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Mr. LANKFORD. He is correct, and I am glad to be able to see a larger proposal to deal with unemployment insurance. It has been an issue for a long time, but this is one of the most classic examples of saying the perfect is the enemy of the good.
Today, we have people getting away with fraud--today--and we can do nothing about it because the statute of limitations has run out. The House has passed a bipartisan bill by a wide majority to deal with this one problem, and they have come to an agreement by a wide, bipartisan majority to say let's at least solve this part and then we will work on bigger solutions later.
What my friend is recommending is to say: No. Let's force everyone to work on the bigger solution, and every single day, let more people get away with fraud until we come up with a bigger solution and can agree on it.
We should stop as much fraud as we can today and keep working on the bigger solution to be able to get the bigger issues done.
If I can also say to my friend, he also knows this bill well. This is not about incidental actions that have happened through someone who accidentally filled out something or a State did something inappropriately. This bill is very clear. That is why it had such strong bipartisan support out of the House. This is about criminal actors. These are people who criminally engaged in large-scale fraud deliberately. It is $191 billion out there that the inspector general under the Biden administration even identified.
I want to do as much as we can on the unemployment insurance side, but let's do things as quickly as we can to be able to stop criminal activity and be able to prosecute those individuals.
So, in knowing that, I will not modify my request.
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Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, I look forward to working on a larger proposal in the days ahead, but that larger proposal is not going to move in the House in the next month or 2 months. In the meantime, we are going to have criminal organizations getting away with it over and over and over again. So let's move as much as we can as fast as we can, but at least, at this point, let's solve what we can today.
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