Andy Biggs

Mr. BIGGS

Mr. BIGGS. Mr. Chairman, I think that it is interesting when we talk about protecting wildlife. How about protecting the homeland? How about protecting our military by allowing them to be ready and prepared? How about protecting the development of new military capabilities through the research and development that goes through both the Barry M. Goldwater Range, which, by the way, is impacted by the ESA, and also the Kofa range. That is why DOD responds. Mr. Chairman, I urge the passage of this amendment. I think it is necessary if you want to keep advocating for preparation, which everybody has been talking about. That is the only thing everybody has been in harmony about until you get to this. Then we are told that if you want that, somehow you are a bigot, somehow you are ignorant. That is audacious, offensive, and childish, and it doesn't warrant the worthiness of the debate that should be going on about a real issue. If you want to talk about it, let's talk about it, but you don't need to throw out ad hominem attacks. That is really a shame. Mr. Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. BIGGS. Mr. Chairman, to oppose this amendment is an example of hate, bigotry, and ignorance. This is a longstanding issue, and you stand there and have the audacity to say there is zero evidence. Explain then why officials have to report that on the Goldwater Range they had to cancel 8 percent of their F-16 training exercises. What is this for? It is for the Sonoran pronghorn, which doesn't inhabit that range? It inhabits the Kofa National Wildlife Refuge in the Cabeza Prieta Refuge. However, anytime that pronghorn gets within 3 miles of this massive range that we have expended--by the way, you all just voted to give Mr. Grijalva from Arizona more money to expand and improve that. Guess what? It won't be able to be used a significant portion of the time. If biologists determine that the Sonoran pronghorn is present within 3 miles of the training range, they shut it down. We can't bomb in certain places. We can't test missiles in certain places. Why? For the acuna cactus. I am telling you, when you say this isn't necessary, it is necessary. It is not extremist to say we need to help get our military ready in one of the most unique training ranges in the country, the Goldwater Range off Luke Air Force Base and the Yuma Proving Ground. 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 exempts defense-related activities from the Endangered Species Act. This amendment would end the Endangered Species Act application in areas used for national defense-related operations and prohibits the Secretary of the Interior from designating areas necessary for military operations as crucial habitats. I have been listening to my colleagues now for quite a while this afternoon and this evening on both sides. Where there was comity and concord, it was always arguing over how much we need to be ready and prepared. I will give you an example of what is happening here, the Yuma Proving Ground and the Barry M. Goldwater Range, where you can fire live fire missiles, are booked literally months, almost a year, in advance. Why? It is one of the most remote areas in the country that allows us to do it, but can we do it all the time? No. They are closed at least 12 percent of the time. That means contractors and the military can't complete their mission and prepare for their mission. Why is that? Compliance with environmental laws has created restrictions on how DOD manages plants and conducts training exercises on its installations, not just at YPG or at Goldwater. According to DOD, 85 percent of Army installations have threatened or endangered species present. Two million acres of Army training and testing lands have training restrictions in place related to ESA compliance requirements. These restrictions hinder our readiness and our mission. Mr. Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. BIGGS

Mr. BIGGS. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding. I find it fascinating to listen to someone who lives in the Northeast, in a nice enclave protected from the border, stand up and say nothing about this is serious. Tell that to the victims of this border-crossing invasion. Tell that to them. They say: Oh, all the fentanyl is being stopped at the border. It is just incredible. What is going on between the ports of entry? Sure, we catch it at the ports of entry. Why? We have massive amounts of resources there. Between the ports of entry are wide open spaces. The last time I was down there--when was the last time you were there? I go down often. I live in Arizona. I get down to the border. The last time I was there, we were driving along and didn't see Border Patrol for miles. Do you know what we came upon? We came upon 21 individuals. There is no town. There is no village. We asked them how they got here. The coyotes dropped us off and told us keep walking north. In that group were two babies under the age of 1 year. I am telling you, this is a result of the dereliction of duty that has put this country in jeopardy. That is why this needs to go to the Committee on Homeland Security, so they can further investigate this. That is why it needs to be there. Laugh if you will. That is the reality. You don't appreciate the seriousness of this, the gravity of it. Laugh at it if you will, but you get to go to the angel families and explain to them why their kid or a member of their family was killed by an illegal alien who came into this country. You get to go to the parents. You get to go to the parents of individuals who have lost their lives due to the fentanyl that you apparently claim is all being interdicted. It is dangerous. We have terrorists and criminal gang members coming in.

Mr. BIGGS

Mr. BIGGS. I am in my seventh year. That is the point. If you want to authorize something, like the Judiciary Committee, they should be holding these types of hearings because it is just what you say. The year that I got elected from Arizona, a famous national journal did a study and estimated that the Department of Defense was wasting $125 billion annually. Well, that is one of those things where you probably would want to bring it in. Actually, in this instance, the NDAA, those hearings on authorization, you would be talking about if there is really that much waste there and what we do to recover that waste and prevent it. We just don't do enough of that in Congress. We are just so busy, again, like I said, trimming around the edges. We are not getting at the core of the problem.

Mr. BIGGS. Yes. I am not sure that I knew that detail because I don't think I have seen that happen since I have been in Congress.

Mr. BIGGS. That is why I support what I call the Buck plan. The Buck plan calls upon Congress, the majority in this case, in every committee to have a subcommittee that is looking at the authorization jurisdiction of that committee and then makes the recommendations, has the hearings. Let's do this right. Transparency is important, but beyond that, the process is broken. If we are going to try to get a handle on our out-of-control spending, you would think we would want to fix the process as much as anything. I commend Representative Buck. For those watching at home, both of you, Representative Buck has put together this plan, has been championing this plan, and I am behind that plan all the way. I think it is something we must do. It should be part of any appropriations process going forward.

Mr. BIGGS. We are too fearful because every program that gets created creates a constituency, and you have to look somebody in the eye and say that program is no longer necessary. The ESA is a perfect example of that. It has basically run amuck. It is why California doesn't build storage facilities for water, which impacts the entire western half of the United States. It is why we had someone who wanted to stop any building in Arizona. They tried to get the Sonoran Desert tortoise to be declared an endangered species, but they had to stop counting when they got over 3 million of them. They said, well, that is not really an endangered species. That would have impacted the entire State because they are found everywhere in Arizona. It is an example of one of those eternal programs that you and President Reagan talked about.

Mr. BIGGS. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Colorado for holding this Special Order and talking about this very important subject. The reality is, as we are on that tank from ``Indiana Jones'' that is going off the cliff, we are busy fighting on top of it, but the tank is still going over the edge. One of the problem areas that we have is this payment of a half a trillion dollars a year--think about that--that we are giving to unauthorized programs. You can go to the Congressional Research Services and they will give you a full print out. You can get the full display of all of them and when those programs expired. One of the oldest ones--and I will just pull it up here. I have to scroll through all of these programs, these hundreds and thousands of programs. This is one where the Judiciary Committee has jurisdiction, Mr. Buck, and I mention that because Representative Buck and I both sit on judiciary. It is the payment to the Legal Services Corporation. You know what that is. That is the public defender's office. The expiration of their authorization was in 1980, 42 years ago. What is the amount of money that they were last authorized to spend? Undefinite, an undefinite amount. There was no cap on it. That is what we have. We have everything from EPA, State Department, ATF. These are agencies and departments that haven't been authorized. Then we have a whole list of additional programs that have not been authorized, but we continue to fund them. Our own rule proscribes that. The remedy for us immediately is, when those come up, at least under previous terms of Congress, we have been able to actually raise a point of order and get that pulled out, if we can. Representative Buck, that gives you kind of a background and an idea of what we are facing, which is part of our huge budgetary problem.

Mr. BIGGS. You would authorize a program--like the NDAA, the National Defense Authorization Act. That is an authorizing program. It authorizes us to spend money, and then we go ahead and appropriate to that authorization.

Mr. BIGGS

Mr. BIGGS. Mr. Chair, I yield myself the balance of my time. When we start looking at the regulatory environment and you start talking about a trillion dollars' worth of regulation being piled up by the Biden administration, a trillion dollars, you wonder why there is a persistence in inflation. That is one of the reasons. I want to talk about something that my colleague said just a moment ago. He said: If you constrain the bureaucracy from making rules, somehow you are thwarting the purpose of government. Mr. Chair, let me remind everyone what the purpose of government is. The purpose of government is to protect the rights and liberty of the American citizen. It is when you delegate from this body--who are elected by the people we represent--to executive agencies and you give them carte blanche, which is basically what we do, we rarely even do a CRA, you are undermining that liberty, that freedom. That is one of the most insidious problems of this runaway regulatory bureaucracy that we have today. My amendment simply says: If you are going to impact the United States of America's economy by more than $50 million, we, the people's Representatives, should be okaying that regulation that ostensibly is going to be made and produced by people who are experts. Well, let the people's Representatives adjudicate through a vote whether we agree with the so-called experts, and then we will be the ones who are held accountable, and we are the ones who should be held accountable. Mr. Chair, I urge everyone to vote for my amendment. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. BIGGS. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. My amendment is needed to lower the economic threshold of the REINS Act to $50 million, requiring congressional approval to go into effect. That will lead to more votes in this body, and that is what we do. We are Members of Congress. That is what we do as Representatives of Congress, and I would rather vote more often than have unelected, unaccountable, partisan agency heads writing rules that we treat as law. The Biden administration has abused executive authority by growing the administrative state. These abuses add up, and estimates indicate that the Biden administration has proposed more than $1 trillion in rulemaking proposals in 2022 alone. That is a trillion dollars without a single vote of anybody in this body. My amendment will fix that. Actions this large, like student loan forgiveness, food stamp increases that nearly double in cost to Americans every 4 years--which even outpaces inflation--for every one of these overreaches, there are more smaller proposals that we never notice. I don't know if you realize that ketchup is regulated--breads, buns, cheese, Asiago cheese versus old Asiago cheese, that is what gets regulated by our government. There is virtually nothing that is untouched in regulation by this government. Mr. Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

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

Mr. BIGGS. Mr. Chair, may I inquire as to how much time is remaining.

Mr. BIGGS

Mr. BIGGS. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for allowing me to speak on this issue today. It is an important issue. I remember my first townhall after I was elected to Congress. We had 1,000 people show up. Many of them were wearing resistance T-shirts. The radical left was busing people in actually from California to protest my townhall. That was fine. That is what it is about. What wasn't fine was the ridiculous number of threats to me, my family, and my staff. That is when I remembered from days in my legal practice my gratitude for the police who came and made sure that the crowd was protected and my staff was protected. They even placed two undercover police officers flanking my wife because she had been threatened, as well. Thank you. Thank you to the men and women of law enforcement. I thank the police chiefs and the rank and file in Apache Junction, in Mesa, in Chandler, in Gilbert, in Queen Creek, and in Maricopa County. The sheriff is a Democrat, but I think he does a pretty good job; not like some of the other folks that I will be talking about in just a minute. I thank the sheriffs and their departments in local law enforcement in the border communities in Yuma County, Cochise County, and Pinal County who are having to take up the slack because of what is going on on the border. The Biden administration is allowing people to just run rampant across our border. It is unbelievable. I thank them. They don't run away. They run toward, to save us. They run toward the people who would harm us, and they provide the rule of law. Mr. Speaker, you can't have freedom if you don't have respect and rule of law. Now let's talk about the Federal agencies for just a second. A story just came out last weekend about the bomber who put the bombs over at the NRCC and DCCC on January 6. Those were inert bombs. It turns out the FBI had surveillance and film of that person placing those inert bombs. They had video of them moving around on the Metro, moving on out to the suburban D.C. area getting into a car. They have the license plate of the car, they have the tracking, and they have the credit card that paid for the Metro that that bomber used. When they went to try to investigate, the leadership in the FBI halted that investigation. The Durham report has come out. I urge you to read it, Mr. Speaker. I heard some of you talk about it. I am not sure you read it. Any objective analysis of that report will tell you that the Department of Justice and the FBI were working with the Clinton campaign to create a false criminal allegation. We are still talking about the Russian hoax. It is unbelievable. As some have said, the DOJ and the FBI abandoned their standards from the start. They had no predicate for that investigation. They knew it at the time. I think we should hold them accountable. You want to keep funding them? Fine. You keep funding them, but you are going to have to reform them someway, somehow. I, like my friend from Colorado, remember the time when it was the Democrats who often called for civil liberties and the protection of civil liberties from the Federal police apparatus. That is where I am. We have now come to a point where we have to protect our citizens from our own Federal police apparatus. I will also get into this notion of federalizing the police. You can't simply always throw Federal grant money at local law enforcement. At least in Arizona, when I talk to our friends in policing there, they will tell you: We take this money with trepidation because the Feds always want to take over. They don't understand. I will just tell you, we don't understand Seattle. Why would you come to Congress and say you control policing in Seattle, you control it in Phoenix, or you control it in the town of Gilbert? Why would we turn that over to the Feds? That is too much. Now, I want to share some comments that we have heard over the last couple of years from some of my colleagues across the aisle. From the gentleman from New York (Mr. Nadler), with reducing the NYPD budget, stating: ``There should be substantial cuts to the police budget and a reallocation of those funds to where we need them.'' The minority leader, asked on CNN, expressed his openness to defunding the police when he said: ``You have to look at that on a case-by-case basis.'' Cori Bush was the vice chair of the Crime and Federal Government Surveillance Subcommittee. She said: ``It is not a slogan.'' ``Defunding the police'' is not a slogan. She said: ``It is not a slogan. It is a mandate for keeping our people alive. Defund the police.'' When she was challenged about that, she further said: `` `Defund the police' is not the problem.'' She continues to always double down on that. The gentlewoman from New York (Ms. Ocasio-Cortez) also said: ``This is what happens when leaders sign blank check after blank check to militarize police, CBP, et cetera, while letting violence go unchecked. We need answers. And we need to defund.'' When New York decided to cut a billion dollars from their police force, Representative Ocasio-Cortez thought the cuts did not go far enough, stating: ``Defunding police means defunding police.'' Representative Jamaal Bowman said: ``We don't need police with lethal weapons carrying out routine traffic stops. Reallocate police funding to unarmed traffic forces to remove even the possibility of state- sanctioned manslaughter.'' Representative Jayapal said it is completely reasonable for us to ``shift significant sums of money from police'' and invest in people. Representative Ilhan Omar said: ``We need to completely dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department because here is the thing. There is a cancer. . . . The Minneapolis Police Department is rotten to the root, and so when we dismantle, we get rid of that cancer.'' Representative Ayanna Pressley said: ``The defund movement isn't new. Folks are just finally listening.'' Representative Rashida Tlaib said: ``When we say #DefundPolice, what we mean is people are dying, and we need to invest in people's livelihoods instead.'' So don't tell me now that you can't vote for this resolution, which honors local police enforcement and condemns the defund police movement. Don't tell me that is idle rhetoric. That is real. That is sincere, and that ought to be what the position of this body is.

Mr. BIGGS

Mr. BIGGS. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his effort on this legislation. So many have worked hard on this. I have been listening to my colleagues across the aisle and all the gaslighting. I am reminded of the secondary output produced by many of the dairy cows in rural Arizona. While my colleagues across the aisle are ignoring this problem, right now, record numbers of people are coming across this border. Do you know what? In Matamoros, right there at the Rio Grande, you have the immigration authorities of Mexico coordinating with CBP on controlled crossings of the river. Why is that? Because title 42 has gone away today. It is going to go away tonight. The cartels control our border. We have had testimony. The Chief of CBP has said that. When I heard some of the stuff I heard here, I said that I wonder if any of them even know where the border is. Come on down to the border. I will show you what it is like. Do you know what CBP officials told local officials in Arizona about title 42? I am quoting here: ``You are screwed.'' You won't do anything to solve the border problem. This bill solves much of the border problem. I get a kick out of someone here who just made a reference to how bad things were and how we didn't do anything. Yuma sector, 2020, apprehensions for the entire fiscal year were 8,800. Do you know what it is today, this fiscal year? Over 350,000. Do you know what it was last year? Over 300,000. Why is that? Because what the CBP doesn't say, hey, let's do the Democrat plan. They say, can you at least let us enforce the law? This administration says no. Thus, we have a crisis on the border. It is more than a crisis. It is cataclysmic. In the Darien Gap in Panama, the numbers crossing, it is a 500 percent increase. The number is between 700,000 to a million people just waiting, coming on up, waiting for title 42 to go away. Do you know what ``expedited removal'' means? It means expedited release into the country. It means community release. Why is that? Because of the weak asylum enforcement laws that we have today. When you come up, if we are taking you back to the border, we are going to get you across the border, and you say, ``I want asylum.'' It doesn't matter what your history is or anything. We are going to get you out of here and release you, community release. Community release means, right now, you are getting released. That is what is happening. Shame on you.

Mr. BIGGS

Mr. BIGGS. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Carter) for yielding. I appreciate his leadership on this issue. I was thinking as you were talking about the first job I ever had. I was making--this is really going to date me--I was making $2.50 an hour. I thought, holy mackerel, that is $100. I was working 40 hours and I was going to bring home $100. No, it was $75. That was a million years ago. I would bring home less today because everything else has gone up. I will just tell you something about that. I have watched that same thing happen to each one of my children. We live in this world where the Federal Government kind of clamps down on you. I appreciate this so much. The FairTax Act would repeal all Federal taxes, corporate taxes, individual income taxes, payroll taxes, self-employment taxes, capital gains taxes, death taxes, and gift taxes and replace them with a revenue neutral consumption tax. Do you know what is so nice about a consumption tax? You choose whether you are going to pay it. You choose whether you are going to pay it because it is how you consume. We pay too much already in Federal taxes, and under this administration we are paying silent taxes we never voted for. Since this administration took over, Americans are paying nearly 15 percent more for goods and services due to the inflation tax. I have introduced legislation, and I know others have as well, to repeal the 16th Amendment to permanently abolish the Federal income tax. This is a fantastic bill that Mr. Carter has. I don't need to remind you that the Federal Government takes up to 37 percent away from families--away from your dinner tables, away from your gas tank, and pays for drag shows in Ecuador, and $85,000 Bob Dylan statues, for Pete's sake. Americans know how to spend their own money better than politicians do. Under the FairTax Act everybody is going to take home 100 percent of their paycheck with no Federal taxes withheld. Americans would decide how much they pay in taxes through the choices they make to purchase and consume goods and services. That means that Americans would keep their entire paycheck they worked for and have the freedom to decide how they spend their money. Flat taxes are sometimes criticized as disproportionately affecting lower-income Americans negatively, but the FairTax Act accounts for that by preparing a prebate. This prebate is an advance tax refund to every legal American family at the beginning of every month to purchase goods and services free up to the national poverty level. That has been compared, quite frankly, to the earned income tax credit, which is part of our Byzantine structure today. When I was in my first year in law school--this was also 100 years ago--this is back before the internet and back when I worked for a tax firm, I was their librarian. Every week I went in and for hours I updated a room full of tax books--the regulations and the code itself being updated all the time as Congress would decide who gets a special break and who doesn't. The FairTax Act, instead, encourages economic growth. It is more efficient and more productive than our current tax code. This means investment, wages, and consumption are higher than they are under the current income tax. In light of the Democrat majority in Congress and the Biden administration, both of which have made clear their policies are to tax, spend, and control the American people, the FairTax Act provides the perfect alternative that gives Americans more freedom. Without a national income tax there would be no need to file taxes or have an IRS, which this bill defunds. You had me at hello with that. In addition to closing the many loopholes in the current tax code, the FairTax Act would reach a much larger group of taxpayers, which nine States have already seen the benefits of firsthand by eliminating their State income taxes. Mr. Speaker, I thank Representative Carter for letting me speak on behalf of his bill. I think it is a wonderful bill, and I support it. I encourage all of my colleagues to support this bill.

Mr. BIGGS

Mr. BIGGS. Mr. Speaker, HFC put in a proposal just recently. I think this is really important. The idea is to shrink Washington and grow the country again. We proposed it in early March. The first thing is we cancel the student loan forgiveness plan which totals $609 billion. We cut the wasteful, woke, weaponized spending programs and get the Nation back on track. We eliminate Green New Deal tax credits and subsidies. I recently scored it at 350. I am told now it is $400 billion. Between those two items alone, Mr. Speaker, we are moving towards $1 trillion. We cut the IRS expansion. We already passed that out of the House. That is $80 billion. We take into account the 500 targeted reductions that we have made. Maybe we don't do all of them. Maybe we just do half of them. Maybe we do 50, 70, $85 billion worth. Then I will tell you something else, Mr. Speaker, that you have to do. You take back the COVID money that we sent out. There is about $80 billion of that that hasn't been spent. Bring that back. All of that is in the first year, and I haven't even talked about reductions. That is the rescissions. Then we start reducing, and we can make it targeted. We can do the discretionary. Guess what? We start getting to a place where we are not in the hole $100 billion per month. How about doing that for a year? How about doing that for a year? I am told that a lot of these folks don't really want to do that, and I find that hard to believe. So in fiscal year 2024 alone, if we add to what I just outlined, what we proposed, what we cosponsored, those 500 bills, we just want you to look at them for mercy's sake. If we took all of them, then we would be a little over $100 billion in savings in fiscal year 2024 alone. There are ways out of this, aren't there? But it is going to take some courage and some discipline. Quite frankly, part of the reason that I wanted to do this tonight is I am hearing all the time that we don't know where you guys are. I say: How can you not know where I am? I have been so explicit, and I am transparent. Everybody knows where Biggs is because Biggs doesn't keep his mouth shut. This is where we need to be. We need to be telling the truth. The American people need to understand clearly what is about to happen to them. What is about to happen to them is they are going to raise that debt ceiling. Somebody is going to raise the debt ceiling. The idea that they are talking about now--just so people know--is anywhere from 1.5 to $4 trillion. That is what they are talking about. They are going to trade it for 10 years with maybe $3.5 to $4 trillion in reductions in savings, net savings--not even net savings, I'm sorry to say that, gross savings. So over here on that ledger, Mr. Speaker, you have to get $4 trillion over 10 years. But if you raise the debt ceiling by $1.5 to $4 trillion over that year, 18 to 24 months, now extend that out for the rest of that 10-year cycle. We are not raising the national debt by $24 trillion. We are raising it by $19 trillion. So we are still hitting 50-plus trillion dollars because we didn't have the courage to make the reductions and the hard choices this year. My favorite thing to hear around here is that we are going to have a 10-year plan to balance the budget. Mr. Speaker, I could go back and show you from 15 years ago. They still relive that first year over and over again because it is like deja vu. So this year they are telling everybody: We are going to do a 10-year plan. It is going to be great. We think we can get balanced in 10 years. We are going to have to make some tough decisions. But next year they will come back and say: We have got a 10-year plan. You have to make some tough decisions. Two years they will come back and say: We have a 10-year plan. Do it now. Do it now. People tell me: You are conflating the budget with the debt ceiling. Do you know why, Mr. Speaker? Because I can tell you that if we don't do it now in the debt ceiling, when that budget comes around, you are going to have an omnibus bill. You are going to have an omnibus bill. That is what is going to happen. That may not work, so you get a CR. Part of the package that HFC put out is that if you end up with a mandatory CR, then you start reducing funding on that. So you never have a government shutdown, which is in some ways too bad, quite frankly. Then we have also proposed adding the REINS Act. The REINS Act says that before a bureaucratic agency can impose rules on anything that will impact more than--it is $100 million--I think that is way too high. It should be like $10 million, but they are telling me it is $100 million--then we have to bring it back to Congress. I think that is a great place to start. Do you know why, Mr. Speaker? We have delegated our authority to bureaucracy. So we have the bureaucracy out there, and they are making rules. That is the same thing as legislating. They are enforcing the rules. That is the executive branch power. They are adjudicating whether you have committed a violation of the rules and fining you. In some cases most of the 40,000 crimes that are Federal in nature were created under the rulemaking process. Mr. Speaker, I am just telling you: Our government is out of control, and our spending is out of control. Guess what, Mr. Speaker? If we went back to 2019 levels--which is what we have proposed--if you go back to 2019 levels which nobody would say: Oh, we had too little government in 2019. If you go back to those levels, Mr. Speaker, guess what? You can pay it because we were spending about $5 trillion, and now we are bringing in about $5 trillion. So let's go back to the 2019 levels, for Pete's sake, and then let's do the rescissions to boot, and let's stop the seemingly endless cycle of a national debt increase. If we do that, then we stop the imminent bankruptcy of this country, we stop the devaluation of our currency around the world, and we stop the inflationary pressures. Then once we do things like reduce some more taxes, reduce some more regulations, and get some better energy production, then we will, again, be the world's economic leader. I am just here to tell you, Mr. Speaker, we have got a plan. We presented our plan. I don't think anybody should ever say that Mr. Good, Mr. Rosendale, Mr. Biggs, and the half dozen others or so, that they don't know where we are. I have never voted to raise the debt ceiling. I don't think that is what I was sent here to do, and I am finding it awfully hard to believe that there is any justification for raising it $2 to $4 trillion. I encourage everyone to understand that we can put an end to this cycle of self-immolation. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. BIGGS. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days in which to revise and extend their remarks.

Mr. BIGGS. Mr. Speaker, we are going to talk tonight about this debt ceiling, this mysterious debt ceiling that we hear so much about. I am joined by two of my colleagues who have strong ideas about this, as well. I want to just relate something to America, so you can hear this. We had a meeting several weeks back talking about the debt ceiling. I don't think anybody had ever asked this question, and I started asking it at every meeting. I said: How much does the Biden administration want to raise the debt? We stand at $34.1 trillion now. We spend $6.1 trillion a year, but we raise $4.9 trillion. Every month, we fall short by about $100 billion. I said: How much do they want? Well, when I first started asking the question, everybody says: I don't know. We don't know. Now, it is $4 trillion. That is what I am hearing, $4 trillion. Tonight, we heard $3.5 trillion. In any event, it is $3.5 trillion to $4 trillion. I asked the next question. I said: Look, I really want to know what happens if we don't lift the debt ceiling. I don't know. These guys might have been there. The fellow was nonplussed. This former deputy at the OMB, the Office of Management and Budget, an economist, stood there for probably 2 minutes. Nobody had ever asked him that question before. He says: Nothing. Nothing will happen. I said: How can that be? I am hearing that it is collapse city. Tell me, how can that be? He said: All the bills go to OMB. They get forwarded on to the Fed, and they all get paid as they come due. They just keep paying them. I am here to tell you that the debt ceiling is mysterious. It is a black box. It is the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain. And it is time for us to face the facts. If they are going to try to leverage us, then we have to do something to make this more responsible, this spending more responsible, and get our budget back together. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Montana (Mr. Rosendale).

Mr. BIGGS. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Montana. He mentioned unauthorized programs that we are continuing to fund. There are more than 1,200 Federal programs that are unauthorized right now. $500 billion. That is what we spend every year for those 1,200 unauthorized programs. Congress hasn't authorized them. They have expired. We haven't reauthorized, but we are still spending $500 billion a year. People wonder what is crazy about D.C. Well, let me give you one more datapoint. That same meeting that we were talking about, the gentleman was getting ready to leave, this economist, and then we had a former head of OMB there with us. I asked them: Can you tell me how many agencies there are in the Federal Government? The answer was ``no.'' I said: What? He said: Nobody knows. That is hard to believe. I couldn't believe it. I did some more digging. Nobody can tell me. Nobody can tell me how many Federal agencies there are. We can tell you how much we are spending. We are spending over $100 billion every month more than we bring in. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Good).

Mr. BIGGS. I thank the gentleman for his remarks. May I inquire of the Speaker how much time I have remaining?

Mr. BIGGS

Mr. BIGGS. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding time to me. There is a great Chinese scholar, Professor Sheridan wrote a book called ``China in Disintegration,'' and he analyzed the fall of China's government in the early 1900s before you moved to kind of an anarchical situation where you saw the rise of Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang versus, ultimately, post-World War II Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist long march as they marched around and eventually the U.S. wavered and China fell to communism under Chairman Mao. What was the premise of ``China in Disintegration''? It was an analysis of why great powers, great nations, great empires fail. They fail because of a loss of geographical integrity. They fail for--that is the first thing. The second thing is they fail because their currency loses value and trust. Once that goes, and the culture begins to change, they are either overextended, or they allow individuals with malevolent intentions to come into their country and influence the population. So what do we have? We have a wide-open border, so we have lost our geographical integrity. We have $31.4 trillion in national debt and rising inflation. We have nations like India contemplating moving to the Chinese yuan for their currency of exchange instead of the dollar. They have settled on the rupee. We have lost economic integrity as well. What has happened? Well, China views, as they always have, themselves as the center of the universe. They have viewed Westerners as barbarians. Mao and his ambitions were superseded ultimately by Deng Zhao Ping, who said we are going to put a unique spin and have a hybridized economy, and it is going to have some elements of capitalism, but it is going to be Communistic overall. Now, why did he do that? Because they were failing as a Communist state. We built the Chinese middle class. We built the Chinese deep water navy. We gave China superior telemetry. Ladies and gentlemen, we have basically given China our technology. What we haven't given them, they have stolen. Now you have reached a point where you have a CEO of a company like Nike, who says, we are not an American company anymore, we are a Chinese company. How have they done that? There are literally tens of thousands of Chinese national students in our universities. When we talk about the billions of dollars that have come in in donations, a more insidious thing is the out-of-State tuition that funds these State universities who rely on out-of-State tuition, so they come in and they pay that tuition. It is not a normalized situation. To come over here as a student, you have to be a member of the CCP. There are 330 million people in the CCP, as many as we have living in the United States today. They send their students over here and they exit. They leave and they go home with what? Our technology and experience that we have given them to defeat ourselves. We can continue to put our head in the sand and hope that it isn't true. There are those who believe it is xenophobic to talk about this. I appreciate the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Bean) being here tonight and leading this Special Order because Americans need to know the peril that we are in because China doesn't view us as an economic opponent or competitor. They view us as an adversary, a geopolitical adversary. For them, they want to be the world's dominant hegemon. That isn't me saying it. You can look at any modern writing within the top leadership of the CCP. It is pretty clear. I would suggest that we need to take back our educational institutions. Couple that with the integration, we need to decouple our economic integration and dependence upon China. They know we are dependent. They know they can exploit that. We saw how they exploited it just recently in the COVID-19 epidemic. Let's be wise. We are going to have to take action.

Mr. BIGGS

Mr. BIGGS. Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.