Give Kids A Chance Act of 2024

Floor Speech

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Mrs. HARSHBARGER. Mr. Speaker, I rise today in strong support of H.R. 3433, the Give Kids a Chance Act, which is bipartisan legislation to help speed up the process for getting treatments to children with cancer and other rare diseases.

I am pleased that this bill also includes a modified version of bipartisan legislation I have been leading with Democratic Representative Juan Vargas: the United States-Abraham Accords Cooperation and Security Act.

This section of H.R. 3433 will establish a U.S. Food and Drug Administration office in the Abraham Accords region, creating a staging ground for technical assistance and friend-shoring collaboration between the U.S. and Abraham Accords countries, for development of and bringing to our markets lifesaving drugs.

I thank House Committee on Energy and Commerce Chair Rodgers and Ranking Member Pallone for working with me to advance this important initiative. Chair Rodgers has been a strong ally in developing this.

Our continued dependence on adversarial countries like China for pharmaceutical products endangers our medical supply chains and jeopardizes our national security. More than 80 percent of the active pharmaceutical ingredients for drugs sold in the U.S. are imported from foreign countries, primarily China and India.

As our country works toward securing critical healthcare supply chains from reliance on adversarial countries like China, the strategy of friend-shoring or near-shoring has emerged as part of the solution for industries where domestic production is not yet fully available.

Leveraging the Abraham Accords countries' robust biopharmaceutical industries to help diversify and protect our access to crucial medical supply chains that don't rely on China is a commonsense step to work with our natural allies in our quest to safeguard our access to vital medical products.

We need to begin this process of fortifying our medical supply chains as soon as possible because we have a big hill to climb. With adoption of H.R. 3433 and establishment of an FDA technical assistance office in the Abraham Accords region, we begin climbing that hill.

Mr. Speaker, I urge all of my colleagues to support this bipartisan legislation.

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