Andy Biggs

Mr. BIGGS

Mr. BIGGS. Mr. Chair, I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. BIGGS. Mr. Chairman, I rise to speak in support of my amendment, which will prohibit the Department of Health and Human Services from making any voluntary contributions to the World Health Organization. The World Health Organization failed the world and America with its response to COVID-19 and has continued to fail the world and the U.S. The WHO helped perpetuate the Chinese Government's wholly inaccurate claims and even praised their handling of the outbreak. The WHO Director-General applauded President Xi's very rare leadership and China's transparency. The WHO was complicit in its deception, willfully accepting what China had claimed and spread to the rest of the world instead of doing its job and verifying the claims that were made. Further, in 2021, the WHO dismissed the COVID lab leak theory as being ``extremely unlikely'' after a visit to China. The WHO even returned from that trip with the theory that the virus was transmitted to humans through frozen food, which was an absurd claim. Then, in 2022, 2 years after COVID, the WHO changed its tune and recommended more investigation into the lab leak theory, the same theory that it had so eagerly dismissed as a conspiracy theory because President Trump suspected what was going on back in 2020. It turns out President Trump was right to withdraw funding from the World Health Organization. In addition, the World Health Organization has allowed North Korea to sit on its executive board. North Korea lacks any qualifications to justify a seat on the board. North Korea lacks any sort of transparency in its management of the COVID-19 outbreak. North Korea's track record of responses to public health issues raises significant concerns that it is able to participate in the WHO's decisionmaking process. How is it that North Korea, a country that has a well-documented history of human rights abuses and atrocities, is allowed to sit on the World Health Organization's executive board, an executive board that sets and enforces the organization's agenda and policy? The human rights record of North Korea is often considered one of the worst in the world. Mr. Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. BIGGS. Mr. Chair, I have been talking about North Korea. At the same time that we put North Korea on the board, you see North Korea on the executive board of the WHO, Taiwan is excluded. Why? Because China isolates Taiwan. If you are concerned about China taking our place in WHO, China already has incredible resources and influence over Director Tedros. That is what is going on. Let's talk about this because I think that what we just heard was a conflation--a conflation, all the things, all the good things the WHO is doing, this and that. Guess what? We paid mandatory fees to them of $200 million in 2021. In the 2021 report to Congress, the excess amount, or the voluntary amount, was $99 million. Since the despicable attack on Israel by Hamas, the World Health Organization and its subsidiary in Gaza has spent weeks using their platform to advocate for an immediate cease- fire, a position that has been the rallying cry for the Hamas- sympathizing political left right here in the United States. On October 18, the Twitter account for the WHO in occupied Palestinian territory--in other words, in Gaza--issued a statement on the explosion in the parking lot of the Al Ahli Arab Hospital, which turned out to be bogus. We are saying we will keep paying a mandatory amount. We are not going to give up our seat, but we are not going to pay a $99 million voluntary amount. Mr. Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. BIGGS. Mr. Chair, I remind everyone that this is only the voluntary amount that we give above our membership allotment to the World Health Organization. We should all be in support of this. Mr. Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. BIGGS. Mr. Chair, I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. BIGGS. Mr. Chair, my amendment would prohibit the use of funds to pay for the salary and expenses of the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is currently occupied by Director Robin Dunn Marcos. ORR's negligence has led to the endangerment of unaccompanied alien children. In March of 2021, ORR weakened its safety protocols by eliminating the proof of address requirements for sponsors and exempting other household members from submitting to a background check or providing identification. ORR has prohibited asking whether a sponsor of a UAC is a citizen and doesn't consider a sponsor with deportation orders as disqualified. In addition to this, criminal history and a refusal to submit to a background check also are not considered disqualifiers for individuals becoming sponsors. Think of this: Children, unaccompanied minors, who have come into the U.S. that we have placed into the care of ORR are being given to people who may have a criminal history, but those people with a criminal history are not disqualified for being a foster parent for this UAC. It is an abject failure that the lack of a vetting process is in place to allow for an individual to become a sponsor when they have a criminal history or deportation orders that are not considered. Mr. Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. BIGGS. You know what I think is a disgrace? I think it is disgraceful when the person who is in charge of placing those children has lost contact and communication with more than 85,000, according to The New York Times, and that was 7 months ago. The real number now exceeds 100,000. Mr. Chair, that is 100,000 children that this individual has lost contact with--her office and the Department has lost contact with. That is what is disgraceful. If we are talking about policy and that she is merely carrying out the policy of the administration, are you telling me that it is the policy of this administration to lose contact and not adequately vet people? You know, you have some people who received literally a dozen or more individuals--little children--into that home, and that person was not qualified and not adequately vetted. Two-thirds of all UACs that leave HHS's care work illegal, full-time jobs, often in factories and in hazardous conditions. ORR has an agreement that the sponsor is supposed to sign to protect the UAC from being trafficked or exploited, but that doesn't seem to be very effective. Caseworkers within ORR claim that HHS regularly ignored obvious signs of labor exploitation, such as single sponsors sponsoring multiple UAC, hot spots in the country where many UAC sponsors are not the children's parents, UAC with significant debts, and direct reports of trafficking. These sponsors that are inadequately vetted by ORR and HHS can be dangerous, and they are sending these children to work in factories and other hazardous work environments. You want to know what is disgraceful? That is what is disgraceful. This person should not be in this position. If this is the Biden policy, that is disgraceful. I don't think that is really what this administration wants done. This amendment would remove this person from office, and let's get somebody in there who is interested in taking care of those kids and making sure they are cared for. I get down to the border regularly. I go to the border often. I can't tell you how many times I have come upon groups with unaccompanied children, knowing that we have no idea whether they are going to be cared for in our country or not. Mr. Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. BIGGS

Mr. BIGGS. Mr. Speaker, this is a serious time. My mind immediately goes to the young deputy from Cochise County who 2 nights ago, while trying to apprehend a runaway vehicle smuggling humans across the border, suffered major injuries. He was transported to Pima County where he is in a Tucson hospital fighting for his life. I am talking about a border that remains wide open where drugs come through. The Tucson sector has the most got-aways known and unknown of any sector along the border. There are terrorists coming in, people conducting criminal conduct coming in, criminal gang members, human smugglers, and sex traffickers. They are coming across our border to the tune of hundreds of thousands every month. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate my colleagues and their position, but I would suggest something: I don't think you can just skip to last weekend and say, oh, my goodness, a CR came out last weekend on Saturday. I think we need to go back to January. I will say this. This body came together on the Republican side and we passed a good border security piece of legislation, H.R. 2. That is good. Last week we passed the DHS bill and the DOD bills which had funding for our CBP, ICE, military leaders, and military men and women. Why were we successful in doing that? What happened to motivate us to get there? Well, for one thing, we didn't bother to pass the 12 appropriations bills as required under the Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974. We didn't do it. Do you know how many times that has not been done? That has not been done 25 years in a row. Do you know how many CRs this body has passed in that same period of time? It is 130. Do you know what that gets you? A $2 trillion-plus structural deficit like we had in fiscal year 2023. Do you know what that leads you to? A $33 trillion national debt, which is where we sit today. It leads you to somewhere north of $700 billion in interest payments. Do you know why that happened? Because this body is entrenched in a suboptimal path and refuses to leave it. It refuses to leave that path. You cannot change if you are unwilling to change. We had every opportunity to change. We were promised change. We were promised we were going to go ahead, and we were going to get those 12 bills done. If we got those 12 bills done--do you know why you do 12 bills? Because it allows you to reduce spending and get rid of wasteful duplicative programs. It allows you to set an agenda to restore fiscal sanity. We chose to not do it again. We were promised we would do it. That is why at the end some people said: We will vote present. We will go ahead. We are going to put our trust in Mr. McCarthy to become the Speaker. That didn't happen. I suspected that would be the case. That was my struggle. That was my struggle last November and December. I iterated it to this body, our Conference anyway. When we got to the debt ceiling, again, that seemed to spring upon everybody like a surprise. When that happened, I was in there for some of those negotiations on where that number would be, and I was astonished how that $1.5 trillion number was negotiated. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. However, I will tell you this: To his credit, the Speaker told us one thing that I believe to be true. He said that is basically the ante in a poker game. You can sit down at the table. I told my colleagues who supported that: That $1.5 trillion in 8 months that you are willing to raise the debt ceiling, that is the opening marker. Indeed, it was. Now, projections are many trillion dollars above that. Yes, I think it is time to make a change. I am not the only one, and thus, it is somber. But what have we failed to accomplish? Why didn't we get this stuff done? When we are campaigning, we are talking about an extension of the debt ceiling to January 2025. We are talking about additional Ukraine funding. Maybe that is good in your districts. Maybe it is not. That money is not offset. We are not paying for it. We haven't designated how we are going to pay for that--the same with the disaster package. The IRS remains 80 percent increased. I could go down the list, but I will just tell you why this happens. When you don't do your 12 budget bills and you rely ultimately on a CR--and I will get to the calendar in a second--what happens is, you cannot leverage this administration to actually enforce the border laws that you need to have enforced. This is a lawless Biden regime. They will not enforce border laws. We can pass them until we are blue in the face, but until you leverage the budget and the spending, you will not see enforcement by this administration. Now, take a look at the calendar that we were just provided last week. We are supposed to finish our 12 bills by November 3. By November 17 is when we are supposed to see that the conference committees have come together, both sides, and we have resolved this. I don't believe that that is going to happen. It wasn't going to happen before. You were betting on the come again. At some point, I would urge you to stop betting on the come and bet on the reality. That is why I can't support the Speaker any longer, and I will be voting for the motion to vacate.

Mr. BIGGS

Mr. BIGGS. Mr. Chair, I rise to speak in support of my amendment, which prohibits the use of funds to pay the salary and expenses of the DHS Assistant Secretary for Counterterrorism and Threat Prevention, Samantha Vinograd. When she was senior adviser for national security, Ms. Vinograd took her role of surveilling and stopping terrorist threats against our Nation and turned it on the American people. As outlined by Judge Doughty in his memo ruling in the Missouri v. Biden case, Ms. Vinograd and her colleagues purposefully and systematically targeted American conservatives who dared to exercise their right of freedom of speech. This is on issues that later proved to be accurate objectively, ranging from COVID-19 origins, lab leak theory, the Hunter Biden laptop. The DHS explicitly sought to suppress statements and posts that made the Biden administration look bad. Turning the counterterrorism role of the DHS on the American people and engaging in explicit government censorship of constitutionally protected speech constitutes a major breach of trust. Despite this--or, more likely, because of it--Ms. Vinograd was promoted. She wasn't held accountable. The court names her as a responsible defendant for this activity. She wasn't held responsible. She was promoted to Assistant Secretary for Counterterrorism and Threat Prevention. In her new position, Ms. Vinograd is no doubt even more of a threat to conservatives who wish to exercise their constitutional right of freedom of speech. Unelected bureaucrats like Ms. Vinograd cannot be allowed to continue to censor Americans and to decide for themselves what is worthy of being called the truth. Mr. Chair, I urge the passage of my amendment. Now, I want to add something different this time, as well. Elected officials have an accountability measure built in. Leave out impeachment or anything else, our voters elect us. They look at us with scrutiny. We stand before them. We tell them what we intend to do. They look at our record to see how successful we were in doing what we said we would do. You do not have the same ability with a bureaucrat. The reason that we know about these things, as we began to see these things, is you had an attorney general and several attorneys general come together and file a lawsuit, and a court, in looking at the discovery and taking evidence, said the plaintiffs here, the attorneys general, the States, are going to probably win this. Why? Because people like this bureaucrat, Ms. Vinograd, abused her authority and violated the constitutional rights of American citizens. Seems to me that someone like that should not be in the pay of the American Government. Mr. Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. BIGGS. Mr. Chair, I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. BIGGS. Mr. Chairman, I rise to speak in support of my amendment, which prohibits the use of funds to pay the salary and expenses of CISA Director Jen Easterly. It is no secret at this point that this administration is waging war on conservative voices, and Jen Easterly has been at the tip of the Biden administration's spear to censor American speech. In the recent case decision of Missouri v. Biden, Judge Doughty specifically pointed out Ms. Easterly's targeting of conservative speech for censorship. In fact, Ms. Easterly's censorship efforts were so explicit and pervasive that Judge Doughty believed that the plaintiffs in the case are likely to succeed in their claims against Ms. Easterly and the other Biden administration officials. This was affirmed recently by the Fifth Circuit. On September 6, 2023, they wrote, ``CISA, however, did flag content. Beyond holding regular industry meetings with the platforms, CISA officials engaged in `switchboarding' operations, meaning they acted as an intermediary for a third-party group by forwarding flagged content from them to the platforms.'' For her part, Ms. Easterly has both worked with and in some cases coerced social media platforms to take down and suppress posts that don't fit into the administration's idea of what the truth is. We know this because Ms. Easterly herself has said that conservative opinions that question the administration are not truth but are instead alternative facts and are dangerous to national security, implying that terms like truth are for her and the administration to define. She and other members of the administration have ordered the removal of posts about Hunter Biden's laptop, the COVID lab-leak theory, the ineffectiveness of masks and the vaccine, questions about the security of the 2020 election and future elections, and the state of the economy. Most of that has been proven objectively to be true, but she suppressed it as well as suppressing a variety of other posts, which happened to be inconvenient for the Biden administration. Mr. Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. BIGGS. Mr. Chair, not only has Ms. Easterly already suppressed many conservative voices, she has stated that she is preparing to do the same thing again for the 2024 election; not somebody else in the administration, not somebody else in CISA, Ms. Easterly has said this. This continuous and purposeful censorship of conservative voices must stop. Just as we saw in the last amendment with Secretary Mayorkas, using the Holman rule helps us do our job and do our duty. In July, Federal Judge Doughty of the Western District of Louisiana gave a memo decision in the case of the State of Missouri v. Joseph R. Biden, Jr. As part of his conclusions, Judge Doughty stated multiple times that it was likely the plaintiffs in this case will prevail on their ultimate case of censorship and suppression of conservative voices by the Biden administration. The primary means of censorship by the defendants in the case was by colluding with and in some cases ordering social media companies to ban conservative individuals on their platforms and to take down posts which dared to question the Biden administration on a number of important issues. Among the defendants listed by Terry Doughty as having directed this purposeful policy of censorship are CISA Director Jen Easterly. I urge my colleagues to join me in this important endeavor of holding someone accountable. I don't know what more we need to do, but certainly we should hold Ms. Easterly accountable. Mr. Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. BIGGS. Mr. Chair, I appreciate the two-on-one here. No, that is fine. I am just kidding you guys. Here is the deal. Not only is this critical that you hold people accountable, but this person, this Director lied in response to a question from Representative Cloud on this particular issue, on these issues that we were talking about in testimony in the approps oversight hearing earlier this year. It is my opinion that if we fail to hold this person accountable, then we are going to see like things happen in the future. When you provide a specific deterrent, you also provide a general deterrent, and that is the way a justice system works. That is the way you hold people accountable. Mr. Chair, in closing, I appreciate my colleagues who don't want to see this done. It is not unconstitutional to do this. This is a good way to hold people accountable. That is one of the jobs of the United States Congress, to hold people accountable. What did the Founders give us? They gave us the purse strings. In this instance, it seems to me that this individual should have her salary eliminated. Mr. Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. BIGGS. Mr. Chair, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. BIGGS. Mr. Chair, I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. BIGGS. Mr. Chair, I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. BIGGS. Mr. Chairman, this may seem like Groundhog Day, but I am going anew. I rise to speak in support of my amendment which prohibits the use of funds to pay the salary and expenses of CISA Director of Election Security Initiative Geoffrey Hale. As outlined in Judge Doughty's memo decision in the Missouri v. Biden case, as Director Hale worked with social media companies to censor conservatives who speak out against the Biden administration, he was singled out by the judge. Under the guise of protecting national security and election integrity, Mr. Hale and his team purposely suppressed social media posts that went against the Biden administration's view of what they considered the truth to be. CISA seems to believe itself to be the ultimate arbiter of truth, ordering social media companies to suppress and ban posts and users that dare to question their side of the story, that dare to speak up for what they believe. Listen to what I am saying, please. That is what was going on in the agency that was supposed to protect cybersecurity and our elections. The blatant censorship by Mr. Hale and others of constitutionally protected speech has got to end. It is the weaponization of government against the American people. It is up to us to stand up against that. I urge my colleagues to join me in passing this amendment. At some point we are going to have to recognize that we need to hold people accountable. Now, I appreciate my colleagues who oppose this, but I will just tell you something. I don't think we can say we can't do this in the appropriations bill. We have already done something else in the appropriations bill. We just passed by voice vote a defunding of the Secretary of Homeland Security. Why cannot we hold these people accountable? I think we can. Mr. Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. BIGGS. Mr. Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. BIGGS. Mr. Chairman, I again appreciate my colleagues and their position. I fundamentally disagree. You have a heavy burden when you are going to enjoin people. When this case came before the court, the CISA Director of Election Security Initiative, Geoffrey Hale, was one of the defendants that was found to be one of the officials of this administration that was engaged in a clear and focused policy of using the Department of Homeland Security to stop conservatives from questioning the Biden administration on social media, even if it meant censoring constitutionally protected speech. I guess we have a fundamental difference here. I appreciate and understand what my colleagues who oppose this measure are saying, but I am just not certain what we are going to do then. How are we going to stand up to an administration where every institution of this administration has been weaponized: FBI, DOJ, Department of Education, the border security leadership. We have CISA and the people who are running CISA leading areas that are systematically suppressing speech and censoring speech. This isn't me saying it. It is a court of law saying it after evidentiary hearings. It is through admissions, through discovery of these individuals. That is why these individuals lost in court, but there is no other way to hold them accountable. Holding an administration accountable is one thing, but holding an individual accountable for systematically participating in violations of our First Amendment rights, this is the way we do it. This is the way we should do it. Mr. Chair, I urge my colleagues to join me, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. BIGGS. Mr. Chair, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. BIGGS

Mr. BIGGS. Mr. Chair, I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. BIGGS. Mr. Chair, I rise to speak in support of my amendment that cuts $300 million in funding for the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative. I encourage all of my colleagues to support that. The fiscal year 2024 Defense Appropriations bill authorizes a total $826.45 billion in new discretionary spending. This figure is $28.71 billion or 3.6 percent more than the fiscal year 2023 enacted level. Currently, the United States has committed over $113 billion in military, economic, and humanitarian assistance to protect Ukraine's border, but we can't fund our own border to protect our citizens from the fentanyl pouring across our southern border that is killing over 290 Americans daily, and the trafficking that the Mexican cartels are engaging in. Mr. Chair, I find myself asking this question: How is it that we are willing to send over $100 billion to Ukraine, and in this bill an additional $300 million, but we can't spend the money or find the ability and will to secure our own border? With no end in sight, we cannot continue to blank-check fund a war when this administration said that we are going to stay there as long as it takes and spend as much as it takes. We don't really know why we are there, but we have morphed into a regime-change objective. I would ask: What does that regime change look like? How are you going to get there? What is going to be the extent of our participation? Mr. Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. BIGGS. Mr. Chair, it is interesting to hear that. I appreciate those comments. Explain to me, then, how this administration and our allies have lost contact and cannot provide a full accounting of all of the money we have sent and all the materiel we have sent. Here is an example of that: When we talk about insufficient oversight of funding going towards Ukraine, the Pentagon has overestimated the value of the weapons it has sent to Ukraine by $6.2 billion over the past 2 years. They have overestimated it. How have central African nations reported that U.S. materiel has been found in the hands of warlords in their areas, in their own countries, rebellious warlords fighting them with U.S. materiel? How is it that we have gone from supplying surplus to supplying our own inventory, where our own stocks are going to take in some instances 7 to 10 years to rebuild, to put our own Nation in jeopardy? The democratic peace theory was debunked 20 years ago, and that is the argument I heard today; basically, the democratic peace theory. That was utterly debunked. This administration has also provided no explanation on what the objective is, what does it look like. The objective is to stay as long as it takes. What does that mean? Another 20-, 30-year war that we are participating in funding? Not only as long as it takes, but as much as it takes. We are $33 trillion in debt. Our structural deficit this year is going to be more than $2 trillion. It will be that next year. Our interest cost is $700 billion. Everything we are sending to Ukraine, we are borrowing. It is our children and grandchildren who are effectively paying for this. Mr. Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. BIGGS. Mr. Chair, I yield 30 seconds to the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Crane), a great American.

Mr. BIGGS. Mr. Chair, in closing, our national interests are best rooted in solving our national debt crisis, which has been determined by many national security leaders as being our number one security threat. I urge Congress to adopt this amendment. Mr. Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.