Fema Corruption

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I have a handful of things we need to do. A little while ago, we had an Oversight Subcommittee hearing--I chair the Oversight Subcommittee on Ways and Means. Some of the things that get said around here, we just shake our heads. Think about some of the things we hear from the press, from the Democrats, they are just panic-stricken.

I need to actually walk the American people and our own staff through a little bit of the facts and a little bit of the truth.

We have done multiple presentations here, saying if we want to find waste and fraud, if we want to find programs that are mis-designed, and other things that are going on, don't hire a bunch of lawyers. Don't actually hire a bunch of investigators. Hire data scientists. It turns out the truth is in the math. The math can tell us.

What is amusing is listening to some of the Democrats talk about how we don't want people seeing our data. Maybe they should actually pay attention to the current law.

When we hear certain leftist groups--and most of these are actually fairly left--saying we did an analysis of U.S. taxpayer data and blank, blank, blank is getting this, actually understand--the IRS is one of the things I oversee. For decades, apparently, they have data-sharing models for researchers. Not to give out the names but Harvard, University of Sydney, so they are not even domestic; some are out of the country. Yes, there are some rules.

The fact of the matter is, with this sort of hyperventilation going on around here, has anyone wondered if it is because the ability to mine data is how we find bad acts?

Look what The Wall Street Journal did over the last year in looking at Medicare. It wasn't about people's benefits. It was about people being defrauded on durable medical equipment. Other groups out there also did data-sharing, modeling, and research agreements with CMS and they found bad acts.

A simple question is: Why has the left become terrified of data?

Aren't they the ones who preached to us in the previous years about science? Why don't we believe in science?

Guess what? Now science is being used to protect the U.S. taxpayers and Americans' future. Instead of being used to research things to write papers to support a leftist cause, maybe it is actually now being used to actually find out how the American people are being cheated.

When we hear them hyperventilating and reading the talking points from the Public Employees Union, maybe take a step backward. Let's deal with the fact that much of what is being put out is clickbait, and understand these research agreements have been going on for years and years. What is going on now is these folks are designated as special Federal employees with an even higher level of standard fiduciary responsibility.

This is just part of the things around here that when we get something we don't like or when we start to expose decades worth of bad acts, fight like hell because the Public Employees Union functionally supports one side here. We are trying to find out what is going on.

One of the things I want to also accomplish in today's floor speech is--and I am sorry. I know I am a broken record, but I am trying to break through. Let's actually deal with a couple of things here.

Before I go to the boards, I made the mistake of looking at some of the comments from last week's speech.

Notice there are almost no people here. That is how it is supposed to be. If this room is full of people listening to an idiot like me give another speech, they are not working. They belong in their committees, in their working groups, in their offices, meeting with either constituents or their staff or other people.

This is where we come to actually have our final debate and vote. The vast majority of work done in Congress isn't done in this room. It is done in the dozens of committee rooms and offices all over this campus. When we see the room, stop falling for the clickbait.

Why is the room empty? It is supposed to be.

One of the reasons we get behind this microphone is we are probably on a thousand televisions around this campus and here in D.C. and around the country. This is our chance to talk to those staffers and help them understand how dire the math is and how intense the battle ahead of us is.

How do we communicate with Members who are maybe new to Congress and get them to realize much of what they are being told may not be mathematically honest or true?

Let's actually, once again, set the baseline. This one is about a year or so old. The numbers are actually slightly uglier. The blue is nondefense and defense. That is all a Member of Congress gets to vote on. A Member of Congress doesn't actually vote on the interest payments, the Social Security, the Medicare, Medicaid, or other mandatory because those are formulas now. Every dime a Member of Congress votes on is borrowed money.

Last year, every dime we voted on was borrowed money and maybe $300 billion or $400 billion of what we didn't vote on was borrowed money because we actually borrowed more than every dime on what we call discretionary. Defense is discretionary.

Remember that in today's world Social Security is the number one spend. It is about 1.4, 1.5. Interest is number two. Medicare is number three. Defense is actually number four. The next time we have some brain trust saying, if we just cut defense--I am sure there are efficiencies that we may find in defense.

I have been pushing for--this my third Congress in a row, trying to get an AI audit because the Pentagon has failed their audits for 8 years. It is unauditable is the report we get back. So use AI at least to go through and stack the asset list because we can't audit it if we don't know where the trucks are and other things. In the security areas, do human auditing of those.

Help us because it has finally actually risen to the surface of people saying maybe technology can help us save our science and our future and our economy.

When we take a look at what really goes on here in Congress, we have to understand: Our government is functionally an insurance company with an army. Almost 100 percent of the next 10 years of borrowing is interest and Medicare. Yet, we are terrified to tell the public the truth. It is math. The math will win, but we have to stop being fearful.

I am going to show you some of these. Stop saying crazy stuff. If your mission in life is to fill out comments or put out things on X and this and that and say things because your life's mission is to be clickbait, don't you care enough about this Republic to tell the truth of the scale?

It is debt, deficit, and demographics. We have a country that in 8 years, less than 8 years now, will have more deaths than births.

We have a shortage of young people, and it really screws up the long- run math and ability to be productive, the ability to actually raise wages, all those things. There are ways to make this work. We just have to do hard things. You see how difficult it is just to have an honest conversation about the math around here.

Look, I showed this last week. I am only going to do it for a second. This is for those people that run around this campus saying: Let's just use current policy because that way I don't have to deal with actually telling someone no.

Baseline, by the end of this fiscal year, CBO says we will be at $37.2 trillion in borrowed money. Then CBO tells us over the next 9 budget years, 10 calendar years, we are going to borrow another $22 trillion. That is $37 trillion, another $22 trillion, and then if we were actually going to do the expiring tax provisions, without finding a way to pay for them, that is $5 trillion to $5.5 trillion. Then there is another $1.3 trillion of interest on top of that. Then many of the President's priorities are another $8 trillion when you add in the interest. You are functionally at $74 trillion of borrowing in the next 9 budget years. You basically have doubled U.S. debt.

Is that really what is going on here? It took 240 years to get where we are at. Once again, for the people who are listening, those are the gross numbers because we borrow from the trust funds. The other problem you actually have, if you really want to geek out, is by the end of this budget window, so the next 8 years, 9 years, the trust funds are almost empty.

One of our models basically says in mid-2033, the Social Security trust fund is empty. It is not because someone stole your money. It was demographics. We haven't had enough young workers, and Social Security was always designed as a pay-as-you-go system.

The money that comes out of the Social Security trust fund and is loaned to Treasury. Treasury pays in interest. In the past, it has actually been a little above even some of the market interest you would have gotten. The problem is, every single month, Treasury gets a little note from Social Security saying: We got our FICA tax collections. It is not enough for all the checks going out the door. Treasury, we want some cash; so they cash in what we call special T bills.

Since the brain trust in this place decided in lame duck that we were going to extend some additional Social Security benefits without paying for them, we actually shortened the life of the Social Security trust fund. Some of the math, in 2033, looks like the trust fund will be gone. If we don't fix it, we double senior poverty in America.

This is the morality of this place. The Democrats right now are writing an ad to attack an idiot like me for telling the truth because they care so much more about winning the next election than doubling senior poverty in America. They are going to try to scare the hell out of you instead of stepping up and saying: Here is how you do it.

Understand, in 2034 or 2035, when you have a full year and the trust fund and Social Security are gone, we calculate that it is like $600 billion a year.

Think about what we are fighting over here, it may be $400 billion a year to extend the tax policy so people's taxes don't go up, but by the end of this window, you have got another $600 billion a year to deal with.

It gets worse every single year, and that is not even dealing with the fact that a couple years outside the budget window, the Medicare part A trust fund is also empty.

Is this place capable of dealing with difficulties?

For everyone out there, when your reaction is: Well, just raise taxes. I have done it a half a dozen times on the floor. The staff is telling me the six people that watch this are bored with it.

Go on the Manhattan Institute's website. I think it's Riedl has a great article from a year ago who took all of the tax-hiking policies that have been offered by the Democrats and scored them and said: Here is the economic effects. Here is what you get if you tax the rich, everyone over $400,000. At the end, the calculation came out to you get about 1\1/2\ percent of GDP. Yea.

We are going to borrow close to 7 percent of the entire economy this year. Does anyone see a math problem? When your default is: We are going to tax rich people more. It doesn't get you close to where you have to be.

That chart I just showed you a moment ago, if we were to do these things without offsets, in 9 budget years we are no longer borrowing about 7 percent of the entire economy; we are borrowing close to 9.2 percent of the entire economy.

It is not popular because the folks out there want their feelings satiated and don't own calculators. I am sorry. I know I am being a bit of a jerk. I am just tired of dealing with lunacy. The primary driver of debt is demographics.

What happens if we can clean up ourselves? What happens if we are able to squeeze waste and fraud and find more modern ways that are more compassionate, more efficient to actually deliver the benefits to our brothers and sisters?

This is just a thought experiment. We have been working on list after list after list after list of things you could modernize, reduce spending, and never cut someone's benefits, never cut their services.

We have one project we are doing in our office. In Medicare and Medicaid, Indian Health Services, DOD, and VA, how many duplicate scans are there? How many people go get an MRI, an x-ray, an ultrasound? What if you take that and then immediately attach it to someone's phone so that the scan is mobile with them? We are seeing numbers where it is billions and billions and billions of dollars being spent in duplicative scans.

Is that cutting someone's services? Of course it isn't. The lobbyists get upset because they make money on how many times--or at least their clients do. I need you to think about how you modernize to do it better, faster, cheaper, and more compassionately.

We have done entire presentations here on the floor over the years trying to demonstrate that maybe the most moral thing we can do as a government is actually help people to be healthier. If we are seeing data that says 5 percent of the population with multiple chronic conditions are over half of all healthcare spent, what would happen if we focused on them being cured?

If diabetes is 33 percent of all U.S. healthcare spending, should we actually think about that? If it is over $600 billion, 16 percent of U.S. healthcare by people crashing, having a stroke because they didn't take their calcium inhibitors, things of that nature, are there things we can do to help our brothers and sisters be healthier?

It turns out a year ago, the Joint Economic economists actually did a study that obesity in America may be an additional $9.1 trillion in healthcare over the next 10 years. Turns out that becomes the number one spend in the U.S. Government.

How do we make our brothers and sisters healthier so they can participate in the economy? Maybe they can actually have families. There is suddenly this awakening in America. It is not Republican or Democrat. I would argue it is just moral. We want our brothers and sisters to not only live longer but more vibrantly. Are we willing to do very difficult things in farm policy, in nutrition policy, in how we deliver health services? It is worth thinking about.

Being in this stupid town, instantly, the partisan rage is: Oh, how is that going to get me elected? How am I going to use it as a wedge to beat the crap out of other side?

Maybe the morality is helping our brothers and sisters and not having this country be crushed in debt when the bond market is the most influential group in America today, not Members of Congress.

Let's actually take a quick look. I am trying to find the nicest way to say this. If we were just to do this TCJA extension--which we believe we need to do. We are not going to raise taxes on working people, but we need to find a way to pay for it. It is not only the $5.5 trillion that CBO is now scoring if you did it to 2035. It is the $1.3 trillion financing cost of doing that. That is the interest.

How about no tax on overtime pay? It is a passion of the President. We need to come up with $3 trillion to cover that cost over 10 years. If we don't do that, it adds another $700 billion of interest cost.

If we do no tax on Social Security, that functionally comes out to almost $1.8 trillion. Almost all of that money goes to Social Security and Medicare. We have got to find a way to cover that if we are not going to have tax on Social Security.

How about SALT for the folks in California and New York who are saying they will not vote to extend the tax policy unless they get something for their areas. That could actually be another $1.2 trillion over 10 years and another $300 billion in interest if we don't pay for that.

No tax on tips, actually turns out that one is fairly easy. It may be $600 billion over 10 years. Our math is a little higher, but that is the number we have been given.

You have to understand, everyone has these wish lists. The President, Members of Congress, our constituents, everyone wants something. We need to look at the fact of how does it help the society grow economically. Prosperity is moral. How do we pay for it in a way-- because if we keep pushing up the U.S. debt--I showed a couple weeks ago that if we were to make the bond and the debt markets nervous, a single point of interest over the next 10 years costs the average American family $30,000. You would have a higher car loan, higher home loan, higher credit cards, higher student loans, everything else around you.

You have got to think about it. There is no free option here. You need to do the data to find out where there are bad acts and things we can make more efficient. Then we are going to have to make hard decisions saying: That policy is 20 to 30 years out of date. We need to end that program or we need to modernize it.

If you don't, if we just do the expiring tax provisions and don't pay for them, understand that in 9 budget years, interest alone is over $2 trillion a year, and that is on today's interest rates.

Mr. Speaker, if you are one of the people like me who believe if we make the debt markets nervous and they start raising our interest rates, you are walking right into that thing they call a debt spiral.

This is current policy if we just do it without paying for it. That is assuming interest rates don't go up on us.

I have shown in the past a chart that basically says if U.S. interest rates--I said this last week, and I need to drill it in so maybe someone hears it. If U.S. interest rates went up to a 6 handle, which we have been close to before, in 9 budget years, 45 percent of all U.S. tax collections go just to interest.

This isn't a game. This isn't a wish list of: I don't want to do difficult things. Do difficult things today, because if you blow this up in the near future, it gets almost impossible to deal with. The dystopian crap you would have to do to the American people will make today's tough decisions look like a walk in the park.

I am going to breeze through this, just because I find some of this fun.

Did you know a penny actually costs like 3 cents to make? Okay. Great. Get rid of them. I don't care.

A nickel actually costs almost 9 cents.

You'll be happy to know that we make money on dimes and quarters and half-dollars.

These are tiny. I am going to make an argument, as I walk through these boards. There are dozens and dozens and dozens of little things that really don't add up to much, and you should absolutely do them. However, if you are the politician, if you are the press, if you are the staff, if you are the talking head on cable television, you are saying: Well, if we just got rid of pennies, we are going to balance the U.S. budget.

Stop saying insanity. One of the problems is people like us, we go home and we talk to our voters, and they have heard these things, they are saying: If you just got rid of the Department of Education, we would be fine. Then you show them the math and they look at you like: Well, I heard it on television. Please, I beg of you, take this seriously. There is a way to make this work. We just have to do really hard things.

Let's take a look at this one. This is one of my favorites. This is as of last Friday. I think there were 45,000 folks, according to The Wall Street Journal, who said they would take the early retirement. The reality of it, with the technology we have today, you could have a revolution in the Federal workforce. You could dramatically change the number of people.

How many law firms today actually have a fraction of the people they had 20 years ago, even 10 years ago, because of the use of technology? Why wouldn't you accept the same thing for your Federal Government? Remember, you are paying for this.

You have got to understand the real math. If 40,000 Federal workers-- and I am not actually talking about the buyouts, it's just the base salary, the average salary is $106,000. Then we added in wages and benefits; multiply it times 40,000, that is one day of borrowing. On average right now, we are burning about $6 billion a day. If 40,000 Federal employees are gone, we covered one day of borrowing.

You absolutely are going to need to do things like that, but don't act like you just solved the U.S. debt problem. It is dozens and dozens of these things you have to stack up.

I am trying to tone down the sarcasm, because we have got to do these things.

Let's get rid of foreign aid. You just covered one week of borrowing.

Can't tell you how many times I am at home and people say: If we just didn't have foreign aid, we could balance the budget. It is a week of borrowing.

The U.S. will waste billions of dollars on the United Nations. We get rid of the United Nations. That is 2 days of borrowing.

Let's take a look here. The U.S. spends too much on the Smithsonian and national parks. If we are borrowing $6 billion a day and the Smithsonian cost $1 billion a year, you have basically covered what, 4 hours?

Maybe you don't want the museums. Maybe you want to create entrance fees or you want to do something else. Don't act like you just balanced the budget by doing something like that.

Let's do another one. Cutting congressional salaries would solve the deficit. Look, we are probably overpaid for the quality of our work, but if you are borrowing $6 billion a day and you do that, if you got rid of congressional salaries, I think it is 20 minutes for an entire year. Take an entire year of borrowing, you just covered 20 minutes. Stop saying crazy stuff.

These are serious problems. Maybe we need serious people to start actually thinking about these things.

Let's take a look at another one. The government spends billions on unused Federal office buildings. Absolutely, we need to clean this up, and it would be about, oh, let's see, 6 hours, maybe 7 hours of borrowing.

Close them up. Get rid of all the unused office space, which we should do. We absolutely need to do that, but it is like 6 or 7 hours' worth of borrowing because we are burning over $6 billion every single day.

Am I making the point? Are you starting to understand the scale of what Members of Congress have to take on?

These trite little sound bites don't get us anywhere. Cutting funding to NPR, PBS, and the National Endowment for the Arts would save billions of dollars. It would cover 4 hours of borrowing. Maybe we should. Maybe we should actually turn those into public trusts and let the public pay rather than taxpayers and have a fundraiser. That is fine, but don't act like we just solved the national debt problem. It is 4 hours of borrowing.

Let's do one or two more to get this off my chest.

Presidential travel, one of the Democrats was going after President Trump. All the Presidential travel is like $350 billion, so you have 1.4 hours--yes, about 1.4 hours. That is less than 2 hours for an entire year's worth of borrowing.

Let's have one or two more for fun just because I have them done. Department of Education salaries, let's just get rid of the Department of Education salaries. Yay, but we covered 9 hours of borrowing.

Emergency services for undocumented--these are people here illegally. They walk into hospitals and get a Federal subsidy. Let's make it so it just becomes uncompensated care of a hospital. Fine. That covers 9 hours of borrowing for an entire year.

The reality of it is that it is not these crazy, little trite things. Yes, they are problems, and there may be hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars out there that we need to crush and get rid of. We are going to borrow about $2.3 trillion this year, and in 10 years, that number is up dramatically.

It is demographics. If you look at the 30-year data, everything that is in the Federal budget, except Medicare and Social Security, actually is designed to grow slower than tax receipts. We modeled that, in 30 years, we will have about a $9 trillion surplus, as we have counted. It grows slower than tax receipts. Medicare and Social Security, my math is actually much more dour, but this board is about 1\1/2\ or 2 years old. It is probably about $116 trillion in spend and interest.

We can make this work. We can do this without cutting our brothers' and sisters' benefits, but we have to be willing to think disruptively. We have to be willing to think creatively. We have to be willing to think morally. We have to be willing to think how we modernize the world around us.

What would happen if we could change the cost of delivering services to our brothers and sisters by getting rid of the archaic designs of many of these programs?

My 2-year-old is somewhere in the back. Yes, I have a 2-year-old. My wife is exactly my age. We adopted a little girl years ago, and the same birth mom, the phone rang--so I have a little person.

I have said this repeatedly, and I am trying to have it break through: Is there anyone out there who thinks morally?

When my 2-year-old is basically 22, 23 years old, every U.S. tax has to be doubled just to maintain baseline services. The math is very clear. It is left math, and it is right math.

Mr. Speaker, every economist who is honest basically says that my kids, your kids, and your grandkids are going to be part of the first generation to actually be poorer than their parents and grandparents.

That is not America. This was the country of aspiration. We were the ones who always knew we were leaving the next generation an opportunity to be more prosperous. It can be that way, but it can only be that way if this place stops acting like intellectual children, the bedwetting--I am sorry; I take that back, Mr. Speaker-- the fear, just the fear of going home and explaining to our constituents the truth.

Mr. Speaker, you see how the Democrats are acting right now just by data scientists digging through and looking for perversities in the datasets. You would think there would have been joy because those aren't cutting services. Those are finding people who are exploiting us and taking advantage of our country, but because it is being done by President Trump, it must be opposed.

How do we fix things? How do we save Social Security? How do we save Medicare? How do we save the future when it is not a loyal opposition anymore? It is basically anything to burn the place down to take power.

For anyone who really doesn't have a life and is watching this presentation, I beg of you, get good at the math and stop making crap up because if you get good at the math, then it provides us the opportunity to have the building blocks to actually produce a solution.

There is hope. There are ways that work.

We also have some economic data that basically says if we don't do it within about the next 4 years and interest rates start to move against us, then we are in for a long, slow rest of the century. That is worth thinking about because the debt starts piling and piling.

Remember, Mr. Speaker, in the previous year, I think we had 3 months when we had to borrow money to pay for our borrowing. For every dime we will take in in tax collections this year, we are going to spend I think it is $1.36, which is an improvement. Last year, it was $1.39.

It doesn't have to be this way. We just have to start telling the truth about the math, telling the truth to each other, and toughening up.

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