Democrat SHREDS Republicans For THIS

[00:00:00]These bills catch fraud before the money they prevent the money from going out the door. That's the problem. So much of this fraud is happening from foreign fraudsters. Once you figure out, "Oh my gosh, we just the government just wired money to this fraudster." Well, they're in China, that money's gone. You'll never get it again.

[00:00:18]That happens every day in the federal government. That's what these bills do.

[00:00:23]Prevent fraud before the money goes out the door to the fraudsters because so many of them, again, are foreign, you'll never get them back.

[00:00:30]>> Mr. Walker Shaw, you're recognized.

[00:00:33]>> Thank you, Madam Chairwoman.

[00:00:35]Fighting and preventing fraud is or should be a bipartisan issue and preventing the misuse of government funds is a priority shared by Democrats and Republicans alike in this body.

[00:00:45]When fraudsters successfully target government dollars, they steal from taxpayers, deprive our most vulnerable neighbors of life-saving services, and undermine the public's trust in government.

[00:00:56]And there's no doubt that the government and this Congress should do more to address this problem.

[00:01:01]That's why Oversight Committee Democrats have supported numerous anti-fraud measures, including the Prepayment Fraud Prevention and Treasury Data Access Act, which seeks to add additional payment verification before checks are sent out the door, and I appreciate the chairman's bipartisan work on legislation like that.

[00:01:18]And Committee Democrats and our Democratic colleagues across the House will continue to fight fraud, waste, and abuse in the federal government.

[00:01:27]However, the bills before us today are flawed and do not constitute good faith efforts to detect and prevent fraud.

[00:01:34]H.R. 8464, the Stopping Fraudulent Payments Act, would give the Trump administration a blank check to stop entitlements and other grants to entities it disfavors for any reason.

[00:01:46]H.R. 8312, the Fraud Prevention and Accountability Act, is a a disguised attack, I fear, on Inspectors General, independent Inspectors General, the chief independent federal watchdogs tasked with rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse at government agencies.

[00:02:02]And H. Res. 1335 is a partisan attack that completely ignores President Trump's pardons of convicted fraudsters. I was interested to hear the White House has established a task force to eliminate fraud. Some days it seems as if the White House itself is a task force to commit fraud.

[00:02:22]H.R. 8464 would give President Trump's Treasury Department authority to stop federal assistance payments to any individuals, nonprofits, communities, or states that they unilaterally decide has a risk of fraud.

[00:02:37]That authority would extend to university grants for research and R&D, grants for transportation funding, Pell grants, NIH grants, and even grants from FEMA.

[00:02:46]It would expand this and any future administration's authority to play politics with programs that millions of Americans our constituents rely on. Uh this administration, unfortunately, has proved it cannot be trusted with that kind of power. It's targeted states led by Democrats on spurious grounds and it's blatantly abused its power at times to advance the president's political agenda.

[00:03:09]H.R. 8312 uses the a facade of fraud prevention to undermine an ecosystem intended to hold the executive branch accountable. It purports to make permanent resources for the highly successful, and the chairman and I agree on this, highly successful PRAC.

[00:03:25]But in reality, it would weaken the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency, or CIGIE, the oversight body that serves as the backbone for PRAC and provides its own oversight of our IGs.

[00:03:39]CIGIE was created by Congress to provide a way for the IG community to coordinate, share resources, set audit and investigative standards, learn from one another, and ensure accountability within the community itself.

[00:03:52]The danger this bill presents is a continuation of President Trump's war on that independent IG community.

[00:04:00]President Trump has shown he's afraid of SIGI because one of its function is to investigate IGs who are accused of wrongdoing.

[00:04:06]A function that disrupts his efforts over the last year and a half to illegally fire independent IGs and replace them with allies who he believes will engage in covering up the waste, fraud, and abuse perpetrated by his own administration.

[00:04:22]To this end, he illegally withheld SIGI's congressionally provided funding last fall, and all of us, Democrats and Republicans, should be outraged by this cuz we approved the funding.

[00:04:31]Caused SIGI to abruptly cease functioning.

[00:04:34]The websites housing thousands of audit reports went offline.

[00:04:38]And investigators and law enforcement officers across the IG community were left without access to essential training. You can't say you want to fight fraud when you literally shut down the fraud fighters.

[00:04:50]Taking the PRAC out of SIGI and moving it to a third new Treasury IG, a new IG by the way, is just another attempt to weaken the case for funding SIGI and to further dismantle what remains of a community already weakened by the president's efforts to purge and replace IGs with cronies.

[00:05:09]Any renewed cuts to SIGI's funding would again result in a massive loss of capacity for the community.

[00:05:15]The bill's expansion of Treasury's do not pay system could also threaten the privacy of millions of Americans, especially given the administration's really heinous track record on information privacy.

[00:05:26]That's why I filed an amendment to the bill that would walk back some of the more dangerous changes and would instead simply make the successful functions of the PRAC permanent. I have an old-fashioned view, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. We all agreed that the PRAC has worked. Let's extend it and let it continue to work. Finally, HR S. 1335 reportedly condemns actors seeking to defraud the US government. It is a blatantly partisan attack that ignores the grievous actions and fraud committed by the Trump administration, makes false claims about fraud in Minnesota and California, and completely ignores fraud in Republican-led states, coincidentally, I guess.

[00:06:04]Trump and his administration are not serious about good faith efforts to combat waste, fraud, and abuse. They've gutted IGs, they've pardoned more than 25 fraudsters, including those committed wire fraud, security fraud, tax fraud, bank fraud, health care fraud.

[00:06:18]And this is the most corrupt administration in American history.

[00:06:20]Trump and his family have made billions through a whole series of corrupt schemes, and this resolution ignores those facts.