Addressing the Hack of U.S. Treasury Payment Systems

Floor Speech

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Ms. STEVENS. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague, the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Casten), for his remarks, his dedication to this Chamber, to this process, and to the lawmaking. We are both in our fourth term.

Mr. Speaker, I thank you in obliging us with this Special Order on the grand discourse of our democracy.

It has always been a delight to work with Mr. Casten, a longtime member of the Science, Space, and Technology Committee, a dedicated member of the Financial Services Committee, and a thinker, to say the least.

When we came together last week to introduce H.R. 1101, the Taxpayer Data Protection Act, I actually don't think that that piece of legislation was on our minds until we witnessed the very troubling, concerning, and questionably legal actions of an unelected bureaucrat, billionaire, appointee going into the Bureau of Fiscal Service to get access to the wires and the information of our taxpayers to do God knows what with.

All of a sudden, the phones of Members of Congress were ringing off the hook: What is going on?

I couldn't take two steps in my beloved Oakland County in southeast Michigan, the district which I am so proud to represent, without somebody asking me, in deep concern, what was going on.

Mr. Speaker, I mentioned Mr. Casten's background, which was also tied to business and certainly tied to the workings of our Congress, but I happen to be a former Treasury official. I went into the Treasury Department as a political appointee right after an oath of office was taken in the early, early days of President Barack Obama's administration because I was a part of the auto rescue team.

What we were looking at was actually a real crisis in this Nation. For the kids watching back home, I don't know how old they are and how much they would remember, but we had a great recession going on. We had double-digit unemployment. We had a rocked financial services sector. We had an insurance market that was practically crumbling. We had housing with subprime mortgages up the wazoo. There weren't for-sale signs in front of people's homes.

Then there was the question about what was going to happen to General Motors and Chrysler because they were staring liquidation in the face.

Mr. Speaker, this Congress, in a different session and a different time, almost in that lameduck period before President Obama took office, passed something known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program to stabilize, ameliorate, and address our economy to make sure it didn't roll off of a cliff.

The Main Street effort of the Troubled Asset Relief Program was this effort to save General Motors and Chrysler from liquidation along with millions of jobs across this country, including 200,000 in Michigan.

They all came into the Treasury Department, from the smallest of suppliers, to the mayors, to the auto dealers, small businesses in their own right, even the foreign original equipment manufacturers, saying: Do not let them liquidate.

We used $80 billion of taxpayer money, which, by the way, was repaid--which, by the way, worked and which, by the way, rebounded the U.S. auto industry.

Did you hear that point? The Federal Government made money off of the $80 billion to save General Motors and Chrysler. Now we have a strong manufacturing economy with true innovation happening, and we are producing and making cars at a rate that was unfathomable at that time, over 15 years ago.

Never once, by the way, did we ever question or seek to knock on the door of the Bureau of Fiscal Service, which is off campus, by the way. It is not in the main Treasury building. We had bipartisan emergency workers. We had people from the Bush administration stay on. We had people from the Obama administration coming in. We were trying to save this country from falling off of a cliff. We were trying to save us from a true great depression, and no one was meddling in the wires.

Mr. Casten and I had to write this bill, the Taxpayer Data Protection Act, to put up and remind ourselves of guardrails. The painful point of this is that we are waiting and eager and just wondering when our colleagues, who don't even seem to be in this Chamber right now, are going to give us the bill to lower the price of goods? We are waiting.

I had a meeting in my district on housing. I brought all of the stakeholders together. We have beautiful homes in Oakland County, Michigan, but we don't have enough of them. We have homes that need to be rehabbed. There is building that needs to happen. So I brought together, as Members of Congress do, all of the stakeholders. I brought them together, and we invited HUD.

We invited HUD, but you know what, per a new executive order, HUD can't go to meetings. So we can't even have a conversation about how the heck we are going to lower the price of housing and get more housing built.

Mr. Speaker, the other thing my constituents are talking to me about on overdrive are the eggs. There are no eggs. We don't have eggs.

Mr. Speaker, there are eggs, but there are shortages on the eggs. People are going to the store, and they can't find eggs.

There was a headline last week in Pennsylvania that $40,000 worth of eggs were stolen. Just yesterday, in Washington State, more eggs were stolen.

I see this Commander in Chief doing all of these press conferences about every revenge tactic and different type of endeavor for the Federal Government.

What are we doing about the costs? What are we doing about the costs of everyday goods?

An executive order came out about the cost of prescription drugs, which are about to skyrocket again, and it is rolling back what we did to lower the cost of prescription drugs and put Medicare at the negotiating table.

This is unbelievable. This is a simple bill and a simple measure to protect the American taxpayer, to reestablish trust, yes, as duly elected Members of Congress, the stewards of the public trust as quoted and delivered by the great Henry Clay, otherwise known as the great compromiser of the 1800s.

We are the holders of the trust, so this bill is a matter that should just be done tomorrow. We should get this done. We are waiting for the leadership of this very body, those who move the bills to the floor, to give us something that will actually help the pocketbooks of the American people.

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