Source: United States House of Representatives – Congressman Steve Scalise (1st District of Louisiana)
WASHINGTON, D.C.—Today, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) spoke to reporters after the passage of the Budget Resolution. Leader Scalise discussed how today’s vote unlocks the reconciliation process which will allow Republicans to fulfill the mandate voters gave us to cut spending through rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse, prevent tax hikes, unleash American energy independence, and secure the border.On House Republicans unifying around the Budget Resolution:“Everybody has been in the room at different stages. Some members had more questions than others. Every member knows, and I’ve been very candid, there’s still a lot of work left to do, but we are including all of our members, from the most conservatives to those in the most swing districts in all of these conversations, because it’s going to take all of us to get it done.“None of these votes are easy, and then the next votes won’t be easy, but they’re all significantly important for the American people. I think if you just keep sight of what the goal is, our goal from the very beginning is to provide relief to families who have been struggling and to get our economy back on track, and deliver on the promises that President Trump and House and Senate Republicans ran on during the campaign, and we’re elected and given a mandate to deliver. We’re now working on those next steps, and we’re going to get this passed because failure is not an option.”On generating savings by rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse:“The beauty is that the committees get to go deal with that. You can find $1.5 trillion and more. Obviously, you saw the press conference this morning. Well, first of all, if you look at just waste, fraud, and abuse in all federal programs, that’s on the table. I think most Americans would tell you, please go root out waste, fraud, and abuse. If any program is stealing money from taxpayers in a way that’s not intended, not even talking about changing eligibility. All of those things are going to be looked at to make the programs work better. Some of these programs do not work well for the people on it. I’ll give you an example, because a lot of lies have been told about disabled people. Medicaid does not work well enough for disabled people. We can make it work better. And part of that is by taking away some of the siphoning off of the program by people that shouldn’t be on it. There are illegals in the hundreds of thousands, at a minimum on Medicaid, taking billions of dollars out of that program, hurting disabled people. So we need to strengthen those programs, and we’re going to be working on that, too.“If you look at some of the other things, Spectrum sales, nobody talks about that. Everybody talks about $880 billion in energy and commerce as if it’s all health care. There’s probably $200 billion in non-health care-related programs before you even start talking about more savings and reforms, things like Spectrum sales. How do you go from 5G networks to 6G? It’s not just some clouds in the sky that you’re dealing with. It’s Spectrum, which is a federal asset that we auction off every few years. Well, it’s been too long. Any of these companies that spend billions of dollars building out networks will tell you we need more Spectrum made available, which means the federal government owns all of that, and we offer it up for sale every few years. We generate tens of billions, if not close to $100 billion for the taxpayers.”On stabilizing the tax code to allow for private investment in the US:“That yields, by the way, billions more private investment. It’s why you get economic growth when you lock in tax rates and make a more sane, common-sense regulatory structure because then you see private investment. I’ve heard these numbers, and you can talk to people in any walk of life in the private sector, in any industry. They will tell you there’s trillions, four, five trillion dollars of money sitting on the sideline not being invested in America now until they see what the tax code looks like. Everybody’s talking about tariffs right now. Most businesses are waiting to see what the tax code will look like before they make major investments. And they will tell you, if we just prevent a tax hike, which, by the way, every Democrat voted today to raise taxes, and they’ve said they wanted the tax rates to go up, we do not. And if we flatline and say no tax increases on American families, that alone will spur trillions of dollars more investment in our economy. You could see 3% GDP growth with the economy, more money in your pockets when you go to the grocery store, when you go to the gas station. But it also gives us, the federal treasury, more money coming in to lower the deficit. “The timeline to get this done is as quick as we can get it done. We’ve said by the end of May.”