[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

[[Page H1291]]

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.

                          ____________________