[Congressional Record Volume 172, Number 50 (Thursday, March 19, 2026)]
[House]
[Pages H2610-H2612]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1120
                         ATTENTION MUST BE PAID

  (Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 3, 2025, Mr. 
Grothman of Wisconsin was recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of 
the majority leader.)

[[Page H2611]]

  

  Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, on today, the day when Members fly out, I 
want to leave the body with some thoughts regarding some issues that I 
don't think enough attention has been paid to.
  The first issue I want to talk about is the issue regarding sheltered 
workshops or community rehabilitation providers. Maybe some of my 
colleagues have taken tours of these wonderful facilities. They are 
largely places in which people who have different abilities work, 
perhaps they have Down syndrome, perhaps they have spina bifida, 
perhaps they are even quadriplegic.
  These facilities, however, offer opportunities of employment for 
people. These are people who years ago had no employment and were 
stuck, sitting at home, perhaps with their parents, perhaps in a group 
home, without the opportunity to share in the satisfaction of work and 
without the ability to supplement their other income. Frequently, that 
other income amounts to some sort of Social Security disability 
payment.
  In any event, I have a bill introduced, which I hope becomes part of 
the WIOA package in the Education Committee. Under that bill, we are 
going to try to stop the current trend of closing down these 
facilities.
  People who want to close down these facilities do it, in part, by 
saying people have to try and fail and work three times and get fired 
three times in the community before they are allowed to work at these 
facilities. That is really just a horrible thing. As a practical 
matter, it makes it very difficult for people to work in these sorts of 
facilities.
  Secondly, right now, it creates a situation in which these folks do 
not have the ability to get outside of what I will refer to as day 
services. Right now--and I encourage all my colleagues to tour 
facilities like this--right now, if a person works in a facility like 
this, they have the joy and satisfaction of getting a paycheck just 
like perhaps the siblings of these people do.
  There is a great deal of satisfaction in buying your own clothes and 
in buying gifts for your relatives, which is why it is so important we 
keep the facilities open and stop the attack of the people who are 
trying to shut down these facilities.
  We might ask: Why would anybody shut down these facilities? First of 
all, people don't like the fact that in these facilities people are 
frequently making minimum wage, which is true.
  However, people with some abilities, if we look at the light work 
they are doing, it is hard to imagine that a profit-making business or 
any sort of business could operate paying some folks like this over 
$7.50 an hour. Upon touring them, we immediately see why some of these 
folks make $6 an hour, $4 an hour, or $3 an hour.
  The other criticism of them is they feel it is segregating people to 
put them in a facility with other people who have handicaps. That, of 
course, is ridiculous. First of all, sitting in facilities like this, 
we have what I will refer to as management or sometimes people working 
part time so that they can ramp up the amount of production in these 
facilities.
  In any event, they may get to know these folks for 10 or 20 or 30 
years. They get to know not only the people with disabilities 
themselves but, again, people in management. That is much less turnover 
than if these folks got a job in the community for 5 or 6 hours a week 
at a fast-food enterprise where there is a great deal of turnover.
  Like I said, it would be very difficult to find anybody in the 
community that frequently can provide a 30-hour-a-week or 35-hour-a-
week job that you really need if you are going to feel like a working 
member of the community.
  Mr. Speaker, I strongly encourage this body, when we pass the WIOA 
Act out of the Education Committee, we pass a bill with it 
strengthening these facilities and stopping the foolish regulations 
that right now are causing, sadly, many of these facilities to close.
  One more time I ask my colleagues, even if they are doing it to get 
reelected, why don't they take a tour of these community rehabilitation 
providers and watch the enjoyment that these employees get in working 
just like everybody else in society and the huge social benefits they 
get by establishing lifelong friends in these facilities, who they 
enjoy spending time with.
  After all, for these folks, it is even more important than other 
people to socialize with people they work with. All of us to a degree 
socialize with our fellow employees. Again, people who have Down 
syndrome or spina bifida, I think their parents frequently worry what 
type of friends they will have when they are gone. These facilities 
provide those lifelong friendships that are so important.


                Budget Requests and Excessive Employees

  Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, the next thing I would like to address is 
soon we are going to take up a budget and begin to take up 
appropriation bills for the year beginning September 1. We also may be 
taking up some sort of bill dealing with the hostilities in Iran.
  Given that, I want to remind people we recently hit $39 trillion in 
debt in this country. We are borrowing about 25 or 26 percent of our 
budget. I think all of the folks back home ought to stop and think. Can 
you imagine what it is like borrowing 26 percent of your budget? It is 
utterly reckless for anyone to do that in their life or their business, 
but that is what we are doing right now.
  Right now, about 14 percent of our tax dollars sent to Washington 
already go to interest. Obviously, that is the beginning of the 
downward spiral toward bankruptcy when 14 percent of our budget is on 
interest.
  What I will ask--I am sure we will be asked to spend money on a 
supplemental for the war in Iran, and I am prepared to do that. I do 
ask leadership to step up to the plate and pass a reconciliation bill 
or appropriation bills that are a little more responsible than the 
irresponsible ones in the past.

  After all, if it is worthwhile to spend billions of dollars, tens of 
billions, maybe hundreds of billions of dollars in Iran, it is 
certainly worthwhile that maybe we don't reduce spending to cover all 
of that but reduce spending to a degree.
  DOGE, which people begin to forget about, pointed out the huge number 
of excessive employees in all government agencies. In the Department of 
Defense right now, we still have just under 700,000 people who are 
nonuniformed personnel. In other words, people are sitting in front of 
a computer for the Department of Defense.
  Mr. Speaker, I don't think anybody can argue that that number is 
high. We reduced the number mildly by providing buyouts for people. We 
reduced the number by putting in hiring freezes so if that people 
retire, they don't get replaced. That only reduced the employment by 
60,000 or 70,000 people.
  Mr. Speaker, I think if you ask around, you will find people who know 
through their relatives or people in their apartment building or people 
in their church that there are still probably hundreds of thousands of 
people who are working there unnecessarily.
  Before the Department of Defense comes back with or at the same time 
they come back with requests for a supplemental to spend more money, I 
think it is important for the Department of Defense to come back and 
explain to us what they have done to reduce the number of employees 
there and for the administration overall to look at the number of 
employees in all other agencies, as well as programs in other agencies, 
and say this is what we have to cut if we are going to begin to fund 
the Iran war.

                              {time}  1130

  I am not even asking for $1 for $1 or $1 cut for every $2 spent. 
Maybe $1 reduction for every $3 spent would be appropriate, but I hope 
they don't insult the next generation by just asking for additional 
spending.


               No Funding for Early Transgender Surgeries

  Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, the next issue I would like to address is 
one that Dr. Oz got in the paper for, and that is the transgender 
situation in this country.
  I frequently hear conservative commentators, FOX News in particular, 
who talk about boys in girls' sports. We shouldn't have boys in girls' 
sports. However, I think that kind of implies that if we solve that 
problem, we solve the transgender problem.
  That is not true. Recent studies have shown a dramatic reduction in 
the number of people who claim to be

[[Page H2612]]

transgender. I think for people like me, that is not a surprise at all 
because I think a lot of people who are being transgender are being 
transgender because they are egged on by psychiatrists or egged on by 
school counselors, or even more, egged on by popular culture as a way 
to find a peer group and as way to kind of be, you know, the cool 
rebel.
  Yet, Dr. Oz has taken on the medical groups, including the American 
Psychiatric Association, who have been in favor of identifying people 
as transgender and even giving them puberty blockers and, worse, giving 
them surgeries before age 18.
  Now, I don't know how anybody, any medical professional, anybody with 
a wit of common sense, would give anybody surgery before 25 years old 
because you know that people change their minds about things, and 
obviously if you have one of these dramatic surgeries and realize later 
that you made a mistake, it is going to result in huge psychiatric 
problems.
  So I strongly encourage Dr. Oz to get more involved in this. I 
strongly encourage this body to lower their opinion of the American 
Psychiatric Association because these people who have spent a long 
period of time in school apparently have a complete and utter lack of 
common sense, and one wonders why we are listening to them or why we 
are required to give them money for their ridiculous efforts on behalf 
of early surgeries on transgender people.
  In any event, I hope that all conservative commentators, when they 
talk about the transgender thing, in addition to talking about the 
relatively tiny number of men who participate in women's sports, go 
after the psychiatrists and psychologists who are giving puberty 
blockers and, even more, giving outright surgeries on our young people 
that I would bet in very, very many cases, they will regret and they 
will regret listening to the professionals who went to school at length 
for such a preposterous endeavor.


               Finding Waste in Income Transfer Programs

  Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, the next thing I would like to point out 
is I thank Congressman Owens for introducing a bill that we recently 
dealt with in the Education Committee.
  Over time, certainly in Minnesota but across the country, we are 
finding shocking amounts of money being wasted on income transfer 
programs. We found another one here. We are right now giving aid to 
students who may not even exist, and maybe some of that money winds up 
with colleges and universities toward tuition, but a lot of the money 
winds up with what we will call ghost students, students who don't 
exist except for on paper, and somebody winds up stealing money that 
the government is printing.
  First of all, one more time, it gives a lesson as to why things ought 
to be handled on a State and local level because I think State and 
local governments are going to be much quicker to pick up on the fact 
that they are being taken advantage of than the unwieldy Federal 
Government.
  Secondly, it is continuing a trend that we have in this country of 
encouraging the crooks in society to take advantage of the Federal 
Government and get wildly rich.
  We are, in this bill, going to make it a much more difficult thing 
and require the government to look into this matter and into the 
students who are getting these aid payments so that things in one more 
program don't wind up completely out of control.
  I strongly encourage this body to pare back on any of these programs 
that are wrought with fraud. I think a conclusion that ought to be 
dealt with once you get done looking at fraud for food stamps or fraud 
for Medicaid or fraud for earned income tax credit is that if you let 
the Federal Government do anything, there will be tons of fraud in it 
and the less of these programs, the better.
  It doesn't mean that people can't be helped, but the people should be 
helped by either private charity, or they should be helped by State and 
local governments.


                          Families Without Men

  Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, my final thing I am going to point out, 
and I recently had a meeting on this with the Vice President, but what 
I think is the biggest problem with the government right today, which 
is further related to all of these income transfer payments, is the 
fact that right now in this government and really for the last 60 
years, we have been penalizing couples who have children in wedlock.
  This has been a longtime dream of getting rid of the nuclear family. 
It was Karl Marx's dream. It was Kate Millett, the mother of the 
women's studies department, dream, families without men. All sorts of 
families can succeed. I assume you know many single parents who have 
done a fantastic job of raising their children.
  Nevertheless, as they work toward their goal of keeping men out of 
the family, it statistically overall does hurt the children to a 
degree. It is not something that we should be encouraging.
  I sit here and listen to hearings about educational achievement. I 
listen to hearings about crime problems, hearings about depression, 
hearings about drug use, and to a degree, I think the answer is never 
brought up in these hearings.
  The answer is: Stronger families. Yet, if this government is going to 
give a bonus of $25,000 per year or penalize somebody $25,000 per year 
for getting married before they have children, it is obviously, first 
of all, unfair on its face, or grotesquely favoring one lifestyle over 
another lifestyle. Secondly, we are reducing the number of children who 
do have a mother and father at home.
  I strongly encourage Vice President Vance and President Trump to step 
forward and appoint some sort of committee or commission to recommend 
what we should do instead of dramatically penalizing couples who decide 
to get married.
  I will point out that you are hurting the children, which is true. I 
think you are hurting the mothers, which is true. Yet, according to 
expert sociologists like George Gilder, you are hurting the prospective 
husbands or fathers because the way society is built up, the primary 
purpose of most men in the country is supposed to be to take care of 
their wives and children.
  As an Indian immigrant friend of mine said: When you have the 
government marrying the woman, it kind of leaves the man out of the 
picture, and he loses what is supposed to be his natural purpose in 
life.
  I strongly encourage Speaker Johnson, Majority Leader Thune, and 
President Trump to establish some sort of committee in which we can 
look at all of these programs. There are about 70 programs out there in 
which we penalize people for getting married.
  Pell grants, it is much easier to get a college scholarship if you 
are a single parent than a married parent. Food stamps, low-income 
housing, earned income tax credit, daycare subsidies, like I said, 
about 70 programs, and it looks, to a certain extent, the way they were 
put together, their design was to cause the breakdown of the American 
family.
  I hope that is something that can be done over the next couple of 
months. I thought it would be done today, but I think the war in Iran 
is taking everybody's focus. Yet, I would like to see us by the time 
June rolls around to have these committees or commissions at work 
preparing recommendations so that we no longer exhibit this hatred that 
we apparently have in this country of people who decide to get married 
before they have children.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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