Reducing and Eliminating Duplicative Environmental Regulations Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. MENEFEE. Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong opposition to the so- called RED Tape Act.

This bill clearly harms our communities. Right now, when the Federal Government approves a major construction project, like a highway or a Federal facility, the EPA has the legal authority to review it and to flag public health concerns. It can say that this project will harm air quality in this community. It can put that on the record, and regulators can act on it.

This bill eliminates that EPA review entirely. The one agency whose job it is to protect human health and air quality gets cut out of the process--no EPA air quality check, no independent public health voice at the table, major Federal projects approved with zero input from the people whose mission it is to protect the air we breathe.

That is not cutting red tape. That is cutting public health protection.

This bill hits different for my district back in Houston. I remember walking through a neighborhood in my district that for years had been fighting a cancer cluster as a result of environmental contamination. The woman who lived there told me: ``In that house, two grandparents passed away. In that house, it was a child. In that house, it was a mother.'' She said it matter-of-factly, the way people do when grief becomes routine.

I later walked that same neighborhood with the EPA Administrator under President Biden. I showed him what I had seen. EPA under that leadership showed up. They did the work, and they provided a line of protection for the community that they never had before.

The Trump administration and my Republican colleagues are now rolling all of that back. They have already fired thousands of EPA employees, roughly one in four people in the agency. They shut down the Office of Environmental Justice. They took down the EPA's environmental justice mapping tool that communities and local governments were beginning to rely on. One in three EPA staffers who were there on Inauguration Day will be gone by the time this is all over. That is not reform. That is demolition.

Today, the air quality in Houston is unhealthy for sensitive groups. The experts routinely tell us to reduce our time spent outside. It just happened this morning. Houston already ranks among the worst cities in the entire country for toxic air pollutants: ethylene oxide, benzene, and fine particulate matter from petrochemical plants and heavy traffic.

Black and Brown communities in Houston are more than twice as likely as White residents to live in neighborhoods that fail on multiple pollution metrics.

Those are the communities that this bill will hurt. Those are the communities that need EPA review of major Federal projects, not less of that, but more.

People across this country are dying and having horrible health outcomes because of hyperconcentration of pollution in their communities. This body's response is to present a bill that removes the one Federal agency charged with protecting public health and the environment from the room entirely.

Before I came to Congress, I stood up to the Trump administration in court when they tried to roll back environmental protections, and I plan to do the exact same thing in the Halls of Congress, as well. We owe it to our communities to make sure they have access to clean air, clean land, and clean water, regardless of where in this country they live.

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to vote ``no'' on this bill.

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