Rosa DeLauro

Ms. DeLAURO

Ms. DeLAURO. Mr. Chairman, I rise in strong opposition to this amendment. For over 50 years, the mission of the Department of Labor's Occupational Safety and Health Administration has been to assure safe and healthful working conditions for working men and women by setting and enforcing standards by providing training, outreach, education, and assistance. OSHA is responsible for making sure employers provide safe workplaces. Since OSHA was created in 1971, the number of workplace deaths and the rate of on-the-job injuries has declined by 65 percent-- with a workforce twice as large. During that time, OSHA issued lifesaving standards for asbestos, lead, carcinogens, chemical exposure, and blood-borne pathogens. Do we not want standards for those illnesses and disasters? The agency has enforced these standards and provided assistance to employers to keep American workers safe on the job. Make no mistake, by eliminating all funding for OSHA, this amendment results in an unconscionable spike in workplace injury, illness, and death. In the most recent Bureau of Labor Statistics report, there were 2.8 million nonfatal workplace injuries in 2022. This is up 7\1/2\ percent over 2021. In 2021, there were 5,190 workplace fatalities. That is up 8.9 percent. This is a reckless amendment. This says we don't care what kind of conditions workers are working in and that we ought to go back to the industrial revolution. It should be clear. This is a reckless amendment, and I urge my colleagues to vote ``no.'' Mr. Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Ms. DeLAURO. Mr. Chairman, I oppose the amendment, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Ms. DeLAURO. Mr. Chair, I demand a recorded vote.

Ms. DeLAURO. Mr. Chair, this amendment and the prior one are indicative of the majority's willingness to put workers' health and safety at risk. Mr. Chair, I rise in strong opposition to this amendment. Public servants should be commended and not demonized. Our Federal Government needs talented, intelligent, hardworking people who are willing to bring their skills to public service. Proposing to eliminate the salaries of hardworking public servants is petty. It really is beneath the dignity of this body. It is not how we should solve differences of opinion on policy. For 45 years, the mission of the Department of Labor's Mine Safety and Health Administration has been to ensure that miners can return home from work every day to their families and their communities safe and healthy. When MSHA was created in 1977, the fatality rate in the mining industry was more than four times greater than the average for all industries in the United States. Since then, mining fatalities have dropped sharply as MSHA has established and enforced workplace safety standards and worked together with all stakeholders to prevent fatalities. For fiscal year 2024, MSHA is prioritizing additional actions to reduce accidents, injuries, and fatalities involving customer and contract truck drivers, falls from heights, and lack of use of personal protective equipment. Taking out the agency's top enforcement official, as this amendment seeks to do while MSHA completes this important work, would be reckless and irresponsible. In addition, it is particularly shameful that this amendment targets a nonpolitical Federal employee who is part of our Federal civil service. Mr. Chairman, I urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' on this vindictive amendment, which I believe is small and is petty, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Ms. DeLAURO. Mr. Chair, I oppose the amendment, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Ms. DeLAURO. Mr. Chair, I claim the time in opposition.

Ms. DeLAURO. First of all, Mr. Chair, let me correct the record here. The Job Corps provision was not a drafting error. I rise in strong opposition to this amendment. Treasure Island, a former naval installation island between Oakland and San Francisco, was closed in the 1990s and is undergoing a major redevelopment. Treasure Island Job Corps is one of the best-performing sites in the country and serves over 430 students with outdated and crumbling buildings. It is located on a sizable piece of land in the middle of the island. The Department of Labor and Treasure Island Development Authority, TIDA, are jointly examining the possibility of selling or exchanging land from the Department of Labor to the Treasure Island Development Authority to allow for additional housing development on the island in exchange for building a brand-new campus for Job Corps within a smaller portion of their current site. Longstanding language on this matter has been included in appropriations bills since 2018. This language waives potential barriers to an exchange, allowing the Department to retain the proceeds from a sale to rebuild a more compact Job Corps site within its current boundaries. There is no cost--let me repeat--no cost to the Federal Government. For years, Congress has recognized this as a win-win: a new Job Corps facility without additional appropriations and badly needed additional housing in the area. This amendment strikes the reference to Treasure Island in a general provision specific to that Job Corps site and inserts the name of a different Job Corps site from the author's State of Texas. This amendment is silly and nonsensical, and it breaks from years of precedent around this language. Mr. Chair, I urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' on the amendment, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Ms. DeLAURO. Mr. Chair, I continue to oppose the amendment, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Ms. DeLAURO. Mr. Chair, I claim the time in opposition.

Ms. DeLAURO. Mr. Chair, the amendment would cut funding for the National Institute of Nursing Research by $19 million. I support $10 million for health workforce training, but I am in total opposition to a $19 million cut to the National Institute of Nursing Research. The National Institute of Nursing Research supports research that develops the scientific basis for nursing practice. For example, the NINR is supporting a research initiative to assess changes in organizational factors that could mitigate or prevent nurse burnout, which we know to be one of the primary causes of a nursing shortage and of people leaving the profession. NINR also supports initiatives such as the AIM of care initiative to address high rates of maternal morbidity and mortality and to prevent adverse maternal health outcomes. Again, we know what a serious issue this is in our Nation with maternal morbidity and mortality. Women are dying. They look at these efforts to try to give us the best information and data possible. The National Institute of Nursing Research supports training opportunities to develop doctorly trained nurse scientists at schools of nursing throughout the United States. By cutting funding for the National Institute of Nursing Research, this amendment would reduce funding for nursing faculty, which would result in schools of nursing turning away many qualified applicants. Let me just say that, in 2020, over 80,000 qualified applicants were not accepted at schools of nursing primarily due to a shortage of clinical sites, faculty, and resources. This institute is already underfunded and underappreciated, which is true of all nursing professions. Maybe that is why HRSA estimates that the nursing shortage will grow from 56,000 to 78,000 by 2025. More importantly, this amendment demonstrates, once again, that overall funding in this bill is grossly insufficient. I support $10 million for training but not a $19 million cut. We need to properly fund health workforce training and the National Institute of Nursing Research. We should not be forced to choose between nurses and nursing research. Mr. Chair, I urge my colleagues to oppose the amendment, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Ms. DeLAURO. Mr. Chair, I continue to oppose the amendment, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Ms. DeLAURO. Mr. Chair, I yield back the balance of my time. Amendment No. 8 Offered by Ms. Boebert

Ms. DeLAURO. Mr. Chair, I claim the time in opposition.

Ms. DeLAURO. Mr. Chair, this amendment would reduce the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Public Health Scientific Services account by $158 million. Bringing this account to the FY 2019 level, think about what it would eliminate: significant advancements in public health, negatively impacting the National Center for Health Statistics, laboratory science, and public health data modernization efforts. I have personal propriety on data modernization. I championed the establishment of a public health data modernization initiative in fiscal year 2020, just prior to the pandemic, I might add. This massive undertaking is moving public health away from the fax machine and into the 21st century. Think about what happened during the pandemic, with all of the laboratories around the country. I think about Connecticut, nearly shut down. It couldn't do its work because it didn't have the equipment, the modernization, the ability to collect data that makes it incredibly important for us to deal with a pandemic or any other disease. I might add, this modernization initiative provides funding directly to 64 jurisdictions, including States, territories, large cities, and Tribes. Eliminating this funding impacts the entire country. I suspect that my colleague on the other side of the aisle would agree with me that the local jurisdictions of public health need to have the capacity to do their job. This funding is critical to improving jurisdictions' public health decisionmaking capabilities. Some have very highly rated and forward-thinking decisionmaking capabilities, and they have what they need, but we have a lot of communities with minimal capacity. This is really pretty extraordinary. We have people entering records by hand. They are writing their records out by hand or using software not designed for tracking outbreak data, to being able to publish provisional national death data on a weekly basis. Some places have no capacity to do this, and they are not reporting the data so that we have no idea what is happening. We all want to know the scope of a foodborne or infectious disease outbreak in our community. I suspect my colleague wants that information for himself, his family, and for his constituents. We all do. However, that does not happen without the data first identifying the cases. Our public health data systems, laboratory resources, and the National Center for Health Statistics are already far behind where we need them to be, and this amendment would only make matters worse. We should have learned a very, very big lesson from the pandemic, where our public health infrastructure in many instances crashed because of the lack of technology, the lack of data collection, the lack of modernizing their ability to collect that data. Mr. Chair, I urge my colleagues to oppose this amendment, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Ms. DeLAURO. Mr. Chair, I oppose the amendment. I think it is not just for the emergency. We need to have a very, very strong public health infrastructure. Mr. Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.

Ms. DeLAURO. Mr. Chair, I claim the time in opposition.

Ms. DeLAURO. Mr. Chair, let me just preface my comments by saying we are not scientists, and we are not doctors. Maybe some are. We may have one or two, but we are not in the business of scientific research or in the medical profession, for the most part. This amendment calls for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to conduct an exploratory study on the topic of a supplement, vitamin D deficiencies, and COVID mortality rates. To make recommendations, Federal agencies leverage the results of multiple randomized control trials that form the same conclusion, which builds the scientific evidence for recommendations. The National Institutes of Health and academic peers have consistently found that there is insufficient evidence for a recommendation either for or against the use of vitamin D for the prevention or treatment of COVID-19. Supplements are not a replacement for preventive measures like a vaccination. Studies are being conducted on more effective linkages between COVID-19 infection and preventive measures, including vaccination and ventilation. The CDC should be receiving additional investments for these studies, not being told to conduct a study on this supplement. Mr. Chair, I urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' on this amendment, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Ms. DeLAURO. Mr. Chair, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Norcross).

Ms. DeLAURO. Mr. Chair, I strongly oppose the amendment, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Ms. DeLAURO. Mr. Chair, I claim the time in opposition.

Ms. DeLAURO. Mr. Chair, I rise in opposition to this amendment. Let me tell you a brief story. I arrived at Congress in 1990. At the time--and this is on a bipartisan basis, and this had to do with women's health--what we discovered at the National Institutes of Health was that all the clinical trials on illnesses and diseases in the country, all the research, all science, and all of these diseases, the clinical trials had included only men--only men. I don't think anyone would view that this is rocket science, that women are physiologically different than men. On a bipartisan basis, the women--Nancy Johnson, Barbara Kennelly, Nancy Pelosi, Nita Lowey, and Marge Roukema--banded together and said this was crazy. Women and minorities need to be included in clinical studies so that we do not just extrapolate data from clinical trials for men and apply it to women. Women and minorities deserved to be in those trials so that we could find out what was the best treatment, what was the best cure, and what was the best way to treat their health issues. This is an amendment that would cut $10 million to the National Institute of General Medical Sciences at the NIH. One of the basic missions of NIGMS is to support the next generation of scientists. This amendment would reduce support for scientific trainees across every stage of their career trajectories, from supporting undergraduate and community college students in research experiences, to Ph.D. and clinician-scientist training, to postdoctoral training and the transition to a first scientific position. Eliminating an office of diversity in biomedical research takes us backward when we moved forward all those years ago to talk about how biomedical research and discovery to cure had to include in the scientific endeavor, yes, men but also women and minorities. This amendment would limit early stage investigators, who are a pipeline to a next generation of researchers for future scientific discoveries. Mr. Chair, with all deference and respect for my colleague, this amendment is shortsighted and counterproductive, and I urge my colleagues to oppose the amendment. Mr. Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.

Ms. DeLAURO. Mr. Chair, I demand a recorded vote.

Ms. DeLAURO. Mr. Chair, I claim the time in opposition.

Ms. DeLAURO. Mr. Chair, I rise in vehement opposition to this amendment. This amendment would eliminate all funding to the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, which would eviscerate funding for research on minority health. This is a lack of understanding of scientific discovery or discovery to cure. Frankly, it is appalling and disgusting. I will be calling for a roll call vote on this amendment. I want to know exactly which Members of the House of Representatives want to eliminate funding for research on minority health and health disparities. The National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities supports research on diseases and conditions that disproportionately affect minority populations--minorities, writ large. The United States continues to experience persistent and preventable adverse health effects with a disproportionate burden on minority communities. To take one example, chronic diseases are among the leading causes of death in the United States. Some racial or ethnic minority groups experience a higher prevalence of multiple chronic conditions. We need to continue research on interventions to reduce mortality from multiple chronic diseases such as hypertension, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, sickle cell disease, maternal mortality, obesity, asthma, heart disease, cancer, which continues to disproportionately affect minority communities. The National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities also supports researchers from backgrounds who are underrepresented in the biomedical research workforce. I urge my colleagues to think about this amendment and how it lacks scientific understanding and the ability to use biomedical research as a discovery for a cure. Oppose this amendment. I look forward to seeing the results of the recorded vote. Mr. Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Ms. DeLAURO. Mr. Chair, I can't state strongly enough how much I oppose this amendment, which thwarts biomedical research to save people's lives. That is what is done in this area. That is what the NIH does. That is what the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities reviews. It is about saving lives. We have no more noble cause in this institution than to help to save people's lives, whoever they are. Mr. Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.