Promoting Efficient Review for Modern Infrastructure Today Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. BEYER. Mr. Chair, the PERMIT Act is the bill you offer when you don't want to protect clean water. It is a very sad and extreme bill. With respect to my good friend, Chairman Babin, this amendment only makes it worse.

In 2023, the Supreme Court gutted clean water protections that we have relied on since the 1980s, and now, the Trump administration is trying to make it the law that Americans don't deserve clean water.

Already today, clean water protections have been defanged, leaving up to 80 percent of our streams and 50 percent of our wetlands at risk of pollution or destruction, but my House Republican friends have offered this bill that further rolls back the remaining protections on clean water.

Mr. Chair, there are a couple of articles this week that highlight why this is so important. In Louisville, Kentucky, their water facility recently investigated why they had a spike in PFAS, so-called forever chemicals, and found out that a superconductor plant, Chemours, had dumped a PFAS called GenX into the water. This is a company that knowingly violated the allowable dumping limits several times.

The only way that folks knew that they were able to address this was when they found out that Chemours had been violating its Clean Water Act permit.

Louisville citizens have not only had to pay for upgrades to make up for their company's violations, but now they face serious health risks. This bill is only going to increase the burdens on Louisville taxpayers and everyone who is downstream on the river.

The second article today is from The Washington Post. Mothers whose drinking water was downstream of sites contaminated with PFOA and PFOS, both of which are considered likely carcinogens, were much more likely to lose their babies and more likely to have a preterm or low-weight birth.

Pollution has impacts, and we are just beginning to learn about the impacts of PFAS in our water.

The Trump administration said that they want to make America healthy again, a wonderful goal and a good idea, but this bill does exactly the opposite. Please, let's kill the bill and kill the amendment. It is dangerous to us all.

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