Usa Freedom Reauthorization Act of 2020
Floor Speech
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Mr. BRAUN. He is really trying to let career regulators at agencies like the CDC bog down the economy again with bureaucratic hurdles. I probably know that as well as any Senator here because, 12 years ago, I fought to reform healthcare and its related agencies that bogged the system down--a system that has given us healthcare costs that are double that of any other across the country. We will get back to that, but 80 Senators on both sides of the aisle weighed in on that before the coronavirus raised its ugly head.
The White House and the task force have been beyond transparent in the midst of this outbreak, indeed, in its holding an unprecedented number of daily press briefings and in its allowing for a free flow of information that has been central to the White House's reopening efforts. This is not about transparency, and the White House is always going to be in favor of transparency. The President comes from a world of entrepreneurs, one in which we embrace competition. This is about the minority leader's trying to use the bureaucracy at the CDC to bog down the economy.
From this point forward, we have to make sure that we adhere to everything the healthcare experts have told us, but we have to be able to do a couple of things at once, which means having a smart restart to the economy. The CDC and other health agencies were targets of the White House's deregulation efforts from day one, and they were the most challenging regulatory agencies to rein in. The Democrats and the bureaucrats, who are content with the status quo, have been blocking efforts to deregulate since President Trump took office.
How can we do that when decades have brought us to the point at which the healthcare system, in general, doesn't make sense to a mainstream entrepreneur like me, who has found that a different dynamic works? The CDC, for example, was in the driver's seat during the initial stages of the outbreak. Its missteps on testing forced us to take a one-size- fits-all approach, which didn't make sense to many of us.
We could have handled this in a way so as not to have now put us on the precipice of there being an even greater calamity. The inability to conduct early and wide testing in the United States, caused by the CDC's and FDA's overly prescriptive stodginess, prolonged the testing process in the early stages when it should have been expedited. The result has been one-size-fits-all, which we are contending with currently.
Thanks to the White House's efforts to fight off the regulatory swamp at the CDC and its efforts to fix the testing problems caused by regulators, we now lead the world in testing. Yesterday, I submitted for the Record, from that over 2-hour briefing with the healthcare experts, that timeline referred to. It happened from late January through early March.
Senator Schumer wants to release the CDC's version of the reopening guidance, but the White House and senior health officials rejected the initial CDC recommendations in that version because the recommendations were overly proscriptive, infringed upon religious rights, and risked further damaging the economy. Are we really going to let the CDC shutter the economy for a second time, like it did with testing, by its dictating overly proscriptive guidelines? President Trump's deregulatory agenda has proven to be an immediate success because we have gone from being initially mired in bureaucratic hurdles to our leading the world in testing and successfully flattening the curve and fighting the virus.
I spoke to a CEO of a pharmaceutical company, which is headquartered in Indiana, who said the very same thing. It was stymied from the get- go. It, among other pharmaceutical companies, has put together an entrepreneurial effort to tackle this. It is not going to be done by trying to tie its hands. It is close to getting testing where it is going to work for all of us. I have a business that three of my four kids run. We want to make sure we have testing to make sure that we can bring employees into a healthy environment and take care of customers. All businesses share that concern.
The minority leader and Democrats do not want to reopen the economy because, I think, frankly, we had the best one I have ever seen, in the 37 years I was the CEO of a Main Street company, that went from a little company like the minority leader always talks about. We share that interest. I was disappointed when the PPP did come out that they weren't helped first. We got that fixed. Let's stay focused on that.
We keep moving the goalposts for reopening. If we do that, we risk, in economic terms, what is called demand and supply destruction, and there would not be enough Federal dollars to remedy that.
The White House proactively gave us the appropriate roadmap to get the economy back on track. We should not leave something as important as reopening the country to career regulators at the CDC, an agency that set back our response efforts due to their overly prescriptive approach.
U.S. testing exploded once the White House's efforts to increase testing and fight off the regulatory bureaucrats won out. The same thing will happen with reopening the economy, using the reopening guidance as a roadmap under the President's leadership.
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