Continuing Appropriations and Extensions Act, 2026

Floor Speech

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Mr. ARRINGTON. Mr. Speaker, I thank the chairman and commend Mr. Cole for his commitment to controlling costs in the stewardship of taxpayers' hard-earned treasure.

Meanwhile, my Democratic colleagues are demanding an audacious $1.4 trillion in new spending or they will shut the people's government down. We should let the people know what that $1.4 trillion includes. It would extend a failed and what they called temporary COVID tax credit that went to people making $600,000 because there was no income limit. CBO said there were 4.5 million phantom enrollees. That is fraud in Plainview, Texas. CMS said 2.3 million ineligible people received this temporary COVID tax credit, tens of billions of dollars in waste and fraud, and this is what they demand or they will shut the government down.

They also want to remove safeguards that we recently put in important safety net programs, safeguards against what? The safeguards keep ineligible people from receiving these social services, people who are in this country illegally from receiving taxpayer-funded services, and people who are able to work but refuse to work. That is the sum of the people who should not receive the hard-earned, taxpayer-funded services, and those are the measures to root out waste, fraud, and abuse that they want to rip away so that we waste more of our tax dollars and continue on this slippery slope of bankrupting our country.

Mr. Speaker, this is the party whose failed policies of tax, regulation, borrowing, and unbridled spending gave us the worst cost- of-living crisis in the last half century. I urge my colleagues to reject their demands and support Chairman Cole and the appropriators in this CR so we can work responsibly to fund the people's government and avoid a costly and disruptive shutdown.

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