administrations, has repeatedly concluded that the species should be delisted. Yet, every time, radical, litigious groups step in to block that decision.
They ignore science. They ignore facts. They ignore the law. They don't want recovery. They want permanent Federal control.
Meanwhile, wolves are wreaking unchecked havoc on ranchers, farmers, wildlife, and rural communities, which are paying the price.
In the State of Wyoming, since they reintroduced the wolf, their moose population has decreased by 80 percent. Why are we choosing wolves over moose in the State of Wyoming?
I spend more time in wolf country than probably many of the Members on this House floor. The elk populations are being decimated. They are starved. I hear my colleagues on the other side talking about how in 4 days, they killed 30 wolves. Do you know what? That is called wildlife management. You can do that.
When you have a hunting season for deer and set a goal to kill 200 deer, there are 200 deer killed in a week. It is wildlife management. That is what we do. That is what the professionals do and do exceedingly well.
I find it interesting that it is the people in this Chamber who don't have wolves in their district who want wolves in other people's districts.
Mr. Speaker, I am an original cosponsor of the Pet and Livestock Protection Act because it delists the gray wolf under the Endangered Species Act. This gives wildlife managers more control in States while protecting domestic animals from wolf attacks.
For years, Republican and Democratic administrations alike under Presidents Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden have all reached the same conclusion: The gray wolf population is healthy, has exceeded all recovery goals, can sustain life from a variety of threats, and should be delisted.
The Endangered Species Act was never meant to be a permanent listing statute. It was designed to recover species, and once recovery is achieved, to step back. That is not what is happening.
Environmental groups have repeatedly run to courts to block delisting, ignoring the science and overriding bipartisan agency findings. The cost is regulatory whiplash, uncertainty, and paralysis while ranchers, landowners, and rural communities pay the price.
Mr. Speaker, I will respond to something that was said at the beginning of this debate. One of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle criticized this Congress for discussing wolves and said we should be focused on affordability.
First of all, we have been and are voting on bills that improve life and make it more affordable for every American, but here is the thing: For the ranchers, outfitters, and rural Coloradans I represent, this is affordability. This is their livelihood. This is how food gets to tables across America, whether you live in a small town or in the largest city. This is a way of life that America depends on, and it deserves respect, not dismissal.
H.R. 845 is supported by science. It respects each State's circumstances. It delivers protection for rural America.
Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time.
Mr. Speaker, H.R. 845 delists the gray wolf across the United States and blocks judicial review of the delisting. This is an antiscience bill that prioritizes politics ahead of species conservation.
This bill will result in hundreds of unnecessary and indiscriminate wolf kills while doing very little to address the legitimate conflicts between some wolves and livestock. I will work with anyone on addressing those legitimate conflicts.
We have tools and funding available to address those concerns--not enough, but we have those--without undermining the progress we have made to recover this iconic species.
Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' on H.R. 845, and I yield back the balance of my time.
Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time.
Mr. Speaker, the facts and the science are clear. The gray wolf is a recovered species. It is time for America to celebrate that, and Congress needs to act to make that happen.
By passing this bill, Congress would be celebrating an ESA success story and endorsing the bipartisan policy of four successive Presidential administrations--namely, to trust the science and delist the gray wolf.
Mr. Speaker, I thank Congresswoman Boebert and Congressman Tiffany for their strong leadership on this important legislation.
Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to support the bill, and I yield back the balance of my time.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. All time for debate has expired.
Pursuant to House Resolution 951, the previous question is ordered on the bill, as amended.
The question is on the engrossment and third reading of the bill.
The bill was ordered to be engrossed and read a third time, and was read the third time.
Mr. Speaker, pursuant to House Resolution 953, I call up the bill (H.R. 498) to amend title XIX of the Social Security Act to prohibit Federal Medicaid funding for gender transition procedures for minors, and ask for its immediate consideration.
The Clerk read the title of the bill.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to House Resolution 953, the bill is considered read.
The text of the bill is as follows:
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The bill shall be debatable for 1 hour, equally divided and controlled by the chair and ranking minority member of the Committee on Energy and Commerce or their respective designees.
The gentleman from Kentucky (Mr. Guthrie) and the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Pallone) each will control 30 minutes.
The Chair recognizes the gentleman from Kentucky (Mr. Guthrie).
Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days to revise and extend their remarks and include extraneous material on H.R. 498.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Is there objection to the request of the gentleman from Kentucky?
Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong support of H.R. 498, the Do No Harm in Medicaid Act. This bill helps support our fellow hardworking Americans whose valuable and finite tax dollars should not continue to fund medically unnecessary care under the Medicaid program.
It is our duty as Members of Congress to focus hard-earned taxpayer dollars on care that is medically necessary to improve the health of Americans. H.R. 498, Do No Harm in Medicaid Act, does just that. It prohibits Federal dollars from going toward specified gender transition procedures for individuals under 18.
My fellow House Republicans, particularly my colleagues on the Energy and Commerce Committee, have worked diligently this Congress to eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse in the Medicaid program and the Working Families Tax Cut Act.
Our goal is to eliminate unnecessary and improper procedures and strengthen Medicaid for expectant mothers and children, low-income seniors, and individuals with disabilities.
The CBO estimates this bill would save taxpayers $445 million over a decade. I want to make it abundantly clear that it in no way prevents minors from accessing medical care that they truly need. It just simply prohibits the use of Medicaid funding on specified procedures that are medically unnecessary.
This critical legislation builds upon our work in the Working Families Tax Cut Act to create a more sustainable Medicaid program. I ask my colleagues to support the bill.
Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
Mr. Speaker, it is shamelessly bold for Republicans to bring a bill to the floor called the Do No Harm in Medicaid Act. That is today's Republican Party. They simply lack any shame.
They say that they are doing no harm to Medicaid when their big, ugly bill earlier this year cut nearly $1 trillion from the Medicaid program. That is a huge cut that will leave millions of low-income families without any health coverage at all.
We already see the devastating effects of their big, ugly bill. States,
We are seeing across-the-board cuts that are crippling hospitals, maternity units, home care providers, and clinics. We are seeing healthcare providers close their doors and cut their services. We are seeing States scale back benefits, leaving those who are able to keep their Medicaid coverage with less of the healthcare that they need.
Now, even with all of that, Republicans have the audacity to bring a bill to the floor that they claim is about doing no harm in Medicaid. That is not what this is about.
H.R. 498 is an extreme attack on medically necessary healthcare for children. The bill bans Medicaid funding for gender-affirming care for minors and strips States of even more Medicaid funding if they choose to cover this medically necessary care with their own State dollars.
Mr. Speaker, Republicans are once again reaching into the doctor's office and taking deeply personal and private medical questions out of the hands of doctors, parents, and patients. They are putting it into their own hands, as if anyone wants politicians making medical decisions for them and their children.
As Members of Congress, we ought to be focused on bringing down healthcare costs and ensuring people have access to the healthcare they need, not getting in the way of doctors and parents who know what is best for their patients and their children.
The reality is this floor debate is nothing more than political theater, aimed at distracting from the devastating healthcare crisis Republicans created and are making worse every day.
They are trying to distract from the fact that their healthcare cuts are going to strip healthcare away from 15 million Americans and close hospitals all across the Nation. They are trying to distract from the fact that they are letting the Affordable Care Act's enhanced premium tax credits expire on January 1.
Republican inaction is driving up healthcare costs for more than 20 million Americans who are facing double, triple, or even quadruple premium increases.
Mr. Speaker, Republicans can't distract from this cruelty. I urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' on this bill.
I also call on Speaker Johnson to immediately bring up the Jeffries discharge petition that now has the support of a majority of House Members and that would extend the ACA premium tax credits for 3 years.
A majority of this House--Democrat and Republican--wants to act to extend these tax credits. It is time for Speaker Johnson to bring that bill to the floor.
Mr. Speaker, I rise today in strong support of H.R. 498, the Do No Harm in Medicaid Act.
Medicaid was designed as a safety net to be used only by U.S. citizens when they fall onto hard times and need medical support. It was never intended to bankroll irreversible, gender-mutilating surgeries on vulnerable children. Yet, today, this program is being exploited by the far left, preying on young children to advance their radical trans agenda.
Adolescence is a vulnerable time for boys and girls. They are growing into the young men and women that God intended them to be. What these children really need is love and wise counsel, not taxpayer-funded permanent chemical sterilization, mutilating surgeries, or activists profiting from their confusion.
The most egregious actor is none other than Planned Parenthood, the leading abortion provider in the Nation and now the leading provider of these dangerous procedures. The Do No Harm in Medicaid Act shields innocent children from predatory companies and stops Medicaid from being weaponized against our next generation.
Mr. Speaker, the Federal Government has no business paying for the destruction of children's bodies, and the American people should never be complicit in it. I thank my colleagues for leading this bill, and I urge all to vote ``yes.''
Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to this hateful legislation. The so-called Do No Harm in Medicaid Act prohibits Medicaid from spending funds on medically necessary care like puberty blockers and gender-affirming hormone treatment for transgender individuals under 18.
This is Congress seeking to ban healthcare for the most vulnerable among us. Republicans are working to ban parents from providing their trans children on Medicaid with necessary healthcare. These types of decisions should be made between families and their physicians. Yet, here we are, letting politicians in Washington, D.C., tell parents across America that they know how to raise their trans youth.
Transgender people need consistent access to essential and medically necessary care like everyone else. This care makes it possible for transgender people to live safely and authentically as themselves.
I have spoken with countless families about the impact of this lifesaving care and what it has done for their children. I have also spoken with doctors that have provided this safe and effective care. The healthcare that trans youth receive is a decision that they should be able to make in consultation with their parents, therapists, and doctors, not by politicians.
Medical care for transgender youth is safe and effective and is supported by every major medical association, representing more than 1.3 million U.S. doctors.
The hypocrisy of this legislation is staggering. The bill bans Medicaid from covering medical care for transgender youth but allows for the same exact care for nontransgender youth. The proof is here in black and white. Republicans are seeking specifically to target transgender youth, and trans people are less than 1 percent of the population.
Republicans are targeting the wrong 1 percent. This is not the 1 percent that is trying to take away the healthcare of all Americans. I call on the Speaker to bring the Affordable Care Act tax credits to the floor now, today, and save healthcare for 22 million Americans.
Mr. Speaker, I rise today in support of the Do No Harm in Medicaid Act, which will ensure that taxpayer dollars are not funding the evil practice of transgender child mutilation. I thank my colleagues from Texas and from Kentucky for sponsoring this important bill.
As a father of eight myself, I know that we all want our children to grow up healthy, supported, and empowered. Children should not be subjected to a medical system that pushes life-altering medical procedures and hormone treatments that are incredibly harmful.
As a family doctor for over 25 years, I took an oath to do no harm and provide my patients of all ages evidence-supported treatment plans. That is why, as a Utah State senator, I led the way in 2023 by passing Utah's landmark legislation that banned transgender treatments and procedures for minors.
As a result, I faced death threats, and my house was vandalized by woke activists, as demonstrated to my left. I am not deterred. That is why I am staunchly committed to getting this right and finding Federal solutions, as I did in Utah, that will protect America's children.
At the core of the practice of medicine is that we do not subject the patient to unnecessary and dangerous medical treatments. When it comes to gender-transition interventions, puberty blockers, hormones like testosterone and estrogen, and surgical procedures, the evidence shows that this is the wrong approach to getting these kids the help that they need.
The most comprehensive and authoritative review of these practices was conducted in the United Kingdom by Dr. Hilary Cass. Her 2024 ``Cass Review'' concluded that the scientific evidence supporting such interventions is
In the United States, the Department of Health and Human Services released a peer-reviewed report last month titled: ``Treatment for Pediatric Gender Dysphoria: Review of Evidence and Best Practices.'' This study concluded that harms from treatments, including these puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries are significant, long-term, and frequently underrecognized in clinical research. The evidence for these interventions in minors is weak and insufficiently checked, particularly for outcomes like fertility, psychological well- being, and quality of life.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The time of the gentleman has expired.
Mr. Speaker, I am proud to protect the children of Utah and commend the 25 other States that have stood up for their kids, as well. I urge all of my colleagues to follow the scientific evidence and stop funding these horrific procedures on kids.
Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Pallone) for yielding.
Mr. Speaker, this bill is the latest in a long line of cruel and calculated Republican actions to erase and endanger LGBTQ+ people, especially trans youth, by using fear as a political weapon.
Let's be clear. Kids trying to live authentically are not a threat. Families seeking care are not political pawns, and the providers committed to their oath to do no harm are no extremists.
Every major U.S. medical group agrees that healthcare for trans youth is safe, effective, and necessary.
This care can reduce anxiety, reduce depression and suicide risk, and help young people thrive. If any other treatment lowered suicidal ideation at the same rate, we would call it a miracle. The ability is that we have an opportunity here to help our kids live as their true and healthy selves, and that is a miracle.
Yet instead of us celebrating or expanding access to lifesaving care, we are debating the bill that would prevent families from getting their children the care that they need. It is, frankly, embarrassing. Politicians should not be telling parents how to raise their own children.
Mr. Speaker, I will fight bills like this with everything I have because equality and dignity and justice are not up for debate.
I stand with the trans community in New York-20 and beyond, and I urge my colleagues to reject this bill.
Mr. Speaker, I yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Crenshaw), the sponsor of the legislation and member of the Committee on Energy and Commerce.
Mr. Speaker, I am very proud to have sponsored this legislation and have fought this battle for many years.
I think we could actually get it done this time. I am not sure that my colleagues even believe what they are saying. I think they know that their constituents don't believe it.
Let's not forget that, in the 1930s, the medical community believed that lobotomies could cure psychosis. They also believed that electroshock therapy could do the same. They even gave the lobotomy inventor a Nobel Prize in 1949. Then the science caught up with the ideology, and medicine was changed for the better.
Today's great sin in medicine is perhaps one of the worst that we have seen in human history. It is a sick and twisted ideology paired with a social media-fueled social contagion that has actually normalized the ultimate lie, which is that biological gender does not matter and can even be changed. Here is the greatest sin: that this lie also applies to children.
There are some very simple, fundamental truths in life: Men are men, women are women, and children are innocent. They can't be told that they are in the wrong body.
Mutilating children is wrong. Irreversible treatments on children who need therapy is wrong. These truths are very obvious to the vast majority of Americans, and it takes an incredible amount of propaganda and institutional coercion to get an entire society to even question these truths. Yet that is exactly what has happened.
Mr. Speaker, polls indicate that more than 70 percent of Americans support a full ban on puberty blockers for minors. That is from places like The Washington Post.
Imagine if the question had been asked differently. That is just about puberty blockers. What if they had been asked about double mastectomies on 12-year-old girls. I think the number would be probably approximately 90 percent, maybe higher.
Mr. Speaker, I am not arguing with my colleagues. I am pleading with Members to understand this. Their constituents don't want children to undergo gender transformations. They don't.
Their constituents know that kids are too young to understand the consequences of permanent physiological changes. I think my colleagues know it, too.
Even if my colleagues are uncertain about that, I think they can be rest assured that they definitely don't want their tax dollars to pay for it, which is all this bill does.
This debate is so often buried under euphemisms. There is gender- affirming care. There is a medical consensus. There is a standard of care.
Strip away the language. Here is the reality: Healthy children are being placed on drugs that halt normal development, sterilize them, permanently alter their bodies before they are even old enough to vote or drink or get a tattoo.
These are kids suffering from teenage angst, and I don't deny the existence of gender dysphoria. However, psychotherapy is the answer to that, not permanent hormonal changes or surgical mutilations. That is not compassion. That is not medicine. That is an abomination.
We are told that questioning this practice puts children at risk and that if we don't medicalize a child's distress, they will take their own life. That claim has been debunked. It is not supported by science. Studies from all over the world have proven it false, and those who continue to promulgate it should be ashamed.
The highest quality medical reviews have consistently found no clear evidence that puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, or surgeries reduce suicide risk in minors--none. Yet we are told to suspend our moral judgment, suspend scientific skepticism, and accept irreversible harm as the default response to childhood stress. That is not how responsible medicine works.
Puberty blockers are not approved by the FDA for treating gender dysphoria. They were never designed to interrupt normal puberty in otherwise healthy children. Cross-sex hormones can permanently compromise fertility. Surgeries irreversibly alter healthy organs. These are not neutral acts.
These are life-altering decisions imposed on minors whose brains, identities, and bodies are still developing.
We are told that treatments are reversible. That claim is very false. International health authorities have concluded that suppressing puberty often locks children into a pathway toward permanent medical transition. Nearly every child placed on puberty blockers proceeds with the cross-sex hormones. The so-called pause button that almost always leads to irreversible outcomes is not a pause. It is a trap.
While activists insist this is settled science, the rest of the world is pulling the emergency brake. The United Kingdom now limits puberty blockers. Sweden and Finland have sharply restricted their use. France's medical authorities warn of serious risks to bone development and fertility. Those lying, depraved activists reviewed the same evidence and said, No, we are good with it.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The time of the gentleman has expired.
Children suffering from gender dysphoria deserve care,
The answer is in evidence-based psychotherapy care, therapy, family support, and clinical monitoring over time.
What does this bill even do? The Do No Harm in Medicaid Act draws a very clear moral line that the government will not participate in, endorse, or normalize irreversible gender surgeries and chemical interventions on minors.
It is codifying President Trump's agenda to protect our children and keep them healthy. It says he won't be complicit.
Medicaid won't fund this abomination, but contrary to what many of the claims are, it preserves narrow exceptions for genuine medical conditions, like early onset puberty, disorders of sex development, and treatment of complications.
This was a very carefully crafted bill that addresses all the concerns that have been raised. It is not about hate. It is not about politics. It is about protecting kids when adults fail them. It is an easy vote.
Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to support the Do No Harm in Medicaid Act, please.
Mr. Speaker, I thank Ranking Member Pallone for yielding.
Mr. Speaker, I rise to oppose the deceptively titled Do No Harm in Medicaid Act.
Healthcare costs are about to skyrocket for millions of Americans across the country, but instead of solving that crisis, we are here with a bill that has politicians interfering with personal healthcare decisions and outrageously putting into law provisions that will essentially ban the type of healthcare that Republicans have decided they don't like. Personal healthcare decisions should be made by patients and providers, not by politicians.
This bill attacks the rights of States by banning Medicaid from covering any medical care for transgender youth, and it would put discrimination into law because it would allow the same exact care for cisgender youth.
The history of gender diverse people goes back to ancient cultures, and why this House majority is so obsessed with a very small group of vulnerable people baffles me. Transgender people deserve the same protections as everyone else, including the ability to access medically necessary care. They certainly don't deserve this bill.
Research shows that health insurance coverage for transgender people is affordable and cost-effective.
This legislation is about discrimination, and we have seen this playbook time and time again. Republicans are fear-mongering about the trans community to divert attention from the fact that they have no real solutions to make healthcare more affordable.
Congress should be focused on fixing the expiring ACA subsidies, addressing the rising costs of healthcare, and addressing affordability issues, which is what I am hearing about at home. We should not be working on this bill that would interfere in personal healthcare decisions that are between patients and their own healthcare providers.
Mr. Speaker, this bill will cause, not prevent, harm, and I urge my colleagues to reject it.
Mr. Speaker, I have been sitting here listening to the remarks on the floor, and I have to admit that I find myself torn between heartbroken tears and the urge to throw something, which I will not do because I am a professional human being.
I have to wonder how many actual trans people and families of trans kids anyone on the other side of the aisles knows, how many conversations anyone has had with parents who are staying up late worried about whether that night is the night that their child is going to take their life because they feel so unsupported and so unloved and are taking in the hatred from the floor of the House of Representatives.
The kids and parents in my community live their lives in terror, and they have it the best, because Washington State is a place where we have fought to protect healthcare access for LGBTQ kids and trans kids. We have fought to ensure that every young person has the ability to make healthcare decisions that are right for them, in consultation with their parents and their doctors. It is true medically directed care in consultation with a doctor.
The American people have told us over and over that they don't want politicians in the doctor's office. They don't want politicians making decisions about what kind of medical care they can access, but that is what is happening right now.
They are trying to strip away lifesaving care from children who are moving to my State at higher and higher rates. Almost every week, I hear of a family who has moved from Texas, Idaho, or Florida because the parents want their children to survive.
This effort not only to cut Medicaid coverage but to try to ban access for children--
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The time of the gentlewoman has expired.
Mr. Speaker, this behavior is appalling. It is dangerous. It is evil. It is evil to seek to deny lifesaving care for children who are more at risk than any others.
I spend a lot of time in LGBTQ clubs in high schools, talking to young people who are shocked when I come in and tell them that, as a queer woman, I am a Member of Congress. They say: Do you know any trans people your age? They don't believe that they will make it to 40. They don't believe that they will make it to 50 or 60. They don't believe that they have a future because they are watching the floor and listening to the words that come out of our mouths, and they know that half of the people in this Chamber do not care if they survive.
Mr. Speaker, I think it is very clear that I am not going to vote for this bill, and I urge all of my colleagues to join me.
The question was asked if we had ever bothered speaking to trans kids. The answer is absolutely yes. Maybe that is why I am so passionate about this. It turns out there are hundreds and hundreds, thousands perhaps, of trans kids who were coerced by radicalized doctors. Their parents were lied to.
Their parents were given studies that said there is a 1 percent remorse rate. These studies are based on nonsense. They are not even based on a pool of participants that are minors. They were told that these things are just a pause button, that it is reversible, that this is just a standard of care. Standard of care based on what? Based on junk science. We cannot base standards of care on junk science.
Now, the science has caught up: the Cass Review study, the systematic review, which is the gold standard of any kind of study because it looks at all the different studies methodically, and then the 300-page review that HHS just did.
I have had them on my podcast twice to talk about their experiences. Chloe Cole spoke at the Department of Health and Human Services just now, about an hour ago. Chloe Cole, at 12 years old, was going through what a lot of 12-year-olds are going through. She is a tomboy. She has older brothers. She likes sports. She is confused. Doctors tell her that she is a boy. They convinced her parents of the same. She is put on puberty blockers and soon on high levels of testosterone. By age 15, she has a double mastectomy. She is not sure if she can ever have kids, and she definitely can't feed her children normally.
Yes, we have talked to them. Maybe my colleagues on the other side should, too.
Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to H.R. 498, the so-called Do No Harm in Medicaid Act.
Yesterday, four Republicans stood with Democrats and signed a discharge
Now, 22 million Americans will see their premiums skyrocket, and our constituents will be forced to decide between healthcare and paying rent or affording groceries.
Instead of allowing a bipartisan vote to lower healthcare costs, Republicans have chosen to bring forward H.R. 498, which completely ignores the affordability crisis and needlessly targets transgender children.
That includes my nephew, Lee, who is currently transitioning. He is a child. He is loved, and like every other child in this country, the healthcare decisions should be made by his family and his doctors, not by politicians.
H.R. 498 would strip Medicaid coverage for gender-affirming care for trans youth, care that is medically necessary, evidence-based, and supported by every major medical association in this country.
This bill will endanger lives, and it will do nothing to bring down skyrocketing healthcare costs or address any real issues facing working Americans. Instead, it denies medically necessary care simply because that care goes to a trans child.
As vice chair of the Equality Caucus, I will always fight to protect the dignity, safety, and humanity of the trans community.
Lee deserves better. Our children deserve better, and the entire trans community deserves better.
Mr. Speaker, before I yield to my friend, I have asked, since we have been meeting this year, about the extension of the tax credits they keep bringing up. Remember, they are talking about the extension of the tax credits that they set to expire.
So the question I have asked, and nobody has been able to answer, Mr. Speaker, is: Why did you set them to expire? Remember, they were set to expire in the Inflation Reduction Act, or the Green New Deal.
Within the Inflation Reduction Act, tax cuts were made so-called permanent, although they were replaced in another bill, but they set these to expire. Nobody has ever explained to me why the Democrats made the decision to end the enhanced subsidies that they are talking about and shutting the government down for 43 days, when they chose to end them, and then coming in here today talking about we need to have a vote on it, when they chose to end them. They never explained why they chose to end them.
Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Crenshaw).
Mr. Speaker, I will not be long. I will just ask a simple question, because the statement was made that all the science suggests that these procedures are medically necessary.
Can they cite their sources? Show me the studies. I cited mine. Cite their sources.
Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong opposition to this legislation. Every parent wants to keep their child safe, wants their child to grow without pain, to sleep through the night without fear or suffering. But when our children are growing up, it is inevitable that they will need medical care, from a fall from a bike or a fall on the playground.
Parents rush to the doctor's office. They bandage scraped knees. They hold their child's hand and wipe away tears while their pediatrician lays out a plan. In these moments, that urgent question on that parent's mind is: What does my child need to be okay?
A broken bone, asthma, gender dysphoria, diabetes, whatever the presenting issue is, a treatment plan takes shape.
For some families, what their children need to be okay is access to gender-affirming care. They need care that is safe, evidence-based, and recognized as essential by every major medical association; care, that for some children, is the difference between despair and hope, between isolation and community, between surviving and thriving.
Yet today, we are debating a bill that would tell parents on Medicaid that their child's pain is unworthy of care, that their doctor's judgment does not matter, and that politicians know better than parents sitting in exam rooms.
Cole, a young person from Massachusetts, wrote to me and said: Transgender people deserve the same chance to thrive and live fulfilling lives as everyone else. Having the freedom to control our bodies and seek the healthcare we need, including gender-affirming care, is an essential right for all people.
I agree.
To Cole and every person who is trans or nonbinary, let me speak plainly: You belong. You are enough, and you deserve to show up in this world as your full, authentic self. You deserve to grow up. You deserve to grow old.
Healthcare is a human right, and parents doing everything they can to make sure their child is okay deserve support, not interference, and certainly not cruelty.
I don't know what God y'all pray to, but the one that I know is a loving God, and He does not discriminate. His love does not discriminate. He loves all the children, including the trans children.
Healthcare is a human right, and parents doing everything they can to make sure their child is okay deserve support.
Shame on this bill. Shame on an agenda that strips healthcare away from vulnerable children, and shame on anyone who votes to deny care to families trying to do right by their kids.
Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong opposition to this incredibly cruel bill.
As prices skyrocket, as Republicans strip away healthcare from Americans across this country, strip away basic support for American families, what are we using floor time for today? A cruel attack against trans children that does nothing to lower anyone's costs and does everything to put a target on the backs of our vulnerable kids and families.
I understand that there is fear that has been promoted by the majority around trans kids and what happens and what this process is. I understand that we have to explain this to people.
But let me be very clear about something. The medical science is clear. The decisions that have been made by trans kids and their families are decisions that have taken months, years sometimes, to go through, consultation with parents, with medical providers, with therapists, before ever providing the medical care.
The most common form of gender-affirming care for young people is medications that simply pause puberty and have been used safely for decades.
Why do my colleagues across the aisle, so-called limited-government people, suddenly want government to get in the way of the decisions that parents and their kids make together? Why do they want to stop children from getting medical care that has been proven to be safe and effective and helps them to live happily, helps them to live, just live?
Why is the majority attacking vulnerable trans kids and raising the level of fear and hatred toward them?
We should be protecting every family's right to make the decisions that they need to make for their child's well-being.
Let me tell you something. What is happening on this floor and in this Congress around this issue is so incredibly dangerous. Trans kids are walking around with mace in their pockets because they are being attacked by people because the majority is insisting there is something to fear from them.
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Moore of Utah.) The time of the gentlewoman has expired.
Mr. Speaker, I will not stand for these kinds of attacks. The condescension that is coming from the other side--have you talked to your constituents? Do you really know? You don't really know what you are doing.
Excuse me. We are here to represent our districts, and I still believe I am the Member that gets the most votes of any Member of Congress anywhere in the country. Don't tell me I don't know how to represent my district.
What you are doing today, what this majority is doing today, is making life dangerous for kids. What the majority
What parent in this body or anywhere in this country wouldn't do anything for their children? What parent doesn't want their kids to live?
This is dangerous. You are putting our kids at risk, and I will not stand for it. The American people won't stand for it. Vote ``no'' on this horrific and cruel bill.
Mr. Speaker, again, it has been stated that these so- called treatments are safe and effective and save lives. I ask the gentlewoman again: Cite your sources. Cite your sources.
You won't. That is because you know that I know all of the sources that you are going to cite. You know what I am going to say about them: about the problems with their methodology; about the pool of participants they use; about how short those studies were; and about how most of them didn't even apply to minors.
You know what I am going to say, and so you won't cite your sources.
Mr. Speaker, I will cite mine. We have systematic reviews that have been published and accepted throughout the scientific community. That is why the rest of the Western world is reversing their stance on this, and the United States needs to also.
That is because I couldn't tell if that speech about harming kids was about our bill or about the act of conducting irreversible physiological changes on children who are going through gender dysphoria.
Yes, we are trying to protect kids. We are trying to love our kids.
Mr. Speaker, I hadn't originally planned to talk about this, but today, December 18, is the anniversary of my grandfather's passing 51 years ago.
My grandfather Emil and his wife, Molly, had 18 grandchildren. What made them extraordinary is that they saw the grace of every one of their grandchildren and wanted each and every one of their grandchildren to reach their full potential. What made them truly special is that that love extended to everyone in our community and across the globe.
As a father of two, I want nothing more for my kids than for them to be happy and to reach their potential.
As a Representative in this body in the House of Representatives, we all should want nothing more for our kids than for every kid in America to reach their full potential and be comfortable in their personal identity.
That is why I rise so strongly in opposition to H.R. 498.
I ask my colleagues on the other side: What are you afraid of?
This harmful bill would prohibit State Medicaid programs from providing lifesaving gender-affirming care to individuals under the age of 18. It not only bars the use of Federal funds to States for this care but prohibits States from using their own money to provide it.
My Republican colleagues want to insert themselves into the practice of medicine and make a family's medical decision from the Halls of this Chamber. Shame on them.
My Republican colleagues want a veto in what health services are available to children and their families.
Mr. Speaker, even if you live in my State of Illinois where the State legislature signed into law protections for gender-affirming care, this body would still prevent that access.
This bill purposely targets kids, children, and only kids. These are decisions that should be made by the patient, their parents and guardians, and the medical providers providing the care to give these kids the chance to reach their potential and to be comfortable in who they are as Americans.
Without access to these services, my Republican colleagues are putting children's lives at risk, and it is despicable.
I oppose this bill, and I urge my colleagues to oppose this bill. I urge my colleagues, as I have done, to talk to people and to talk to families to hear the stories of how this care has saved lives and to get their noses out of the business of individuals, their families, and their medical providers.
Mr. Speaker, I am glad my friend from Illinois pointed out this only affects children because adults can make their decisions. We don't take any decisions away from adults. This affects children.
It is very specific. I think my friend from Texas is going to talk about it. I would like for my friend from Illinois, or anybody, to read through what is specifically identified as prohibited in this bill and say which of those saves someone's life. It is permanent surgery to change someone. It is very limited what is in this bill.
Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Crenshaw).
Mr. Speaker, this claim is made over and over, that allowing gender-affirming care, as they call it, is saving lives. The problem with that claim is that there is no evidence to suggest that.
All of the reviews, all of the studies, all of the systematic reviews--a systematic review means a systematic review of all of the studies--show that there can be no clear line drawn between suicide rates and doing this kind of care.
A paper published in the British Medical Journal examined the landscape. Mr. Speaker, 61 systematic studies concluded there is great uncertainty about the effects of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries in young people.
On suicide risk, there is no clear evidence that these medical interventions prevent suicide. A 2020 study analyzing trans-identifying patients of all ages over 40-plus years found that suicides occur at every stage of medical transition.
A 2021 systematic review concluded that based on available data, no conclusions can be drawn about whether hormones, puberty blockers, or surgeries reduced suicide risk.
Again, in 2024, another independent review found that Britain's post- 2020 restriction of puberty blockers did not cause a rise in suicides despite many of the lies told on social media by activists.
They keep saying that every medical society supports this--and, so, okay, then, we have to listen to them. Well, that is true. It is because of ideological pressure rather than scientific evidence. We know that these studies that they are citing are based on low-quality evidence, small sample sizes, and very high risk of bias.
A Johns Hopkins systematic review found that the evidence supporting claims that hormonal treatments may improve quality of life, depression, and anxiety among transgender patients was ``low.'' The study called for more research, particularly on adolescents.
The same review concluded that it was about impossible--this is Johns Hopkins--it was about impossible to draw conclusions about the effects of hormone therapy on suicide risk.
Even a review published by the American Academy of Pediatrics, which institutionally has supported gender transition, admits that ``evidence regarding the psychosocial and cognitive impact of hormonal treatments for transgender adolescents is generally lacking.''
I could keep going. The point here, Mr. Speaker, is you have got a problem, and it is a gender dysphoric problem. We know that a kid is going through something hard. And you want to take the most extreme possible medical intervention to deal with that while the science says we have no idea whether that is a good idea or not.
That is what the actual scientific consensus says.
Now, if the argument was: Hey, give them more fruit or something, then that is not really harmful. That would be fine. We wouldn't be arguing about it, but the minority is talking about double mastectomies. They are talking about puberty blockers and hormonal therapies that permanently change the physiology of a young person before they are old enough to even understand what they might want in 20 years.
That is the most irresponsible type of policymaking one can imagine. It is the most irresponsible type of medicine that one can imagine.
Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition today to H.R. 498, the so-called Do No Harm in Medicaid Act, and I urge my colleagues to support my motion to recommit.
H.R. 498 is an unnecessary ban on Medicaid funding. Instead, we see what Republicans are doing: a $1-trillion cut to Medicaid in the big, ugly law that is going to mean a 15 percent cut next year in Florida that they are going to have to work on and trying to insert themselves into deeply personal medical decisions.
Mr. Speaker, there was a Christmas miracle this week. We saw four Republicans join us in a discharge petition to get at what the American people really want to vote on. They want us to vote on extending the enhanced premium tax credits for the ACA to stop a huge healthcare hike for 20 million Americans. That is what people want us to be talking about here today, before their premiums double, triple, and even quadruple.
They don't want us to be delving into these culture war issues when we have real work to do to fund Medicaid and to extend the ACA tax credits.
Affordability is the biggest thing in the Nation right now. My district has the second most ObamaCare of any district. In my district, 275,000 people will see their healthcare double or triple, so this should be the priority right now.
Mr. Speaker, all America wants for Christmas is a 3-year ACA tax credit extension, and I am hoping we can get it together. I have given us an opportunity.
For this reason, at the appropriate time, I will offer a motion to recommit this bill back to committee. If the rules permitted, I would have offered the motion with an important amendment to this bill.
My amendment would include a clean 3-year extension of the enhanced premium tax credits, just in time for Christmas.
Mr. Speaker, I ask for unanimous consent to insert the text of my amendment in the Record immediately prior to the vote on the motion to recommit.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Is there objection to the request of the gentleman from Florida?
Since that is the motion to recommit, maybe it would be a good opportunity for my friends on the other side of the aisle to let the country know when they decided to let these tax credits expire in the same bill that they have permanent tax credits for the Green New Deal. I don't know, you would have to think maybe they want to take the money from the tax credits and spend it on the Green New Deal. Unless there is a better explanation than that, that is exactly what the bill did.
Mr. Speaker, may I inquire how much time is remaining on my side of the aisle.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The gentleman from Kentucky has 11 minutes remaining.
Mr. Speaker, I just heard my colleagues across the aisle give a lecture about irresponsible policymaking. I remind this body that we are 7 days from Christmas. We were scheduled to take votes tomorrow, but the Speaker and my Republican colleagues are in such a hurry to get out of town before the holidays that you have canceled votes tomorrow and are leaving town. In many cases, many of you are planning to leave in the next several hours, and this is the bill that you are running? This is the bill that you are running, not a bill to save the healthcare of millions of Americans? This is your bill 1 week before Christmas, to take healthcare away from LGBTQ kids in the United States?
I mean, it is hard to believe that this is what you are doing with your majority. This is one of the most powerful bodies in the world, and you have canceled votes, to take away healthcare from LGBTQ+ kids.
If passed, this bill would prohibit young people in communities all across the United States, in low-income families, from receiving lifesaving care. I am proud to come from a State, New Mexico, that has protected gender-affirming care and which stands with the LGBTQ+ and trans community and their families.
Let me tell you that, yes, this is necessary care, and it is care that keeps kids alive. It is about mental health. It is about self- harm. It is about reducing suicides. It is about making sure that human beings, young people, have access to care that is essential for them to live their lives.
In addition to this, this bill tramples on the so-called States' rights that you tell us every day you want to protect by penalizing States that would take their own resources to ensure that kids have access to care.
If you are actually concerned about the welfare of children, if you are actually concerned about healthcare in this country and its costs, and if you are actually sincere about your care for the American people, then bring a vote on the Affordable Care Act extension to this floor now.
The American people are tired of these games. You all are going to get on a plane and go home in a couple of hours while millions of Americans lose their healthcare, and this is the bill that you are running on the floor before you do that? Shame on you. It is disgraceful.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Members are reminded to direct their comments to the Chair.
Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
Mr. Speaker, I remind the gentlewoman that we did have a bill yesterday that passed. It hardly got any Democratic support. If you look at the enhanced tax credits that they set to expire to pay for the Green New Deal, so the moral cause that people are bringing up, they chose to put Green New Deal tax credits over extended premium tax credits. That is obvious. It is in the same bill. It wasn't like they voted for one bill and then another.
At the same time, yesterday, we estimated a good half of the people on--we know, from a GAO study, there is waste, fraud, and abuse in the ObamaCare marketplace that we wanted to fix. It went to the Senate, and it got taken out during the reconciliation bill.
We put in cost-share reductions that were estimated to lower premiums in the marketplace by 12.7 percent. When it went to the Senate, the Democrats challenged it in the Senate and took it out.
We also know there are another 163 million Americans who get their healthcare from their employers, which they offered nothing to assist and help, which we did yesterday. We know most of the people in the marketplace are small business men and women who have to buy in the individual marketplace because they work for themselves and don't have a big employer with a big employee pool. We allowed them, in yesterday's bill, to band together so they can buy across their associations. Instead of being a car dealer with 20 employees, you can be 100 car dealers, with 20 times 100 employees, so they have a bigger pool and can get cheaper rates for their employees.
We did have a bill that passed yesterday without a single Democratic vote that lowered premiums in the marketplace and premiums for every working American.
Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Crenshaw), my friend.
Mr. Speaker, I love debunking lies in real time. It is one of my favorite things to do.
The chairman just did a great job debunking a lie. We were just told that this is the only bill we are doing this week. No, it is not. It is an important bill, but everything he just listed was also pretty important to lower people's healthcare costs. I don't know why there was no Democratic support for it.
I want to debunk some more lies. Again, on this idea that puberty
The FDA ordered the manufacturer to add a warning label, noting that children taking Lupron may develop new or worsened psychiatric symptoms. Trans-identifying minors are already three times more likely than the general population to experience anxiety, depression, and neurodevelopmental disorders.
Why make it worse? Stop talking about compassion. They are the ones doing the opposite of compassion by tricking these kids into thinking that this might be their answer. It is not. Therapy is.
There was another claim made that this tramples on States' rights, so I guess we need to have a quick civics lesson. We are talking about Federal funding, Medicaid funding provided by the Federal Government. The Federal Government can put restrictions on what that money is used for. It is not a trampling of States' rights. It is not a trampling of doctors' rights.
Let me ask something. My daughter picks up my fake eyes, and she goes: ``Eye, eye, eye.'' She is 2. She puts it on. Maybe when she is old enough to talk, she might identify as somebody with one eye. Should I take her to the doctor and say: Hey, will you enucleate her eyeball because, you know, she identifies as monocular just as I am, just like her daddy.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The time of the gentleman has expired.
Mr. Speaker, you would say that is insane. You would call that absolutely insane, and it would be insane.
Here is the reality. The scary part about that analogy is that it is actually a lot less troubling to lose an eye than it is to completely change your gender. Completely changing your gender is a far more invasive procedure than losing an eye. Trust me, I know.
Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
Mr. Speaker, I just have to correct two comments that were made by my Republican colleagues.
First, the sponsor of the bill said that they are just talking about Federal funds. The fact of the matter is, they are not just talking about Federal funds because this bill prevents States like Washington State--we had two people speak about this--from using State funds for gender-affirming care for minors. It is not just a prohibition on Federal funds.
Also, my chairman from Kentucky kept saying that the healthcare bill that the Republicans put on the floor yesterday would lower costs and somehow address the healthcare crisis. It does not. It does not lower costs, and it certainly doesn't extend the tax credits that are necessary under the Affordable Care Act to lower costs. Those expire January 1.
Mr. Speaker, I know the sponsor from Texas also mentioned medical professional organizations that oppose this bill, and there are many, but I include in the Record a letter from four of those organizations: American Academy of Pediatrics, American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, American College of Physicians, and American Psychiatric Association.
Mr. Speaker, I am going to read certain sections of it. They say: ``We, the undersigned medical professional organizations, write in strong opposition to H.R. 3492.''
``Healthcare for transgender young people is individualized, age- appropriate, provided according to longstanding expert clinical guidelines, and supported by leading American medical organizations. . . . Our organizations are united in opposition to political interference in the practice of medicine. The confidential relationship between a patient, their caregiver, and a physician is the foundation of clinical care.''
Physicians and other health professionals should never be stopped ``from providing care consistent with evidence-based guidelines and best clinical judgment, and the government should not interfere. Physicians, not the Federal Government, are best positioned to work with patients and their families to address their unique medical and mental health care needs.''
Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Landsman), a member of our committee.
Mr. Speaker, I have been watching this debate, and I will say just one thing, which is, Mr. Speaker, I remember when the Republican Party was about small government, local control, and personal liberties. Those were the foundations of the party that I grew up with.
I wasn't a Republican, but I admired those things about the party. It seems as if they all have strayed, Mr. Speaker, from those core tenets of personal liberty, States' rights, local control, leaving people alone.
We are talking about children here, kids who get bullied, who have the highest suicide rates of any other group of kids. Now, politicians are bullying them and saying that they are going to pick on them, too. It is wrong.
Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time.
Mr. Speaker, I will say that I totally oppose this bill. I think these decisions should be left with parents and physicians, but more than anything else, I will mention today that Republicans need to do the right thing and bring up the Jeffries discharge petition that would extend the tax credits under the ACA for 3 more years. They should not allow them to expire on January 1. It should be brought up now.
I oppose this bill, and I ask that the Speaker bring up the discharge petition now.
Mr. Speaker, I invite anyone to read through the list of the specific things that are prohibited in this bill from being performed on minors and say which one they think is good for a minor to have. Instead of reading through the list, I wish they would go through the list and say which is good for a minor to have.
On Medicaid, we have this issue of States providing Medicaid to people who are here illegally. That is the Medicaid administration. It is the same dollars. It is commingled.
If you are going to operate something through Medicaid, unless you say that you are going to use Federal dollars for this procedure but State dollars for that procedure, it is the same administration doing them.
We tried to fix that in the big, beautiful bill. It was struck down by the Democrats in the Senate. We think that is wrong.
Mr. Speaker, may I inquire as to the time remaining.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The gentleman from Kentucky has 6 minutes remaining.
Mr. Speaker, in closing, let's just summarize what we have heard today.
We have heard that so-called gender-affirming care is necessary, effective, prevents suicides, and helps vulnerable children. No one can cite any sources for that claim. They can cite letters from certain associations that are ideologically driven.
I will again read the quote from the American Academy of Pediatrics when they did a review. On hormonal treatments for transgender adolescents, APA said: ``Evidence regarding their psychosocial and cognitive impact is generally lacking.'' I get that their leadership is saying one thing, but the scientists are all saying something else.
As responsible policymakers, we might want to take a pause before we just go on and assume that permanent physiological changes to children are a good idea because they are going through something tough, whether that is gender dysphoria, teenage angst, depression, or anxiety.
If you talk about compassion, I am talking about compassion, too. Compassion is being a responsible adult in the room for that child who doesn't know all of these things.
Compassion is not a doctor lying to a child's parents about junk science in studies that say they won't have any remorse, that they will be fine, that puberty blockers are like a pause button. No, they are not. There was a study in Britain that showed 96 or 98 percent move on to hormonal therapies. It is not a pause button at all.
Again, ask the thousands of trans kids who now vehemently regret their decisions. They are in lawsuits with the doctors who did this to them. That alone should tell us to take a pause here.
Let's just take a pause on this ideology because there is no evidence that it works, and there is plenty of evidence to show that it is extreme in nature because it is permanent.
They wouldn't do this for any other body part. You can't just identify as one-armed and ask the doctor to cut off your arm. The doctor won't do it, just like the doctor won't take out someone's eye because they want to identify like me. They are not going to do it because that would be malpractice and insane.
Tell me how this is any different. I have asked my colleagues to cite their sources many times, but no one has. I have cited all of them.
This is about very simple common sense. The vast majority of Americans agree that these treatments shouldn't even be done on minors.
Mr. Speaker, let me remind everyone that this bill doesn't even go that far. It simply says that your tax dollars won't allow this to be done on minors, just your Medicaid tax dollars. That is all it does.
To not vote for this is to truly vote against their own constituents, truly vote against the American people's wishes, and vote against common sense.
The science is settled on this. There is no benefit to what they are claiming. I don't know why they keep fighting this battle. It is a losing battle. I hope many of them will change their minds and come across the aisle to vote for this bill.
This really doesn't have to be a partisan issue at all. It should be an issue of common sense, science, and true compassion for children.
Standardizing Permitting and Expediting Economic Development Act
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to House Resolution 951 and rule XVIII, the Chair declares the House in the Committee of the Whole House on the state of the Union for the further consideration of the bill, H.R. 4776.
Will the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Williams) kindly take the chair.
Accordingly, the House resolved itself into the Committee of the Whole House on the state of the Union for the further consideration of the bill (H.R. 4776) to amend the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 to clarify ambiguous provisions and facilitate a more efficient, effective, and timely environmental review process, with Mr. Williams of Texas in the chair.
The Clerk read the title of the bill.
The Acting CHAIR. When the Committee of the Whole rose earlier today, a request for a recorded vote on amendment No. 6 printed in House Report 119-410 offered by the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Roy) had been postponed.
The Acting CHAIR. Pursuant to clause 6 of rule XVIII, proceedings will now resume on those amendments printed in House Report 119-410 on which further proceedings were postponed, in the following order:
Amendment No. 1 by Mr. Clyde of Georgia.
Amendment No. 5 by Mr. Roy of Texas.
Amendment No. 6 by Mr. Roy of Texas.
The Chair will reduce to 2 minutes the minimum time for any electronic vote after the first vote in this series.
The Acting CHAIR. The unfinished business is the demand for a recorded vote on amendment No. 1, printed in House Report 119-410, offered by the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Clyde), on which further proceedings were postponed and on which the ayes prevailed by voice vote.
The Clerk will redesignate the amendment.
The Clerk redesignated the amendment.
The Acting CHAIR. A recorded vote has been demanded.
A recorded vote was ordered.
The vote was taken by electronic device, and there were--ayes 205, noes 220, not voting 14, as follows:
Mr. HARRIS of Maryland, Ms. MALOY, and Mr. BACON changed their vote from ``no'' to ``aye.''
So the amendment was rejected.
The result of the vote was announced as above recorded.
The Acting CHAIR. The unfinished business is the demand for a recorded vote on amendment No. 5, printed in House Report 119- 410, offered by the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Roy), on which further proceedings were postponed and on which the ayes prevailed by voice vote.
The Clerk will redesignate the amendment.
The Clerk redesignated the amendment.
The Acting CHAIR. A recorded vote has been demanded.
A recorded vote was ordered.
The Acting CHAIR. This is a 2-minute vote.
The vote was taken by electronic device, and there were--ayes 208, noes 214, not voting 16, as follows:
So the amendment was rejected.
The result of the vote was announced as above recorded.
The Acting CHAIR. The unfinished business is the demand for a recorded vote on amendment No. 6, printed in House Report 119-410, offered by the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Roy), on which further proceedings were postponed and on which the ayes prevailed by voice vote.
The Clerk will redesignate the amendment.
The Clerk redesignated the amendment.
The Acting CHAIR. A recorded vote has been demanded.
A recorded vote was ordered.
The Acting CHAIR. This is a 2-minute vote.
The vote was taken by electronic device, and there were--ayes 204, noes 217, not voting 17, as follows:
So the amendment was rejected.
The result of the vote was announced as above recorded.
The Acting CHAIR. There being no further amendments, under the rule, the Committee rises.
Accordingly, the Committee rose; and the Speaker pro tempore (Mr. Simpson) having assumed the chair,
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the rule, the previous question is ordered.
The question is on the engrossment and third reading of the bill.
The bill was ordered to be engrossed and read a third time, and was read the third time.
Mr. Speaker, I missed the following vote out of mistake and inadvertence due to the heavy (11-item) vote series. Had I been present, I would have voted NAY on Roll Call No. 356.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to clause 8 of rule XX, the unfinished business is the vote on the motion to recommit on the bill (H.R. 1366) to provide for the location of multiple hardrock mining mill sites, to establish the Abandoned Hardrock Mine Fund, and for other purposes, offered by the gentlewoman from New Mexico (Ms. Leger Fernandez), on which the yeas and nays were ordered.
The Clerk will redesignate the motion.
The Clerk redesignated the motion.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The question is on the motion to recommit.
This is a 2-minute vote.
The vote was taken by electronic device, and there were--yeas 205, nays 213, not voting 15, as follows:
The SPEAKER pro tempore. There is 1 minute remaining.
So the motion to recommit was rejected.
The result of the vote was announced as above recorded.
Mr. Speaker, I was in an important meeting. Had I been present, I would have voted YEA on Roll Call No. 358.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to clause 8 of rule XX, the unfinished business is the vote on the motion to recommit on the bill (H.R. 845) to require the Secretary of the Interior to reissue regulations removing the gray wolf from the list of endangered and threatened wildlife under the Endangered Species Act of 1973, offered by the gentleman from California (Mr. Huffman), on which the yeas and nays were ordered.
The Clerk will redesignate the motion.
The Clerk redesignated the motion.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The question is on the motion to recommit.
This is a 2-minute vote.
The vote was taken by electronic device, and there were--yeas 204, nays 213, not voting 16, as follows:
The SPEAKER pro tempore. There is 1 minute remaining.
So the motion to recommit was rejected.
The result of the vote was announced as above recorded.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The question is on the passage of the bill.
The question was taken; and the Speaker pro tempore announced that the ayes appeared to have it.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to clause 8 of rule XX, the unfinished business is the vote on the motion to recommit on the bill (H.R. 498) to amend title XIX of the Social Security Act to prohibit Federal Medicaid funding for gender transition procedures for minors, offered by the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Soto), on which the yeas and nays were ordered.
The Clerk will redesignate the motion.
The Clerk redesignated the motion.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The question is on the motion to recommit.
This is a 2-minute vote.
The vote was taken by electronic device, and there were--yeas 204, nays 212, not voting 17, as follows:
The SPEAKER pro tempore. There is 1 minute remaining.
So the motion to recommit was rejected.
The result of the vote was announced as above recorded.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The question is on the passage of the bill.
The question was taken; and the Speaker pro tempore announced that the ayes appeared to have it.
Mr. Speaker, I was unavoidably detained. Had I been present, I would have voted AYE on Roll Call No. 352, AYE on Roll Call No. 353, AYE on Roll Call No. 354, NAY on Roll Call No. 355, YEA on Roll Call No. 356, NAY on Roll Call No. 357, YEA on Roll Call No. 358, NAY on Roll Call No. 359, YEA on Roll Call No. 360, NAY on Roll Call No. 361, and YEA on Roll Call No. 362.
Mr. Speaker, I was absent from the chamber today. Had I recorded my vote, I would have voted No on Roll Call No. 352, Clyde amendment No. 1 to H.R. 4776; No on Roll Call No. 353, Roy amendment No. 5 to H.R. 4776; No on Roll Call No. 354, Roy amendment No. 6 to H.R. 4776; Yea on Roll Call No. 355, motion to recommit on H.R. 4776; Nay on Roll Call No. 356, passage of H.R. 4776 the SPEED Act; Yea on Roll Call No. 357, motion to recommit on H.R. 1366; Nay on Roll Call No. 358, passage of H.R. 1366; Yea on Roll Call No. 359, motion to recommit on H.R. 845; Nay on Roll Call No. 360, passage of H.R. 845; Yea on Roll Call No. 361, motion to recommit on H.R. 498; and Nay on Roll Call No. 362, passage of H.R. 498.
Mr. Speaker, I was unavoidably absent and unable to vote. Had I been present, I would have voted AYE on Roll Call No. 352, AYE on Roll Call No. 353, AYE on Roll Call No. 354, NAY on Roll Call No. 355, YEA on Roll Call No. 356, NAY on Roll Call No. 357, YEA on Roll Call No. 358, NAY on Roll Call No. 359, YEA on Roll Call No. 360, NAY on Roll Call No. 361, and YEA on Roll Call No. 362.
Mr. Speaker, today I rise to honor Wyoming Highway Patrol Dispatcher Chris McGuire, who served our State for 35 years.
Chris handled split-second decisions, juggled multiple emergencies at once, and saved lives on Wyoming's highways. She coordinated responses during snowstorms, rescued stranded motorists, and managed AMBER Alerts, all while training new dispatchers and supporting her colleagues.
Dispatching is not a job for everyone. It demands focus, courage, and the ability to stay calm under intense pressure. Chris worked 60-hour weeks, often sacrificing time with her family. Yet, she never wavered in her commitment to keeping our community safe.
Public service is more than a job. It is a calling, and Chris inspires all of us who serve and reminds us of the unsung heroes who protect our families every day.
Mr. Speaker, Wyoming thanks Chris McGuire for her remarkable career and unwavering service.
Mr. Speaker, healthcare in the Virgin Islands is in crisis. The Medical Executive Committee wrote an open letter to the community and to CMS, detailing adverse conditions in our hospitals. These include shortages of supplies, medication, equipment, staff, and patient placement challenges.
This crisis reflects systemic failures that compromise the ability to deliver appropriate care. These conditions did not develop overnight. Our two hospitals still operate under Medicare reimbursement formulas from 1982 and 1996.
While I continue to fight for Medicare rebasing, fortunately we have secured permanent increases in Medicaid funding from 55 to 83 percent and over $1.7 billion in FEMA obligations to rebuild our hospitals.
Mr. Speaker, Congress and the administration must do more. Virgin Islanders deserve the same access, dignity, and quality of care as every American citizen. We will not stop fighting until our healthcare system receives the Federal support required to deliver standard of care.
Mr. Speaker, today I have the extraordinary privilege of honoring Elias Sussman, a man whose life spans a century of American history and whose service continues to inspire and guide us.
At 100 years young, Mr. Sussman's story began in Brooklyn, New York, where he was born on October 28, 1925. He was inducted into the U.S. Army in December 1943. Driven by dedication, he volunteered for jump school and rigger training, earning the rank of Technician Fifth Grade and becoming a vital part of the Airborne Forces.
As a Member of the 17th Airborne Division, he saw heavy action, fighting in the Battle of the Bulge and participating in Operation Varsity, the mass parachute drops into Germany. His heroism reached beyond combat.
After landing, his unit liberated American prisoner-of-war camps. Moving to what he thought was a nearby labor camp, he freed Jewish survivors suffering from extreme hunger, sharing every ration that he had to sustain himself. This act of profound compassion is the true hallmark of his service.
Returning home after the war, he was honorably discharged in April of 1946. Mr. Sussman's journey from the streets of New York to the front lines of freedom is an enduring inspiration to us all. We thank Elias Sussman for his sacrifice, his bravery, and his incredible 100 years of life.
Mr. Speaker, I rise today to hold Republican leadership accountable for their unwillingness to extend the ACA Enhanced Premium Tax Credits.
I am a proud cosponsor of the Healthcare Affordability Act and Protecting Healthcare and Lowering Costs Act. Both permanently extend these credits. My colleagues in the Democratic Caucus have fought tirelessly to extend these subsidies.
What has Republican leadership done? They put out a 111-page healthcare bill that doesn't contain a single word about ACA credits. What the bill does do is cause 100,000 more people to become uninsured. Without extending these credits, a 60-year-old couple in my district will see their premiums increase by $13,000 and an average family of 4 by $17,000.
My Republican colleagues can pull all the stunts they want to make it look like they are working on healthcare costs, but Americans are not buying it.
Mr. Speaker, as we barrel towards the December 31 expiration date, the people of Westchester and the Bronx need to know that I, along with my colleagues, will fight for their access to affordable healthcare. That is something every American deserves.
Mr. Speaker, I rise today to congratulate Liberty University women's soccer team on their 3-0 victory over the Missouri State Bears to claim the 2025 Conference USA Women's Soccer Championship.
Ivy Garner was named the CUSA Player of the Year and Championship Offensive MVP. Lauren Lettle earned honors as the CUSA Defensive Player of the Year and Championship Defensive MVP. Midfield Bri Myers and forward Lauren Flax were selected to the CUSA All-Tournament Team.
This title marks Liberty's second Conference USA crown in three seasons and secures them in automatic advancement to the NCAA Tournament.
I commend these student-athletes, their coaches, and the entire program that exemplifies excellence, dedication, and team spirit. Their success brings honor to Liberty University, who trains champions of Christ, Virginia's Fifth Congressional District, and the Commonwealth of Virginia.
Mr. Speaker, I rise today with deep concern for the recent anti-Semitic attack in Bondi Beach, Australia.
This tragedy reminds us that hate does not recognize borders. Hatred toward the Jewish people is not confined to one nation or to one moment. It is a global threat, and it resurfaces everywhere. It demands a response from everyone.
Anti-Semitic events in the United States have reached historic highs in recent years. In Florida alone, reports have increased from 269 to 353 within only 1 year. However, what we need to realize is that America is an interfaith nation where Christians, Jews, Muslims, and people of all beliefs have helped shape this country.
When one community is targeted, all communities are at risk. Anti- Semitism has no place in Australia, no place in the United States, and no place in this world. We must condemn anti-Semitism loudly and reject all forms of hatred. We must respond to hate with unity. We must meet fear with courage, and we must choose to lead with justice and dignity for every single person, every single day.
Mr. Speaker, I rise to honor Steve Reeder, a dedicated local historian and the chair of the social studies department at Monrovia High School.
He has taught at Monrovia High School for over 25 years. Steve spent nearly 2 years researching and writing ``Our Town,'' a book that chronicles the history of Monrovia and the surrounding areas in Morgan County. He first undertook the project to help his students with pride and to have pride in their community. ``Our Town'' was published earlier this year.
Steve and his students have also helped with the installation of several local history markers in the community. In addition to getting published, Steve was honored by WISH TV with their Golden Apple Award, which recognizes exceptional teachers in central Indiana.
I thank Steve for his decades of educating children and for supporting Morgan County communities.
Mr. Speaker, I rise today to recognize the important role that interns and fellows play on Capitol Hill and in the district offices and the important contributions that they make each and every day to this institution.
Every semester, young people from across the country come to intern and be part of democracy in action. Their enthusiasm, service, and optimism infuses our office with hope, energy, and much-needed help.
Today, I lift up all of my interns but, most especially, my communications fellow, Claire Satkiewicz, who has served our office well for the past 7 months. Her strong work ethic and multimedia talents have brought my team's messages to life, especially during the government shutdown, when our constituents needed to connect with us most.
She even had to step into our comms director's role when our comms director was absent for jury duty.
She will soon return to Northeastern University to complete her studies, but we know her future is bright.
In sum, to Claire and to all of our interns and fellows across the entire bit of Congress, we are thankful for their contributions, their enthusiasm, and heart for public service.
Mr. Speaker, I rise to recognize three outstanding high school football teams from North Carolina's 14th Congressional District who brought home State championships.
From my home county of Cleveland County, I congratulate the Crest High School Chargers, the 5A State champions. These young men showed grit, discipline, and heart all season.
Also from my home county, I congratulate Shelby High School, which earned the 3A title, continuing a proud tradition of excellence, proving that Cleveland County is a football home.
In northern Mecklenburg County, Hough High School captured the 8A championship. This incredible achievement reflects the talent and determination in communities like Cornelius.
However, these victories actually reflect much more than athletic skill. They reflect the support of coaches, parents, teachers, and communities who stand behind these teams. These young athletes made us very proud to represent the best of the 14th Congressional District.
Mr. Speaker, the wealth of our Nation is the health of our people. Yet Republicans are doing everything in their power to make families sicker.
They want to deny children food, ban abortion care, and obstruct the extension of the Affordable Care Act subsidies. This is dire for folks in my district where, in a 3-mile radius, life expectancy drops by 30 years.
For my constituent, Paula, whose husband lost his job and became ill, the ACA has been their lifeline, carrying them through years of uncertainty as she became his caregiver.
This is a healthcare crisis that Republicans created, and it is intersectional.
Abortion care is healthcare.
Once again, the Republicans are using abortion care as a political bargaining chip. The truth: Republicans will send premiums sky high just to stop families from using their own money on a plan that covers abortion.
They are not just putting healthcare out of reach for millions; they are further restricting reproductive care. The shame and the sham of it all.
Mr. Speaker, we have the votes to extend these subsidies and save healthcare for our constituents. The House must vote on it now.
Mr. Speaker, I rise today to recognize the courageous men and women from the Indiana National Guard who are here to serve in Washington, D.C.
On December 6, about 300 servicemembers from Indiana deployed to our Nation's Capital. They have already started their mission in D.C. to keep our streets safe and free from violent criminals. I am especially thankful to these men and women for serving during the holidays.
These Hoosiers will miss cherished times celebrating Christmas and New Year's with family and friends to restore order in D.C.
While these Hoosiers just begin their mission here, this deployment is just another one of the ways on a long list that Indiana troops have supported our country.
In 2024, Indiana National Guardsmen deployed to Texas to secure our border. Earlier this year, 400 National Guardsmen returned from their mission in the Middle East. Indiana National Guardsmen continue to pour out their time and talents to serve our Nation.
Mr. Speaker, the Indiana National Guard's dedication to serving our country continues to make all of us in Indiana very proud.
Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor the life and legacy of a great Rhode Islander, A.T. Wall.
A.T. was a dedicated husband, father, and criminal justice leader. After a life-changing internship with the juvenile justice system in New Haven while an undergraduate at Yale, he dedicated his career to making the Rhode Island Department of Corrections more just and restorative.
During his lengthy tenure, A.T. founded groundbreaking programs, offering medication-assisted treatment for inmates struggling with substance use disorders and training service dogs for disabled veterans. He dedicated his professional life to fostering second chances.
A man of deep faith and dedication, A.T. was always happy to lend a helping hand to anyone, including me.
My thoughts are with his wife, Maria; his children, Harrison and, my dear friend, Ash; his grandchildren; and his extended family.
Mr. Speaker, as I travel across Michigan's Fifth District,
Earlier this year, we passed the working families tax cut legislation, which is profamily, proworker, and pro-Michigan.
This historic legislation empowers families by preventing residents of Michigan's Fifth District from facing a 27 percent tax hike and increasing take-home pay by up to $11,700.
In addition, the legislation increases the child tax credit, strengthens paid family leave, and establishes savings accounts for newborns, allowing families to invest in their child's future from birth.
House Republicans have accomplished so much this year, but we are only just getting started.
Mr. Speaker, I rise to recognize a century of excellence by the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Incorporated, Chi Omega Chapter located in Rocky Mount, North Carolina.
The Chi Omega Chapter was chartered under the leadership of Anna Easter Brown, one of the original 16 founders of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Incorporated.
The chapter is home to Ruth Anderson Smith, who has served as a member for over 75 years and is 103 years old. She is a Chi Omega Diamond. There are three Chi Omega Pearls who served for over 65 years in membership, with 12 over 50 years who are Golden Members.
That is 100 years of membership, educational support, health advocacy, and steadfast commitment to our HBCUs and transforming lives and strengthening eastern North Carolina.
Mr. Speaker, I congratulate everyone who came to celebrate this amazing celebration of 100 years.
Mr. Speaker, I rise with a heavy heart to pay tribute to the life of Tense Franklin Banks, who passed away this week at 75.
Tense was a gifted writer and recognized for contributions to preserving the history of Linville Falls and Avery County of the North Carolina Society of Historians.
Tense is remembered by many as someone who had an impeccable memory and who believed that the preservation of local history was critical to pass on to future generations.
Tense was a friend and someone I admired greatly for her talents and warmth. She, along with the entire Banks family, has a special place in my heart.
Mr. Speaker, may God continue to provide comfort and care to the Banks family during this difficult time.
Mr. Speaker, I rise today to celebrate Norma Cynthia Simon on her 100th birthday. Her life exemplifies the power of education, family, and service.
Ms. Simon was born on December 15, 1925, in South America, in Guyana's capital, Georgetown.
Ms. Simon devoted 35 years to learning and teaching as an educator. She taught her children that education is a pathway to opportunity. She is the mother of 5, grandmother of 10, and great-grandmother of 14.
I am very fortunate to have her great-granddaughter, Maxe Samiko Hinds, in my office, continuing her great-grandmother's legacy of public service.
Today, I wish Ms. Simon a happy birthday and thank her for leaving us a great legacy. I commend Ms. Simon on the occasion of her 100th birthday.
Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor and remember the life of Donald E. Olsommer, Sr., of Sterling, Pennsylvania.
Born and raised in Scranton, Don devoted his life to serving his country, community, and family. He was a U.S. Army veteran and served for 30 years in the Pennsylvania National Guard. He rose to the rank of major, leading the National Guard units in Carbondale, Honesdale, and Scranton, and the Tobyhanna Reserve Unit as a company commander.
Don was elected to public service twice as a Wayne County commissioner, served as township supervisor, and was deeply involved in civic and charitable efforts throughout his community.
Don owned and operated a local Christmas tree farm, founded a small insurance company, and was the cofounder of the Sterling Little League. Most of all, he cherished the time he spent with his family.
It was an honor to know Don, and I know everyone who had the pleasure of meeting him feels the same way. My thoughts and prayers go to Don's family and friends, including his son, Pennsylvania State Representative Jeff Olsommer, as they grieve their loss and remember Don. He will be greatly missed.
I rise because we have to do something about the nonimmigrant visa process right now. I have several constituents who want to see their families for the holidays, but, unfortunately, this administration has put in place a new social media policy for anyone applying for a nonimmigrant visa.
Essentially, they are scrubbing your social media to see if you agree with the President or not. That is essentially what is happening. It is not about dangers to our country. If it were, it would go a lot faster than the many months that it is taking right now.
I have one constituent, for instance, who traveled abroad for a consular appointment. When she tried to come back, she was notified that, because of this policy, they need 4 months to review her social media, including accounts that they had already deleted. As a result, she faces the possibility of losing her job. Her daughter, who is a U.S. citizen, is going to fall behind in school.
These are serious consequences for so many families across the country. We need to make sure we change this policy and make it better. Most importantly, we need to get these visas approved.
Mr. Speaker, I rise today to congratulate William ``Bill'' Long on his retirement from MEMA, The Vehicle Suppliers Association.
As the Representative for Michigan's Fourth Congressional District, home to many of those hardworking MEMA members, I can attest to the lasting impact of Bill's leadership as president and CEO.
Bill Long has spent more than 40 years in the automotive and parts industry. Prior to joining MEMA in 2012, he held executive roles at Echlin Inc., Dana Incorporated, and Proliance International.
Appointed CEO in 2019, Bill helped redefine MEMA's mission: uniting vehicle aftermarket and original equipment suppliers, and positioning the association as a strong, unified voice during a period of major industrial transformation.
Bill's commitment and collaboration are evident in the partnerships he has built with automakers, technology leaders, research institutions, and government agencies and representatives.
Over the years, Bill has served on numerous boards and earned widespread recognition. He remains a respected figure in motorsports, including leadership roles with NASCAR and IndyCar. He currently serves on the boards of the Automotive Hall of Fame and the Center for Automotive Research in Michigan.
Mr. Speaker, please join me in honoring his distinguished career. I wish him the very best in his well-deserved retirement.
Mr. Speaker, 'tis the week before Christmas, and here on the Hill, to keep health insurance premiums from skyrocketing, we have just the bill.
A majority of the House is ready to vote ``yes,'' but the Speaker is sending us home. Why? It is anyone's guess.
ACA enhanced premium tax credits expire at the end of the year. Without them, millions will not afford healthcare, I fear.
Small business owners and employees, gig workers, farmers, and the self-employed, too, without those tax credits, they don't know what they will do.
The Speaker shrugged, saying our work for the year is done, but there is one bill we should pass before heading home--just one.
Two hundred eighteen House Members signed a petition to bring a 3- year tax credit extension to the floor. We should vote on it now before we head for the door.
We will vote in January, so don't give up the fight. In the meantime, may your holiday season be merry and bright.
Mr. Speaker, I rise today to recognize the outstanding career and well-earned retirement of the chief of police for the Biloxi Police Department, John Miller.
A coast native, Chief Miller dedicated more than three decades of his life to protecting the people of Biloxi, Mississippi. He joined the department in 1990 as a patrol officer and quickly distinguished himself through hard work and leadership. Just 5 years later, he was selected for the Special Crimes Unit, where he rose through the ranks of sergeant and lieutenant serving in both the narcotics and criminal investigative units.
In December of 2009, John Miller was named chief of police, a role he carried with integrity, humility, and an unwavering commitment to his officers and to the community. His compassion, dedication, and steady leadership were especially evident during one of the most challenging times in the history of the department and the city of Biloxi: Hurricane Katrina.
Chief Miller set a tone for professionalism, resilience, and service that truly exemplifies what it means to be south Mississippi strong.
On behalf of a grateful community, I thank him for his service and wish him and his family the very best in his retirement.
Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor the life and legacy of Michael L. Friedman of Toledo, Ohio, a devoted public servant, proud veteran of the 180th Fighter Wing, and indefatigable community leader whose half century of impact on northwest Ohio will long endure. Mike Friedman embodied service.
From his honorable duty in the United States Air Force and the Ohio Air National Guard's 180th Fighter Wing to his tireless advocacy for working families through the American Federation of Government Employees, he lived by the values of responsibility, loyalty, and fairness. He believed deeply in democracy.
Serving for decades as an Ohio Democratic Party State central committeeman and executive committee member, a national delegate, and even a Presidential elector, he carried out all these roles with conviction, heart, and perseverance.
Mike was also a storyteller. His unmistakable voice brought people together across neighborhoods, union halls, veteran posts, and dinner tables. Guided by his faith, Mike was grounded in love for his beautiful family and unwavering in his beliefs. He gave generously of himself to others.
America is stronger and more just because of citizens like Mike Friedman. He lived, served, and cared so deeply.
Mr. Speaker, today, I learned that the Kennedy Center board asked or said that the Kennedy Center would be renamed the Trump- Kennedy Center.
That is a sacrilege to a martyred, heroic, historic American President whose name was attached to the Kennedy Center for his support for cultural excellence in America and because he was an assassinated President who we all mourned on November 22 through November 25 and thereafter because he gave his life for our country.
The idea that Donald Trump would want his name to go before Kennedy's or even with Kennedy's is a sacrilege. It should not be changed ever, and it should go through this Congress, who named it the Kennedy Center, on a bill in this House and signed by President Lyndon Johnson.
Stop this, Mr. Trump. If you have any sense of dignity and honor, you will renounce this. Don't say that you are honored. You should renounce it. John Kennedy's name stands before all others, and the Kennedy Center should not be renamed.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Members are reminded to direct their remarks to the Chair.
Mr. Speaker, I rise today to speak about the new Republican healthcare legislation.
Instead of extending Affordable Care Act tax credits and keeping premiums from skyrocketing, House Republicans are pushing a plan that would force more than 20 million Americans to pay, on average, twice as much for the same coverage they have today. As a result, 4 million Americans will lose their insurance while others are going to be forced to pay far more for far worse coverage.
Americans are already facing an affordability crisis. The House Republican solution is to cut a trillion dollars from healthcare, pass the largest cut to SNAP in history, and do nothing while Trump's tariffs raise costs across the board.
When families are struggling every day to keep their heads above water, House Republicans are cutting all lifelines and throwing them a bag of bricks.
This is not how government is meant to work. We need to uplift the American people and give them a fair shot at a good life that rewards hard work.
That is what House Democrats will always fight for, a government that works for you, the American people. That is why we are forcing a vote to extend the ACA subsidies. We should not leave D.C. until we have that vote.
Regardless of what the Republicans do, the American people need to know that House Democrats, when we are back in the majority, will fight for a healthcare system that works for all Americans.
Mr. Speaker, earlier this year, Brownsville native Seaman Angelina Petra Resendiz was tragically murdered while serving our Nation at Naval Station Norfolk.
Angelina was a culinary specialist whose life and service to our country was cut short.
Despite many warnings from her friends and family of her disappearance, the U.S. Navy mislabeled her as an ``unauthorized absence'' instead of the ``duty status whereabouts unknown.''
This was tragic. I was proud to honor Seaman Resendiz by securing language in this year's NDAA to conduct oversight of the Department's application of designations in cases involving missing servicemembers who are later found deceased. This is an important step towards ensuring that any servicemembers who go missing receive a proper classification and investigatory response to assure their life has every shot of living.
Today, I ask us to continue looking out for our servicemembers at home and abroad to assure their safety and security.
Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor the life and legacy of Ms. Haregewaine Mitiku Ayalew, a beloved community member from San Jose, California, who passed away in November.
Ms. Ayalew's life was defined by service, generosity, humility, and an unwavering commitment to uplifting the vulnerable.
Ms. Ayalew dedicated her professional life to caring for those made vulnerable by illness, age, or circumstance. As a certified home care aide and home health aide, she provided essential care for our aging neighbors.
Guided by her faith and deep compassion, her service reached across continents as she organized aid and support programs for families in her native Ethiopia, including raising funds to build a facility for elders and individuals living with disabilities and illness.
Her volunteer energy and time commitment to the Mekane Rama Saint Gabriel Church was extraordinary and deeply appreciated by an entire community.
I recall visiting that very church when I attended her memorial and was moved by the sight of more than 1,000 neighbors who came out to pay their respects and pay homage to this remarkable woman.
May Ms. Ayalew's memory be a blessing. Her life's work and values live on through her two daughters, Aden Kassaye and Rebekah Kassaye, and in the countless lives she uplifted through her compassion and service.
Mr. Speaker, tomorrow at midnight is the deadline for Pam Bondi to release the Epstein files. That is what Thomas Massie's and my bill calls for. It passed this body 427-1, passed the Senate 100-0, and the President signed it. Now, three Federal judges have ordered the release of all of these files from Maxwell's and Epstein's grand jury.
Here is the reality. Any Justice Department official who does not comply with this law will be subject to prosecution for obstruction of justice. If Pam Bondi does not comply with the law, she will be held either in inherent contempt of Congress or subject to impeachment.
We will not rest until the law is complied with and justice is served.
Mr. Speaker, I rise today to recognize Christine Culberson of Spotsylvania County as Virginia's Seventh District Constituent of the Week.
Christine was recently named Teacher of the Year by the Virginia Technology and Engineering Education Association for good reason. She was recognized for her unwavering passion of career and technical education. This work has enriched the learning experience for students across Spotsylvania County Public Schools.
Educators like Christine take the time to invest in our students and inspire a lifelong learning, restoring quality education of our children.
Christine's recognition isn't just a personal achievement, it reflects the innovation flourishing in Spotsylvania County Schools. Her efforts uplift her colleagues and elevate the entire CTE community.
Mr. Speaker, I thank Christine for everything she has done for public education, and I am proud to honor her today.
Mr. Speaker, many of us in Congress are calling for the immediate release of Mr. Ekrem Imamoglu, who is the mayor of Istanbul, Turkiye.
Istanbul is Turkiye's largest city. It is one of the world's great cities where 16 million people live and stand strong for democracy. They elected Mr. Imamoglu as their mayor three different times, and he is focused on improving public infrastructure and serving nutrition and health to the millions of kids who live in that city.
He was detained in March 2025, along with 106 other leaders in Istanbul. The Turkish Government has now seized his family business, suspended his Twitter account, revoked his college diploma, and banned any public images or posters of him.
I want to tell Mayor Imamoglu that he has many people in the United States Congress closely following this outrage against democracy and the rule of law. We are wishing his family happy holidays, and we are working and demanding to see that he be released.
Mr. Speaker, I rise to honor the life of Ms. Norma Moye who passed earlier this week at the young age of 92.
As a fourth-generation resident, Norma was Paso Robles, California, in the 19th Congressional District. She served her community in many ways: being on the boards for the Pioneer Day, the Historical Society, and, of course, as a leader in the Chamber of Commerce. However, where she was most impactful was due to her work as the founder and executive director of the Paso Robles Main Street Association.
Under her leadership, downtown Paso Robles transformed from vacant storefronts to a bustling hub of community. She was a champion for local businesses, supporting her neighbors, helping them thrive, and transforming the local economy.
Thanks to her commitment to service, she lives on in every person who visits downtown in the community and the energy that is Paso Robles.
As we mourn her loss, let us celebrate Norma Moye, her legacy of service, and let us do that by enjoying the town of Paso Robles.
Mr. Speaker, tonight it is a great honor to gather with our
The United States, for over a century, since our hard-fought victories with Allies during World Wars I and II learned the hard way: Isolation is not in our Nation's security interest.
Isolation is not in our Nation's security interest.
Our Nation is not the most populous nation on Earth, with 340 million people. However, in every era it seems the constellation of dictatorship begins to upset world order. These aggressors invade smaller nations first to conquer more territory and for their own narrow self-interest.
Dictatorships in today's world include Russia, with 140 million people; China, with 1.5 billion people; Iran, with 92 million people; and North Korea, with 26 million people.
This group of nations is a developing spiderweb of tyranny with four times the population of the United States. Thus, alliances with free nations matter. That is why Canada, Australia, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organizations matter. Only together with Allies can the free world offset predatory dictatorships.
Following World War I, slowly and at great cost, a constellation of Allies began to emerge. Leaders of surviving nations created what has come to be called the free world, but this alliance of liberty was very hard-fought, and it champions freedom, not dictatorship.
Foundational is the rule of law with institutions of justice, ensuring individual rights, not repression by dictators or conquest by aggressor, thugs, and murderers.
Our Nation did not seek to be leader of the free world. Rather, our forebears grew this association with the realization that cataclysmic wars were not in the interests of humanity nor the United States of America.
President Woodrow Wilson created the League of Nations after World War I, which three decades later transformed into the United Nations, an institution to collectively assemble world leaders to promote understanding and peace so as to avoid war.
Civil and political leaders of our Nation in both major political parties, though reluctant to assume leadership in such a daunting undertaking never before in the world, were determined to build a world of law, not conquest. The goal of lasting peace outweighed their own self-interest.
A short distance away from our Nation's Capitol rests the national World War II Memorial. It was dedicated in 2004 to the Allied victory in World War II. Over 100 million people, nearly one-third of our population, has now visited that hallowed site. This monument represents the 20th century's greatest achievement, the victory of liberty over tyranny.
The monument stands as a timeless reminder of the moral strength and power that can flow when free people are united and bond together in the common, just cause of liberty itself.
Following the horrific great power wars of the 20th century, across Europe alone are lain the bodies of 500,000 U.S. veterans who rest in military cemeteries and fields from World Wars I and II. From Flanders Fields to Normandy, their enormous sacrifice, along with the millions of veterans who returned home, bequeathed to us the moment to build the umbrella of alliances to push back tyranny. Extending liberty and achieving democratic governance peacefully served as examples to other nations. What the World War I and II generations yielded for us has been the longest era of peacetime among great powers in the history of the world--until now.
Not only is Russia at war in Europe, but the United States of America is acting peculiarly and dangerously out of step with our forebears' resolve.
Let me just, for a moment, focus on Vladimir Putin and his evil aspirations as dictator of Russia. Let us recall Putin's imperative is to reconstitute the Soviet Union that collapsed in 1991 of its own criminality and dysfunction. Its border extended across 13 time zones then, all the way through most of Germany. Through force, Putin aspires to rewrite the structure of Europe again and end democratic practice across the Continent.
Meanwhile, the United States appears absent. Liberty is under threat, and America seems to be wavering on the sidelines, playing off liberty and dictatorship.
The increasingly collaborative coalition of Russia, Iran, North Korea, and China, the spider web of modern tyranny, are enemies of liberty. See it. They collude to upend American and global security.
Chancellor Merz of Germany, a NATO ally, recognized this reality when he recently stated: ``The threats are real. We are not at war, but we no longer live in peacetime.''
Ukraine has become the front line for liberty's fight in our time and generation. See it.
In 2014, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, an ally of the United States. Together with our European allies, we partnered to achieve Ukraine's accession to the European Union of free nations, and clearly Putin invaded Ukraine in 2014 just after Russia's puppet dictator who had become President of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, was driven out of that nation after his treasonous betrayal of the democratic aspirations of the free people of Ukraine.
He stole millions and committed crimes against its freedom, and he found his way back to Moscow. Vladimir Putin knew his control of that puppet and of Ukraine had been thwarted, so he chose to invade Ukraine starting in 2014 against all laws of diplomacy. Putin snuffed out liberty in his own country, and now he intends not just to end liberty in all of Europe, but he seeks to replace it with tyranny that traces its bloody lineage across centuries of Russian aggression and murder of innocents.
There can be no compromise with Putin. He violated the Budapest Memorandum, which allowed Ukraine to prosper, starting in 1991 after the fall of the Soviet Union, when it promised to let all nuclear weapons be removed from Ukraine with the promise that they would not be invaded, that others would protect them.
Russia signed that agreement. The United States signed that agreement. That agreement has been violated. Why should we trust Putin now, when he couldn't even keep his word on the Budapest Memorandum?
Let us not forget the great betrayal that allowed Putin to invade Ukraine in the first place. As the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, a newly independent Ukraine had become the third largest nuclear power in the world. However, as a responsible nation, Ukraine signed the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons at the behest of the United States of America and the demand of Russia. In exchange, the security of Ukraine was to be guaranteed under the 1994 Budapest Memorandum signed by our country, Russia, and Ukraine.
However, Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014 after his puppet was driven out. Russia always betrays its commitments. Look no further than the decades before when the Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement during World War II was signed and then violated and Poland was invaded. We must not betray our commitment as leader of the free world to Ukraine's liberty.
Ukraine is fighting valiantly against Russia. It is holding the line at the front. The Ukrainian people have fought so astoundingly until the current President and his party here in Congress decided not to send the funds to allow Ukraine to procure the weapons it needs. There has been a pause during this year, which makes it harder, but the Ukrainians have held the front.
Ukraine has one time zone and encompasses a landmass less than 3 percent the size of Russia's vast territory which stretches across--are you ready?--11 time zones. They have enough. They ought to deal in their own country. Russia's population equals four times as many people as Ukraine's.
Putin was the aggressor. He invaded, as I said, in 2014, and he has kidnapped tens of thousands of Ukrainian children. Why? It is because in Russia, the birthrate is going down. He has murdered tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians. He has reinstituted the gulag system of prisons to torture Ukrainians. He has attacked religious communities and buildings, broken families apart, murdered and tortured scores of
This is what Putin promises the rest of Ukraine and our NATO allies, should we let him succeed in Ukraine. See it. See it for what it is. Russia's history is marked by repressive expansion and murder throughout the centuries. There is no liberty nor desire for any liberty. Russia kills at will.
Freedom advocate Alexei Navalny, a Russian, was imprisoned last year and left to die in a frozen Arctic prison. Putin's goons murdered a young Ukrainian journalist almost 30 years ago when Ukraine became free. Why? It is because Gongadze was telling the truth about the corruption and the underhandedness of Russia inside of the free Ukraine. He was killed and then buried with his head in the ground and his legs in the air right before people would enter the town just to be a lesson to behave yourself and don't ever, ever put a word in a publication against Vladimir Putin.
Putin murdered countless Catholics, Mormons, others who wanted to freely practice religion in that part of the world. Why were they murdered? It was because they weren't Russian Orthodox adherents.
If Putin is permitted to conquer Ukraine, he will not stop there. This is not speculation. This is history. We already see Russian troops concentrated at the borders with Baltic States. They are hitting the fly zone in Poland, the border, Finland, Russian violations of NATO airspace and territorial waters.
A Polish diplomat once advised me: If you pay no attention to foreign affairs, then foreign affairs will find you. What a true statement that is. Surely, the Poles know.
America has tried in the past to stick its head in the sand. That doesn't work. Isolation doesn't work. Partnership works. America can repeat the mistakes of the 1920s by withdrawing our support, but we have already lived through that. We don't want to go through that again. Inevitably, that myopia will force the free world to pay a higher price for freedom as tyranny deepens its roots in the world. On the other hand, America can take a stand now to provide further assistance for Ukraine to advance liberty for this new generation.
Remember, only 20 percent of the world is free now, according to Freedom House's Freedom Index. This means that 80 percent of the world lives under some form of tyranny. We are very privileged in our country if we can hold it.
In our privileged place in the world, America cannot forget that around our globe and throughout history, liberty is extremely rare and precious and utterly vulnerable.
The Trump administration is failing to meet the moment. My dear colleagues will talk about this in just a moment, but what this administration is doing is just not ignoring the problem. They are actively complicit in tyranny's march across Europe.
This administration's new and adolescent national security manifesto, as they call it, is a retreat.
During his campaign, President Trump frequently repeated that he will end the war in Ukraine on day one. That surely didn't happen. One year into his return to office, the war in Ukraine rages on, and his actions have been favoring Russia's dictatorship.
In February and March, President Trump made his first real effort to negotiate, but what is he negotiating? Not liberty. Ukraine's President Zelenskyy came to the table and agreed to President Trump's mineral rights deal.
Trump responded to Russia's growing strikes but granted Putin several weeks' warning to end the shooting or face new sanctions. He did not implement the sanctions, even as Ukrainians were being murdered every day.
In August, President Trump literally rolled out the red carpet for dictator Putin to step foot in the land of the free during his visit to Anchorage, Alaska. Putin conceded nothing then; he concedes nothing now. Trump whined at Putin and again threatened sanctions.
Finally, in October, the President did sanction two large Russian oil firms, Lukoil and Rosneft, but then reinvigorated a negotiating process with several decidedly Kremlin-friendly provisions, even as Putin showed no signs of compromise.
Now, 4 months later, we are waiting on the Trump administration or Republicans in Congress to move additional sanctions. Up at the desk, we have a discharge petition to move a bill to enforce sanctions on Russia. We only need 2 more signatures to get to 218.
Where is the majority in this House? Two more signatures on the discharge petition to move Russian sanctions forward--liberty is calling. Can you see it? Can you hear it?
This October, the Trump administration started issuing Russia's threats to Ukraine for Putin. The Russian-drafted 28-point peace plan asked Ukraine not to negotiate peace but to capitulate.
They cited a recent corruption scandal in Ukraine, not for what it is--Russian interference and corruption in Ukraine through their emissaries--but as evidence that Ukraine is weak and must surrender.
This is a Russian infiltration of Ukrainian institutions that has been going on for centuries, and it has plagued Ukraine from the first day it became free, in 1991. Ukraine has had to build a nation on the corruption and infiltration of the corrupt, calculating, interfering Russian regime.
Then, just last week, the Trump administration stood shoulder to shoulder with the Russian dictatorship. Never in my life did I imagine I would live to see the day when the United States of America, as a founding member of NATO and the United Nations, would vote with the dictatorships of the world. This happened on December 10, 2025, when the United States joined the dictatorships of Russia, Belarus, China, North Korea, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Niger in a 97-8 vote to oppose the United Nations resolution that aimed to strengthen international cooperation and coordination of efforts among nations.
This shameful vote of 97-8 does not express the values of the United States of America. It does not express the values of the American people, who place liberty above all. We value our closest allies, especially when Europe is at war. We don't side with the dictators.
The Trump administration publicly holds that the ultimate goal is peace. I agree. Everyone wants peace, except Putin. Do you not see it? Putin doesn't want peace. He wants Ukraine. The Ukrainians prove to us every day that liberty is worth fighting for. We best not forget that here in America.
Frankly, I haven't found anyone in the Trump family who has ever fought for the cause of liberty. There is no record of military service or public service in his family's history. In fact, Trump famously avoided service in Vietnam by faking bone spurs.
No one in my family ever had that luxury. They fought for over 100 years for this country, and we are proud of their service for liberty.
What seems clear to me is that too many people, like Putin, judge others by the weight of their wallet rather than the weight of their conviction for liberty.
As peace negotiations ensue this weekend in Miami, let us pray that the negotiation is not about squeezing every business deal out of Ukraine for The Trump Organization. That outcome is not in America's interest.
Steven Witkoff and Jared Kushner, two former real estate businessmen from New York, should negotiate peace and liberty, not business deals for themselves or the President they serve, business deals of a Russian-occupied Ukraine.
The free world must push back Russia's aggression and greed, or Putin's appetite will grow to spread Russian repression across all free peoples, which he has been trying to do since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Our late colleague John Lewis observed that freedom is not a state. It is an act. It does not sit on the floor but must be elevated by the steady diligence and attention of citizens who sacrifice to remain free. Liberty is not simply bestowed upon a people but fought for and defended.
History instructs us. In the 1770s and 1780s, a revolutionary generation of men and women rose up to secure liberty across 13 otherwise disconnected coastal Colonies here on the American continent.
Roughly 80 years later, a subsequent generation was called upon to fight and die in America's internal great war for liberty, the American Civil War, still our most costly war, with over 600,000 deaths. That generation ended the original sin of slavery and extended the hope of liberty across the American continent.
Then, in the 20th century, generations rose to the renewed call for sacrifice. Called the Greatest Generation, I call them the most unselfish generation. They fought, died, and successfully preserved and extended liberty here at home and to subjugated people around the world. They did it for us.
Americans believe that the history of their struggle against global tyranny ended with the defeat of Nazi Germany and the fall of the Communist Soviet Union, yet today, that history is still being written.
Free nations face not a new enemy but an old one. It is our turn now. Our free world must never play footsie with an axis of dictatorships like Russia, North Korea, Iran, and China to unleash their aggression on our world again. How not only stupid that would be, but how un- American.
America's foreign policy must promote liberty, not bow to tyranny. Free nations must support those who are willing to fight and die for liberty around our world, and Congress must ensure our Nation is always ready.
Our National Defense Authorization Act just passed, providing for military readiness for our Nation as well as assistance to Ukraine to ensure NATO's eastern flank is secure and Vladimir Putin moves back his troops inside his own country. He has plenty of it that he needs to attend to.
Congress can do more by passing a discharge petition that has been sitting in the well of this House since July. It would unlock the most significant legislation introduced in this Congress to place economic sanctions on Russia for its war crimes against Ukraine. Our petition needs only two more Member signatures to bring forward the vote to the floor. Every Democrat and two Republicans have signed thus far.
In our country, we must defend liberty first, last, and always, and it must never accommodate dictatorships.
We are reminded of this by this astounding visionary poet of Ukraine, who on Christmas, December 25, 1845, penned the following words about a country that, at that point, was only imagining through its greatest citizens a future that they could not live in their own lifetime.
Mr. Speaker, in closing my formal remarks tonight, I will quote the poet laureate of Ukraine, Taras Shevchenko, who said:
Mr. Speaker, he was so prescient. He was so prescient.
Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Pelosi), the Speaker Emerita of the House of Representatives.
Mr. Speaker, I salute Marcy Kaptur and the Ukrainian Caucus for inviting Members to come together to raise concerns, to speak frankly about the need for strong sanctions on Russia, and to insist that any peace must be just, durable, and centered on the Ukrainian people themselves.
Mr. Speaker, for nearly 4 years, the people of Ukraine have stood on the front lines for freedom, defending their democracy, their sovereignty, and their right to live in peace on their own land. In fighting for democracy, they are fighting democracy writ large.
Congresswoman Kaptur spoke beautifully, historically, geographically, and chronologically in every way about placing this conflict in time and place. I want to pick up on two parts of it in the time that I have.
In the conversation about peace, we hear people talk about Ukraine giving up land. What we are saying to Ukraine is that Russia came in, stole their children, as Congresswoman Kaptur mentioned, tens of thousands of their children. They took them into Russia. Mr. Speaker, imagine if that ever happened to your family.
Secondly, they raped the women. They raped the women. Sometimes they did it in front of the children and sometimes in front of their parents.
I said to some Russian friends: Isn't it sad how the Russian troops have become brutes and are raping women as a weapon of war to demoralize the people of the country?
They said: Make sure you understand one thing. Russian soldiers follow orders. They are doing that because that is what they are told to do.
In addition to that, we have seen evidence of their killing families in front of family members in such a brutal way. What a ridiculous request: Kidnap our children, rape our women, kill civilian families, and ask us to give you land in return.
The other thing we sometimes hear people say in our country is: Why should we pay all that money when, in fact, we have needs in our own country? I don't think people realize that 90 percent of the security that we send to Ukraine is spent--of the 100 percent, 90 percent is spent in the United States, creating jobs in our country.
Secondly, there are other forms of humanitarian assistance. Across the board at least 60 percent of all that we spend on Ukraine is spent in the United States of America, creating jobs.
Again, Congresswoman Kaptur spelled it out. I mean, some things bear repeating. She said it so beautifully. This is awful. Mr. Speaker, who do you trust? Who do you trust?
The Congresswoman spelled out very clearly the ridiculous notion that Ukraine should trust us--the Russians after the Budapest Agreement. Give up your nuclear weapons, and we will come to your aid, should you need that.
Forget about it now. Ukraine has been treated with great disrespect. Its people have just been subjected to such horror, and they have fought valiantly. The least we can do is the sanctions. What we should be doing in this House, which has overwhelming bipartisan support in support of the people of Ukraine, is to get some more people to sign the discharge petition.
I thank Congresswoman Kaptur for her relentless, persistent, dissatisfied advocacy for Ukraine and the fact is we know, those of us who have visited there: If Putin takes Ukraine, what country is next? That is what we hear, the fear we hear from people in the region.
Do they trust Putin? The only person who trusted Putin was President Trump. I don't know what that is about. I know I had a picture, coming out of one of his Cabinet meetings, I pointed to the President, and I said: I am leaving this meeting because, Mr. President, with you, all roads lead to Putin.
Mr. Speaker, this is awful. They say Putin is the richest man in the world. He is a villainous person and somebody who uses rape, kidnapping, and family killings in order to demoralize a country.
He hasn't succeeded, and he is a loser because he thought he was going to win the first week of this war. It is now 4 years later.
Mr. Speaker, I thank Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi for her unrelenting support for liberty and the people Ukraine. May God bless them and may in our lifetime we see their consequential victory. We must not abandon them.
One more thing: Right before Christmas a few years ago, when President Zelenskyy came here and spoke, this body just rose up in support. We need more than applause, though. We need a discharge petition.
Mr. Speaker, I thank the Congresswoman for joining us tonight with all of her duties.
Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer), the very distinguished former and future majority leader of our caucus who has distinguished himself in his career with a total commitment to our alliances globally, including our precious European colleagues. We thank him so very much for joining us here this evening from the State of Maryland.
Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman who heads the Ukrainian Caucus and has ties to Ukraine. She is deeply tied to America, to democracy, liberty, and freedom.
Mr. Speaker, I adopt her remarks as my own. I will add to that, but it will be surplusage because we could repeat
As I was sitting here, with the exception of Mr. Vindman, who is a young man, it occurred to me that the speakers who have spoken so far are of a generation who were children at the time of the Soviet Union. They understood the viciousness of the bear, and they understood the enslavement of the Russian people and the captive nations.
Mr. Speaker, I rise today for the people of Ukraine, for the people of America, for the people of Europe, for the people of Asia and Africa, South America, and Australia because all of us are at risk if dictators like Putin prevail.
For Ukraine, the question is: Will America and this Congress allow it to become a nation betrayed? I have said it before, and I will say it again. President Trump, Vice President Vance, Secretary Rubio, Negotiator Witkoff, Secretary of Defense Hegseth, and others have done everything to express support for Vladimir Putin's and Russia's position and to exonerate them from the aggression and from their war crimes.
Earlier this year, Trump said that the Russians have all the cards. Mr. Speaker, someone ought to remind our President--and I do so tonight--that NATO has a combined defense expenditure of $1.58 trillion. Together, we field 3.5 million troops. Our combined GDP is 25 times more than Russia's. Europe holds some $246 billion in frozen Russian assets.
I suggest to all of us, to the President, and to the world at large: Those are a lot of cards, but we need to play them.
As long as they are in the deck, they won't make a difference. Every day we do not, we look weaker in the eyes of the world. That is a danger for us and a danger for the international community.
Every day, Russia slaughters more Ukrainians. At least 43,000 Ukrainian soldiers have already given their lives in defense of democracy, and many more have been wounded.
The Ukrainians will continue to fight valiantly, as the gentlewoman pointed out, with or without our support. However, our decision will determine whether their fight is in vain or will prevail.
The other day, a Ukrainian soldier on the front lines told a reporter: ``They kept withholding military aid, couldn't agree on how to respond, and we keep paying for their indecisiveness with our blood, the blood of our children.''
He was referring, of course, not just to the United States but to the world at large. Ukraine may be paying the price for our negligence today, but we, the free world, will ultimately bear the cost if we let Putin prevail.
When we fail to show our strength, our adversaries doubt our resolve. When our adversaries doubt our resolve, they are assuredly more likely to test our might.
That is the mistake that Neville Chamberlain made. That is the mistake that America and the United Kingdom made when we did not honor the Budapest Memorandum when Putin annexed Crimea.
In my view, Crimea is the mother of this war. The failure to act decisively in the face of that war crime, of that theft, and of that international law that was broken led Putin to believe that he could do this, the invasion of Ukraine, with impunity.
That is a mistake that Donald Trump is making now. This Congress must not do the same, and the good news is that this Congress has not done the same. There were 12 votes between 2022 and July of 2025.
Mr. Speaker, the good news is that, on both sides of the aisle, the overwhelming majority of Members voted to support Ukraine. Mostly, it was unanimous on this side, but it was also unanimous on the Republican side, save 1 vote, and then it was 110 to 117, just a small minority.
Those votes average 80 percent of the Members of Congress voting to support Ukraine. It is not as if there is division in this House. As the gentlewoman said, there is a discharge petition, which lays in that desk behind me.
Mr. Speaker, 214 Democrats have signed it, and 2 Republicans have signed it. There are 216 signatures in all now. We need 2 more to say to Ukraine, to say to the world, and to say ``yes'' to our administration that we are in support of liberty over tyranny; we are in support of a people who have shown extraordinary courage.
Fortunately, we have a winning card to play. Ranking Member Meeks and I have that bipartisan discharge petition to force on the Ukraine support, and two Republicans have signed that. That means there are another 100 who support Ukraine, and all they need to do is sign that petition, and we will vote in January on that bill that says that we are going to support Ukraine, freedom, democracy, liberty, and international law.
Every House Democrat and two Republicans, I say, have signed. Our legislation includes both sanctions to undermine Russia's war economy and direct financial and military aid for Ukraine's defense and reconstruction.
There were 80 United States Senators who have signed onto a bill imposing sanctions on Russia some 6 months ago, and it has not moved. What do you think that does to the psychology of Ukraine, Ukrainians, and their soldiers?
If we report out this bill, in my view, it will change this war not only materially but psychologically. It doesn't matter how many concessions you give to Putin--and this administration has given him many--he will keep fighting this war so long as he thinks he can outlast the free world.
This is an issue of resolve. I mentioned how much superiority we have with respect to Russia in size, in money, and in resources.
Mr. Speaker, I know we can do this. Since the Russian invasion in 2022, the House has had at least 12 votes, and I mentioned them, and 80 percent of our people have supported them.
Mr. Speaker, now is not the time to fold. Now is the time to call. If we play our hand correctly, we can still ensure that Putin suffers a defeat that will make other dictators around the world think twice before violating international law and creating war crimes.
Mr. Speaker, we must because make no mistake: Vladimir Putin is playing for keeps and for empire. Our European allies know that to be the case because they have been at the point of the enemy's spear when Chamberlain said that we were buying peace in our time. We then had World War II.
Let us act.
Mr. Speaker, I urge my Republican colleagues and friends who have signed on and voted for supporting Ukraine to sign this discharge petition.
Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from California (Mr. Costa), the really extraordinary Congressman from District 21, who has just been unwavering as a freedom fighter here not just for our country but for countries around the world that are trying to liberate themselves from the type of tyranny that Ukraine is facing.
Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague, the chairman of the Ukraine Caucus, Ms. Kaptur, for her leadership, and for my other colleagues who have spoken this afternoon: Speaker Emeritus Pelosi and Representative Steny Hoyer.
Mr. Speaker, I rise today to address the ongoing threat that Russia poses to Ukraine, to Europe, to the United States, and to the broader international order.
On February 24, 2022--I think all of us can remember--Russia, preplanned and unprovoked, attacked Ukraine. At that time, there was broad consensus among Republicans and Democrats about what we needed to do. That was to stand up for democracy.
Senator Lindsey Graham said it quite well at the time that this was about good versus evil.
I submit to you today that it is still about good versus evil.
Since that day, Russia has continued its assault on the rules-based international order. From the illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014 to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia has shown a blatant disregard for international law, national sovereignty, and fundamental human rights.
Sadly, I believe that modern-day Russia is a syndicate masquerading as a country with a mob boss called Putin. That is Russia today.
President Putin has violated, as any mob boss would, every international agreement he has ever signed, period. That is why a peace deal must be backed up by strong military deterrence and strong commitments from Europe and the United States to back Ukraine with NATO-like defense guarantees. It is very clear. Otherwise, Putin has no intention of keeping any agreement.
This is not a conventional war. It is a hybrid conflict, combining military force with cyberattacks at all different levels and fronts, disinformation campaigns, and economic warfare, alongside deliberate efforts to weaken NATO and undermine democratic institutions. They go on attacking civilian neighborhoods, bombing schools, hospitals, and churches. Clearly, Putin is a war criminal.
When the United States hesitates or sends mixed signals, we do not create stability; we invite aggression. Let's be clear about that. History is replete with examples of those who hesitate or send mixed signals. Therefore, American leadership remains the cornerstone of global security.
To President Trump, Putin respects one thing and one thing only, and that is strength. By supporting Ukraine, the United States is sending a clear message: authoritarian regimes cannot invade their neighbors without consequences. I ask the President of the United States to be strong and stand by the brave people of Ukraine and our allies.
Any sustainable resolution to this conflict must include Ukraine at the negotiating table. How else could you reach a peace agreement? The country under attack must have a decisive voice in shaping its own future and determining the terms of peace--otherwise, it is illogical-- ensuring that agreements respect its sovereignty and the will of its people.
Therefore, we must continue to strengthen our alliance, develop agile and region-specific strategies, and ensure that we are prepared to respond across all domains, including cyberspace, information warfare, and economic coercion, because economic sanctions can work.
The President has the leverage, with continued military support, economic support, and sanctions using the sovereign wealth of Russia to pay for the damage and the harm that they have created, with our European allies. We have the leverage.
We cannot allow this aggression to go unanswered. We must stand firmly with Ukraine and defend the democracy and international order that we helped create. It has created prosperity since World War II, economic prosperity that democratic nations have shared because America stood strong.
That same order has brought peace and economic prosperity--think about it--throughout the world for 80 years for democratic nations. Therefore, this is a seminal moment in American and world history that we are facing.
I urge my colleagues to act as we have--as Representative Steny Hoyer indicated, 12 times in an overwhelming bipartisan fashion--to stand up for America's values, to stand up for human rights, to act collectively in a bipartisan fashion. Why? Because our security and the security of free nations everywhere depend on it.
My colleagues, my friends, the world is watching and looking for American leadership. This is the test of our time. ``Glory to Ukraine''; ``Slava Ukraini.''
Mr. Speaker, I thank Congressman Costa for his fervent leadership on every level and for all he has done to continue negotiations with our closest allies that fight at our side and push back the edge of tyranny wherever it exists.
Mr. Speaker, may I inquire how much time is remaining.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The gentlewoman from Ohio has 8 minutes remaining.
Mr. Speaker, I rise today to reaffirm my commitment to peace in Ukraine, a peace that acknowledges the massive sacrifice of the Ukrainian people and that secures perpetual sovereignty, not just a temporary reprieve that the Russians will use to rearm and reattack.
We must continue to stand firmly with the Ukrainian people in their fight for freedom and sovereignty. I have traveled to Ukraine extensively since this major phase of the war started in February 2022, 15 trips, the first 14 between June 2022 and October 2023, investigating war crimes and trying to help the Ukrainian people. The last one was the only bipartisan House delegation visit to Ukraine this year. Frankly, I think that is a shameful statistic, that only Congressman Mike Turner and I managed to make it to Ukraine this year, a year the Ukrainians faced enormous pressure.
In those trips, I visited places like Bucha, Irpin, Hostomel, places where Russian soldiers brutally executed civilians, places where Russians attacked Ukrainian infrastructure, attempting to freeze and starve the Ukrainian population.
I tell you that what I saw was a war crime, and those crimes are perpetuated almost daily by Russians, including attacks on and killing of POWs.
It is in the United States' national security interest to secure peace between Russia and Ukraine, but only when that peace comes with dignity and security for the Ukrainian people.
We have seen Russia's playbook. They use time. They buy time to rearm so they can attack. They sow discord throughout the neighborhood, in Moldova, Transnistria, Georgia, and Ukraine.
True peace will never be achieved by the world by appeasing Putin. That is why we must stand together. This peace proposal that we have recently seen, the 28-points, Dmitriev, who is the leader of the sovereign wealth fund, and Witkoff, a real estate investor--I call it the Dim-Wit peace proposal.
This Dim-Wit peace proposal is nothing more than a giveaway to Vladimir Putin. It does nothing to achieve peace. Frankly, it would have made Prime Minister Chamberlain blush after Munich, that level of weakness and appeasement.
Let me be clear. A just and lasting peace in Ukraine could not be achieved by the United States alone. It could not be achieved without transatlantic unity. It could not be achieved without European support.
We must stand with the Ukrainian people. We must stand on the right side of history and not support a shameful and weak appeasement deal.
Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Landsman), who represents Ohio's First District in the greater Cincinnati area. Let's be kind to him. He has been waiting a long time.
Mr. Speaker, I thank the Congresswoman for her incredible leadership and remarkable remarks.
I rise today on behalf of the children of Ukraine. More than 35,000 children from Ukraine have been stolen by Vladimir Putin. These children are being hidden in Russia and being sent to indoctrination camps. Some are even being trained as soldiers to fight against their own country.
We can't wait for a peace agreement to reunite these children with their families. They are not bargaining chips, and Putin must release them now.
As the father of two, I can't imagine the terror of having a child taken from our family, from our home.
Earlier this year, we uncovered a State Department program to track these abducted children had been terminated. We were able to get it back up and running.
Our bill, the Abducted Ukrainian Kids Recovery and Accountability Act, will restart this program so that we can keep tracking every single child. This bill was included in the NDAA and will be signed into law tonight. We can't stop until these children are back where they belong, which is home.
Mr. Speaker, I thank Congressman Landsman. He is such an outstanding Member. I thank him for being here.
Mr. Speaker, thank you for your deference and ability to allow us to speak.
I just want to end this evening by saying that this Special Order is not really just about this generation but those to come, and for our children, for our grandchildren, the kind of world that we leave them. We simply cannot appease dictators, because we will leave a very ugly world to them in the future.
The last thing I wish to place on the Record, if you would allow me just a couple of seconds here, in 2014, when the Olympics were going on in Sochi, for the first time in Russia in modern history, Vladimir Putin used the Olympics, when most people were distracted, to cover up the fact that he was going to invade Ukraine, which he did. The Olympics were the shield from a public relations standpoint, but what had just happened was that his stooge who was the head of Ukraine then, Viktor Yanukovych, had to flee the country because he was such a crook and was totally a tool of Putin.
What the American people need to understand is, Ukraine had to dig itself out from under decades, centuries of Russian imposition and corrupt leaders that held down the ability of this country to flower into a free nation.
What we are fighting for is for the ability of people to have liberty first, last, and always, in the place, in the world where Stalin killed more people than anyplace else in the history of the world.
God bless America.
``Glory to Ukraine,'' ``Slava Ukraini.''
Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Members are reminded to refrain from engaging in personalities toward the President.
Mr. Speaker, it is my honor to be here this afternoon as we talk about the need to promote accountability, flexibility, choice, and to allow small businesses to galvanize together to find the best options for their employees in the changing health insurance market.
I will start today by ceding some time to my friend from the State of Montana, Representative Downing, who has great experience in working with the marketplace in his home State of Montana.
I yield to the gentleman from Montana (Mr. Downing).
Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Florida, Mr. Haridopolos, so much.
I rise today to discuss or to comment on what I see is the biggest fraud this body has ever put upon the American people.
Let's go back to the beginning of the unaffordable care act, ObamaCare. How was this sold to the American people? You can keep your doctor if you like them. You can keep your plan. Your insurance premiums are going to go down.
I will tell you, all of that--I will tell you; this is one time that both the Republicans and Democrats agree, that it did not deliver on that.
The Affordable Care Act, ObamaCare, has been one of the biggest drivers in increasing not just the cost of health insurance but the cost of healthcare.
To continue this deception, it was clear that this plan would not work. You don't have to be a Ph.D. in mathematics to understand why. As you start to add things--the essential health benefits that you added onto these policies, these required benefits, as you started to add things that had to be covered--and I am not saying whether those were good or bad. But if you add expenses, you can't make prices go down. It would be like saying if you went to a fast food restaurant and ordered a soda and the price is going to go down but they have to give you a free cheeseburger as well. It just doesn't make common sense. It doesn't make mathematical sense. So to further this deception, they realized that it only worked by subsidizing it. You had to levy a tax to subsidize it.
The architects on the other side of the aisle who put this together realized that the American people would rebel against this if they were given a tax to pay for it. How did they hide that? Well, let's just tax the payers, let's tax the insurance companies, and then they can pass those expenses down to the American people through higher premiums. That is exactly what happened.
Then let's look at another phenomenon. As these prices start going up, people start to question whether they are getting value for what they are paying for. For some folks, the answer was no. They didn't want to pay those higher rates, and so some folks came off.
As we see, the people who come off tend to be the people who least need services. So the healthy, younger people tend to be the ones that come off. As they do that, that concentrates the risk. That makes the prices go higher for the insurance companies, for the payers.
As that happens and you get into the next policy year, they have to raise the rates again. As they raise the rates again, you lose more subscribers to those policies. You further concentrate the risk. This is known as adverse selection.
What happens in adverse selection, every time you see that raise, those prices rise, you start to see more people come off. They look for alternatives like healthcare sharing ministries, they look for something else, or they go uninsured. You start this endless cycle of these prices going up.
There is another thing I want to point out. This is kind of economics 101. The more money you put into a system, the more expensive things get. We have seen that in so many different areas. We have seen that in subprime lending. We have seen that in student loans. You put money into a system, and it starts to push prices up.
One of the other contributors we have is not just adverse selection, which is concentrating the risk and making it more expensive for the insurance companies, but we put so much money in the system that we are seeing rises in actual healthcare.
It is important to make the distinction between the rising cost of healthcare and the related rising cost of health insurance. So we just come to this death spiral of this becoming more and more and more unaffordable. In my personal opinion, this entire system is going to collapse under its own weight, and you have got two solutions.
The other side thinks that we should just write a blank check from the Federal Government, no matter how big that check is going to be, so that we can hide the fact that this is failing.
Let's face it. This is seen as a landmark piece of legislation that the Democrats have pushed over the last couple of decades. It is important to them to protect this landmark legislation. I am sorry, but the emperor is not wearing clothes. In order to hide that, they are doing these smoke screens with these increased subsidies.
Now, let's look at the subsidies that have really gotten a lot of attention, these ObamaCare subsidies that we have been talking about that the Democrats brought in response to COVID. These are subsidies to folks who are on the individual market.
It is important to note that the individual market is a small percentage of the insureds. This is not the entire market. This is not a small group. This is not a large group. This is a small percentage of folks who are on the individual marketplace, who get their health insurance through healthcare.gov or through one of the exchanges. It is a very small part.
When the Democrats first put this, it was a reaction to the chaos during COVID, and it was, by their intent and by their architecture, a temporary solution for a temporary problem. So it was designed to expire. It had a sunset.
Then, when it was coming up to a sunset, when the Democrats still had control and had the ability to make this permanent, they still put an expiration date on it. These enhanced premium tax credits, or these ObamaCare credits, were designed to expire at the end of this year. Essentially, January 1 is when they were designed to expire.
It is entirely policy brought by the Democrats. This was not Republican policy, it was a smokescreen. There are estimates it will cost between $300 and $400 billion to pay for it over the next
Folks are starting to talk about whether prices are going to go up or go down or what these subsidies will do. Let's talk about that for a second. These subsidies are a very small part of the increases that we are seeing in premiums because of what I have already talked about. It is because of rising costs of healthcare and because of rising costs of health insurance that are due to those healthcare increases as well as that adverse selection.
Let me just put this small percentage in perspective. In Montana, we have a number of payers, a number of insurance companies. The one with the largest increase on the individual market was about 25 percent. It is a high number, I agree, but that 25 percent was a single digit amount. About 9 percent of that, was attributed to the enhanced premium tax credits, the ObamaCare credits. Even without that, the prices are going up. Independent of these ObamaCare credits that we are discussing, it is going up in the small group, the large group, and it is going up in every other part of insurance.
That part without the enhanced premiums, as I said, that delta between 25 and 9, let's say that is 16 percent, everybody else is still seeing that. They are still seeing that increase.
One of the smallest increases we saw from our major payers was about 10, a little bit over 10 percent, and about 3 or 4 percent of that was attributed to the ObamaCare premiums.
The reason I am bringing this up is that it is a very small percentage of these overall costs. One thing that I want to point out is that if these tax credits are allowed to expire on the 31st, premiums are going up. If we extend them, premiums are going up. It is happening either way.
Just one thing I want to end on so that people understand how this process works. If this body decides to extend those premiums, let's say it is for 2 years or 3 years, an arbitrary amount, then what happens?
The way that insurance rates are filed is they go to the States, the payers, the insurance companies bring them to the States. They file, they are approved, they get filed with CMS, with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, and then the open enrollment period starts, which is usually mid-November to mid-December.
Mr. Speaker, during that open enrollment period is when you buy your policies for the following year. We just closed that open enrollment period a couple of weeks ago for the 2026 policy years. Those rates are already baked in. If we were to extend those credits, the rates are already baked in.
Unless we go to extraordinary measures of allowing the payers to, once again, refile their rates and then have another open enrollment period, which I guess would be March or April by the time we got all that through, then, what do we with that?
Do we make those rates ex post facto? Do we have them go back to the beginning of the year? Or do you allow it to go through its normal cycle, in which case those rates affect the 2027 year.
The point I am making is that by extending those ObamaCare subsidies, we are not affecting the 2026 rates without going to extraordinary measures to unroll everything that has already happened.
What will happen is those insurance companies that filed higher rates with the assumption of those premium tax credits staying in will get the benefit of having a higher rate plus having that tax credit.
Going back to how I started this, this fraud was put on to the American people to hide the taxes so that the American people weren't taxed directly. They taxed the insurance companies that are getting these tax credits to change those rates for the people. This is not going to affect what is happening right now without extraordinary measures.
In closing, what we need to do, and I thank the gentleman from Florida for yielding, we need to start looking at alternatives on what are the core drivers of the costs of health insurance.
How do we rate health insurance so that younger, healthier people are still willing to pay for it so we have spread risk there?
What are the things that we can look at for driving costs down to stopping this endless cycle of adverse selection so that people can actually, as was promised on this big fraud perpetrated on the American people, have the doctor they want, the plan they want, and have their rates going down?
This ObamaCare premium debacle is not the answer, but we do need to get to work and figure out how we can get to the root causes of these rising prices. That is because, as I said, this is either going to collapse under its own weight or we are going to be forced to write an unlimited check to the Federal Government which many of my colleagues and I are unwilling to do.
Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his remarks. We appreciate his expertise and understanding on these issues as we take it on toward the future.
I want to read one comment before I call up the Congressman from Colorado.
This is from The Washington Post, which may be the most liberal major newspaper in America.
Their comments were simply: ``Many honest people will feel the squeeze next year, but any serious effort to extend ObamaCare subsidies would need to include lower income caps, require some out-of-pocket premiums and impose additional anti-fraud protections.''
The Washington Post said this. They recognize the reality that this has been a broken system that has been covered up for years at the expense of other taxpayers and the overall cost of healthcare. That is why we are having the discussion today.
Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Crank). I thank him for joining this conversation, and we look forward to his comments.
Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Florida for yielding me time.
Mr. Speaker, we heard so much from the gentleman from Montana who knows a lot about health insurance.
Healthcare is more than these enhanced premium tax credits. The Democrats have tried to make it about enhanced premium tax credits, but healthcare is more than that.
As the gentleman from Montana pointed out, enhanced premium tax credits would cover 7 percent of the American people. That is what we are talking about with their solution. It would be 7 percent.
Even if we were to fix that 7 percent, what would the fix mean?
Let's talk about who these people are.
These are folks in the enhanced premium tax credit who make, for a family of four, over $128,000 a year. That is what we are talking about. We are not talking about people who are making 40 or 30 or $50,000. Those tax credits continue under this broken, failed Affordable Care Act system. Those continue.
What my friends over here want to do is pull money out of our pockets and give it to people who are making for a family of four over $128,000 a year.
Is that their solution for 7 percent of the people?
That doesn't make sense. That is what it would do.
What effect would it have?
It would reduce premiums by 5 percent for 7 percent of the population all making over $128,000 for a family of four. That doesn't sound like much of a solution to me because it is not a solution.
The solution is free market reforms.
The fact of the matter is that the enhanced premium tax credit is a Band-aid on the gaping wound of ObamaCare. It is a Band-aid on the gaping wound of the Affordable Care Act.
The left loves to mislabel things. We know that they called the spending package that they passed 4\1/2\, 4 years ago the Inflation Reduction Act. What did it lead to? It led to 22 percent inflation. In 1 year, 9 percent inflation. We are still dealing with the effects of their misnamed Inflation Reduction Act.
They called this the Affordable Care Act, and it has been nothing of the sort. It is anything but the Affordable Care Act.
My friends on the other side of this aisle created this mess. No one over on this side, not one person who is here serving in this body on this side of the aisle, voted for our current healthcare system--not one voted for the Affordable Care Act.
Those on the other side of the aisle who did vote for it promised a few things. What did they promise? Lower premiums. Where are the lower premiums? This is the ObamaCare system that we are living under right now. They promised lower premiums. We are not getting those.
They promised better healthcare. Are we getting better healthcare? I don't think most Americans believe that we are.
They promised that if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. Sure, if your doctor takes the insurance that they force you into.
We are currently living under ObamaCare, under the Affordable Care Act, so if you don't like our healthcare system, news flash, you don't like ObamaCare, you don't like the Affordable Care Act.
The fact of the matter is that this law was written behind closed doors in a backroom deal here in this building and down at the Obama White House with and by insurance companies. There you go, with and by insurance companies. That is a fact.
The scam is this: The scam is that the money is taken from average Americans and sent as a subsidy not to other Americans, but to big insurance companies. That is the scam. That is the scam. The profits of these big insurance companies are at an all-time high. UnitedHealthcare profits are up 1,200 percent under their plan. I get lectured all the time that we are the ones for big business, the ones cutting the deals. They are the ones that cut the deal with the insurance companies, and they put it to the American people when they did.
Those same insurance companies are denying the claims of the very same taxpayers who pay taxes to subsidize their profits. What a scam, a government-sponsored scam.
Under the ACA, the government colluded with insurance companies to ensure customers for themselves, for the insurance companies, and to profit from subsidies provided by the government.
Government intervention does not work in healthcare. In Medicare and Medicaid, the government sets reimbursement rates that underpay doctors and cause access issues.
Very quickly, what are the solutions?
We are $36, $37 trillion in debt. We have to fix this system. We can't throw money at the problem. We can't just continue to throw more money. We have to fix a broken system.
How do we fix that? We need long-term solutions for healthcare. What are the real solutions? There are lots of them. I don't have time to go through every one individually today, but the bottom line is that we need to get the government out of dictating healthcare to the American people. We need to return to a patient-centered, market-driven solution in healthcare that doesn't pick big insurance companies over the American people. The American people should have a choice about who they see and who they pay for their insurance.
That is the solution. It isn't this scam. It isn't this election-year gimmick that some are trying to make it out to be. It isn't the solution that fixes a 5 percent fix for 7 percent of the population. It is real, honest healthcare reform for all the American people.
Mr. Speaker, I thank Congressman Haridopolos for hosting this Special Order hour on one of the critical issues that we face as a nation and have faced for the better part of 20 years now.
I am referring, of course, to ObamaCare, a deceptively named bill, the Affordable Care Act, which has, of course, been a disaster for Americans all over the country.
Before it was passed, Democrats essentially allowed big insurance companies and Federal bureaucrats to craft an extremely regulated patchwork of rules and cloudy regulations to enrich themselves at the expense of the American patient and American physician.
They then jammed it through Congress without a single Republican vote, ushering in a new era of high costs, restricted access, and lower quality healthcare.
As is the case far too often, this law is now harming precisely the groups of people it was designed to assist.
At its core, ObamaCare is a redistributionist program that empowers a public and private bureaucracy rather than patients and physicians.
In various medical fields that are not part of the ObamaCare web, the harmful effects of its policy have not been seen since the law's passage. For example, over the past decade, the cost of outpatient services rose between 80 and 100 percent on average. Prescription drugs are up, at times, 200 percent.
Meanwhile, as a counter example, the cost of LASIK surgery, which is not covered under the ObamaCare policy or subjected to its onerous regulatory framework, has decreased by 30 percent over the same time. Free from bureaucratic suppression, more providers have entered the LASIK market, and innovations like bladeless lasers have made operations safer, more efficient, and more available.
Another example: Cash-pay diagnostic imaging is often 75 percent cheaper than the ObamaCare-approved MRIs. Direct primary care providers offering wholesale labs can be, at times, 15 times cheaper than doctors who are required to fill out government-mandated paperwork.
The examples could continue on and on. Sadly, ObamaCare has succeeded in blocking free market innovations from reaching the broader American healthcare system. Rather than reform the broken system that they designed, the Democrats are committed to throwing more money at the problem, literally subsidizing a framework that has elevated costs so much that they are even willing to subsidize households earning $600,000 per year.
It is time to reintroduce competition into healthcare by removing handouts to corporate titans. We must cut the layers of red tape that hurt patients and providers. We must build a commonsense system that enables the patient to have choices, which will, of course, bring about more quality care and increased access. In a very basic sense, we should not make healthcare a DMV-type experience.
I thank Congressman Haridopolos again for holding this Special Order.
Mr. Speaker, I appreciate Mr. Haridopolos' leadership on this issue and organizing this Special Order, inviting all of us freshmen and a few other nonfreshmen here to talk about an issue that is so important to our country and to all of our constituents.
Mr. Speaker, our healthcare system is broken, and my constituents in North Dakota know it.
The law that was supposed to make things better, the Affordable Care Act, has definitely not lived up to its name. If you like your plan, you can keep it, they promised. A typical family will save $2,500 a year, they assured. The ACA will help bring down healthcare costs and even reduce the deficit, they claimed. Well, none of that is true.
Here we are, fixing the ObamaCare mess Democrats created 15 years ago. Families today are paying higher premiums, facing fewer choices, and watching Washington throw money at a problem that needs to be fixed immediately.
Yet, somehow, my colleagues on the other side of the aisle continue to paint this as a problem that Republicans created.
The reality is, Democrats passed ObamaCare without a single Republican vote, not one. They also set the enhanced premium tax credits to expire this month. Ask them why. They had the votes. They could have extended this. They could have made it permanent, but they didn't. They set the expiration date for this month. This was completely their doing.
The COVID-era enhanced premium tax credits expanded eligibility far beyond the ACA's original design, including households earning well into six figures. In North Dakota, that means a family of four earning over $125,000 a year. Making those temporary subsidies permanent would cost taxpayers $350 billion over 10 years. For all that money, it still won't fix the problem.
Since the enhanced subsidies were enacted, premiums have increased 31 percent. These subsidies don't show up in people's wallets. They go straight to the insurance companies with no incentive to lower prices or improve care. Even worse, massive fraud plagues the marketplace.
A recent Joint Economic Committee study found roughly 35 percent of marketplace enrollees are now considered phantom enrollees. These are people who exist on paper but generate zero medical claims. The chart on my right shows a massive growth of these types of claims, all the way up to almost 11 million of those types in existence today.
Regardless of whether they have a single claim in a year, insurance companies still get paid anyway, while working families pay more and more for their premiums.
Democrats call that affordable. North Dakotans sure don't. That is why Republicans offered a different path last night, one that focuses on patients, affordability, and real competition, not endless subsidies.
The Lower Health Care Premiums for All Americans Act takes practical steps to lower costs and expand options. It creates cost-sharing reductions that will actually stabilize the market. These will reduce marketplace premiums by 11 percent after the first year of implementation. That is nearly twice as much as the impact of extending the Democrats' credits.
Our plan also cracks down on pharmacy benefit managers, the middlemen who drive up drug prices. Our plan requires transparency so employers and workers can finally see where their prescription dollars are going.
It also expands association health plans, allowing small businesses and self-employed workers to band together and increase competition. This could lower premiums by as much as 30 percent. Our plan also protects employer-sponsored insurance and strengthens flexible tax- advantaged options like CHOICE arrangements.
These reforms give workers control over their coverage dollars and lets employers offer benefits for the first time.
Most importantly, this is just the beginning. We have many more policy reforms coming. Republicans' vision for healthcare is putting patients, not insurance companies, in control, with greater access, more choices, lower costs, and good quality care.
These are commonsense reforms. It is past time we move beyond temporary patches and tackle the problem head-on and fix what is broken.
Mr. Speaker, recent polls show that the top issue on the minds of Americans today is that of affordability. Whether food, education, childcare, energy, or healthcare, rising prices are resulting in more and more Americans feeling less secure about their economic well-being.
Indeed, prices have been going up. Under President Biden, inflation hit 9 percent in June 2022. Cumulatively over the Biden Presidency, inflation is up 21.2 percent.
Things have improved since President Trump and Republicans assumed office in January. Energy prices are down by 6.3 percent. Inflation is moderated, but with the exception of energy, we have not had deflation. Prices are higher than we would like them to be.
Nowhere is the issue of affordability more acute than in healthcare. We must address America's healthcare affordability crisis. As a physician, I will tell you, though, the first step in solving any medical problem is getting the correct diagnosis. If you do not know what the problem is, you will not formulate the right treatment. You may make the patient worse.
That is what has been going on.
What is the problem, then? Our problem is that Big Government's anti- free market, anticompetitive, and anti-consumer policies have made our healthcare system more and more expensive by the year.
This has been a problem for a long time, but it was made much worse after the passage of ObamaCare in 2010.
How did ObamaCare, the unaffordable care act, make healthcare more expensive? Quite simply, by removing what market forces there were in our system and expanding the role of government. The unaffordable care act literally outlawed the private insurance market.
Remember Barack Obama saying that if you like your plan, you can keep it. They lied. They outlawed your plan. What were the results?
The ostensible rationale for the unaffordable care act was to get more people insured, but we know that, in many cases, workers lost their private insurance and have been, if you will, dumped by their employers onto Medicaid.
The Foundation for Government Accountability has estimated that if non-Medicaid expansion States all expanded and added able-bodied, working-age adults to their Medicaid programs, an additional 3.6 million Americans would lose their private health insurance.
Similarly, enhanced COVID-era ObamaCare credits--remember, that is what we are talking about today--crowded out employer-based insurance.
According to the Paragon Institute and the Congressional Budget Office, extending the COVID credits would reduce employer-based coverage by roughly 4 million people.
In addition to crowding out employer plans, The Wall Street Journal's Allysia Finley recently highlighted that the ACA and its subsidies even led many Democrat-run cities, including Chicago and Detroit, to offload public-sector retiree healthcare costs onto ObamaCare. These cities moved their retirees onto ACA exchanges, eliminating their unfunded healthcare liability. Finley correctly argues that COVID credits make this dumping of public-sector retirees' healthcare obligations onto the exchanges even more likely, as few governments have set aside, especially in blue States and cities, the money to pay their retirees' future healthcare costs. Through ObamaCare, you are paying for the financial irresponsibility of some of our biggest city governments, blue cities especially.
The unaffordable care act has resulted in skyrocketing health insurance premiums. In 2014, the first year that subsidized ACA marketplaces were in effect, premiums increased 47 percent. That is right. They increased by 47 percent in 1 year. Over the next decade, premiums increased another 96 percent.
The only reason that this is not more obvious to Americans today is that the healthcare consumer is not only paying the premiums, but the taxpayer is paying extensive subsidies, accounting for 90.3 percent of the increased premiums.
Healthcare affordability is critical. Therefore, we need to look at the issue that has received a lot of attention these days, the expiration of the COVID-era enhanced ObamaCare credits. The expiration date was passed by congressional Democrats as part of the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act without a single Republican vote.
Mr. Speaker, as mentioned, this scheme known as ObamaCare exchanges resulted in skyrocketing insurance costs. At the same time, we need to address some false assertions about what the expiration of these enhanced super subsidies would mean.
First, the vast majority of ObamaCare subsidies are not expiring at all. What is at issue are these temporary COVID-era subsidies. Even if these enhanced COVID super subsidies were to expire, the Federal Government and the taxpayers will still cover 78 percent of the premiums, compared to roughly 88 percent right now. That is a relatively small change, nowhere near doubling.
In fact, if the COVID subsidies are allowed to expire, only 4.3 percent of the projected premium increase would be attributable to that change. Again, that is less than 5 percent of the increase. Here is the key point the other side does not want to talk about. ObamaCare premiums are going up regardless, even if the COVID credits are extended.
ObamaCare premiums are expected to rise about 18 percent in 2026, driven by higher medical costs, labor shortages, economic uncertainty, inflation, and other conditions. These increases are structural. They have nothing to do with the expiring subsidies.
What Democrats are doing is conflating premiums with out-of-pocket costs. Premiums are not doubling, and out-of-pocket costs are rising only because the expiration of these enhanced subsidies is exposing a deeper truth that the unaffordable care act is, for many families, anything but affordable.
According to CMS, the projected average premium after tax credits for the lowest-cost plan, should the COVID subsidies expire, is $50 per month. That is about $20 less than they were in 2020.
In the year 2026, most enrollees on HealthCare.gov will have access to plans priced at or below $50 per month. To put that into perspective, compared to the years prior to the COVID pandemic, marketplace enrollees this year will have access on average to lower- plan premiums and more choices.
This debate isn't just about premiums. It is also about expanded eligibility and widespread abuse. The COVID expansion dramatically broadened eligibility far beyond the middle-class and lower middle- class families and significantly increased the subsidies.
Under this system, households earning $500,000 a year or more can qualify for subsidies. In 2024, nearly 42 percent of the enrollees, on the other hand, paid nothing at all. These subsidies don't go to individuals. They go directly to insurance companies.
That is why many Americans see these enhanced COVID subsidies for what they really are: Welfare checks to large healthcare corporations. Worse still, the system incentivizes fraud. People are encouraged to misreport their income in order to qualify for larger subsidies and zero-dollar plans. As a result, insurance companies collect an estimated $35 billion in taxpayer subsidies for phantom enrollees.
An estimated 6.4 million individuals were improperly enrolled in ObamaCare in 2025, often fraudulently taken off their private insurance plans to do so, costing taxpayers $27 billion. Among households claiming incomes between 100 and 150 percent of the Federal poverty level, roughly 62 percent were not actually eligible. It gets worse.
In 2024, insurance companies received at least $35 billion in subsidies for about 12 million marketplace enrollees who made not a single medical claim--not a single checkup, not a single prescription.
About 40 percent of the people fully subsidized under the COVID credits never used their coverage at all, often because they didn't know that they were enrolled or they didn't even exist. One Social Security number, according to the Government Accountability Office, was used to purchase health insurance 125 times. That is massive fraud.
When fraud estimates from the exchange subsidies alone range into the tens of billions of dollars, it is not unreasonable--no, it is responsible--to ask people to contribute something. Even a small copay insurance payment per month, $10 or $20 per month, promotes personal responsibility, discourages fraud, and helps ensure that the system serves the people who really need it, not those gaming it and not the corporations cashing the check.
That is what this debate is about. It is about facts, accountability, sustainability, and making coverage more affordable for all Americans. It is not the fear-mongering of my Democrat colleagues.
Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Moore), the Representative of the 14th District. He is the former speaker of the house of North Carolina and my current colleague on the Financial Services Committee.
Mr. Speaker, before giving my remarks about the Affordable Care Act, I want to mention a couple of things.
Mr. Speaker, it is with a heavy heart that I mention on the House floor the tragic passing of Greg Biffle, his wife, and two children in an airplane crash that happened just a few hours ago in North Carolina. On behalf of this body and all North Carolinians, I want to express my condolences to this wonderful family on this terrible tragedy. They will be in the thoughts and prayers of so many around the Nation.
Mr. Speaker, I want to let this body know about the passing of a great leader in our State, former Governor Jim Hunt, who passed away today. The news came out a little bit ago from his daughter who currently is our State's Lieutenant Governor.
He was a great man and a great leader in North Carolina. He loved and cared a lot about public education in our great State. He was a man I came to know during my time as speaker of the statehouse and he was someone who loved his State.
Our thoughts and prayers and condolences are with his widow and with his family, particularly as we go into this Christmas season.
Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Haridopolos) affording some time to not only myself but to a number of our colleagues today to talk about the legacy of ObamaCare that we find ourselves inheriting here in this Congress.
It is a program that passed some 15 years ago before I believe any of the Members who have spoken so far today were even serving in this body. Here we are in a situation where we have to try to clean up this mess. Why would I say it is a mess?
Mr. Speaker, I can think back to a time before ObamaCare, back before this passed. Healthcare was less expensive. Healthcare was more accessible. A person could go out and afford to buy health insurance. Prescription medications were more affordable. In fact, when I talked to colleagues, when I talked to businessowners, and when I talked to folks, it was easier to be able to get good health insurance.
ObamaCare passes. What happens? We see healthcare costs spike. We see prescription drug costs go out of control. We see total inefficiencies in the system. We see a lot of wasted money. We see these phantom insured folks. These people aren't really insured, but insurance companies are receiving billions of dollars every year for coverage that simply does not exist.
Look at the premiums. Look at a lot of the sticker shock that a lot of Americans are getting right now during this time of year, as we are in the Christmas season, where they are told, they will have to pay more. They need to understand ObamaCare is what has caused all of this mess.
When we move away from a free-market system where we are allowed to have greater efficiency, when we have a system that strives for cost containment but, at the same time, great health outcomes, it works better.
Today, we hear stories of denials and delays, everything on insurance, and it costs more. That, my friends, is unfortunately the legacy of ObamaCare. It is why this body is not going to continue to throw good money after bad. It is an investment that is not paying off economically, and it is an investment that is not paying off for the health of Americans around this country.
On the planned premiums, the actual cost, the premium cost, ObamaCare premiums have risen two times faster than employer plans.
We have a chart. We probably can't see it on TV. There is a chart where we can see this thing spiking up right there out of control. Those are the resulting ObamaCare premium increases that are happening.
This is not acceptable, and it is not appropriate to keep throwing money after it.
These surging premiums are also driving a higher Federal subsidy cost. So what do we mean? The ACA subsidy grew from $18 billion in 2014 to $92 billion in 2023. Now, how many people out there think that they have actually gotten better healthcare in that period of time? I don't think many are going to speak up and say that they are.
Get this. I have talked about it going from $18 billion to $92 billion. This year alone, in 2025, costs are projected to reach $138 billion. Again, it just keeps going up.
The only thing my friends on the other side of the aisle know to do is to keep throwing money at it--keep throwing money at it; nothing to try to improve efficiency, nothing to try to improve coverage, nothing to try to improve the system, nothing but wasting more and more money in a system that is not working.
The COVID extension is what a lot of talk has been about. There was a temporary COVID extension that, when Democrats were in charge, they solely passed, right? They passed to put that in place. The Biden administration put that in with an expiration date.
Well, they knew it could not continue. They knew it wouldn't sustain. I think, frankly, they knew it wasn't going to work.
Get this. Let's say we went along with extending that. It would cost right now $335 billion over 10 years, which is going to, again, only put the budget more out of balance, is going to affect our national debt, and it is simply not sustainable.
The other thing that we looked at earlier was what is called the zero-claim enrollment. That is where folks really aren't even assured. I think they are called phantom insured. It is not real, but it is money being paid to insurance companies. These zero-claim enrollments have more than tripled--more than tripled--rising from 3 to 4 million in 2021 to nearly 12 million in 2024.
Get this. In 2024, about 35 percent of the marketplace enrollees had zero claims, up from 20 percent before the subsidy expansions. At the same time, these insurers received billions in taxpayer subsidies for enrollees who received no care, including--this is real numbers--$21 billion in 2023 alone.
To those folks watching, those folks who are genuinely concerned about improving access to healthcare and affordability, know that Republicans are serious about this. We passed legislation this week to deal with that--to look at some marketplace reforms, to look at association health plans, to look at PBM reform and transparency, and to do things to drive those costs down and to make healthcare more accessible.
Also, look at the bill we put in a few weeks ago to put $50 billion into rural healthcare that will help all of America. It will help my State in North Carolina, but it will help all 50 States because there are areas of our country where simply they do not have access to healthcare because of the rural location, distance to hospital, distance to provider, you name it. Republicans are putting those funds in there to make this more available.
Don't believe a lot of the hype on the other side out there of just spend money and spend money on a system that isn't working. Republicans are serious about improving healthcare for all Americans. The bills we have passed this week and the statements we have made are clear to that.
I appreciate Congressman Haridopolos, my good friend from Florida, for doing this.
I have to say, Congressman, you helped them bring attention to this. You did a great job in Florida when you were in the State legislature, the work that you all did, the work to help there and bringing this issue to the forefront here in Congress. Sir, as a colleague, I appreciate what you are doing, and I appreciate the time to speak today.
Mr. Speaker, I rise today in order to commemorate the extraordinary story and mission of one of my neighbors and her family in North Carolina, someone by the name of Olivia Wooten.
Olivia is currently suffering mightily in a battle with ALS. I have watched in admiration as she has remained a constant source of robust encouragement and joy despite her debilitating illness.
Her circumstances have only brightened because of the eternal hope that she has in the Lord, her Savior, Jesus Christ. I spoke to Olivia earlier today, who fearlessly and joyfully awaits entry into eternal life, where `` . . . there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, nor shall there be any more pain. . . . `' as stated in Revelation 21:4. She helped me draft these remarks knowing that they would be heard by all today.
Olivia Wooten's parents, Robin and Elizabeth, met while attending college in Raleigh, North Carolina. Robin attended NC State, and Elizabeth enrolled at Saint Mary's School. They were married shortly after graduating in 1989 and returned to Robin's hometown in Kinston, North Carolina.
Robin and Elizabeth passed the years enjoying all that makes east North Carolina so special. They, with their loved ones, enjoyed hunting, fishing, time at the Crystal Coast, and a community that is more of a family than a neighborhood.
In the greatest blessings of all, Robin and Elizabeth became parents to two girls, Olivia in 1992 and Carrington in 1995.
In 2016, Robin was tragically diagnosed with ALS. Up to that point, Robin's faith in the Lord had been more ceremonial. While his wife, Elizabeth, regularly attended neighborhood Bible studies and prayer groups for years, Robin had not.
However, that fully changed as Robin came to grips with his diagnosis. Rather than indulging in fear or resentment of assured physical suffering here on Earth, Robin encouraged anyone he met to look up and to consider Christ. He pushed others to focus on eternity and to rely on the Lord rather than the fleeting things of this Earth. Robin helped others grow in their faith until entering his Heavenly home 1 year after his diagnosis.
Tragically, in July of 2023, Robin's daughter, Olivia, would herself be diagnosed with ALS. Since that time, Olivia has surpassed every expectation in how long and how well she has fought this vicious disease. Yes, while she has weakened, she remains buoyant and inexplicably joyful in a manner that can only be called inspirational and miraculous.
It was my honor and my privilege to speak with Olivia today. In spite of her physical limitations and her suffering, which are unbelievably real, she will likely not walk unassisted again. She cannot go out with friends today. Absent a miracle, she will no longer be able to travel far from home. Absent a miracle, she will likely never meet her nephew, who will likely be born in the next few weeks.
Despite this very real suffering and the limitations that she is currently experiencing, her joy and her hope remain palpable. Olivia knows that her earthly departure is not the end but, rather, her new beginning in Heaven is with her Savior, Jesus Christ.
When I asked her what she wanted me to share with all of us, she simply requested the following for our consideration. She did not bring up policy. She did not bring up new types of ideas for Washington, D.C.
She simply said the following: ``This Earth is fallen, and it offers afflictions for which there is no remedy other than the Almighty. My faith in Jesus has become more vibrant and real than anything I could have ever imagined. To anyone who hears this message, if you do not know Christ, I urge you to consider Him. Where this Earth offers temporary solutions, it cannot and it will not offer durable and lasting ones. Only Christ can offer real peace, real healing, real rest, and an eternal home.''
Olivia closed our conversation with a verse, which she aptly described as her life verse. It is Romans 8:28, and it simply states: ``And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.''
In Olivia's testimony, I can see firsthand and I have seen firsthand the truth of this passage. As we enter the week of Christmas, when we celebrate the birth of Christ, I stand in awe and in gratitude for Olivia and her family's witness and example, and I urge each person who hears this to consider her Savior, the Savior of the world, Jesus Christ.
Mr. Speaker, I thank Congressman Knott, Congressman Crank, Congressman Downing, Congressman Onder, Congresswoman Fedorchak, and also Congressman Moore for their comments today about the broken ObamaCare system.
It is simply that; it is broken. It is the reason why they have been subsidizing a broken system for a long time, at the expense of so many Americans and so many potential innovations, as well.
As this issue has been talked about very well today, I just want to remind people of where we were versus where we are. The Democrats had the opportunity to make this a permanent plan. They did not have the votes or the will
This year, when we were passing the big, beautiful bill back in July, we had the opportunity again to reduce costs for this broken system. The Republicans put forth in this body a CSR. What happened here? They used the Byrd rule in the United States Senate to fight what would have reduced rates by 11 percent.
Let's break away from this discussion about affordability. Let's talk about reality. This is purely politics. Their votes have been shown throughout the year. They care nothing about results. They care everything about politics.
Candidly, maybe Republicans aren't as good at politics as the Democrats, but we are pushing policies that work and are based in reality. That is what this push has been about today, laying out the facts for the American public to say this system is untenable, and it only undercuts what could be the best system in the world.
There has been so much discussion about the 22 to 24 million people on ObamaCare. We all found out today that half of them might be phantom enrollees. We found out that the future is not bright when you look at the contrast of what it is doing to the remainder of the people who are paying for their own healthcare system.
There are 165 million people who have employer-based systems that they most likely contribute to or pay out of their own pocket. They are paying $1,500 to $2,000 a month, and they have to subsidize a broken system on top of it and crowd out a medical system in the process.
All we are asking from the other side is to say let's start doing some commonsense things. The number one thing I would like to see us do is simply do income verification so that those people who pay full freight and subsidize the system know that the people who are being helped are actually people truly in need who qualify for a program, instead of giving it away.
It is simple identification checks, just like we have asked the Democrats to do on things like voting, just like we have asked the Democrats to do on simple ideas to make things work again, so that when you pay your taxes, which are quite exorbitant, in my opinion, people know they are actually going to help people.
Mr. Speaker, I appreciate your indulgence this afternoon as we get ready to celebrate the holiday season.
Mr. Speaker, the California State auditor, the nonpartisan official auditor for the State, has just released a report that updates its assessment of the State's high-risk agencies.
The contents of this report are truly stunning--not really that stunning, actually, for those of us who have experienced the California State government at work. Even given our very low expectations, what the auditor has just reported is truly troubling.
This comes, by the way, as our State's Governor, Gavin Newsom, has recently boasted that California is the original DOGE. Newsom held out California government as a model of efficient, responsive, and accountable government.
Let's juxtapose that very notable statement, very surprising statement, with the clear-eyed fact findings of the State auditor. In this new report, which is issued annually, the auditor identifies high- risk State agencies. What does that mean? It means they pose a substantial risk of serious detriment to the State or its residents. To be considered high risk, an agency must not only exhibit serious waste, fraud, abuse, or mismanagement but must also have failed to take adequate corrective action.
In this new report, the auditor has identified eight separate California agencies as high risk. Four of those eight have joined the club, this dubious distinction, during the Newsom administration, including the newly added Department of Social Services this year.
Among the findings as to why these various agencies are considered high risk are that massive payment errors in our CalFresh program could now cost the State $2.5 billion in Federal funds.
With Medi-Cal eligibility, ongoing problems in determining who is eligible, continuing to make payments to people who don't meet the income threshold, or who have left the State entirely, is also putting billions of dollars at risk.
Continued fraud and overpayment with our unemployment insurance benefits continue to cost the State billions of dollars. This is after the massive $32 billion fraud in unemployment benefits during the COVID years.
Incredibly, the State has missed six straight deadlines for its annual comprehensive financial report, which puts in jeopardy our credit rating, as well as Federal funding.
The auditor's report documents IT projects that languish for months, for years, as antiquated systems beleaguer our bureaucracy, this despite Silicon Valley being a stone's throw away.
You have State entities that continue to fall short of minimum standards for information security and cybersecurity, putting our State, data, and privacy at risk.
Alarmingly, it is more than just cybersecurity. It is also the security of our physical infrastructure. For instance, the auditor finds that there are 49 dams that pose an extremely high hazard to life and property, and it is getting worse. In just the last 2 years, the number of dams rated either poor or unsatisfactory has increased by 73 percent.
The quality of government service is also unacceptably low. With the EDD, for example, not only do we have continuing, ongoing massive fraud and overpayments, but the folks who actually deserve to get paid benefits have a heck of a time getting the benefits they are entitled to.
The auditor found that, on average, the typical claimant has to call the EDD two to five times per week just to get assistance. The EDD has consistently failed to meet Federal benchmarks for timely payments to those who are actually deserving of benefits, whereas those who are committing fraud against the system seem to have no trouble getting their hands on as much money as they would like.
There are other examples in this report that just truly boggle the mind. For example, the aforementioned EDD during the COVID-19 years decided to order thousands of mobile devices, 7,224 to be exact--this is cell phones, hotspots--so that employees who aren't going into work can continue to do their jobs. These mobile devices, even after they were no longer being used because the pandemic was over, the State continued to pay for them, for thousands of them. They continued to pay service fees, costing the State millions upon millions of dollars.
Another illustrative example comes from CARB, the California Air Resources Board, that is responsible in many ways for the very high gas prices that the citizens of California have to pay. The report found that there was one particular CARB employee who was paid $171,446 in salary on an annual basis, so a pretty decent salary they are getting paid. Here is the problem: It was for nearly 15 months after the employee had stopped working that they continued to get paid.
On top of all of this, the auditor found rampant nepotism at the Department of General Services and Caltrans when it came to hiring. They would hire their family members. They would hire their friends for these State jobs. They would even find instances where managers gave the candidates the questions, interview questions, in advance in order to help them get the job.
Now, all of this is in addition to the very well-known examples of just mind-boggling fraud and waste that exist in the California government.
We, of course, have the high-speed rail, now estimated to cost $128 billion, which is several times more than initially anticipated, where after nearly 20 years we still haven't seen any track laid.
We have homelessness where there was another State audit that found that the State spent $24 billion, lost track of the money, couldn't tell us where it went, and couldn't tell us if it did any good. Meanwhile, the homeless population in California increased substantially to the point to where half of the unsheltered homeless in this country reside in California.
More recently, we had the 911 system, where taxpayers were charged on their phone bills for years. $650 million was spent to build out a new 911 system, and then the State had to scrap the whole project because the technology doesn't work.
Mr. Speaker, this is absolutely unacceptable. Californians sacrifice so much, paying the highest taxes in the country, and yet our citizens also get the least in return.
I will continue to call for accountability for the agencies and, more importantly, the political leaders in California who refuse to reform our State government in a manner that more appropriately and effectively serves our citizens.
I will also continue to use every tool we have here at the Federal level to insist upon the State giving our taxpayers a higher return on their investment. I will make sure that everyone is aware that when the Governor says the California government is a model of efficiency and responsiveness, nothing could be further from the truth.
Mr. Speaker, they have done it again. I rise today to recognize an extraordinary achievement by the Folsom High School Bulldogs football team, who captured their sixth California State championship with a very impressive 42-28 victory over Cathedral Catholic.
This championship run was defined by resilience, preparation, and leadership, none more evident than in the performance of junior quarterback Brody Rudnicki, who stepped into the spotlight and delivered a truly remarkable performance.
Brody accounted for six total touchdowns, throwing for two scores and rushing for four more while compiling 117 passing yards and 186 rushing yards.
This title marks the second State championship in the last 3 years under the leadership of Head Coach Paul Doherty, whose commitment to excellence has continued to elevate the Folsom football program as one of the premier high school programs in the entire State of California.
The Bulldogs' championship capped off an outstanding 14-1 season, highlighted by a 12-game winning streak that showcased consistency, teamwork, and competitive excellence throughout the year.
Equally impressive is the program's success in preparing student athletes for the future. Seven senior players have committed to continue their football careers at the next level, earning opportunities at some of the Nation's most well-respected institutions and programs, including the United States Military Academy at West Point, Dartmouth College, Brigham Young University, the University of Southern California, Stanford University, the University of Nevada, and Oregon State University. These commitments reflect not only athletic talent but also academic achievement and character.
I had the chance to visit with the team a couple years ago when they won the State championship. When I was in the State legislature, because they won championships back then too, I actually had the chance to recognize the team during a session where they were there in attendance and the coaches were on the floor with us. The team was up in the gallery. That was a lot of fun.
I am sorry they can't be here in the U.S. House, though they are certainly welcome to visit anytime. At the very least, I look forward to seeing all of the players and hardworking coaches in person very soon and extending my congratulations, because this team means so much to the city of Folsom and to our entire community.
Congratulations, once again, to the State champions Folsom High School Bulldogs.
