Doug LaMalfa

Mr. LaMALFA

Mr. LaMALFA. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate Mr. Begich's remarks. Indeed, with all the rich resources we have in Alaska, it would be amazing if we could get the permitting process so they can produce these rare earths and critical minerals in our country instead of relying on them from adversaries that are not going to be reliable long term. I appreciate him bringing that to our attention, and the work that he and others are battling to do up there. Mr. Speaker, I now yield to the gentleman from Montana (Mr. Downing), one of our new Members here as well who represents half of Montana. He doesn't get to have the whole State anymore, I think, with two Members there. I appreciate his joining us here. Mr. Speaker, indeed, these large States are home to so many rich resources that are important to our country, and we are glad to have Western Caucus membership that is recognizing that and working with us here.

Mr. LaMALFA. Mr. Speaker, I thank Mr. Downing for his perspective on that. We are finding that these Western States, the Western Caucus focus area, I guess, is very rich in so much of what we need here. I appreciate his work with those folks in the mines to illustrate how important they are to the whole country and our energy grid, et cetera. I thank him for his time with us, and the technical issues with the podium emphasized the point. I am pleased to have excited, new freshman Members who really want to take charge and get going here. It is good stuff. Mr. Speaker, I yield now to the gentlewoman from North Dakota (Mrs. Fedorchak), a new Member who has shown a lot of enthusiasm in jumping in with us here in the Western Caucus and helping to make it happen. She represents another at-large district, which means the entire State. Even though there are maybe not a lot of people in these areas, what they do is extremely important.

Mr. LaMALFA. Mr. Speaker, I thank Representative Fedorchak. Those were great points she emphasized for us. It is a common theme here, and I thank her for that. Mr. Speaker, there is red tape and endless delays in doing the work that needs to be done to produce what comes from the Western States, Western Caucus, and our whole country. I have to remember and to emphasize these products come from all over. When we talk about mined materials, farmed materials, and wood, it is all important. The same laws that affect us in the Western States affect us everywhere. Why do we spend so many years on permits to do things that we know how to do well? Indeed, the United States does this with a better set of environmental regulations and are way more conscientious than what will be produced in China or some of the other Pacific Rim areas. We have the technology to do it the best, as Mrs. Fedorchak was talking about. I don't talk about CO2 a whole lot because I think CO2 is an essential building block. It is not a pollutant, as has been whipped for so many years amongst regulatory agencies and NGOs and such. If we look at how the United States has been doing, we are one of only a couple of countries that has been able to level off and even reduce CO2 production. We are going to get to the point where it will be so critically harmful to our industry that we need to reassess how burdensome these regulations are, especially as CO2 is not a poisonous pollutant, per se. I mean, plants need it, and all things in moderation we might say. It is important that we have some reality on how these regulations affect us. We have talked about water storage. We have talked about energy production. When we talk about our water storage, we know how important hydroelectric energy is in that it is a CO2-free source. Ms. Maloy talked about geothermal. That is a clean source of energy to produce electricity. What we haven't touched on much but is a potential issue the Western Caucus will be working on is nuclear energy, another CO2- free source of electricity. If we want to deal with CO2, here it is. These forms of electricity generation continue to be pushed out or pushed off in the regulatory climate we have here. We have the opportunity to mine uranium--a lot of it in the Western States--and build the plants that are going to serve our urban centers. I was talking earlier about how AI and data centers are going to use so much more electricity, as well, if the electrification of cars and trucks keeps getting pushed. Where is that electricity going to come from? It is amazing how we mandate this in a lah-de-dah atmosphere of, well, we are just going to have more EVs. The folks regulating that and pushing that are not accountable for where that electricity is going to come from. They think more and more acres of prime farmland covered with solar panels is going to do it or offshore windmills will produce a certain amount of electricity. They find that they have problems with that. There might be negative effects on the wildlife and the ocean life there. We need to have the ability to take a look back at these layers and layers of court decisions since these laws were made with good intentions back in the early 1970s. We talk about the Endangered Species Act, NEPA regulations, Clean Water Act, or the Clean Air Act. All had good intentions, but they have been weaponized by NGOs, environmental organizations, and even those certain belief systems of government. My home State of California is weaponized to stop some very good projects from happening. When we talk about the Endangered Species Act reform, there are species that are basically used to stop water storage, stop highways from being built, stop power plants from being built, and even things like levees being repaired in areas that have the potential to be flooded. One project in my district took 20-plus years to finally get approved and through for a project on a levee that already existed. They required that it be set back from the river more. Then a bunch of habitat created out of the farmers' orchards that were adjacent to that on the outside of the old levee but now inside the new levee. That took over 20-plus years. It is because a species was listed as an endangered species by the Fish and Wildlife 20 or 25 years ago, maybe longer. Fifteen years ago they recommended to delist it. Mr. Speaker, it seems you can hardly delist anything under the way these rules have been misinterpreted. One issue ravaging much of the West and right now has really taken hold in my district has been the wolf population that has been introduced. I know the Biden administration had done some of that at the end with over 40 wolves being dumped into Colorado last minute on their way out the door. Wolves in California have really taken hold in the northeast part of the State. They are ravaging Modoc County, Siskiyou County, Lassen County, Eastern Shasta, and other areas to a little bit lesser extent. The deer population is being decimated. When they run out of deer, guess where they look next? They look at livestock. Here is an example. I don't mean to be morbid, but people need to see what this really looks like. Here is a wolf toting off a deer right here. There is a deer head right there. This isn't native to that area. These are Canadian gray wolves. These are great big, powerful, scary wolves that really aren't indigenous to the farther Western States. It is still listed. We are making efforts to delist this wolf from that list, but it is running into problems and difficulties because of the environmental movement saying, no, we need to have mating pairs in every county in order to satisfy their desires on that. These wolves are plentiful in areas like Minnesota and neighboring States and the central part of Canada. It is not an endangered species. There are plenty of numbers there. Mr. Speaker, if you want to look at a gray wolf, travel to that part of the country because we don't need to have them everywhere in order to somehow deem them as recovered. I like the giraffe analogy. If we want to look at a giraffe, go to places in Africa. If we want to look at it in North America, go to the zoo. We don't have them here. We can't deem them an endangered species in North America because we don't have them here. Someone would have to start a new program to encourage and build a giraffe habitat to bring a species that really doesn't belong in that area. It doesn't make a lot of sense, and it is really devastating. Over 200 calves have been taken in the northern California area and part of Oregon, as well. Here, we see a calf that has been devastated. It has been just completely annihilated and fed upon by a pack of wolves there. Again, I am not doing this to be morbid. Mr. Speaker, I hope it does shock you. I hope it does shock you because this is really happening to the livelihoods of the people who are producing food that Americans want and that others want. They can't do so because of a wolf population that has been introduced by government at the behest of basically urban people who think, oh, that would be a nice ideal to have these wolves in that area. They don't have to live with the results. These wolves have become so brazen in how they act in the area. It has taken a sheep. Any livestock is on the menu for them because when they start running out of the local wildlife, they are going to take what they need. The ability for people to push back on that, to haze them, or to move them away is very, very limited by how U.S. Fish and Wildlife has made the rules. They have very, very few options to keep them not only out of their herds but away from their doorstep, including this doorstep right here. Yes, this is the family dog right here. This is what is happening to families that are working in and living in those rural areas for four, five, six, or longer, generations. They provide food and put it on the table for Americans, and this is what they have to live with today. They can't let their pets out in some of these areas anymore. They can't let their kids go down to the bus stop without being guarded and to do normal things like go to school. People are afraid to go outside their homes at night in certain areas because they hear the wolves howling, and the wolves don't feel any fear of mankind. They don't feel any deterrent due to the very limited and meager measures that people can take to deter them. They are not allowed to shoot them. They are not allowed to shoot over them. They are not allowed to be very aggressive with vehicles and such. Indeed, one anecdote I received on visiting some folks in the district is that they have drones they try to fly over and move the wolves away from the herds and away from their area. Funny, the wolf just looks up at it and lays down and watches it. They fly pieces of a flag or a ribbon on their fence and hope that ribbon flapping in the wind will scare the wolf away. It is called fladry. The wolves are pretty smart. They are going to go around that. When they are running in packs like that, they are very effective at moving the livestock, moving them, herding them to other areas. There are stories about them coming in and wiping out an entire flock of sheep on one farm just for the heck of it. A single wolf in one case killed 30 sheep, killed the dog, and basically scared the horse, ran the horse over a cliff area, killing it. That is more or less for sport. This is what is happening to people. This is what is happening in the northeast part of my State and all over the West. The elk and deer population is being devastated in these areas. We don't talk about that much because it is an ideal under the Endangered Species Act that we have to move these animals wherever someone deems they need to go, indeed, when we have populations that will sustain and prevent extinction just from what is in the upper Midwest and Canada. What is it going to come down to? Do people have to be victimized to get a nice, idyllic scene like this with people hiking the trails? The Pacific Crest Trail runs through that portion of my district. Have warnings been sent out by the people promoting this wolf population to those who are looking to utilize these trails, such as the Pacific Crest Trail, or to climb the different mountains around northern California? Are there adequate warnings going out to the urban areas when people expect they are going be able to do this as they come travel and recreate a little later on this spring and summer and fall? Are they doing that? We have this idyllic scene of a family hiking out there. Do they know possibly there might be wolves lurking in here if they are hungry and they have run out of deer to attack? The farmers and ranchers have sold their livestock herds or pulled them out or just lost them to wolf attacks. They are going to get hungry and start coming after anything they can find. Are people going to be on that list? Am I being dramatic? No, this is the reality. This can happen. Will this scene be allowed anymore in those areas? Well, it is a wolf habitat now. We don't have any people recreating on their lands, on their national lands, on their parklands, the forestlands that are deemed to be multiuse. That use is being narrowed more and more to not doing timber operations and preventing wildfire and having wildlife flourish but to satisfy a very narrow group. This is part of the work that we need to get done. The Western Caucus is going to be focusing on endangered species reform, our energy, and agriculture. We need to make the farm bill a reality here soon because the farm bill has had extensions so far. We need to pass a full farm bill this year that is good for 5 years. Agriculture is a very important cornerstone of Western Caucus priorities, as well as a national priority. We have our work cut out for us, but we have a great team on our Western Caucus staff. Nearly 100 Members of the House are in this, as well as our colleagues over in the Senate, led by my good friend, Senator Lummis from Wyoming. It is a very positive thing, and I am looking forward to the work here. I am honored to be able to chair that. Mr. Speaker, with that, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. LaMALFA

Mr. LaMALFA. Mr. Speaker, Congress is moving forward with reconciliation to rein in Washington's reckless spending and put the budget back on a responsible path. This process brings multiple committees together to craft one comprehensive bill that strengthens the economy, reduces waste, and prioritizes taxpayers. The bill secures the borders with real enforcement measures, keeps taxes low for families and small businesses, and rolls back job-killing regulations. It also boosts domestic energy production, making America less dependent on foreign adversaries while lowering costs at home. Every committee has worked to ensure this bill eliminates wasteful spending and focuses resources where they are actually needed. Budget reconciliation is about making the Federal Government work smarter, not bigger, and being accountable to taxpayers because the hard-earned money they have to send this place is certainly not voluntary. Budget reconciliation puts America back on a strong track to what we should prioritize to begin with.

Mr. LaMALFA

Mr. LaMALFA. Mr. Speaker, I thank Mr. Moore for leading us in these efforts to help enlighten folks on what we are doing here in Congress to give people more choice, more options, and have goods be more reasonably priced and available for them. As we are coming out of the Biden administration, we saw a lot of devastation to the economic conditions for families, for homes, for small businesses, et cetera. In Washington, there seems to be an obsession with overregulation. It does make life harder for everyday Americans. Under the Biden administration, the energy efficiency standards became weapons of control, driving up costs, limiting choices and strangling economic growth. Under the antienergy agenda that President Biden had, American families felt the pinch every day, every time they turned on a light, heated their home, powered their appliances, or drove their car. These so-called efficiency standards didn't lower costs, they shifted the burden on to local level wallets and bank accounts. Back in my home State of California we see the impact firsthand, as these ideas seemed to start there first, between skyrocketing energy bills and blackouts caused by misguided policies. Public safety power shutoffs is what they call them. When the wind is blowing and they haven't trimmed the trees in the forested areas around the power lines they have to shut off the power rather than doing the work out in the forests that is needed, but that is another issue. All of this causes families to have to pay more for less reliability in their needs. This is the future that our Democratic colleagues seem to want for the rest of America, one where energy is not affordable nor dependable. The conversations keep pushing more toward wind and solar, which are fine in and of themselves, but they are a tiny part of the grid. They are not a 24/7 available source of power anyway such as we would get from nuclear energy, hydroelectric, natural gas, or coal. Those can be counted on at any time. You can turn them on and use them at any time. Obviously with the wind or solar you have to wait for the Sun to come up, the clouds to go away, for it to stop raining, or the wind to blow--as long as the wind doesn't blow too hard, which in that case, they have to slow down and shut off the windmill because the wind might spin it off of its hinges. Washington bureaucrats are now trying to dictate what kind of refrigerator you can have, what kind of stove you can use, and even how long your dishwasher should take to run. Most folks want to see that the dishwasher runs long enough to get things clean and dry; the same with your dryer, the same with your clothes washer. Folks want what it takes to get the job done, not some arbitrary shutdown of when a bureaucrat decides you have used enough energy. So really it is just limiting options and you being told what is good enough for you, rather than what you actually need. Californians have already been through a lot of this. We have been forced to live with policies that prioritize these whims of regulators over the needs of families. Indeed, we have seen the elimination of many outdoor tools, gas-powered lawn mowers, weed eaters, leaf blowers, and I will come back to even they are trying to take away generators. Now, how do you take away a gas- or diesel-powered generator? When the electricity goes off, and you need something to replace that at least temporarily, what do you power that generating vehicle with? It isn't going to be other electricity. Some will argue we need to have batteries with this power saved up. Okay. Well, there are a lot of issues with batteries on what it takes to make them, what do you do with the metals and the materials from a battery that is now no longer useful and it has to be discarded versus just having something that works at the flick of a switch or the pull of a cord. You can start your generator using gasoline or diesel and have great success like you had for generations. They want to take all these options away from us. Indeed, they do many things to inconvenience families, small businesses, and they also strangle our economy. It is amazing to go out to Tractor Supply or someplace like that, and they have a whole lineup of those outdoor appliances and they are all electric. It just happened overnight. I don't know how well they are selling or how well people like them, but we have to get to a point where we can overcome these mandates or at least not have them at the Federal level for the other 49 States or whatever amount of States that are not following California as more and more of them seem to want to get toward with California's craziness. Manufacturers are forced to spend millions trying to comply with these rules changing the dynamics, changing the makeup of how their equipment works. Take the electric car industry, for example. I remember back in California in about 1990, the California Air Resources Board, known as CARB, pretty famous now, I believe it was 1990 they wanted to mandate that 10 percent of all vehicles by the year 2000 had to be zero- emissions vehicles. At the time, all that would mean is, well, you have to use batteries instead of fuel. The manufacturers were standing on their heads, the auto manufacturers, trying to figure out how are we going to meet this mandate in 10 years for 10 percent production. You ended up with these basically glorified golf carts with batteries on them using the same old battery technology we had and finding out that you can't just slap a license plate on a golf cart and have a practical vehicle for people. They actually had to relent on that mandate before 2000 occurred, but you still saw these little golf carts running around dealerships with license plates on them pretending to be automobiles that people would buy. They don't always know by making a mandate--many in those institutions believe that, well, if we force the mandate, then they will come up with the technology. Well, battery technology still hasn't made a quantum leap into the future yet to where it can be such an incredible source and for long extended periods as really the previous generation. They have got more experimental materials. They have different, more exotic materials they are actually using now, but the battery life hasn't extended that much more than what batteries of 20 years ago were doing. The more we hamstring the energy production and force businesses to conform with out-of-touch mandates, the more time businesses have to waste on developing technology, which really isn't going to go anywhere. The further refinement of internal combustion engines has so far achieved amazing results with how clean gasoline and diesel engines are running these days. They have put the filtration systems and the fuel additives on there to make a diesel engine run pretty darn clean, so why don't we allow those manufacturers to continue in the direction of making them even better instead of saying, no, we are going to force you to stop selling gasoline-powered vehicles in California I think by 2030, and you can't sell any new ones and take away diesel-powered trucks. We are going to run into a real reckoning in California when these mandates kick in and there are no goods to deliver. People expect to take the raw materials from a mine or from a farm or wherever to the mill, to the manufacturer and then bring a finished product to the store shelf and you go pick it up and bring it home. What is taking away these options, it is going to be a real strangle on the economy of California and any other State foolish enough to follow what we do out there. So it really isn't about saving energy. It seems to be a lot more about controlling what people do, the ideals of putting people in stacked communities and these walkable communities, transit communities instead of letting them live how they would like to or what is needed. In my rural district I have in northern California, the people that produce things that other people need whether it is timber, and the products that come from timber, wood, lumber, paper, et cetera, that has to come from a rural area. You need rural people living there that can do that, and they need to have the vehicles and the wherewithal and the tools to do it. That all seems to be taken away. Instead, they would rather burn down those forests. So what kind of choice is that? People would like to have choices where they can live as well as what we are talking about previously with energy choices and the energy using apparatus choices in those. Americans deserve a little bit better than a government that prioritizes green ideology over their own quality of life. What you get right down to is that when these choices are taken away you don't really get that much greener of a lifestyle because there is an offset for taking away the power plants that we have. There is an offset of replacing them with solar panels that cover many, many acres, especially of prime ag ground like they are trying to do in central California in some of the richest ag ground anywhere in the world and products there that so many Americans have come to expect that come from California with these amazing vegetable crops, fruit crops, nut crops. Mr. Speaker, 90 to 99 to even 100 percent of those crops are grown in California, and they want to cover those areas with solar panels because those areas have had their water rights and their water taken away because of more green things and more environmental policies that put the needs of fish over the needs of people. Instead, we need to go in the direction that puts energy policies that would actually lower prices, expand the consumer choices, and create opportunities for American jobs and an American economy and American prosperity and not have the continued stranglehold we saw under the Biden administration. The work we are doing here along with President Trump is extremely important to bring these things back to the forefront of families having choices in the basics like their appliances, their automobiles, their ability to heat or cool their homes and just enjoy their life. We will continue, and I look forward to being part of the battle here of pushing back against that out-of-touch agenda, whether you want to call it the Green New Deal or green ideology and move toward a future where families and not bureaucrats get to decide what works best for them.

Mr. LaMALFA

Mr. LaMALFA. Mr. Speaker, foreign influence in American education, higher education especially, is a growing threat that cannot be ignored. For years, adversaries, like the Chinese Communist Party, have funneled billions into U.S. colleges and universities through undisclosed donations and contracts, gaining influence over research, curriculum, and even campus policies. These backdoor financial arrangements jeopardize academic integrity and national security, allowing foreign governments to push their own agendas under the guise of educational partnerships. Foreign regimes, including the Chinese Communist Party, have capitalized on loopholes in the Higher Education Act to expand their influence. Many U.S. institutions fail to disclose foreign gifts, as required, allowing foreign entities to quietly infiltrate and manipulate academic environments. The DETERRENT Act, which will be taken up soon, introduced by my colleague from Washington, Representative Baumgartner, takes a decisive stand against this threat by enhancing foreign gift and contract reporting requirements. By slashing the reporting threshold to just $50,000 and implementing an even stricter zero-dollar threshold for countries and entities of concern, the bill ensures universities disclose all foreign funding regardless of its size or source. Lowering that threshold will bring more and more of them into the light. China alone has sent over $1 billion to U.S. universities in the past decade, much of it undisclosed until recently. These financial ties have been linked to research theft, censorship of critical discussions, and undue pressure on faculty and students. A congressional investigation uncovered nearly $40 million in unreported contracts between two top U.S. universities and the CCP. Foreign-backed research centers are often used as footholds for regimes to infiltrate American institutions, steal intellectual property, and push their political agendas. Some universities, either unknowingly or in pursuit of financial gain, have allowed foreign- funded centers to operate on campus, shaping curriculum, limiting academic freedom, and suppressing dissenting viewpoints. The DETERRENT Act strengthens reporting requirements, ensures greater transparency to Congress and the public, and imposes strict penalties for noncompliance. It requires universities to disclose foreign gifts and contracts to individual faculty members, who are often the most targeted by adversarial regimes. It also holds private institutions accountable by revealing foreign investments in their endowments. With the current administration failing to investigate this growing threat, the DETERRENT Act provides a necessary course correction. Foreign influence not only threatens the integrity of academic research but also compromises national security by giving adversarial governments access to sensitive technological advancements. These financial entanglements, if left unchecked, will continue to erode the independence of U.S. institutions, putting both intellectual freedom and national interests at risk. Higher education should be a place where students are taught how to think, not what to think, especially by foreign entities with their own agendas that go against United States interests. Increased oversight is essential to ensure that universities serve the interests of students and the Nation, not those of adversarial regimes. With the previous administration failing to take this step, it is essential that we do that now with the DETERRENT Act.

Mr. LaMALFA

Mr. LaMALFA. Mr. Speaker, the previous administration, the Biden administration, spent most of its years forcing extreme energy mandates onto everyday appliances: our gas stoves, our water heaters, dishwashers, air conditioners, you name it. These rules really aren't about efficiency, as the manufacturers have worked for decades to make them more efficient and meet already existing standards. No, it is more of a control situation. These drive up costs, limit the choice for consumers, and force everything onto an already overloaded power grid. Gas stoves, I know, are the preference for many people in their homes. Gas water heaters work well. It is a deal where the government wants to take away the choices. Natural gas is, indeed, one of the most affordable, reliable energy sources we have. The previous administration was the enemy of that. They did everything they could to push it out of homes and businesses and the production of it on our open lands that have so much potential, especially in the Western States. We have seen attempts to regulate gas stoves out of existence, and earlier this month we in the House voted to overturn one of those rules. Americans should be able to choose appliances that work best for them, not be forced into expensive, unreliable electric alternatives that they may not be able to afford that the government simply mandates. The push to electrify everything is reckless. In my home State of California, for example, they want to take away lawnmowers, leaf blowers, even--get this--generators. Now, when the power goes off, that means the power is off, the electricity is off. What are you supposed to run a generator on, if you need to, especially for a couple days, to keep your freezer going, things like that? It doesn't make any sense. The electric grid is already struggling to keep up. These mandates pile even more demand onto it while shutting down traditional energy sources that actually work. Where is the electricity going to come from? In my home district in northern California, they have torn out four hydroelectric dams, and they have their sights on many others. In Mendocino County, they are looking at what is called the Scott Dam, Lake Pillsbury that generates some electricity and is also important for agriculture. It is a constant push to remove water storage. In California, we lost one nuclear power plant due to an incredible amount of regulations to keep it going. That power plant was in San Diego, San Onofre. We are barely holding on to the one in San Luis Obispo, which represents 9 percent of the power grid. San Diego also represented 9 percent of the grid at that time. It has to be made up for with solar panels or windmills, which the solar one that they have in Ivanpah they are going to decommission pretty soon because it is not working very well. When we are forced into this electricity grid need, we will find that we are going to be running out because at the same time they mandate this, they mandate taking away the generation. We have rolling blackouts in California, skyrocketing energy prices, and warnings--get this--not to charge electric cars that have been mandated by the State because the grid can't handle it at certain hours. Our Governor came out saying, well, we need to do this thing, and at the same time they are warning people, better not plug your electric car in. As we know, wind and solar energy aren't enough to power the country. They are a tiny percentage of the overall pie. Wind power seems to work for a few years, and then they have to dispose of it, hauling the blades to some landfill in Utah because they don't have a way to recycle it. Mr. Speaker, we need a reliable, balanced energy approach. That includes natural gas, which is so abundant in this country with the miracle of hydraulic fracturing. We have much that we can develop here and also be a good exporter to Europe so they don't have to rely on the Russian bear to import through their pipeline. Isn't that something. Natural gas is affordable and efficient. It keeps costs down for families, businesses, and our economy. Instead of eliminating it, we should use it to strengthen our grid and keep energy reliable and cost- effective. The regulations previously were nothing more than government overreaches disguised as environmental policy. They don't make life better for working Americans, for the economy, or for U.S. strength and readiness. They make it more expensive, less reliable, and less efficient. It is time to roll these regulations back and put the power literally back in the hands of the people. It has been shown these mandates do not make things better; they are less efficient. Let industry and innovation catch up to make more efficient systems. The government can't do it.

Mr. LaMALFA

Mr. LaMALFA. Mr. Speaker, for decades, Washington has poured trillions of dollars into the education system of America with actually very little to show for it. Since the Department of Education was created by Jimmy Carter in 1979, it has spent over $3 trillion, yet student achievement hasn't actually improved. It has only gone down in that time. After Federal taxpayers spent another $200 billion on education during the COVID era, all we have to show for it is math and reading scores that are at the lowest levels in decades. Per-pupil spending has skyrocketed by 245 percent since the 1970s, proving more money doesn't always achieve better results. The Federal Government has only added red tape, forcing schools to waste time and resources on compliance instead of teaching. I am married to a teacher who, at the time, was frustrated by additional requirements that were coming down on trying to do her job. The Biden administration alone added nearly $3.9 billion in regulatory costs and millions of hours of paperwork and funneled over $1 billion into grants pushing radical ideologies instead of core academics. President Trump's executive order directing the closure of the Department of Education returns control over education to the States, parents, and local leaders. Instead of Washington bureaucrats trying to dictate how kids learn, we should have those decisions be made locally. This shift will cut waste and eliminate overreach.

Mr. LaMALFA

Mr. LaMALFA. Mr. Speaker, on Monday, March 10, 2025. I was unable to vote on Roll Call No. 63 due to unavoidable circumstances. Had I been present, I would have voted YEA on Roll Call No. 63.

Mr. LaMALFA

Mr. LaMALFA. Madam Speaker, as we take on the continuing resolution, once again it is not the best way of doing business around here. We should be grinding through the twelve different points that the appropriations process has. At least there is good news as CRs go in that part of it that is being plussed up includes the issue with our military. A lot of times when CRs occur, our military is the one that gets shorted on that. They have to plan for the long term for weapons systems, what they need in upgraded facilities, and take care of the personnel in the process. This does boost up our military needs to an extent in the CR. It will upgrade all four branches--Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines-- that are on the front lines. It will strengthen their readiness and help modernize some of their infrastructure. Delays, of course, put these projects at risk. That is why it is important that the CR be done timely. As I mentioned, family housing is a very important aspect for the comfort and efficiency of our personnel. It is directed towards improvements in the living conditions for the servicemembers and their families. Stable funding makes sure these projects stay on track. The Arlington National Cemetery, of course, has amazing meaning to our whole country, especially those that have fallen and would be interred there. There are improvements there for a better process for people to be able to get in and out of the facility, as well as the ceremonies that might be held there. We have a significant improvement in veterans' healthcare, medical services, community care, and facility improvements to ensure veterans can get the good healthcare that they need and deserve. Uncertainty does not help that to remain. That is why passing the CR at this time is important. For retirement homes for veterans, it ensures they will have facilities that continue to stay on track, whether new ones are built or continued upgrades and maintenance is not passed over. One of the aspects that we are disappointed with not getting into the continuing resolution has bipartisan support. I am pleased to work with my colleague from Colorado (Mr. Neguse) on what is known as Secure Rural Schools. That is a fund that we do every single year. It is nothing new. It is nothing that is going to plus-up spending around here or require additional budget effort. It is something that is basically there to supplement the income at the local level, for counties. It is called SRS, Secure Rural Schools. A large part of it goes to help local schools, as well as county roads. This funding used to come from the timber industry which overlaps so many of the areas that the SRS fund would go to. With the decimation of the timber industry starting really in the late seventies and the eighties, and the spotted owl movement and other environmental concerns that have made it just nearly impossible in some cases to do the timber harvest that is really needed to be done, this program came along and replaced those receipts. It is fairly tough every year to come here. Our county supervisors come here hat in hand every year and ask us to support the SRS one more time. These are dollars that have to come from the U.S. Treasury rather than from the forest and the industry. Until such point as we can get a much more viable timber industry going again in this country with a much more streamlined process of permitting, especially on Federal Forest Service land, why should it be difficult to do things that make good sense as far as thinning our forests and harvesting from it? It is a renewable resource. We plant it back, and the trees grow again. What we do instead is we seem to ignore that fact and just let them burn year after year, especially in the Western States. In my own district, we had a million-acre fire 3 years ago; a 400,000-acre fire last year; a 600,000-acre fire a couple of years before that, time after time. All my colleagues in the Western States pretty much can point to that same thing happening in their States as well, millions of acres burned every year in the West. For some reason, the U.S. is now the number one importer of wood and paper products and the number one importer of lumber. What are we doing here? We have to come hat in hand each year and ask for funding from the Treasury to replace an industry that we need and to replace wood and paper products that we use regularly in our daily lives. Heaven knows, this place goes through a lot of paper. Why should we have that come from foreign forests somewhere? When I am at the railroad crossing back home waiting on a train, I see all these loads of lumber and Canadian wheat coming south. Why aren't we doing that at home? We need to get SRS in the next round.

Mr. LaMALFA

Mr. LaMALFA. Mr. Speaker, one of the good aspects in the continuing resolution for California, and nationally for those who like California-grown food, is a portion that will be in there through the WIIN Act regarding Bureau of Reclamation funding for water projects in California, mainly the Sites Reservoir. What you see here is the Shasta Reservoir and all that water going over that is actually going nowhere except out to the Pacific Ocean. Sites Reservoir's existence will mean we will have the ability to impound up to 1.5 million acre-feet of saved water that the whole State can use instead of being lost. We have lost so much water this year due to, I think, not great management of that resource. At least 800,000 acre-feet, maybe up to 2 million acre-feet, have been lost just from Lake Shasta down the river out to the ocean. This funding here will help build a good project. It will help California's water supply go much further than what we see happening right now. We see farms being cut to 35 percent of their allocation. We see people in urban areas being cut to 42 gallons per day because we can't manage this water supply. Build the storage, manage the water better, and we will get a lot more wins.

Mr. LaMALFA

Mr. LaMALFA. Mr. Speaker, we will be taking on the continuing resolution soon this week. Although it is the way we don't really like doing business around here, I would much rather we grind through the Appropriations Committee process, which is a lot more open, it is a necessary evil we have to get done in order to keep the government funded and keep things moving forward. With what President Trump and his team have been laying out for us here, I think it is something that we can certainly deal with and get a good result as we grind through the following fiscal year on appropriations. Again, it is not ideal, but it is the way to keep things operating, and it does have some good pluses in it as well. I also want to point out, as several colleagues did here tonight, the moving on of a good friend, James Min, who I first knew working in the Kevin McCarthy office when he was whip. He helped our team get up to speed here in this place when I was a new Member and my new staff as well. I really appreciate him and wish him all the best across the street, wherever he is going to be in those endeavors. I thank James Min a lot for his effort and for just being a good, fun guy. We will see him.

Mr. LaMALFA

Mr. LaMALFA. Mr. Speaker, the costs of illegal immigration to this country and to my home State of California according to a 2023 report, the benefits and services provided to the estimated 3.23 million illegal aliens just in California costs local taxpayers just under $23 billion annually. Factoring in about 1.15 million U.S.-born children of illegal aliens, sometimes known as anchor babies, adds more than $8 billion in costs making it roughly $31 billion total. This total cost under these findings of $31 billion works out to a per capita cost to Californians of $7,074 annually. This report pegs the combined Federal, State, and local costs nationwide associated with illegal immigration at $182 billion annually, and that is probably a low number. State and local taxes paid by Californians accounts for one-sixth just in my home State of the nationwide costs associated with illegal immigration, including in K-12 education, housing, and nutrition assistance, in-State tuition at public colleges and universities, health coverage under the State's Medi-Cal program, which is the trouble, and sweeping sanctuary policies that make our cities less safe.

Mr. LaMALFA

Mr. LaMALFA. Mr. Speaker, when my colleagues contemplate inflation, Members can really boil it down to two main drivers of inflation. One would be profligate government spending. We have a $2 trillion deficit the last couple of years, post-COVID. We need to get back, of course, to pre-COVID levels of government spending and get back on a better track. Importantly, the other driver is the cost of energy because energy affects everything from the production side. Whether you are in the farm fields, in a mine, in a manufacturing plant, anything that is being made requires energy. When you mine those products, take those raw materials, and turn them into something, there is energy consumed at every step of the chain. Finally, delivery from factory or mill or whatever to the store shelf requires energy. Whether it is by a truck, train, or ship, what have you, they are all brought here because of energy. The electricity in the plants that are producing things, sawing up timber, milling grain, whatever it is, all requires energy. When those costs go up, I would say unnecessarily the last few years, then, of course, the price of everything has to go up. It would not be just at the store shelf, but at every step of the chain to when it finally reaches the store shelf. When people get in their vehicles and go get those items or order in when they have a grocery delivery, it still takes energy to get there. With these prices driving everything, it really isn't just some abstract, where inflation comes from. These are the real-life consequences of policies that make it harder and more expensive to produce, transport, and buy these things that everyday families need. The Biden administration's regulatory agenda imposed these costly mandates on energy production, and I am seeing it in my home State of California, which seems to be anti-energy, as well. Governor Newsom and the new State legislature are making it more and more impossible to locate and have fueling stations, as well as California's oil-rich holds it has underground, especially in that Kern County area. Mr. Speaker, the Biden agenda has caused these things to go up. These rules don't just squeeze businesses or big, evil corporations and things like that. They hurt every American family and every American's bank account. This week, we are taking action to reverse some of the most damaging regulations and restore some commonsense policies that actually work for Americans, that will lower costs for families, farmers, miners, timber people, manufacturers, and small businesses. H. Res. 42 aims to stop the Department of Energy's overreach on household appliances and commercial equipment. The Biden administration imposed stricter efficiency standards for making everything from dishwashers to industrial equipment. It just drives up the cost and makes it more difficult for families when they want to replace something. These regulations limit choices and drive up prices. If people want a new gas water heater, they are going to have to get one that doesn't fit in the same spot as the old one because it is going to be a lot thicker from more insulation and stuff in the idea of efficiency. The regulations make it more difficult to do that. If Democrats take away the gas water heaters and gas stoves and make them electric, people will have a whole other set of problems. Outside in people's yards, my Democratic colleagues want to ban their gas lawnmowers and their gas leaf blowers. My favorite is when my colleagues on the other side of the aisle want to ban, like in California, gas- or diesel-powered generators. Mr. Speaker, when the power goes out, tell me what people are going to power a generator with if they don't have these fuels available and generators that use those fuels. How do people turn a generator on if they don't have fuel to do it? Are they going to plug it into a battery or something like that? What fueled the battery? What if it is several days, like sometimes when we are having these ice storms in the mountainous areas like what happened in my district? These mandates don't make a lick of sense, so we want to have, with H. Res. 42, the ability for families and businesses to purchase reliable and affordable products without bureaucratic interference and whatever the whim of the day is by a stroke of a pen. H. Res. 61 seeks to reverse EPA's excessive emissions rule targeting rubber tire manufacturers. Mr. Speaker, can you believe that? The mandate drove up the cost of manufacturing tires, making essential goods more expensive because a lot of things we get come on a vehicle with tires, as well as the cost of tires on the vehicle itself. Whether it is higher prices for tires or increased costs for transportation, this rule added a burden on families and businesses already struggling with inflation. Reversing this regulation protects manufacturers, safeguards jobs, and keeps products affordable for manufacturers, small businesses, and families. S.J. Res. 11 aims to eliminate an unnecessary rule from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management that slowed down oil and gas development. The Biden administration required excessive archeological reports that make more energy production almost impossible.

Mr. LaMALFA

Mr. LaMALFA. Mr. Speaker, I was in my office for a meeting and the roll was closed sooner than normal and I didn't get to cast my vote. Had I been present, I would have voted YEA on Roll Call No. 58.

Mr. LaMALFA

Mr. LaMALFA. Mr. Speaker, I thank Mr. Newhouse for leading this. It is a regrettable situation we are in. It is not one we enjoy at all. I have been disappointed over the years at outbursts that come from this Chamber at whoever the President is. I know people on my side of the aisle have done it. In the case I am thinking of, that person later regretted it and apologized for it. That person understands that we have to have decorum in this place. It is hard to contain emotions, perhaps, but we are in the business to be leaders. We are in a business that we are supposed to be able to contain our emotions and contain ourselves in such a way that we are good leaders and good examples for the American people; that they can be proud of us and what we are doing. They may disagree with us on our policies, and they may disagree strenuously. I consider Mr. Green a friend, at least an acquaintance. We don't hang out a lot or are on the same committees, but we chat together in the hallways. I like him, and I hope he likes me too. We have probably extremely different views on some issues, and I know he expresses himself in some pretty strong views and emotions, as well. That is fine when we are doing that in debate and we are doing that in the proper format here. However, decorum in this hallowed Chamber and for what this has stood for for well over 200 years requires us to be able to operate much better than that. I wasn't so much mad last night as I sat just a few chairs over from Mr. Green. I was really mostly disappointed that it had to come to that. I have had Presidents who I have strongly disagreed with over their rhetoric or their policies, and I think they have been, in my view, very harmful to the country. Members don't act that way and completely disrupt the operations of this Chamber and the joint session last night for their own theater. That is what I am afraid it was. Did the gentleman feel strongly? Certainly he did, but Members of Congress don't act that way. We don't wave a walking stick around at people like that. It is just not good. It is improper. It is not the way we are supposed to conduct ourselves in this place or at any public forum, city council level, what have you, including townhalls. Mr. Speaker, I enjoy having townhalls, by and large, but if they are going to be advertised as a forum as a free-for-all for people to come out and do screaming matches, what should we do? Should we just turn on the clock for 90 minutes and have at it? I would like that the interactions at our local level could be constructive and both sides can hear each other to understand what is going on. In this Chamber here, during that hallowed event, when the whole country and the whole world was watching, for someone to be able to single out their own interests or their own theater because they disagreed strongly with a President whom they don't like, it is really, really bad decorum and a really bad way of doing business. I tell the gentleman that I don't enjoy casting this vote at all if it should come up tomorrow. I personally like my colleague on the other side of the aisle. I wish we could have done better last night. I hope we can count each other as friends after this. I don't hold any long-term anger or angst, but it just wasn't good. I wish I could have taken the gentleman aside last night and said: Let's not do this. Unfortunately, it happened. This is a proper reaction. We can't just let this stand. It has to be done correctly. We have to have a decorum for this House, and this censure is what is necessary to hit that reset and do so. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the gentleman yielding time to me.

Mr. LaMALFA

Mr. LaMALFA. Mr. Speaker, before President Trump got into office recently, America's security was really, really in doubt, especially on our border, so the actions taken by us in this House as well as, very importantly, what President Trump has done to secure our border is incredible. The numbers are down dramatically from the amount of people coming across illegally daily to the mere small number that is still doing so now until such point as we complete the border fence and the other measures taken to have the border completely secure. It is a pretty amazing turnaround. Tomorrow, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform will question the mayors of several of our large cities who seem to be just more concerned about the benefits of illegal immigrants than of those of the American people. The mayors of Boston, Chicago, Denver, and New York who have been harboring illegal immigrants as sanctuary areas and have jeopardized the public safety of their own constituents and drained taxpayer resources will be held accountable in this hearing. These so-called leaders have chosen to ignore Federal immigration laws. They are breaking the law. They brag about it, and they say they will continue to do so. They chose to shield the illegal immigrants, including criminals, rather than protect the people they were actually elected to serve. They chose policies that have overwhelmed law enforcement, strained public services, and put American families at risk. They don't seem to care that these tax dollars come from the hardworking people who actually did have eligibility to vote for them. We House Republicans refuse to let this continue and have continued to take action. President Trump declared a national emergency and deployed the military to the border to slow down that massive tide. Indeed, it has worked. He has ended catch and release where basically law enforcement catches somebody at the border, processes them as fast as they can, and turns them loose in the country maybe to come back for a hearing on asylum supposedly within a couple years. He reestablished the remain in Mexico policy so they are not to just come into the country. If Mexico is going to let them in from the south, then they can deal with it. Remain in Mexico is not automatic passage into the U.S. He has restarted the border wall construction. Indeed, that makes it so much easier for our law enforcement personnel, our border personnel, to be able to narrow down the tide coming in and focus on what is going to happen there. He shut down the CBP One app. He has terminated taxpayer-funded benefits for illegal immigrants. We still have States like my home State of California who can't give it away fast enough, at one point $9.5 billion for illegal immigrants in their health care program at the same time that the State is asking for $40 billion to get bailed out after the horrific fire situation in southern California. He has terminated taxpayer benefits overall for illegal immigrants via executive order. We need to back him up on that. He began transferring criminal aliens to Guantanamo Bay so they don't get away. He classified cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, and indeed they are. He suspended the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program. He has clawed back DHS funds that were being used for the benefit of housing illegal immigrants while at the same time we have people suffering from disasters. Here we were able to pass the Laken Riley Act to keep violent criminals off our streets, especially those who are here as illegal immigrants. We passed the Violence Against Women by Illegal Aliens Act to protect these innocent lives. We passed the HALT Fentanyl Act to stop deadly drugs from flowing across our border. Fentanyl is an existential crisis in this country for so many people. It is so deadly and yet so prevalent. It is sent through Mexico so much by China. Mexico is not being a good neighbor when they keep allowing this. We passed the Agent Raul Gonzalez Officer Safety Act to give law enforcement the tools they need, as well. The results are that illegal border crossings, as I mentioned, have dropped dramatically. Apprehensions have fallen by 93 percent because they don't have to apprehend this 93 percent, which is a major victory for border security. We will not back down. I know President Trump will not back down. We need to move forward because we raise our right hand and swear allegiance to this country and its Constitution. It is our job to make our country strong, to make our country safe, and to serve our own citizens who are already struggling enough with inflation and with choking regulations in some cases. So much is going against the grain of what the founding of this country was about. I am proud of the work we have been trying to do here on the House floor. I hope we can get more of a bipartisan effort on that as we see the common sense of what we are trying to do. The Senate can take this up and support the leadership President Trump has provided and the results we have seen so strongly so far.

Mr. LaMALFA

Mr. LaMALFA. Mr. Speaker, unhinged bureaucrats have stood in the way of American energy for too long. Overregulation, job-killing policies, and reliance on foreign nations have driven up costs and hurt American families, businesses, and farms. That changes now as we take measures to unleash America's full energy potential. President Trump has already taken decisive action by declaring a national energy emergency to cut through the bureaucracy, red tape, and nonsense to finally get back on track. He has rolled back the Biden administration's crippling regulations, ending the so-called Green New Deal policies, and withdrawn from agreements, such as the Paris climate accord, that put other countries first while holding us back and exporting our jobs to the Pacific Rim and others. We are opening back up the 625 million acres for offshore drilling that were put in recklessly via a last-minute monument. That is a 1,000- by 1,000-mile square, to say no more. The President is opening that back up. Lifting Biden's ban on liquefied natural gas exports helps get energy flowing again to Europe, helping our allies not be dependent on Russian gas. We are backing it up in Congress. We are passing legislation to protect domestic energy production and ensure we never face these kinds of restrictions again, including three pieces of legislation this week alone that will be done. The results are clear: Crude oil prices will have dropped 5 percent and will continue to drop.

Mr. LaMALFA

Mr. LaMALFA. Mr. Speaker, we welcome President Trump tomorrow to the Capitol for his joint address here in Congress. It is more than just a speech. It is an opportunity to lay out the successes so far of this administration and the important work ahead to restore American strength, the economy, as well as world affairs. In just a short time, President Trump has delivered real results, ending the taxpayer-funded DEI programs and stopping the government from wasting money on divisive policies. He took decisive action to secure our border. The numbers have been dropping dramatically from those who were illegally crossing just a couple of months ago to just a couple hundred a day. This puts the safety of American citizens first. The President is cutting through bloated bureaucracy and the alarming waste and missed priorities of programs that the American taxpayers don't even want any part of. This makes government work for the people, not against them, which respects taxpayers. On the world stage, he has proven that peace comes through strength, rejecting the weak leadership that left America vulnerable and our adversaries emboldened, which helps to prevent wars that would happen and end current wars.

Mr. LaMALFA

Mr. LaMALFA. Mr. Speaker, this week, we made an important step in passing the budget resolution in order to carry out the business of the House for the American people. As we get into the budget reconciliation process, which is going to be a positive one for getting spending under control, we also need to have a lot more truth surrounding what is going to be happening in that process. For more than I would like to have heard the last week, week and a half, 2 weeks, we keep hearing the same rhetoric that Republicans are going to cut Medicare, SNAP, Medicaid, Social Security, all of these things. Nowhere in that budget reconciliation document does it say that. In the resolution, nowhere does it say that. We need not lie about what we are doing around here in order to gain political points. We actually should be sitting down at the table together and looking at how we can make these programs work better for longer. Social Security is going to be in big trouble within 7 or 8 years. If we want to have solutions to that, why don't we sit at the table together and figure these things out instead of lying about it? We are trying to achieve better budgets and get closer to balancing the budget than what we have had the last 4 years. Why don't we be truthful in this process instead of the nonsense?

Mr. LaMALFA

Mr. LaMALFA. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the time and effort to make this time available so that we can communicate directly with the American public about what is going on in Congress. Mr. Speaker, I am disappointed that I sometimes hear a lot of misinformation going out, including several presentations just a few minutes ago on the distortion of what the intentions are under the budget resolution and ultimately budget reconciliation and how we are going to return the United States back in the direction of a balanced budget, which has ballooned to be so unbalanced in the last few years. At least let's get back to the pre-COVID numbers instead of $2 trillion annually. We will resolve that, and we will talk about that. We will talk about it publicly in the upcoming weeks, and the people can tune right into the committee hearings and see for themselves rather than having to believe lies made by politicians and by the media. Mr. Speaker, I also will share this time and this hour here with colleagues, including my new colleague here from Indiana (Mr. Shreve), who would like to give his comments and thoughts here. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Shreve).

Mr. LaMALFA. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for participating and letting us know what is going on in the gentleman's district. I wish the gentleman the best in his first term and new term as a Member of Congress. Mr. Speaker, just in quick review once again here, in passing the budget resolution this week, H. Con. Res. 14, it is a 60-page document, I invite people to look it up for themselves and reconcile for themselves between what they are hearing and what my colleagues on the other side of the aisle are trying to scare the public with on things that are going to be cut because of it. They are not in there. Again, Medicaid, no cuts. Medicare, no cuts. Social Security, no cuts. SNAP, none. We even heard a bit ago about veterans. No. We want to make these things better for them. We want to make them more effective. Our veterans deserve to have the best possible care and the best possible services for them. It isn't going to come from the type of rhetoric of what we are hearing here. As I mentioned before, Social Security. No one is going to reduce Social Security, but looking forward in the long term, it is going to be in big trouble in 7 or 8 years. Shouldn't we be working together in a bipartisan way to make sure that that program can sustain itself beyond that when the trust fund runs out, at such a point when more money will have to be paid in by workers or having less benefits or things like that because it just flat runs out? That is not good. Let's have an honest debate on that and how Medicaid is going to go forward, as well. All of these programs need to be looked at in order to keep them on a solid fiscal course. That doesn't happen when lies get told about what we are trying to do here in sight of running $2 trillion budget deficits. Mr. Speaker, with so many different issues for us to be looking at in Congress, we also have to revitalize our economy. A growing economy will help a lot in solving our deficit problem. Two big drivers of inflation are overspending by Federal Government and the cost of energy, which is integral to so much of our economy, to every aspect of production and transportation and delivery and what we do in our daily lives. The cost of energy, from electricity in our homes and businesses, manufacturing, and fuel for vehicles, trains, and aircraft. Those are the two main drivers. As we have seen in the last several years, when the Federal Government has basically put a giant vacuum on the available money supply, prices go up on everything. The energy to produce those things causes higher prices. I am a farmer in my real life at home. A couple of years ago, I saw the tripling of the cost of fertilizer as an input for our crops and the doubling of the cost of fuel. Where is that going to be made up? It is in the price of food. Everybody is kind of mad about the price of eggs right now. I get it. I understand that. A couple of points that factor into that is that we have California regulations, especially on how eggs are to be produced and the chickens are to be raised. We have seen all those things that drive inflation affect the egg growers and the poultry folks. Also, I believe there is an overreaction on the bird flu. The last number I saw was 160 million chickens have been exterminated because of the idea or perception on that. Yes, there is a real deal out there, but I think the Biden administration took it way too far. When you have these things going on, that is going to affect the price of eggs. The Trump administration is working diligently on that. I spoke with the Secretary of Agriculture just yesterday, and they are looking at remedies for that. We will be soon getting a handle on that and other things that are inflationary if we are allowed to have our economy thrive and be open enough to take care of these things. I am encouraged by this direction. There is a lot of talk about DOGE and what it is doing. It is, indeed, flipping over rocks and finding a lot of cockroaches scurrying away on some things that the American public cares zero about on what is being spent in foreign areas. At USAID, at the beginning, there were some good aspects of USAID, but it sure turned into something that the public doesn't care about or want. There are effects from these costs and of these actions of government. Mr. Speaker, we should then look at the regulatory side. We have had so much being expended on climate change, in my home State of California especially. What actually is climate change, and let's look at long-term trends. There is a lot of science behind that being ignored, I believe. What are the trends on temperatures? What are the trends on CO2? There are so many different aspects that are a lot more scientific than politicians, me included, who are trying to expound upon that. We have seen very difficult regulations come down the pike on the regulations especially of CO2. My colleagues have probably seen this poster of mine in the past, where I have pointed out the makeup of CO2 in our atmosphere, one of the greenhouse gases that are the main concern by several administrations now. The main gas is nitrogen, oxygen, and these trace gases. We put right over here, especially carbon dioxide. Look at that very narrow strip which that represents. When I actually show them this stuff, people are astounded at how little CO2 is in the atmosphere because they have been scared and had so much fear instilled in them by media, by politicians, and by regulatory agencies who say that CO2 is going to be the end of mankind. It is an existential threat. It is the biggest threat we have according to John Kerry and others. It is not the actions of China and others in the promoting of war and terrorism around the world. Let me show my updated chart here. This one points out the same one I just showed here. This is currently in 2025. This is what it looked like back in 1970, back when I was a kid in school and they were instilling fear in us that we were going to have an ice age. Those are the days of the ice age. Those are the days of global cooling. Look at the two charts. They are a bit smaller than the first poster here, but they are the same ratios. There is CO2 once again, that little, skinny, purple piece of pie in that chart here. There it is right here. It is the same ratios. Yes, CO2 is bumped up a little bit over that time, but that can be defined by so many things besides human activity. Mr. Speaker, the credit that we would get as a nation isn't very often forthcoming that we have actually already done a lot of good things in this timeline. There is the Paris climate accord. Only the U.S. and one other country have actually seen their CO2 numbers go down in that period of time and leading up to it. Everyone else's is going up. When efforts are being made to so dramatically regulate carbon dioxide, it is killing our economy. It is killing people's choices. Look at my home State of California, where they want to ban vehicles that are gas or diesel powered by 2035. They are coming after locomotives. More and more, they have forced aircraft into using different types of fuels. That is fine. If you can develop the fuel and it is a better fuel, let's look at it, but is it really going to produce? Instead of where the rubber meets the road, I guess where the wing meets the air, are we going to see dramatic savings in the different pollutants that are being focused on, or is it going to be offset by such tremendously high costs that it is never worth doing it? When you look at the CO2, so many things are being done to try and avoid CO2, such as, again, vehicles. They want to take away gas stoves and gas water heaters. We have had legislation recently to address that, no, this isn't something that should just be done by whim, by the stroke of a pen in executive orders by EPA or others. We have had CRAs, referring to the Congressional Review Act, to say, no, we are going to let people keep what they have because it really hasn't been shown that there is going to be a dramatic positive effect by taking away people's appliances, their gas stoves, vehicles, what have you. Let's go back a little bit. I want to talk about greenhouse gas and the efforts by the EPA in different administrations. In 2003, under the Bush administration, there was a petition submitted to the EPA for the agency to regulate greenhouse gases and CO2 under the Clean Air Act. It led to litigation that went all the way up to the Supreme Court, which ruled, in 2007, that the Clean Air Act was written broadly enough, at least in that Court's decision, for EPA to regulate greenhouse gases, which include CO2 supposedly as a greenhouse gas--you can debate that if you want--and that EPA must decide if emissions from new motor vehicles endangered public health or welfare. Once the Supreme Court made that ruling in 2007, 2 years later, the Obama administration, under their EPA, jumped to issue a 2009 finding that CO2 greenhouse gas endangered public health and that these emissions from new motor vehicles contribute to that endangerment. That is the endangerment clause that we talked about. With these actions, the EPA is now required to establish CO2 standards for new motor vehicles for upcoming years. Up until that 2007 ruling, EPA generally did not regulate CO2 and greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles. We saw that, in '09, as I mentioned, the Obama administration moved in that direction, and we have been hearing about CO2 as a pollutant ever since. Let's go back to basic school chemistry and science on that. CO2 is an important element in the atmosphere, even though it is only this tiny fraction at 0.04 percent. It is enough to sustain plant life. It is an important element, a key element. We breathe oxygen, basically. We breathe all this, but oxygen is what we carry in our bloodstreams. CO2 is basically the same oxygen for plant life, tree life, all of it. Interestingly, if we are too successful at reducing CO2 below the 0.02 percent level, you will see plant life starting to die off. You will see, with certain agricultural and horticultural operations, some will put up greenhouses in order to get the new developed plants to grow faster. Maybe for retail sales, so you can buy your tomatoes at the market to plant in your garden, they will inject extra CO2 into that to boost the speed of the plants. That shows right there firsthand that CO2 is essential to plant life and tree life. If we are making that an existential threat, then we are really missing an important key to the science. Even though back in '09, in that area, everybody wanted to say that the science was settled. This is a catastrophe waiting to happen, that has been happening ever since, especially in my home State of California, where they are hell-bent on taking away people's choices on their vehicles, gas stoves, gas leaf blowers, and whatever you can think of, even--catch this--generators. Think of what a generator does during an emergency. Generally, they are pretty portable and are needed when there is no electricity available in an area. A lot of times, this might be up in the hills or in the woods where there is no electricity anyway or in a remote area, maybe out on a farm. Maybe you need to weld something on your farm equipment, so there is a generator on the truck that can hook to the welder. A lot of people have home generators that are fuel powered, frequently gas powered, some diesel powered. Let's say they get their way and ban fuel-powered generators of all types. Hospitals have backup generators when the power goes out there. Lord knows, in my part of the State here, we have seen plenty of power outages where we have what is called public safety power shutoffs in northern California because we have so many forest fires. Some of them have been started by the interaction of trees and tree branches and such with power lines. You get two bad results when that happens. A tree falling into a power line or a large branch, et cetera, sparks and causes fire. The two bad outcomes frequently will cause a blackout. The power will be knocked out, but the things that are more dramatic and more noticeable in the long term are the fires that could come from that and then torch tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands and, in one case, a million acres. In my district, a perfectly healthy-looking tree that had been inspected and deemed to be okay fell into a power line. That is how the Dixie fire started and burned 1 million acres. What are the effects of that fire on CO2, air quality, and all that? It is really bad. The Dixie fire, for example, was, as I mentioned, 1 million acres of such concentrated smoke that that smoke plume got up into the atmosphere in such density that it made it up into the jet stream that comes across west to east in this country and affected the East Coast. People in New York, Philadelphia, and even here in D.C. were advised for a several-day period to not go out and do physical athletic activities outside because the smoke was seen as above healthy levels. This isn't just in my backyard, where it happens so often that people are almost used to having brown skies because of burning forests. Our fire is affecting the East Coast. You noticed it a year or two ago with the Canadian fires, where it was coming down from either Ontario or Quebec, much more close by, and suffering those effects, too. That came all the way from back there. That is a result of regulations not allowing us to manage the forest in such a way that you can put fire out much more simply and sooner. You are always going to have fires. You are always going to have burning forests. The last 50 years or so, because of the way they have not been managed, the forests are now so dense, so full of burnable material, burnable fuels, that it is extremely difficult to put a fire out. We need what is called shaded fuel breaks, which in plain English means thinning areas of the forest. We should prioritize around towns and cities, of course, but any area that you can do that means that you are going to have a lower density of trees per acre. A lot of the brush and other material that gathers on the bottom of the forest, that biomaterial can actually be used for positive things. There are folks talking to us even more about expanding the use of that for pellets to export, positive export, positive for our economy and our trade deficit, but also for cleaning up our forests and putting jobs back in our forests. For some reason, we are the number one importer of wood products of the Western countries. Let's get some wins on that. Let's get some wins for everybody on the management of the forest and the negative environmental effects you have on air quality as well as water quality. You have all the ash that is left behind on these catastrophic fires that basically leave you a moonscape that is washed into the streams, brooks, and rivers, and eventually the lakes, such as lakes in northern California that store mass amounts of water--4.5 million acre-feet in Lake Shasta, 3.5 million acre-feet in Lake Oroville, when they are allowed to be full. That is the water supply for most of the rest of California. It is the drinking water for L.A. It is important. What do you do with that water quality with all that stuff flowing in there because we are not managing the forest lands? When we harm ourselves with CO2 information that really isn't accurate or proportional, we hamper our ability to do much of anything. I am excited to see that our new EPA Administrator, Lee Zeldin, is taking a look at this again. We are not just accepting that, back in 2009, the Obama administration was able to just say that the science is settled. What do you know about science? Science is never settled. Science is constantly evolving at some level or another as new information is found. I don't know how many things you can really decide are the final word in the area of science, biology, or what have you. We are always learning more, so how you can have the whole equation on whether it is mankind's involvement or what nature does with forests and trees--in the rain forest, for example, as plant life grows and dies, as it absorbs oxygen doing so, it releases CO2 when it dies off. What is happening in the ocean? There are a lot of sources where CO2 could be happening. That is under the assumption that we think CO2 is bad, but ask a tree. CO2 is good. Pretty much everything is carbon-based anyway in our world and our lives. If we are going to eliminate CO2, which I don't know that we can eliminate that much, down to 0.02 percent, that would be really dangerous to do so. I am pleased that under the executive order that President Trump put out, the EPA Administrator is going to look at recommendations on the 2009 endangerment finding as it was called at the EPA under the Obama administration. It has been the basis for many climate-related regulations. This executive order will determine whether this really aligns with what the energy policies, legal interpretations, and, more importantly, the needs of Americans are for energy and all the things that come from energy. Remember, I talked about the main cost drivers of inflation and why everything is so expensive now, including eggs and fuel. Our fuel in California is about $1.25 or $1.50 a gallon higher than the national average. That is another thing we get to enjoy under the regime in California. Taking a look at this endangerment finding and saying the science isn't settled is going to be extremely important. We can actually get some more science involved back in how we are going to look at CO2. The other greenhouse gases, I think we need to continue to look at methane and NOX, nitrogen oxide. Those are still issues we need to look at, and I think certainly that Mr. Zeldin over there at EPA is going to be responsible in that area. I also am very glad that we are asking the question once again, because if you watch this floor very much, you might see me pretty often talking about this chart because so many people have been scared into believing that CO2 is this giant existential danger. I ask people frequently when we have gatherings or meetings and sway into this topic a little bit. Most people on the street believe the atmosphere is somewhere between, typically, 20 to 50 percent of CO2. Again, they are dumbfounded when they find out that it is 0.04 percent. We are exporting our jobs to the Pacific Rim, Mexico, or other places because we don't want to do it here. Part of the findings is that when you look at the whole equation, we are not helping overall global emissions. The finding itself states that even if the U.S. cut its emissions to zero, global emissions would keep increasing because of countries like China, India, and others in that neighborhood. They would keep going up. Remember the Olympics that were held in China just a few years ago? The air is so nasty there in those large cities that they actually shut down their industries for about a couple of weeks leading up to the Olympics and during the Olympics so they could try to have blue skies and cleaner air for the athletes participating back then. We don't have to do that stuff here, except when we have forest fires. Of course, no one wants to go outside if the forest fire is affecting them. That gets down to a forest management thing I will talk about on a different day. We have achieved so much, and we have achieved good things with regulations in this Nation here going back to '66 and '68. A lot of those rules came in on car emissions, devices, and such that have helped. The L.A. Basin is a lot cleaner than it was in the late sixties and earlier seventies and probably before that, as well. We have done so much. The technology with engines these days, with the internal combustion engines, called ICE, is so tremendously much cleaner-burning now than it used to be. Credit doesn't seem to be given to industry for doing that. Truck engines and tractor engines are up to Tier 4 now. They burn pretty darn clean. We can still do more to improve, but if industry is allowed to improve on its own as technology is done organically instead of being forced by a regulation that is taking it in the wrong direction, away from improving what we have, we are not going to get there. We are going to have these electric vehicles that nobody can afford and nobody really wants, other than the elitists and what have you. They are being forced upon people, and they are forced upon the industry that is trying to develop a way to make it better. Battery technology, I am sorry, has not caught up to the desire to have battery-powered vehicles. Storage batteries, it takes so much area, so many resources to build the batteries, so many metals, metals that we are not allowed to mine in this country due to EPA and other regulations. In one case, a copper mine took 29 years to permit. Copper is going to be dramatically needed as more and more AI technology; AI centers are built. The amount of electricity to run them is going to be tremendous as well. Where are we going to get the energy to do all this? Well, we have these clean forms of energy that have been shunned for a long time. One form is hydroelectric power. In my own district, just recently, they took four hydroelectric dams down that generated CO2-free power. Hydroelectric creates zero CO2 in making that electricity. Nuclear power creates zero CO2. The type of power they make is 24-hour, 7-day a week availability of power. You don't have to wait for the Sun to come up, the rain and clouds to go away, or for the wind to blow, as is necessary for a windmill or solar plant to become effective. I am not against those forms of power, but I am just looking at what is the efficiency of them versus what we know has worked for a long time. The country has moved away from coal. Coal is still a very important component. Coal could still be a win if we would redesign the power plants and allow them to be retrofitted. Maybe it is a good backup plan. I am not sure. That is a tougher debate. Natural gas plants are very, very clean running plants. We need more of them, as we have so much natural gas available after the miracle of hydraulic fracturing was invented and is being perfected more each day. There is so much potential there. It is important that we up the production of natural gas and the export of it, as well. Look at Europe, where Russia built the giant pipeline to bring gas into Germany, and other areas I suppose. When you look at the history of that area of the world there, I am astounded that Europe would want to be dependent upon Russia for natural gas. They could take that 90- degree valve and shut it off anytime if they didn't like what Germany or others were doing politically or what have you. We have a much stronger relationship with Europe. We are in NATO together, which we need to maintain that relationship. I am glad to see President Trump is also requiring stronger participation by NATO folks to pay for more of their own way. Why should that be on the American taxpayer? They seem to be getting it. Germany was talking more recently about participating at a stronger level. That is all good. We are still their friends. We are still allies together. There is nothing wrong with that. Why would they want to be dependent on the Russian bear for their natural gas? What if there was actually not a political crisis but just some kind of hiccup anyway? The U.S. has tremendous ability to develop more natural gas and export it via those big ships to Europe. We should be doing a lot more of that as a good ally and a good trading partner. It will help with trade. We were talking about trade in agriculture a little bit earlier today. We are not having a lot of great results on that trade. Dairy, for example, is really suffering in this country as there is a tremendous amount of imports coming in, kind of undercutting our dairies. Why is that? Why are we seeing so much Canadian lumber and wheat coming down? I see it as I sit at the railroad crossings in northern California when a train goes by. Why are we importing all that, especially the lumber? We burn hundreds of thousands, millions of acres each year that are not being managed by the Forest Service or by allowing those contracts to be let out for the lumber, the timber that needs to be taken from those areas. The first thing you will hear from the environmental groups: Oh, you want to clear-cut. You are just in it for big lumber, big timber companies. That is not what it is at all. We are managing these lands. We will be much more successful. The forests will be healthier, and it is better for the wildlife. Nothing is good for the wildlife when you burn a million acres. The habitats of the spotted owl, cougar, and raccoon, and everything else goes up with them, and the water quality, on and on and on. It comes back to these choking regulations that don't allow us to do what we need to do. I am getting back to the CO2 and the work the EPA will be looking at. As I mentioned, the U.S. has cut emissions in absolute terms as a share of global emissions since really the 1990s. Despite our increasing population, larger economy, we have been able to accomplish that. An important thing to note about the ruling by the 2009 Obama EPA is that Congress has not directly given the EPA the authority to regulate these emissions. It was by the sweep of a pen in the Supreme Court. Well, isn't Congress the most responsive, the closest to the people, especially this House, as each of us represents about 750,000 people? We have the most opportunity to interact most directly with our constituents and hear from them. That is the model that was set up by the Founders. The U.S. House is the one most directly responsive to the people and has 2-year election cycles so that if they get tired of us they can throw the bums out. There has to be a responsiveness. It has a responsibility in that it really should be leading the way on how regulations are going to affect those same people that send us here. That is why we have, thankfully, for the EPA and others, the Congressional Review Act where if a regulation is put in and it seems to be overreaching, overbearing, we have the opportunity in the House to hear those. We have passed a couple lately that say, no, we are going to put you back in your more reasonable role as a regulatory agency. What we are hearing from the people is they don't want their light bulbs taken away. They don't want their cars taken away. They don't want all these things to happen to them when the science is unsettled about if it is really helping anything. They know it is driving costs up. They know they have fewer choices. The Supreme Court has already had another recent ruling where the EPA has tried to move even more aggressively to regulate emissions and they have found that some of these rulings were illegal in their overreach, so it comes back to us to legislate on it. Let's take credit for what we have done. Let industry take credit for having done the research and development to make cleaner running vehicles, more efficient vehicles, cleaner power plants, more efficient appliances than ever. Just over time, by attrition, when more and more of these are replaced with the newer stuff, you are going to see improvements in that, even with the increased population and more things going on with the economy. As I mentioned AI a minute ago, the amount of need for electricity is going to grow dramatically just for that. If we did have all these electrify-everything mandates, electricity needs to be grown as well. How are we going to do that if we are not building more power plants, like nuclear power, natural gas, hydroelectric? They are after more hydroelectric plants in northern California, Washington, and Oregon. It is all about tearing dams out right now. We are seeing some of the negative effects. Let's talk about the Klamath River. As soon as they tore the dams out, millions of cubic yards of silt flushed right down the Klamath River. I have the pictures in the other room--I have shown them to you enough times probably--of dead fish, dead wildlife, and the muck that has been moving down the Klamath River. That is a pretty negative effect from all the hype of what it was going to do to help that. With all this happening, we still have a pretty amazing, strong economy in this country. I am very, very pleased that President Trump is trying to restore that after the 4 dark years of the Biden administration not really paying attention to much of what we need, especially in the rural sector with the economies we used to have in timber, mining and agriculture as well. Due to the timber industry being devastated for most of the last 50 years, we have to resort to something called the Secure Rural Schools Act that myself and Mr. Neguse from Colorado are putting forward. It is a fund that comes from the U.S. Treasury to make sure that the schools and roads in local areas have some of the money they need that they used to get from timber receipts. When you cut timber in those areas, they had this fee upon that timber that went to the local roads, local schools and counties, et cetera. With the sweeping away of the timber industry and so many mills that we have lost in the West, the negative effect it has had on those local funds has been required to be replaced by the Secure Rural Schools Act that we are again putting forward. We have enjoyed pretty good bipartisan support in the past on that, but it does have a budget effect, so we have to fight for it every year. Wouldn't we rather fight for the timber receipts and not have to come hat in hand to Congress, to the American people and say, yeah, we need this fund for something that got taken away by a regulatory act? It is something we need anyway. It would be better for these wood and paper products to come from American forests instead of us being the number one importer of wood products, as I mentioned. Why are we doing that? We are not forced to take these products by any type of trade agreement. Certainly, President Trump is looking at how we are going to even the score with other countries via tariffs. Tariffs are controversial, I get it. I have long believed, just personally--this is as a nonpolitician, when I was much younger--you know, our policy with other countries ought to just be a mirror. You treat us how we will treat you or vice versa. That is what our trade policy is going to be. If you are going to tariff us, then I guess we should tariff you back until we get to the point where we can just get rid of the tariffs and whoever can build the best product or compete the best is going to be able to trade with each other. India has been pretty bad on that. Even some of our best trading partners we have these tariffs. I hope that ultimately, if that has to be a stick until we can get to the carrot--and I hope we get to the carrot soon--then that is something we have to look at. I am encouraged that under this administration we are looking at things in a different way, maybe more scientifically than we have in a long time, but the greenhouse gas thing is going to be very detrimental long term to our economy and the things that we do well unnecessarily. I mean, in California, they are still pushing forward on this high- speed rail project. You have heard me talk about this maybe a few times. What started as an idea back in 2008 and put before the California voters was a $33 billion fast train from S.F. to L.A. Well, this is 2025. That is 17 years, and not a single mile of track has been laid yet. There have been kids born and graduated high school during the amount of time that this hasn't been done. This fast train from S.F. to L.A. was projected to be finished by 2020. That is what the voters were told when they approved the bonds by a narrow 52 to 48 percent. Okay. We will put forth $9 billion of bonds to kick-start the investment. I love that word ``investment'' around here, meaning we are going to spend your dollars, we are going to invest. That said, they narrowly agreed to that because private investment was going to come along as well. They would be attracted to it. This will be a great project, a money maker. It will be a great thing. Private investment has stayed away in droves. Nobody wants to come in on this unless they can have guarantees that they will make money. However, in that bond initiative specifically, in order to pass it, because people would be warning against that, it specifically outlined that no subsidies of train tickets, what have you, are allowed. Now they are going to try to find ways around that, which is another lie told to the voters on that proposition. Still, they forge ahead. Many years later, not a single mile of track has been laid. They have these bridges and causeways built, which one day will be monuments to the idiocy of this project. Still, they forge ahead. You can only identify between that $9 billion--and then right back in 2009 there are kids in junior high school that saw that happen--or still in high school, I mean, that saw during that timeline when the Obama administration had the ARRA funds, which was known as the stimulus package then for shovel-ready projects. How many years can you do a project and have it still be deemed shovel-ready when we are 17 years in on high-speed rail? Shovel-ready projects, they had a component for high-speed rail around the country. Three other States wanted a piece of that. After a while, looking at the cost, they gave it back, so it all went into one pile. California said: We will take that $3.5 billion. Here we are 17 years later without having a mile of track even laid. We are having an investigation into that, too. I appreciate that Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy came out to L.A. a little over a week ago and announced that they are going to be auditing that, reviewing that, and seeing if the American taxpayers are getting a bang for the buck for the money that had been, not really asked for, but had put in there, that original $3.5 billion in 2009, and then right at the end of the Biden era another approximately $4 billion. As I started to mention, you can only identify between all this money, the $9 billion, the two chunks from Federal, and then California has implemented a cap-and-trade act to tax people's ability to make CO2, as in manufacturing. If you are a certain size or larger manufacturer, you have to go buy the right to do what you have always done if that produces CO2, you know, 0.04 percent of the atmosphere in that. Mr. Speaker, they have created their own phony currency. They just had the auction for it. They have an auction where people have to go bid for this. They had it sometime in February and raised some money for the State government to spend. About a billion of that is dedicated each year since then to the high-speed rail. If all of these numbers are added up and if they are somehow allowed to keep the $3.5 to $4 billion that Secretary Duffy is looking at--that I hope to claw back--adding all that up, it is about $18 billion or $19 billion. The price of that rail project has quadrupled since its inception in 2008 from the $33 billion to now about $130 billion. Let's look at these numbers for a bit. The $130 billion, after all this trouble, after all this battle to get Federal money--two chunks of a little over $3 billion, the $9 billion from the voters, and this $1 billion at a time for the CO2 cap-and-trade money generated in California with that fake currency they are taxing people that produce--$18 billion to $19 billion, they are about $110 billion to $112 billion short of the $130 billion that is commonly accepted to be the total price. They have extracted maybe seven or eight out of the Federal Government. They want another $110 billion, and the private sector is not coming forward to finance this thing because they know it is a loser. They can recognize that. Are they going to hit the people of California with another bond? Instead of just $9 billion, it is a bond of $110 billion which takes 30 years to pay back once they have doubled the price of that. Where are they going to get the $110 billion? Secretary Duffy of the Department of Transportation is right. He is smart to look at the $4 billion still hanging right now just recently given by the Biden administration. Let's claw that back now and let them figure it out in California, my home State. Let them figure it out. Why should the other 49 States pay for something that isn't working at all and that is so late? They promised--back when this came along in 2008, 2009, 2010--it will probably provide a million jobs for California. Are we kidding ourselves? People up there on that dais were promising that number. It turns out, after review a couple of years later in a State senate hearing, they said we meant a million job years. Job years is a different terminology than what they had been telling people. Currently, they claim there are 14,000 jobs involved in building whatever the portions of high-speed rail they are doing. When we do the math on that, 14,000 divided into that million job years, that means that at about 70 years of 14,000 people at a million job years, it will take about 70 years to make that math work, which they are right on track. It is going to take about 70 years to build this rail if they actually got the financing. I don't know that anybody wants to come forward with $110 billion to continue this. I thank Secretary Sean Duffy for looking at this. I thank EPA Director Lee Zeldin for looking at the CO2 side of it here because most of the premise of the high-speed rail in California is that it will be a CO2 saver. We have this electric train. Where does electricity come from? How many trains can they actually run on that track from northern California to southern California to displace Southwest Airlines and all the other airlines that have a heck of a lot of traffic? How much is the ticket going to cost to ride this since it is not allowed to be subsidized? It will probably be in the rage of $300. They say it will be cheaper than airlines. How will it be cheaper with these rates? It can't be. It can't possibly be. People will ride it for the novelty. Even at one point they said, in order technically for it to be the high-speed rail going from San Francisco to L.A. in 2\1/2\ hours, they only have to run one train as an express each day to do that. Other trains can stop in little burbs along the way, which means it won't be a high-speed rail anymore except in between the cities. It will probably end up being a 4-hour train anyway by the time they do that. What have they gained? What have they gained for all that money? What have they gained for all that pain--from the ag land, the farmland, a rendering plant that is in the way of it? Rendering plants are very essential, where they take discarded farm animals that have died: dairy, horses, whatever. To resite a rendering plant isn't popular. No one wants to be next to one of those, especially in this day and age where people don't understand rural issues and rural needs. They ask: What is all this dust? What is all this noise? What are all these tractors going slowly down the road? It is making our food is what it is doing, but we will worry about all that later. Maybe we can import all that. It brings back this old poster I always use here. We are not growing the food in California if we are not growing these crops. Somewhere between 90 and 100 percent of these crops listed here are grown in California. If we don't grow them, then we have to import them or do without them. We have to pay higher prices. We won't have the stability of where they come from, all because it is being regulated out of business. The water is being taken away for these growers. The land is being taken away in some cases like this debacle going on at the Point Reyes National Seashore Park where farmers for dairy and beef ranches are being kicked off right now because the national parks have muscled them off, along with environmental organizations. They are muscling them off because of phony NEPA stuff that they have made up to move them out of the way. They say the Tule elk will now thrive there because of that. Cattle and Tule elk get along just fine on these lands. Cattle are very essential for helping maintain the landscape, grazing at a level that helps with keeping it healthy. In areas where it is dry, it keeps it safe from fire. That is more government regulation muscling people out there. That is what we see. That is why we have the Congressional Review Act. That is why we have what we are looking at here with DOGE flipping things over, finding these phony-baloney contracts, and giving it even to some of the media here, to buy subscriptions to the media to keep them pumped up. We see how many people are getting laid off from some of the higher levels of media and some of the programs that are closing because maybe they are not getting these hidden subsidies anymore from things like USAID. It is disgusting when a lot of people see what is going on and what this Federal Government has been getting away with behind the scenes. It is exciting to see the rocks flipped over and watch the cockroaches run away on this. There is criticism about how some of it is coming about, and I think that is being looked at and refined. To throw away the process of making government accountable is a giant mistake if that is allowed to happen. The rhetoric flying out of here on that is just amazing. People are defending basically this massive government waste and these scandalous issues that are being funded by our tax dollars. I understand. Tax dollars aren't contributions. People don't have the option of making these contributions for these investments. These are mandatory. If people don't pay their taxes, bad stuff happens to them. Wages are garnished. Stuff is taken away and auctioned. A person might even find himself in handcuffs and prosecuted if they think it is a high enough level. I think the American people need to be optimistic about the direction things are going and not fall for all the scary stories. Again, we have been hearing it all week long. They are going to cut Social Security. They are going to cut billions and billions from Medicaid. Nope. We need to look at how these programs can be made better, but there is nothing in the budget resolution this week that said we are going to do that. Ongoing, the President has pledged that. We, in Congress, should look at it. How can we make them better? It is by not taking a single benefit away from anybody. Don't buy the lies. Read H. Con. Res. 14 on the budget resolution. It is not even listed in there. Don't buy the lies flying out of this place and that the media keeps pushing. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the time and the ability to get some of these ideas across to the American public and our colleagues here. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. LaMALFA

Mr. LaMALFA. Mr. Speaker, let's be very clear about something. Last night, the House budget resolution passed, unfortunately on a very partisan, party-line vote, but indeed it did pass. One thing it does not do is cut Medicaid. It is right here in this document. There is no mention of cutting Medicaid or even the words ``Medicaid,'' ``Medicare,'' ``SNAP,'' or ``Social Security'' in this document that passed last night. Any claim to the contrary is actually fear-mongering, plain and simple, or I guess in my neighborhood it would be known as a lie that is being perpetuated to put fear in people and to drive anger at the majority party and have unruly townhalls because people are being fed lies. It needs to come to a stop. We need to have an honest debate, an honest conversation, around here about how we are going to get our government back on a track that doesn't lead us to endless, massive deficits in our budget each year. We are still on track for $2 trillion, upside down, following COVID spending. COVID is over with. We need to get back to at least pre-COVID levels of spending with an opportunity to actually balance our budget, where it might be only $700 billion, $800 billion, or $900 billion upside down. The only way we are going to take a bite out of the national debt is to actually bring the lines together and have our budget balanced. We can do that with limited spending and a strong economy. My understanding from years ago is that if the growth of spending was only 1 percent, these two lines would meet. We need to have a little bit of discipline around here. That is what was being sought in the budget resolution. This budget resolution is not the final say. It actually is a roadmap for moving forward on the fiscal year `25 budget. It does not make final spending decisions. Those are still to be debated and heard in committee on TV in front of the people on C-SPAN and in the committee process that folks can attend. It includes instructions for committees to review and adjust spending and revenue priorities, but it does not dictate specific program cuts, unlike the lies that are being spread all over in this Chamber, in committees, and in the media. Reconciliation is indeed a standard budget process that will be taken up. The resolution instructs 11 committees to find ways to either reduce wasteful spending or invest in key priorities. These committees have until March 27 to develop their proposals, so nothing is set in stone yet. No lies are needed. This is how budgeting has always worked. Democrats know that. Republicans know it. Unfortunately, on the other side of the aisle, they would rather scare people than be honest about this process, and indeed, honesty is very much needed in order to get a harness back on the profligate spending that has happened in this place over the last few years. We need to have honest conversations about these programs. My good colleague, the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Schweikert), speaks about this frequently. Social Security will be on the rocks by 2031, 2032, 2033, when that trust fund actually goes empty. Are we going to do something about it, or are we going to have lies and distortions about what is actually happening with that? Do we want to fix it as much as we can ahead of time while we still have some runway to do so, or do we want to just have lies about this and not try to do anything about it? I think we were instructed by the voters to do something about it and try to have these programs be salvaged so they aren't on the rocks in just 5, 6, or 7 years. We need to have the allocations of taxpayer dollars that come from the hardworking taxpayers. Frequently these are called ``contributions.'' These are not contributions. They are compelled. Otherwise, people come take your stuff, and maybe you go to jail. These tax dollars need to be respected as the work of the people. When we make these allocations, whether it is for national defense, border security, or tax relief for hardworking Americans, let's be honest about it and get it done. This legislation is indeed focused on that and is an ongoing effort with budget reconciliation and the work of DOGE. We are hearing all this bad stuff about DOGE. It has had a few fits and starts, but doggone it, it is getting to the bottom of a lot of wasteful spending. Each time they flip over the rocks, more cockroaches run out, and we find more things with bad contracts or spending that is not even a priority that any normal American can even think up. In my home State of California, they are still seeking more money for that high-speed rail system that started out in 2008 for a price of $33 billion. The price has quadrupled now to $130 billion. Is that a bargain for Americans? Is that a bargain for Californians? They have already tapped all the money they can at the local level, $9 billion of State money and about $3.5 billion of that ARRA money. Remember that shovel-ready so-called stimulus money back in 2009? They already tapped that. They have what is called the cap-and-trade tax in California, which raises about a billion dollars per year. It is like a new currency now. It taps into the producers of carbon dioxide in the State and makes them pay a ransom to continue to produce whatever manufacturing they do. This budget resolution is a good start, but it is not the final document. We will be working on that in the light of day in front of the people.

Mr. LaMALFA

Mr. LaMALFA. Mr. Speaker, in the budget resolution document there is no mention of Medicaid or any cuts to it or Social Security or Medicare, any of them. That is a lie that continues to be told on this floor and in the media. People shouldn't buy into it and then swamp their Member of Congress as a result of these lies and have these aggressive townhalls. Constituents are being lied to when they say this stuff. We are going to contemplate this budget resolution in the budget reconciliation process, and that will be in front of the people so they can see. I did want to talk about the situation in Israel a little bit and Hamas and the way they have so brutally murdered and abused people there. It has been 500 days. It is time that we recognize Hamas for what they are because they are not wearing any ``Coexist'' stickers on themselves or the bumpers of their cars. They do not want to get along with Israel. The goal in much of that world is to destroy Israel. This is what we are dealing with. We need to remember that as negotiations go forward and as we get the hostages back.

Mr. LaMALFA

Mr. LaMALFA. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate my colleague yielding me the time here and the effort on this review. We see that this is an eleventh hour rule put in at the end of the Biden administration, like many, that was contained in the Inflation Reduction Act, the so-called Inflation Reduction Act. That is a pretty funny name. What we have is a situation here where there are a couple of main drivers of inflation in this country: government overspending and energy costs that have been driven so high during the Biden administration. It hasn't helped. What we are doing, in effect, is that we are punishing the people with the reduction of methane by imposing these strict financial charges on the facilities. Due to that rewrite of the greenhouse gas reporting rule, the natural gas tax will capture many more producers than the so-called Inflation Reduction Act actually authorized. It is already being misapplied. When you look at the whole issue, H.J. Res. 35 is important to get back to energy independence and also not drive our partners in Europe into the arms of--not yet another Russian hoax, it sounds like here today--Russian natural gas dependence. If anybody would view the history of those areas of the world, why would they want to be dependent on Russian gas? Why would we do things to help foster that by driving up the price and lowering the availability? Indeed, with the miracle of hydraulic fracturing, we made natural gas so incredibly available for our country to lower the cost of energy. We enjoyed that for a while until the Biden policies have put us where we are. We have to take a step back, repeal that horrific rule made by rule, not by a discussion in Congress, but by the stroke of a pen in the Biden era. Let's repeal this. Let's put us back on energy independence that will make our economy stronger, our country stronger, and also help us be better trading partners with those around the world that can rely on cheap American gas instead of Russian gas.