[Congressional Record Volume 171, Number 55 (Wednesday, March 26, 2025)]
[House]
[Pages H1290-H1294]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
ADVANCING AMERICA FIRST POLICIES
(Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 3, 2025, Mr. Moore
of Utah was recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority
leader.)
general leave
Mr. MOORE of Utah. 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 the topic of this Special
Order.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Is there objection to the request of the
gentleman from Utah?
There was no objection.
Mr. MOORE of Utah. Mr. Speaker, the last few weeks have been nonstop.
The Trump administration and congressional Republicans have been
advancing legislation and policies that put Americans first.
Just last week President Trump issued an executive order that puts
decisions about our students' education back where it belongs, in the
hands of parents and the States.
As the father of four young boys, I know firsthand that those closest
to educating my children--the teachers, administrators, and special
aides--are the ones who know what they need to get ahead academically
and succeed.
Data shows that our current educational system is failing our
students. Our outcomes are not where they need to be. Reading and math
scores are not where they need to be, et cetera.
We have got plenty to focus on with this particular issue. I am right
in the thick of it. My wife and I are very much in the thick of it. We
could not be more grateful for the support that we have back home with
our teachers. It has been probably one of the most positive things in
our lives as we see those boys progress.
House Republicans are also continuing to assess our education system
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this week by advancing the DETERRENT Act, to protect our higher
education institutions from foreign influence by strengthening gift and
contract disclosure requirements and potentially banning contracts from
foreign entities of concern.
I applaud Michael Baumgartner, a new freshman out of Washington, for
his work on this important bill.
We are also seeking to reverse harmful Biden-era energy regulations
on essential home appliances, including refrigerators and freezers.
Americans deserve the ability to purchase the appliances that best suit
their families' functional and financial needs.
I am grateful to Congresswoman Stephanie Bice and Congressman Craig
Goldman for taking the lead on this issue. I will speak more on these
later.
This week, we are seeing great progress in getting our reconciliation
package to the next step. The efforts seek to serve Americans better by
securing our border, supporting our economy, bolstering domestic energy
production, maintaining a pro-family and pro-growth Tax Code, and much,
much more.
I thank each Member involved in these critical discussions for their
work, and I thank my good friend from California (Mr. LaMalfa) for
being here today to kick us off with his message.
Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from California (Mr. LaMalfa).
{time} 1445
Mr. LaMALFA. Mr. Speaker, I thank Mr. Moore for leading us in these
efforts to help enlighten folks on what we are doing here in Congress
to give people more choice, more options, and have goods be more
reasonably priced and available for them.
As we are coming out of the Biden administration, we saw a lot of
devastation to the economic conditions for families, for homes, for
small businesses, et cetera. In Washington, there seems to be an
obsession with overregulation. It does make life harder for everyday
Americans.
Under the Biden administration, the energy efficiency standards
became weapons of control, driving up costs, limiting choices and
strangling economic growth.
Under the antienergy agenda that President Biden had, American
families felt the pinch every day, every time they turned on a light,
heated their home, powered their appliances, or drove their car. These
so-called efficiency standards didn't lower costs, they shifted the
burden on to local level wallets and bank accounts.
Back in my home State of California we see the impact firsthand, as
these ideas seemed to start there first, between skyrocketing energy
bills and blackouts caused by misguided policies. Public safety power
shutoffs is what they call them. When the wind is blowing and they
haven't trimmed the trees in the forested areas around the power lines
they have to shut off the power rather than doing the work out in the
forests that is needed, but that is another issue.
All of this causes families to have to pay more for less reliability
in their needs.
This is the future that our Democratic colleagues seem to want for
the rest of America, one where energy is not affordable nor dependable.
The conversations keep pushing more toward wind and solar, which are
fine in and of themselves, but they are a tiny part of the grid. They
are not a 24/7 available source of power anyway such as we would get
from nuclear energy, hydroelectric, natural gas, or coal. Those can be
counted on at any time. You can turn them on and use them at any time.
Obviously with the wind or solar you have to wait for the Sun to come
up, the clouds to go away, for it to stop raining, or the wind to
blow--as long as the wind doesn't blow too hard, which in that case,
they have to slow down and shut off the windmill because the wind might
spin it off of its hinges.
Washington bureaucrats are now trying to dictate what kind of
refrigerator you can have, what kind of stove you can use, and even how
long your dishwasher should take to run. Most folks want to see that
the dishwasher runs long enough to get things clean and dry; the same
with your dryer, the same with your clothes washer. Folks want what it
takes to get the job done, not some arbitrary shutdown of when a
bureaucrat decides you have used enough energy.
So really it is just limiting options and you being told what is good
enough for you, rather than what you actually need.
Californians have already been through a lot of this. We have been
forced to live with policies that prioritize these whims of regulators
over the needs of families. Indeed, we have seen the elimination of
many outdoor tools, gas-powered lawn mowers, weed eaters, leaf blowers,
and I will come back to even they are trying to take away generators.
Now, how do you take away a gas- or diesel-powered generator? When
the electricity goes off, and you need something to replace that at
least temporarily, what do you power that generating vehicle with? It
isn't going to be other electricity. Some will argue we need to have
batteries with this power saved up. Okay. Well, there are a lot of
issues with batteries on what it takes to make them, what do you do
with the metals and the materials from a battery that is now no longer
useful and it has to be discarded versus just having something that
works at the flick of a switch or the pull of a cord. You can start
your generator using gasoline or diesel and have great success like you
had for generations. They want to take all these options away from us.
Indeed, they do many things to inconvenience families, small
businesses, and they also strangle our economy. It is amazing to go out
to Tractor Supply or someplace like that, and they have a whole lineup
of those outdoor appliances and they are all electric. It just happened
overnight. I don't know how well they are selling or how well people
like them, but we have to get to a point where we can overcome these
mandates or at least not have them at the Federal level for the other
49 States or whatever amount of States that are not following
California as more and more of them seem to want to get toward with
California's craziness.
Manufacturers are forced to spend millions trying to comply with
these rules changing the dynamics, changing the makeup of how their
equipment works.
Take the electric car industry, for example. I remember back in
California in about 1990, the California Air Resources Board, known as
CARB, pretty famous now, I believe it was 1990 they wanted to mandate
that 10 percent of all vehicles by the year 2000 had to be zero-
emissions vehicles. At the time, all that would mean is, well, you have
to use batteries instead of fuel.
The manufacturers were standing on their heads, the auto
manufacturers, trying to figure out how are we going to meet this
mandate in 10 years for 10 percent production. You ended up with these
basically glorified golf carts with batteries on them using the same
old battery technology we had and finding out that you can't just slap
a license plate on a golf cart and have a practical vehicle for people.
They actually had to relent on that mandate before 2000 occurred, but
you still saw these little golf carts running around dealerships with
license plates on them pretending to be automobiles that people would
buy.
They don't always know by making a mandate--many in those
institutions believe that, well, if we force the mandate, then they
will come up with the technology. Well, battery technology still hasn't
made a quantum leap into the future yet to where it can be such an
incredible source and for long extended periods as really the previous
generation. They have got more experimental materials. They have
different, more exotic materials they are actually using now, but the
battery life hasn't extended that much more than what batteries of 20
years ago were doing.
The more we hamstring the energy production and force businesses to
conform with out-of-touch mandates, the more time businesses have to
waste on developing technology, which really isn't going to go
anywhere. The further refinement of internal combustion engines has so
far achieved amazing results with how clean gasoline and diesel engines
are running these days. They have put the filtration systems and the
fuel additives on there to make a diesel engine run pretty darn clean,
so why don't we allow those manufacturers to continue in the direction
of
[[Page H1292]]
making them even better instead of saying, no, we are going to force
you to stop selling gasoline-powered vehicles in California I think by
2030, and you can't sell any new ones and take away diesel-powered
trucks.
We are going to run into a real reckoning in California when these
mandates kick in and there are no goods to deliver. People expect to
take the raw materials from a mine or from a farm or wherever to the
mill, to the manufacturer and then bring a finished product to the
store shelf and you go pick it up and bring it home. What is taking
away these options, it is going to be a real strangle on the economy of
California and any other State foolish enough to follow what we do out
there.
So it really isn't about saving energy. It seems to be a lot more
about controlling what people do, the ideals of putting people in
stacked communities and these walkable communities, transit communities
instead of letting them live how they would like to or what is needed.
In my rural district I have in northern California, the people that
produce things that other people need whether it is timber, and the
products that come from timber, wood, lumber, paper, et cetera, that
has to come from a rural area. You need rural people living there that
can do that, and they need to have the vehicles and the wherewithal and
the tools to do it. That all seems to be taken away. Instead, they
would rather burn down those forests.
So what kind of choice is that?
People would like to have choices where they can live as well as what
we are talking about previously with energy choices and the energy
using apparatus choices in those.
Americans deserve a little bit better than a government that
prioritizes green ideology over their own quality of life. What you get
right down to is that when these choices are taken away you don't
really get that much greener of a lifestyle because there is an offset
for taking away the power plants that we have. There is an offset of
replacing them with solar panels that cover many, many acres,
especially of prime ag ground like they are trying to do in central
California in some of the richest ag ground anywhere in the world and
products there that so many Americans have come to expect that come
from California with these amazing vegetable crops, fruit crops, nut
crops. Mr. Speaker, 90 to 99 to even 100 percent of those crops are
grown in California, and they want to cover those areas with solar
panels because those areas have had their water rights and their water
taken away because of more green things and more environmental policies
that put the needs of fish over the needs of people.
Instead, we need to go in the direction that puts energy policies
that would actually lower prices, expand the consumer choices, and
create opportunities for American jobs and an American economy and
American prosperity and not have the continued stranglehold we saw
under the Biden administration.
The work we are doing here along with President Trump is extremely
important to bring these things back to the forefront of families
having choices in the basics like their appliances, their automobiles,
their ability to heat or cool their homes and just enjoy their life.
We will continue, and I look forward to being part of the battle here
of pushing back against that out-of-touch agenda, whether you want to
call it the Green New Deal or green ideology and move toward a future
where families and not bureaucrats get to decide what works best for
them.
Mr. MOORE of Utah. Mr. Speaker, I thank my good friend from
California for his message and for his willingness to always be here.
Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Meuser).
Mr. MEUSER. Mr. Speaker, I thank my good friend from Utah for his
leadership.
Mr. Speaker, the United States spends more money per student than any
country in the world, yet among developed nations, we sadly rank near
the bottom in educational outcomes.
Mr. Speaker, 70 percent of eighth graders, 70 percent, Mr. Speaker,
aren't proficient in reading or math according to the latest National
Assessment of Educational Progress.
Believe it or not, and it gives me no joy to say this, there are
reports that say 54 percent of Americans cannot read at a sixth-grade
level. This is not just disappointing; this is indeed a national
failure.
At this point, the Department of Education just doesn't need reform,
it needs a complete overhaul.
In the last 5 years, the Department of Education has spent over $1
trillion with no measurable gains. Under President Biden its spending
surged over 200 percent from $71 billion in 2019 to $268 billion last
year.
At the same time, the Biden administration's love of excessive
regulations imposed an additional 4.2 million hours of paperwork
burdens on schools pulling teachers and administrators away from what
matters most--the students.
President Reagan said back in 1982, and President Trump has recently
echoed, that we need to turn the schools back to the States and to the
local school districts. President Reagan rightly noted that `` . . .
the decline and the quality of public education began when Federal aid
became Federal interference.''
Fortunately, President Trump and Secretary McMahon are committed to
returning control of education back to the States where it belongs and
empowering parents, local leaders, and definitely teachers, but putting
funding and decisionmaking back in the hands of States is just one
piece of the puzzle.
If we truly want to improve student outcomes, we must embrace school
choice and voucher programs, something my home State Governor's office
in Pennsylvania still refuses to do.
School choice States have flourished. Florida, Indiana, Utah, and
Ohio now rank among the best performing K-12 systems in the country.
President Trump recognizes the importance of school choice, issuing an
executive order directing the Department of Education to guide States
on how to use Federal funds for K-12 scholarship programs.
It also instructs the Education Secretary to prioritize school choice
when awarding discretionary grants. That is real leadership focused on
students, not bureaucracy.
To that end, I am pleased to support H.R. 833, the Educational Choice
for Children Act, which offers a Federal tax credit to encourage
charitable donations toward scholarships that help families cover K-12
expenses, tuition, books, supplies, and more.
This bill is expected to benefit over 2 million students nationwide,
opening the door to better opportunities whether in public, private,
religious, or homeschool settings.
Unfortunately, forward-thinking solutions like this are not being
considered in my home State of Pennsylvania where there are some
families that feel trapped in a system that puts bureaucracy before
students.
We cannot allow the status quo to be accepted.
School choice works, Mr. Speaker, and what are these politicians
afraid of? I went to a public school, and I had some great teachers. My
son went to public high school, and he had some great teachers, but not
all of them were.
We need accountability. Parents and children must come first. Reforms
are needed, not a year from now, not 5 years from now, but right now.
This is critical. We are failing far too many young people.
Education is the foundation of a better life, a stronger economy, and
a more advanced society, yet we continue allowing too many students to
fall behind.
A child only gets one chance at a quality education. The time for
change is now, and thankfully we have a President who puts students,
families, and results first. President Trump and his administration
will deliver for our students and for their futures.
The executive orders returning education authority to the States not
only prioritizes school choice, it also ensures that vital services and
benefits continue without disruption during the transition.
That is how we reform education the right way: by empowering parents,
protecting students, and putting our educational life and results ahead
of regulation.
[[Page H1293]]
{time} 1500
Mr. MOORE of Utah. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the message of the
gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Meuser). I think it is actually one of
the most important things to be focusing on right now.
Mr. Speaker, I take a lot of questions from folks back home. Utah is
a State that hits above their weight in academic outcomes. We have
large families. This is a big, big deal for us.
The confusion of why would you dismantle the Department of Education,
I will make sure I do my part, and I have spoken about this to a lot of
constituents back home. One of the key aspects and the things that are
important under title I is making sure that we have underfunded
communities well represented.
My son is on an IEP. He is a 9-year-old in the third grade. He is on
a specialized education plan that meets his needs. My wife
painstakingly got us to the point of making sure that that was the
right scenario for him.
We value the work that gets done here, and we want to see more
resources pushed back to our State, who has largely led this effort. We
have had meetings for our boy to be able to get into the situation
where he is in a thriving third-grade class at a public school and
where he has a little extra attention on things that he does well. He
is reading well above a third-grade level, but he really struggles in
other areas. He is on the autism spectrum.
The attention that our teachers, local administrators, and PTA have
put into our boy, who is the pride of our life, we know that that will
be cared for moving on. If we can move as much of those resources back
into the decisionmakers' hands, we are going to have success here.
Mr. Speaker, I think we are going to look back at this point down the
road and say that this was a key part of why we were able to better
fund schools that are in tough communities, to better fund special
education needs, and to make sure that we are still fulfilling all of
the FAFSA and student loan requirements that we currently do.
Mr. Speaker, let's give this an option. If we are having such bad
outcomes holistically, why not take a look and try to do something
differently. We can't just keep doing the same thing.
Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the gentleman's commentary on that issue,
and I look forward to being a part of this change. I am actually very
confident that, when Utah is given more opportunities in the space of
education as we move more of those resources back to the State level,
we will continue to thrive. I want to be a big part of it. I am sure my
wife will be right there birddogging us to make sure that our son will
have what he needs to also thrive in this environment. I look forward
to that chance.
Mr. Speaker, I have been very encouraged this week to see the House
and the Senate Republicans coming together to deliberate on our
reconciliation package. We are trying to get this timeline going as
quickly as possible. There is an enormous amount of good work that is
going on in every committee with respect to this reconciliation
package.
This is going to be a key factor to making sure that we maintain a
progrowth and profamily tax policy amongst the other aspects of
securing our border, bolstering our economy, supporting domestic energy
production, promoting peace through strength, and making our government
more efficient and effective.
This is the profamily and progrowth tax code that we are developing
and have been developing since 2017, and we want to make sure that we
don't see these provisions expire.
The number of inversions that took place before 2017 and the
repatriation of companies and their operations has been pretty well
underrecognized. When you make progrowth tax policy domestically, you
encourage companies to repatriate those operations and their
intellectual property, and you are able to actually raise revenues.
That is the big thing. If we want to raise the rate on taxes so we
can claim we are raising revenues, if the outcome is to raise revenue,
then every Democrat should be celebrating what took place in 2017.
What we are trying to make sure doesn't happen now is that those more
antiquated international tax policies that encourage companies to put
their intellectual property in Ireland and in other European countries
or in other tax havens across the world, it encourages them to keep it
there or put it there instead of investing back into America.
I wish my Democratic colleagues were more honest on this, because
they know and they see the numbers, too. When you create a competitive
environment, you are able to actually raise that revenue for the U.S.
Companies want to invest here. If they have a competitive tax
environment, they will always choose to be back in America.
Mr. Speaker, I worked very hard to get spots on the Committee on Ways
and Means and Committee on the Budget. It has been an enormous amount
of work getting us to this point, and the lion's share of that work is
still up ahead. I wanted to be on those committees for this very moment
because I knew that 2025 would be a major tax policy year. Known as the
Super Bowl of tax colloquially, I believe that we have a real
opportunity to extend tax policies that benefit hardworking Americans
and that support families.
Let's remember that the child tax credit was $1,000 pre-2017, and
Republicans doubled it without a single Democrat vote in 2017. We are
going to go at this alone, it looks like, again, where we are trying to
avoid the child tax credit from going back down to $1,000 at the end of
this year if we don't get this tax bill done. We want to make sure that
we reestablish as much as we possibly can and moving it forward.
I am one of the key leaders on this particular issue with the Family
First Act and to making sure that we are supporting families and
encouraging that type of positive environment. Strong families will
lead to so much good in our communities. I don't want to demean the
concept of a strong family, but it is one of the core aspects of having
a strong economy.
There is a lot going on now and in the coming months. I am looking
forward to seeing the Senate come together and getting us the
parameters that they would like to see with respect to this tax
package. We are working very close in hand with our Senate Committee on
Finance and Senate leadership to be able to take a look to see what
this reconciliation bill is ultimately going to pan out.
We recognize that it will be a partisan moment back here because we
won't have any support from Democrats on these incredibly important
progrowth and profamily tax policies. That is just the nature of this
place, but we are working very hard to build this out and continue on
the successes that we have had from 2017.
Mr. Speaker, the irony of this place is that all of those tax
provisions could have been repealed in 2021 and 2022, when Democrats
had the White House, House, and Senate. None of them were because
Democrats recognized deep down that doubling the child tax credit,
doubling the standard deduction, encouraging increased wage growth
without the inflation that came from the American Rescue Plan, which we
saw the Democrats enact in 2021, all of that positive economic growth
is actually a very good solution.
I hate that this place ends up being so partisan in these moments of
what we call the trifecta, when one party has the White House, House,
and Senate. It is just the way that it is, but there is so much of this
tax policy that both sides of the aisle share a common vision on.
We did an awesome bipartisan tax bill last year. I wish it would have
been able to survive in the Senate, but it didn't. There is so much
good that will come out of what we are going to extend here.
I shared a lot of this with my newsletter followers yesterday. I feel
like, as congressional Republicans, we have the most momentum now that
we have ever seen regarding our looming debt crisis.
A statistic I shared is that, for several decades, our Federal
revenues have remained at approximately 17 percent of GDP. Over the
last couple of decades, our expenditures have skyrocketed to 26 percent
of GDP. In the early 2000s, our expenditures were approximately 17
percent to 18 percent.
The way I shared it was that I know it is sort of the old adage that
we don't have a revenue problem, but we have a
[[Page H1294]]
spending problem. That is just what the data bears out. In years of tax
reform, we have still been able to maintain 17 percent of GDP.
Remember that, in 2017, even though we reduced taxes in multiple
areas, we have what is called broadened the base, which actually helped
bring in more tax revenue. We have continually maintained that 17
percent of GDP, but our spending has gone from about 17 percent to 26
percent over the last 25 years.
You have to look at things with respect to GDP. That is why I always
talk about debt to GDP and how we are at World War II levels while we
have largely been in peacetime. We have to take advantage of this.
This is not going to be easy. This is not going to be overnight. Yet,
with progrowth tax policy, which keeps our economy strong and keeps our
GDP moving in the right direction, we have an opportunity to limit some
of this spending. It is not going to be easy. I never intended for it
to be.
Anytime you add to the budget, it is much easier. Trying to remove
from the budget is much, much more difficult, as anybody could probably
attest. Yet, it is something that has to be done, and I hope that we
can continue to do it in the most thoughtful way possible. We have a
really strong plan.
Our committees have been working on this for months and months to
identify where the best opportunities for savings over the next 10-year
budget cycle are. In doing so, we want to be able to change that
trajectory of, like I said, 26 percent of GDP. It is far too high, and
we have to recognize that data that has been a success for our Nation.
I am thankful to be on these two committees as we work toward a
really difficult needle to thread in getting this policy done, but we
are moving it along.
I thank all of my Senate colleagues who are equally working on this.
This is ultimately why I am back here, is to make sure that this work
is done in the most responsible way possible. As we navigate the
reconciliation process over the next few months, I look forward to
being able to celebrate some significant wins for our American families
and our economy.
Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
____________________