Energy and Water Development and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2025
Floor Speech
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Mr. ROY. Mr. Chair, the amendment I have at the desk is designed to prohibit funds for FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which subsidizes transmission to renewables. There is a certain order number, order No. 1920.
The thing is, a lot of Americans don't really know what the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is or does, but it plays a massive role in their lives. It is an agency that regulates interstate transmission of natural gas, oil, and electricity, to which President Biden has appointed a lot of commissioners to advance his climate agenda.
In May, FERC approved order No. 1920 which will force everyday Americans to subsidize the cost of transmission lines so renewable energy developers can reap the benefits of billions of dollars in Federal subsidies.
Just so everybody can understand what is going on, Congress, in its infinite wisdom, while we are $35 trillion in debt, while our economy was reeling in the wake of a massive economic shutdown in response to the pandemic, in Congress' infinite wisdom, it passed the so-called Inflation Reduction Act, in which we massively subsidize and fund predominantly Chinese companies and billion-dollar companies here in the United States to advance openly what our colleagues on the other side of the aisle want to advance with respect to pushing their climate agenda.
We are going to subsidize our enemies, undermine our natural resources and strengths to produce American natural gas, American oil, American cars, the internal combustion engine, and in doing so, we are going to drive up the cost of all American families' goods and services and their ability to carry out their lives.
Now, in order to carry out the fantasy that our radical, progressive Democratic colleagues want to push on the American people--much like when they tried to jam the metric system on me when I was in elementary school--they want to jam this absurdity onto the American people.
They are going to say now not only do you have to eat a more expensive electric vehicle, not only do you have to have an unreliable grid, not only do you have to subsidize China and our enemies, oh, no, you get to go even further. This is going to force electricity rate payers--that means Americans--to pay for the cost of transmission lines to renewable projects which will make unreliable energy allegedly more available.
Guess what? On a cloudy, windless day, you still need that wonderful natural gas, coal, and nuclear power to power your homes or power all of your magic unicorn electric vehicles that power you around the country. Meanwhile, those electric vehicles are piling up on the lots of dealerships.
Now, you are reading articles where 50 percent of the people who own electric vehicles today are saying: Oh, gosh, I don't think I will do that anymore. I am going to sell them.
Yet, we also have this administration about to jam the American people with a rule saying you are going to have to have two-thirds of the fleet in our country be electric by 2032.
This is an administration, and these are radical, progressive, Democratic colleagues who are at war with the American family. I believe we should defund this. That is what my amendment does.
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Mr. ROY. Mr. Chair, I would note that FERC Commissioner Mark Christie exposed this rule for what it is: ``The final rule inflicts staggering costs on consumers by promoting the construction of trillions of dollars of transmission projects, not to serve consumers in accordance with the Federal Power Act, but to serve a major policy agenda never passed by Congress, to serve the profit-making interests of developers of politically preferred generation, primarily wind and solar, and to serve corporate `green energy' preferential purchasing policies.''
Chuck Schumer basically admitted this, saying the order is: `` . . . what we need to see the clean energy revolution, we catalyze with the IRA come to fruition.''
This is an agenda. This is not about 1950. This is about 2050. You need clean-burning natural gas to actually power our homes, our hospitals, and our lives. You need to have reliable power. We ought to have more nuclear power. We can do that, and we are working on that, but you shouldn't be having these fanciful energy policies being put out there, mandated on the American people, that are crippling families.
That is the truth. In the quest for this radical agenda, you are empowering our enemies and absolutely destroying the American family who can't afford an electric vehicle that costs $17,000 more than the internal combustion engine.
Mr. Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.
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Mr. ROY. Mr. Chair, I demand a recorded vote.
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Mr. ROY. Mr. Chair, the amendment that I have put forward here would prohibit any of the funding in the Energy and Water Development appropriations bill from being used to carry out President Biden's executive orders on climate change.
Now, we have successfully gotten this amendment adopted in numerous appropriations bills last year and this year, and I hope we will again. The executive orders serve as the catalyst to--as I was referring to Chuck Schumer a minute ago--some of the Department of Energy's most radical actions.
The Justice40 Initiative is a radical environmental justice initiative that directs 40 percent of the Federal clean energy and energy efficiency spending based on race, migrant status, and other characteristics.
DOE's transition to carbon pollution-free energy sources, a zero- emissions fleet, and a net-zero building portfolio make our Federal agencies wholly dependent on China for energy and wasting taxpayer dollars in the process.
DOE's overall efficiency standards for almost every household appliance, from washing machines to dishwashers to refrigerators to gas stoves, all of this is designed with a purpose. It is all designed to advance this radical agenda by radical, progressive Democratic colleagues who are more interested in worshipping at the altar of this so-called climate agenda than they are at advancing human flourishing, as God gave us the resources to do, and to develop wisely and appropriately for the betterment of civilization and to make our world a better place.
We manage climate change. We don't run from it. We actually protect our people. We allow people to advance, to be able to live in heat and cool, to be able to move around the planet and engage in commerce and lift people up, create economic opportunity.
We don't do that by hiding. We don't do that by empowering our enemies. We don't do that by undermining prosperity and undermining all that made this country great, with the available and abundant resources God gave us in this great continent of North America. We don't do that.
That is what our radical, progressive Democratic colleagues want to do. That is what they are doing. They are sending us back to the Stone Age and making people suffer. They are making the American people suffer. They are driving up the price of goods and services. They are making it harder to afford a car. They are making it harder for a plumber or small business man or business woman to do their job or take care of their families.
The goal here is to say these orders have no place. Congress has a role here in telling the administration: You have yet again overstepped your bounds. You are ignoring the Court on student loans. You are making up policies on a daily basis, endangering Americans with wide- open borders. You are allowing Americans to get killed, fentanyl to pour into our communities, and here, with this radical agenda, you are bankrupting the hardworking American family who made this country great. That is the purpose of the amendment.
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Mr. ROY. Mr. Chair, this is not about looking backwards. It is about looking forward. That is the whole point. We are going to talk about, oh, we are going to have 400 million people or 450 million people, great. Fine. We should grow as a country. By the way, we should have more kids. That is a different conversation and a different debate. Let's grow as a country. Fantastic.
Do you know what you need? Power.
Do you know what building we are sitting in right now?
One powered by natural gas.
Do you know what most of the hospitals and places in Texas that are functioning right now in the great State of Texas are powered by?
Natural gas.
Do you know what we could be powered more by?
Nuclear.
Do you know why we are not?
Crazy ideas mostly from radical, progressive Democrats who don't want to deal with the fact that we could actually safely have nuclear power.
The fact is, instead, we want to litter our continent with wind farms and solar farms which are inefficient and unreliable, demonstrably and proven to be so. That is the truth.
The fact here is we just want to have reliable power.
Even if you accept this trope that somehow we are having significantly more storms----
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Mr. ROY. I yield to the gentlewoman from Ohio.
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Mr. ROY. Reclaiming my time. Yes, we do. Yes, Texas has significantly more wind and solar than a lot of other places in the world because we embrace the all-of-the-above approach, and, no, I don't believe that is a good thing. No, I don't believe that one-third of our grid in Texas should be wind and solar.
Do you want to know why Texas is now more wind and solar?
Yes, we started it. But guess what?
The Feds are subsidizing the hell out of it. They are making it so it is not cost-effective to be able to go build more natural gas and coal, and that is destroying our country. The Federal Government is making it where Texas and other States cannot have reliable power. That is the truth. You are causing taxes on the American people, making our grid unreliable, and this trope about storms is garbage.
The fact is over the last century, many, many more lives have been saved because of the availability of reliable power than there were a century ago when, for example, a hurricane demolished Galveston long before there was any kind of fossil fuel issues.
Mr. Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.
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Mr. ROY. Mr. Chair, my amendment fully defunds the Department of Energy's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, EERE.
I offered this amendment because we cannot, in my view, continue to fund the destruction of United States energy to satisfy the climate agenda that I have been describing over the last 15 minutes.
I do want to say, with all due respect, I believe that the Appropriations Committee did a good job in trying to pare this back, and they limited the funding of this particular office knowing that it deserves to be reduced.
I just want to take it a step further. I think when our country is $35 trillion in debt, I think when our country is bleeding $2 trillion a year, I think that our country needs to pinch every penny we can. I think we should pinch those pennies in offices that are designed, frankly, to undermine the very productivity and economic growth we need to drive ourselves out of the debt that this incompetent Congress and incompetent government created for the American people.
The fiscal year 2024 minibus, that is last year's spending bill, gave this office $3.5 billion. Again, I want to applaud the Appropriations Committee for reducing that down to about $2 billion, $1.96. I would like to strike it to zero. That is what this amendment would do.
This office's mission is to ``equitably''--that is already a big strike. Just start with equitably.
This office's mission is to equitably transition America to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions economy-wide by no later than 2050. It funds wind and solar which are actively destroying the power grids which I just described a minute ago, undermining the ability to have reliable energy, despite the Department of Energy claiming they would lead to ``enhanced reliability.'' They don't.
On EVs, it funds zero-emissions vehicles which I already described are significantly beneficial to the wealthy. Today, only the wealthy can afford them. Fifty percent of them are saying they don't even want them. They are piling up on dealerships' lots. We have the government now saying that you have to have two-thirds of the fleet being available by 2032. We shouldn't be funding an office to advance the thing that is already being advanced by a Congress that is messing up the ability of the American people to live.
Third, it is woke. It actively promotes divisive concepts like ``energy equity and environmental justice,'' whatever the hell that means, which allocates taxpayer dollars based on immutable characteristics.
This is, again, your glorious government at work, picking winners and losers, dividing us up by race, making up all kinds of policies in the name of wokeism while destroying our economy in the name of pursuing their climate activist agenda.
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Mr. ROY. I respect the gentleman from Tennessee, and I appreciate the cuts as I already stipulated. I am glad to see it reduced by $1.5 billion. I still say that is $2 billion too many. I don't even know where we are getting the $2 billion. I won't engage the gentleman on that, but nobody on this floor can tell me where we are getting the $2 billion.
Mr. Chair, do you know what we are really doing? We are borrowing money from China. Believe it or not, in the appropriations bill this last go-round, we actually subsidized China. We borrow from China, we pay interest, and then we turn around and we subsidize China. That is what the geniuses of the congressional body do for the American people while we rack up $35 trillion in debt.
Let's move off of the fanciful, radical climate agenda that is destroying American entrepreneurial capability and abilities and driving down prosperity, and let's move straight on to debt.
What in the hell are we going to cut if you can't cut this?
Who on this floor is going to stand up and talk about Social Security and Medicare and everything else?
No. Everybody is going to preen and posture about it. Meanwhile, we are destroying the greatest country in the history of the world by putting a tax on the American people in the form of what? Inflation.
We are killing our own country while we spend money. Mr. Chair, $2 billion more is going to go to have this office advancing more of the very radical agenda destroying our ability to produce wealth and drive ourselves out of the debt. We are going to borrow $2 billion more so that we can advance energy, equity, and environmental justice and try to drive toward ``zero-emissions vehicles'' that I already described only the wealthy are driving that cost $17,000 more than the internal combustion engine, and we are going to drive up the price of a used internal combustion engine so that a plumber in 2030 is going to collapse. That is what is going to happen.
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Mr. ROY. Mr. Chair, I will just add this. Every time I get my gas can out and I have to use the stupid spout that spills all over the place because it has been regulated by the Federal Government--we messed up an actual gas can--and then I have to stick the gas in with ethanol into it that goes into the engine that then clogs up the frigging fuel pump that I then have to replace because of all that garbage, I would just tell you that none of that stuff is there if it is not subsidized. That is the truth.
The American people are tired of the Federal Government subsidizing less than optimal energy, and that is what we are doing. Without those subsidies, they die.
Mr. Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.
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Mr. ROY. Mr. Chair, I demand a recorded vote.
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