Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2023

Floor Speech

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Mr. GROTHMAN. Mr. Chair, I have seven amendments in the en bloc, and I will talk on two issues, in general, that cover, I think, all of the amendments.

The first thing is an overall concern of spending. It is a lot easier to break an economy than to fix an economy. And the American Rescue Plan and the very high-spending infrastructure bill--between them, spending over $3 trillion--I think is the primary reason for the huge inflation we are having to deal with today.

Look at these underlying bills--the T-HUD bill, up 12 percent; financial services--in general government up 17 percent--these programs have to be held at an even or slight decrease level for years to make up for the damage that was done with those two big bills.

I am not going to say there wasn't damage done before that. I think a little bit of the COVID bills that were originally signed by the prior President were not exactly the most frugal things either, but everybody knew at the time this was a problem. And my amendments are along the lines of not destroying programs, not taking out programs altogether, but going back to the amount that was spent last year, or the amount that was spent in President Obama's final year.

I sometimes use President Obama's final year to show that I am not being reckless here, but what I am saying is, there ought to be a little bit of restraint in the Committee on Appropriations and a little bit of restraint of the new bills coming out.

A couple of my amendments also address this obsession with hiring bureaucrats to enforce diversity. America is supposed to be a country in which we view ourselves as individuals. There are people who, I think, want to destroy America, and try to set one group against the other group.

When I look in my district, I know a lot of people who are Hmong. I recently got to know a lot of people from India. I know people from Russia. They have had no problem succeeding in America. And they all tell me the same thing: The easiest place in the world to succeed is America.

But there are people who try to divide us and set up programs in which you say, I am not going to succeed because of who I am. I want to succeed as a group of people determined by where my ancestors were born three or five or ten generations ago.

Not only are these programs, first of all, a waste of money. We have to have some people administer the programs, we have nowhere near enough people to work in American business as it is.

Secondly, they are designed to train people that what goes on in Washington is a fight or a contest between ethnic groups--that is a cancerous way to think. The fact that so many immigrants come here without even being able to speak English and succeed, wildly show it as a lie. I am trying to reduce funding or get rid of funding all together for some of these programs.

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