Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I was unable to be present for votes on May 30th.

Had I been present, I would have voted YEA on Roll Call No. 238, YEA on Roll Call No. 239, and YEA on Roll Call No. 240.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today in support of H.R. 1163, the Protecting Taxpayers and Victims of Unemployment Fraud Act, which addresses the urgent need to safeguard taxpayer dollars from unemployment insurance fraud schemes.

One of our most crucial oversight duties is to ensure the responsible use of taxpayer funds. Recent reports from the White House, GAO, the Department of Labor, and other organizations have exposed the alarming theft of up to $400 billion in taxpayer dollars due to unemployment insurance fraud during the COVID pandemic.

This revelation demands immediate action. What we are trying to accomplish here is to show a plan that is feasible to be able to go after this fraud.

My colleagues on the other side of the aisle talk about wanting to go after fraud, too. These arguments that we are talking about are missing the point. This bill will go after the fraud that took place. We introduced H.R. 1163, and it will help enable the recovery of lost dollars, ensuring that this stolen money is reclaimed.

While fraud has been widespread across this Nation, some States have demonstrated success in minimizing these losses. In Utah, my home State, overpayment due to fraud consisted of less than 1 percent of total benefits disbursed. I am proud of this.

Our leaders in Utah have done an excellent job managing and protecting these resources thanks to the systems and processes implemented by former Governor Herbert, Governor Cox, their administrations, and the Utah State legislature.

The Federal Government must now work to restore public trust. It starts with holding bad actors accountable. This bill will enable that by strengthening the integrity of our systems for the future and encourage States to be proactive rather than reactive.

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to support this fiscally responsible bill.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today in support of the Limit, Save, Grow Act.

Every time I talk about debt, deficit spending, the budget-- anything--I think about my four boys who are 10 years of age and under. I bring it up a lot, and it drives what I do. It gets me out of bed every single day to be working on this. I just can't hear one more time: Well, let's just raise the debt ceiling, and then let's get to work on this.

It is no longer time for that. We cannot accept not using every single opportunity that we have back here in Congress to address this.

I am in my second term in Congress. I have sat on the sidelines, and I have watched us constantly do this over and over again. I want to see something substantive happen here.

That is what we are doing here today, Mr. Speaker. We are trying to do something substantive.

Our debt exceeds $30 trillion. The optimism of our future depends on what we do over the next 10 years.

We have learned that the outcome is not good for empires that overextend themselves like we have done.

America has done this before, and we are at an inflection point. Our debt to GDP is where it was right after World War II, and for the bulk of the 21st century, we were able to get our debt to GDP down.

We have to take action, and we have to do it now.

Let's use this opportunity like we have done over the last 30 or 40 years when there is a debt ceiling increase that comes up. Let's take advantage of this, and let's find a way to reduce our spending. That is the best way to address our debt-to-GDP ratio, and I know everybody in this Chamber understands that.

We have an opportunity. This spring is our moment, again, to stop debt-fueled spending sprees and give our children a fair shot at success and not a mountain of IOUs.

This act saves $4.8 trillion, it grows our economy and our workforce, and I urge my colleagues to support this bill.

Mr. Speaker, had I been present, I would have voted YEA on Roll Call No. 185, and YEA on Roll Call No. 186.

Mr. Speaker, I am grateful for the opportunity to honor the abundant and exceptional life of Mr. Minoru Hamada as he celebrates his 100th birthday. Born in Ogden to Japanese immigrants, Mr. Hamada embodies the best our country has to offer and has made Utah proud.

When much of the nation turned a suspicious eye toward their Japanese American neighbors following the Japanese Empire's attack on Pearl Harbor, Mr. Hamada saw an opportunity to demonstrate his allegiance to the United States. He volunteered for the military, joining with other Japanese Americans to serve as members of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. Many of his fellow soldiers in the 442nd were incarcerated in internment camps created to house Japanese Americans in accordance with President Roosevelt's executive order.

Mr. Hamada and his fellow Japanese American soldiers saw the war as a chance to fight totalitarianism abroad and racial prejudice at home. The 442nd remains the most-decorated unit in U.S. military history for its size and length of service. As a member of the American forces fighting German and Italian fascists for control of the Italian peninsula, Mr. Hamada was wounded in battle. He served in uniform for another two years.

After the war, he married his sweetheart, Martha. They were married for 61 years until she passed in 2007. They delighted in raising two kids and now have two grandchildren and four great grandchildren. Mr. Hamada continued his service to Utah's defense community, making dental prosthetics at Hill Air Force Base and for a local dentist in Layton.

It is through the service and sacrifice of individuals like Mr. Hamada that allow all Americans to live in freedom. His life is a model of courage, selfless-service and altruism that we can all learn from.

I thank Mr. Hamada on behalf of his fellow Utahns and a grateful nation for his service and wish him a very happy 100th birthday.

Mr. Speaker, I hereby remove my name as cosponsor of H.R. 25.

Mr. Speaker, as our country grapples with how to respond to this pressing moment facing women, families, and children, I believe we must strive for a better, more compassionate future.

All Americans want women and their babies to be safe, loved, and empowered, no matter their situation or socioeconomic status.

I believe Americans are capable of seizing this moment and coming together to support those facing tremendous challenges and uncertainty.

We can support critical, comprehensive services for women in need. We can make it easier for working-class families to earn money and raise children, and we can support the rights and dignity of our youngest Americans.

This month, I was elected to serve on the Ways and Means Committee, and I intend to use this position to do better by American families.

We owe our most vulnerable children more effective policies that give them a better runway to achieve their dreams in a broken world.

I am engaging on Title IV-B and IV-E programs to ensure child welfare and foster care programs are as evidence based as MIECHV.

I am engaging on the Connecting Forever Families Act to expedite foster care placements and help child welfare courts adopt new procedures to address the unacceptable delays and backlogs for children waiting for placements in supportive homes.

I will fight for children in foster care who have to spend nights in shelters, government offices, or other inappropriate settings because of our congregate care crisis.

I am shedding light on the unfair audit rates of families who have claimed their adoption tax credit, 70 percent of whom were audited in the most recent available data.

Children are obviously our future and we must work harder to ensure every child has the opportunity and resources to thrive and succeed.

Mr. Speaker, today, we begin the work to reform our government to work better for the American people and not against them.

So what do I mean by that?

The last 2 years Democrats have had control of the White House, House, and Senate, and they have passed and attempted historic spending provisions. In order to do that, you have to raise revenue. This bill became a ploy to leverage the IRS to be able to essentially do that without directly raising taxes. That is what we are talking about here.

I represent thousands of IRS employees. They are some of the best, most hardworking people in my entire district. As I talk to them, they care about two major things: customer service, and that technology needs to be improved. That is what I love about this bill because that keeps that in here, and we actually want to focus our spending to be able to directly support them.

As we put forth this bill, we are sincerely trying to take what all of our constituents have been saying: We need the IRS to have more support on customer service and technology.

That is why I urge everybody to vote ``yes'' on this bill.

Madam Chair, while I cannot support the entirety of the package we are considering today, I am grateful that my bipartisan, bicameral Saline Lake Ecosystems in the Great Basin States Program Act was included in this bill.

This important legislation, which moved through the House Natural Resources Committee with unanimous support, will be the first step in addressing the challenges many Utahns know we are going through right now with the Great Salt Lake and other saline lakes.

Let me say a special thank-you to my friend from California, Congressman Huffman. He and I disagree on many issues, the entirety, almost, of this bill or this approach, but I do appreciate the relationship that we have been able to establish so we can get this to the point where we got it today.

It is very important to my State. My State legislature has been working on this, as well as our Governor. It has been a key aspect.

Let me add one piece about what we are going to be talking about today. The Republican team, led by Mr. Westerman, has exceptional ideas on how to get out ahead of this issue that we are facing with wildfires, and we want to have that voice and have that be implemented more on these issues.

Mr. Chair, I rise today in support of amendment No. 81, which would provide funding for the Modernization Access to Our Public Land Act, otherwise known as the MAPLand Act, which was enacted last April.

I was proud to work with a strong, bipartisan coalition of Members in the House and the Senate to get this bill signed into law, and I appreciate Congresswoman Dingell for working with me on this amendment before us today.

Making public land information more detailed and accessible in the digital age is one of the many reasons why this bill has enjoyed such broad support as it soared through the legislative process.

Adoption of this amendment today will provide the funding needed to modernize and improve the quality of this data so that Americans can more easily recreate on our Federal lands, which will also improve our ability to fund important conservation programs that enhance and protect habitats across this Nation.

This amendment is about helping families spend more time together outside, about improving the way our government works, and about fostering and sharing the joy of the great outdoors.

Mr. Chair, I urge my colleagues to support amendment No. 81.

Madam Speaker, I rise today to honor the life of David Dickson. Utah lost a wonderful father and a man of faith. David was just forty-two years old when he died late last month due to medical complications, and he leaves behind his eight children. As a single father, David devoted his life to ensuring his children could have full and prosperous lives.

Born and raised in Ogden, Utah, David was a man of the community. He graduated from Ogden High School and Weber State University--both of which I also attended. His life took him from Utah to Arizona to Idaho, where his family resides to this day. Despite difficulty in his most recent years, David was resolute in his determination to provide a bright future for his children and family.

David's eight children are between the ages of seven and eighteen years old. He was a devoted father who loved his children deeply. David will be dearly missed, and our community will continue to lift his family up in prayer.

Mr. Speaker, I thank Congressman Hern for organizing this Special Order tonight and for his leadership on the Republican Study Committee.

Mr. Speaker, I frequently reach out to my constituents and conduct polling, if you will, on what are the issues that matter most to them. And at the top of the list, every single time, is debt and deficit. It is constantly debt and deficit. I know that is on the minds of many Americans, but particularly in Utah, where we are so fiscally smart that we have a balanced budget, and we have a rainy day fund. We are still the most philanthropic State in volunteer time and dollars than anywhere else in the Nation. But we care so deeply about being smart fiscally that what I ultimately take from this, and as I look back on the last 20 or so years of our inability to do this, Americans need confidence that their Congress, that their government can actually do something practical and reasonable. And that is what we have here in front of us, is a plan.

Americans need to know that there is a plan to be able to inject fiscal responsibility again into what they have not seen for too long.

Like everywhere in the Nation, Utah families are burdened with painfully inflated prices at the gas pump, grocery store, and more. The average American household is paying hundreds more than they would for the same goods that they purchased just a year ago.

Despite repeated Republican warnings of excessive Federal spending and what it would do to our economy, Democrats have continued to vote for massive spending bills. As a father to four young boys, I know we must provide for the next generation a more stable economic outlook for their financial success. It is why I ran for Congress.

However, achieving a balanced budget after over 20 years of consistent deficit spending is a very tall task. And when I decided to run for Congress and I made this a key part of my platform, I knew it was going to be a very tall task.

On top of increasing Medicare and Social Security spending, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that over the next 10 years interest costs will total $8.1 trillion. The longer we don't address this issue, the larger the hill we must climb. Even so, leaders from both parties have historically come to the table to build solutions, and we must rise to the occasion.

The Republican Study Committee has worked dutifully to chart our path forward. This plan is outlined in the Blueprint to Save America. This roadmap provides a fiscally sound path to balancing our budget in 7 years, protecting our border, bolstering our Nation's defense, expanding workforce opportunities, making the successful Tax Cuts and Jobs Act permanent, and so much more.

This budget is--in the words of Congressman Hern--for all Americans. All Americans--not just Republicans--need a balanced budget. This issue matters to Utahns, which is why I convened a debt and deficit task force in my own district to get their input and have spent countless hours as I have worked with my colleagues to know what exactly we can do going forward.

We must be committed to reversing our economic policies that are hurting Americans and get us on the right track.

Madam Speaker, I thank Representative Arrington for yielding. I am so appreciative that he brought up the night that we broke bread and the excitement that I had. I did, I lit up knowing that there was a real concerted effort to be able to forge a path forward to solve our Nation's biggest problem.

Make no mistake: This is our Nation's biggest problem. This is a national security threat. This is something that affects every single American. I am looking forward, and I owe it to every constituent, to make sure that I am working on solving the problem.

I will not go back every couple years when we run for reelection and complain about how much debt we have. I put the task force together so I could explain where we are at, what the ideal State looks like, what it should look like, what we need to strive for, and what are some near-term recommendations for us to be able to accomplish.

You heard from Representative Cloud. I have a provision that he put forth. I have numerous workforce ideas. We have 11 million jobs. That is a participation rate that would create an enormous amount of revenue if we could get all of those jobs filled.

We have the opportunity ahead of us. There is a strong bipartisan collaboration going on led with your motivation, and I believe in it, and I am willing to work tirelessly because it is our Nation's biggest problem.

Among all my comments today, what I want to make sure that I highlight is that we have to look at the data at what works. We have to look in 2017--didn't solve every problem; we still have a spending issue that Republicans weren't able to address with the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, but it got our taxes on a globally competitive scale. That allowed for us to keep companies and workers here in America, growing the economy, growing that revenue that is needed so badly.

What we did in 2017 was actually empowering Americans. What we have done in 2021--I greatly fear is what President Biden and the administration has focused on--is empowering government. In 2017 we empowered Americans. We empowered ingenuity. We empowered that to drive us forward. And in the last year we have been empowering government. The massive amount of government spending has directly led to the inflation that we are seeing today.

Few things impact the lives of our constituents as directly as the state of our economy. Utahns I know are desperately hurting. Grocery prices are out of whack. Gas prices--I will talk about that--they continue to skyrocket, reaching $5. I filled up for $5, the national average, in Utah, and it is predicted we could be at $6 a gallon in July.

The Biden administration's blatant economic mismanagement has put us on the precipice of a recession. We are seeing the effects of that. The indicators are already there. From the Consumer Price Index to the stock market to confidence indicators. We are seeing a recession come about as we have to raise interest rates to solve the self-inflicted mess that was created a year and a half ago when Democrats put in the American Rescue Plan masqueraded as the COVID bill, suppressed our workforce and rampant inflation. This has been mishandled at every turn.

The administration claimed that inflation posed a small risk and that the effects would be short lived, but Friday's Consumer Price Index report, which stated that the price of goods has increased 8.6 percent in the last 12 months, validated what I have been hearing for months from my constituents, that inflation is hurting us, and it isn't going away.

Due to inflation, the average household pays an additional $460 per month for the same goods and services that they purchased just a year ago at this time.

Last month, we experienced the highest inflation in 40 years, yet again breaking the Biden administration's inflation records.

Republicans sounded the alarm last year when Democrats in Congress rammed through trillions in partisan spending priorities. According to the Congressional Budget Office's ``May 2022 Budget and Economic Outlook,'' over the next 10 years our total deficits will equal $15 trillion with a deficit of $2.3 trillion in 2030 alone.

This isn't free money. Sooner or later, reckless spending like this will force tax increases on hardworking Americans. Inflation is already a tax on hardworking, lower-income Americans that we say we are trying to help, and it does not help. That is an extra $460 a month on average.

To reverse our poor economic outlook, I organized a debt and deficit task force, and I already spoke about that a little bit, but it is with a group of really concerned citizens. These are experts in their field, across industry, a group of people that want to do this because they have fear, they have seen this in their lifetime with stagflation before, and they want to be a part of this and advise me in my role and how I can share that with all of my colleagues in Congress to be able to do four simple things: Grow the economy; save and strengthen vital programs; focus America's spending; and fix Congress' budgeting process. That fourth piece is something that we have to come together on immediately, and I know there is bipartisan support to be able to do that.

This task force will continue to develop a clear vision for how we can best bring Utah's fiscally sound policies to Washington to relieve inflationary pressure on hardworking families. I will continue to share our framework of solutions with my colleagues in Congress.

The United States has a flexible economy with a wealth of natural resources and competitive demographics. We are the envy of the world, and we need to continue to remain the envy of the world.

For the sake of each and every Utah family, we must get our fiscal house in order. Our plan will help do just that. I sincerely thank the gentleman from Texas for the encouragement. As I entered into Congress to find a niche of something that I am so passionate about, I will continue to beat this drum until we make it work.

Moral hazard.

Mr. Speaker, I rise to oppose the previous question so we can immediately consider H.R. 6858, the American Energy Independence from Russia Act.

I am a proud cosponsor of this bill that will strengthen our energy security, bolster our economy, and position ourselves to counter Russian aggression in Ukraine.

This morning, gas near my district office in Ogden, Utah, is $4.30. For the average family driving the average vehicle in Utah, this means that each fill-up will cost over $110. For Utah's hardworking agricultural industry, this means thousands of dollars more will be spent on fuel so they can feed the rest of America.

These skyrocketing prices are unacceptable. I share my constituents' outrage over how the Biden administration's policies have contributed to this painful situation. This is a self-imposed tax on all Americans. For those of us who come from energy producing States, we know we can do better.

It is past time we get back to what we were doing in 2019 when the United States was a net exporter of energy. It is better for our economy and our environment when we produce domestically. In Utah, we understand this because we do this.

Instead of allowing Americans to do their jobs, the Biden administration has shut down new oil and gas leasing. Instead of helping our communities grow, he has asked the oil cartels in the Middle East to pump more oil. Instead of investing in America, he has made us more dependent on energy imports from Russia and other foreign adversaries. We can do better.

Passing the America Energy Independence from Russia Act today will put us on a path toward energy independence. I encourage my colleagues to join me in rejecting the previous question so we can lower prices for all.

Madam Speaker, had I been present, I would have voted YEA on Roll Call No. 75.