Advancing America First Policies
Floor Speech
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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 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.
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Mr. MOORE of Utah. Mr. Speaker, I thank my good friend from California for his message and for his willingness to always be here.
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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 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.
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