Providing for Consideration of H.R. Fraud Prevention and Accountability Act; Providing for Consideration of H.R. Stopping Fraudulent Payments Act; Providing for Consideration of H.R. Condemning Actors Seeking to Defraud the United States Government, and Expressing the Sense of the House of Representatives That Governmentwide Fraud and Improper Payment Prevention Reforms Will Meaningfully Improve the Financial Prosperity of the United States, and That Federal Program Eligibility Should Be Verified Before Payment; and Providing for Consideration of S. Secure America Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Mr. Speaker, I first came up here to talk about three of the bills, which were in waste and fraud, but I will make a simple point being from a border State.

The chaos that was allowed to happen in my State and other border States for functionally 4 years, millions and millions and millions and millions, you didn't think there was ever going to be a societal cost, a government cost?

We have done entire presentations here on data from the Joint Economic Committee. Take a look at the Social Security actuary report of the suppression of working people's wages because of the importation of low-skill populations.

If you care about people and economics and wage growth, take some responsibility for the chaos you brought to my State and so much of this country.

Mr. Speaker, we are on a battle right now trying to explain the term so many of us all use, which is ``waste and fraud.'' We have got three bills on this. It is wonderful. Now, we need to actually add some of the definitions and the mechanics of how we are going to take it on.

Those of us on the Joint Economic Committee have been producing some reports that basically say that we have access to technology today so that the fraudulent checks never ever go out the door.

I will argue that the model we use today is perverse. Pay someone and then let's hire lots of auditors, lots of lawyers, lots of law enforcement, and let's chase it down. How often does someone ever go to prison? How often do we ever get any of the money back?

Mr. Speaker, my first request is, as we move forward on this agenda of taking on waste and fraud--this shouldn't be partisan, but it is technology. We need to take that on.

The second thing--and this one I have an absolute passion for because it is a level of immorality that the criminals are producing all over the world. There are headlines and stories. Have you read the stories of basically the enslavement of thousands of people in these scam farms where they are basically locked up and their job is to scam the elderly in the United States, to scam working people all over the Western world? This is an article from just a couple days ago. We have the technology.

Mr. Speaker, the Joint Economic Committee, Republican and Democrat, sent a letter to the big telephone companies, the ISP providers, saying: Moving forward, are you providing us with the technology that would stop the scam farms from being able to call grandma and do the evil of stealing billions and billions and billions? This is a bipartisan approach, and it exists.

If you have actually seen some of the videos of the misery these fraudsters and these criminal organizations are doing to people, being collected off the streets all over the South Pacific region and being locked up in scam farms in Cambodia--

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Mr. SCHWEIKERT. I am trying to talk fast. I had a lot of coffee.

This is the hardest part here. When we say waste and fraud, the waste is often the way we have designed programs where the rent seekers, whether it be in Medicare Advantage, whether it be in Medicare, whether it be the stories of the hospice fraud of New York where the visitation is actually the fastest growing job production in New York City over the last 5 years.

We are going to have to also take on pieces of legislation that we have passed and stop the scammers from scamming us on that.

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