To increase the flexibility of the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development with respect to the amount of premiums charged for FHA single family housing mortgage insurance, and for other purposes.

Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 5981) to increase the flexibility of the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development with respect to the amount of premiums charged for FHA single family housing mortgage insurance, and for other purposes.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

We have for these couple of years now had a bipartisan effort that began in the Bush administration and has been continued in the Obama administration--and it's been bipartisan on the Committee of Financial Services--to make sure that the FHA is both an effective and an efficient means for housing finance. Having a reliable way to provide the funding needed for housing finance in its various aspects is important both for the citizens who benefit from it and for the economy.

The FHA had not been in a great shape. We have a package of measures and we have had administrations--and as I say it's been bipartisan on the two administrations in our committee--to improve the FHA's capacity, to increase its capacity, but also to provide that it will be done in a reasonable way.

This House passed earlier this year overwhelmingly, by a bipartisan vote, a comprehensive reform of the FHA. It may shock the Members to know, Mr. Speaker, that the United States Senate has not acted expeditiously on this noncontroversial measure, and there are a couple of pieces of it that cannot wait.

It is my intention--and I want to assure the gentlewoman from West Virginia, the ranking member of the subcommittee who put a lot of good work in this bill and who was responsible for some of its most important provisions and safeguards--that we do not intend to let those die. We will continue to press the Senate for the rest of this bill; and we will also, in accordance with what we have said, have the administrator of the FHA before us to talk about how this is being done.

But what we need to do now is to take the authority we gave the FHA to raise the fees--this is a bill when it had the CBO certification they say doesn't result in any direct spending. In fact, it will save money. It will price the FHA appropriately. People have been worried about the FHA's fiscal solvency. This helps it.

So it's a bill--and I will say finally, it's taken from the larger bill we have passed. We are reenacting today a small piece of a comprehensive bill because while I am still fully committed and I know others are to the comprehensive bill, it's important we do this now. We're about to be without legislative capacity for 6 weeks.

So I urge that the House pass the bill.

I reserve the balance of my time.

Will the gentlewoman yield?

My answer is absolutely, we will have the commissioner. I have to say HUD, the Secretary and the commissioner have been very cooperative, and we will have such a hearing in September.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members have 5 legislative days in which to revise and extend their remarks and include extraneous material with regard to this bill.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I'm rising today in support of this bill, H.R. 5981, and as our chairman said, we have been working diligently, I think, to bring forth solid FHA reform. We passed that bill almost unanimously--I think it was 406-4--probably about a month ago, and so the majority, the large majority of this House is in agreement with a lot of the provisions in that bill.

One of the provisions, as he said, is raising the annual premium on FHA, and I think this is right and proper; and I think it's something we need to do because, as we know and as has been brought forth in our committee, the capital reserve fund has fallen, I believe, dangerously low. And what we're trying to avoid is a situation where we may be asked to bail or at least to help the FHA in some sort of infusion of dollars from the Treasury.

So I wholeheartedly will support this bill, but I do want to reemphasize, as the chairman said, we had a whole host of reforms in our original bill. We cannot forget the other important reforms that were in the original H.R. 5072, and we need to move forward with those after our district work period and recess. We need to move forward with this as expeditiously as we did before we left.

One thing in the short bill we're considering today, it does say that the commissioner has to come before the committee within 270 days. I would like to ask the chairman if we could have a hearing in September on this very topic so that we can see what the status, at least interim status, of the fund is.

I yield to the gentleman.

I thank the chairman for that.

I have no requests for time, and I yield back the balance of my time.

General Leave

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Banking Committee be discharged from further consideration of H.R. 5981, and the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration.

I ask unanimous consent the bill be read a third time and passed, the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table, with no intervening action or debate, and any statement related to the bill be printed in the Record.