Fraud Prevention and Accountability Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. WALKINSHAW. Madam Speaker, I yield myself 5 minutes.

I am opposed to the Fraud Prevention and Accountability Act.

As the chairman said, since its creation, the PRAC has clawed back millions of dollars in pandemic fraud, and it stands as an exemplar of what smart oversight can do with strong bipartisan support. It works. I support making it permanent, as do my Democratic colleagues on the Oversight Committee.

That is why we supported the extension of the PRAC's authorization to 2034 last year. Thanks to that bipartisan work, the PRAC is in no danger of disappearing in the near future.

The danger this bill presents, however, is far-reaching, and it is a continuation of President Trump's war on the inspector general community.

Right now, today, the PRAC is housed in the Council of the Inspectors General for Integrity and Efficiency, or CIGIE, which was created by Congress to provide a way for the IG community to coordinate, share resources, set audit and investigative standards, learn from one another, and, most importantly, ensure accountability within the IG community itself.

The danger this bill presents is a continued weakening of that IG community. It is clear that President Trump and his administration are afraid of CIGIE, because one of its functions, its core functions, is to investigate inspectors general who are accused of wrongdoing; a function that disrupts his administration's efforts over the last year and a half to illegally fire independent IGs and replace them with political allies who his administration hopes will cover up the waste, fraud, and abuse perpetrated by his own administration.

To this end, he illegally withheld CIGIE's congressionally provided funding last fall. All of us, Democrats and Republicans, should be outraged by that because we appropriated that funding. It caused CIGIE to abruptly stop functioning. The websites housing thousands of audit reports went offline. Investigators and law enforcement officers across the IG community were left without access to essential training. That fraud prevention work came to a halt.

Taking the PRAC out of CIGIE and moving it to a third, new Treasury IG is another attempt to weaken the case for funding CIGIE and to further dismantle what remains of a community already very severely weakened by the Trump administration's efforts to purge independent IGs and replace them with political cronies.

Renewed cuts to CIGIE's funding would result in a massive loss of capacity for the IG community and less waste, fraud, and abuse identified.

Worse, the bill's expansion of the Do Not Pay system could threaten the privacy of millions of Americans, given this administration's really poor track record on information privacy. That is why I filed an amendment to the bill that would walk back the changes proposed and would instead simply make the successful functions of the PRAC permanent within CIGIE. It ain't broke. We don't need to fix it. But the majority would not allow that amendment to move forward.

This is another example of congressional Republicans lining up to support the administration's unrelenting attack on the IG community that started with the illegal mass firings in his first month in office in 2025. Since then, many IG positions have been left vacant, and they have installed overtly partisan appointees in others.

That governmentwide overhaul has created a culture of fear, where IGs are fearful to come forward when they identify waste, fraud, and abuse. Independent oversight has been blocked, and I fear that this bill would give the Trump administration another way to pull the rug out from inspectors general, and I urge my colleagues to oppose it.

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Mr. WALKINSHAW. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

The gentleman from Kentucky said that I had done nothing about fraud for the last 4 years here. I know the gentleman from Kentucky knows that I have not been a Member of this House for 4 years because he reminds me often, but I did spend the last 5 years serving in local government for a county government that was repeatedly named the best managed county in the United States of America.

One of the reasons for that is we had independent auditors, the analogue to IGs, and when they brought forward information that might have been inconvenient for us that there was perhaps waste, fraud, or abuse taking place within the government, we didn't fire them. We listened to that information and acted on it. The Trump administration could learn a little bit from that.

I come to this floor often, and one can be forgiven, Madam Speaker, if you come to the conclusion that Joe Biden is President of the United States right now. That is because with my friends on the other side, every sentence is ``subject verb Joe Biden,'' ``subject verb Joe Biden,'' ``Joe Biden this,'' ``Joe Biden that.'' Joe Biden is on the beach in Delaware.

Donald J. Trump is President of the United States, and he is responsible for the fraud, the corruption, and the abuse taking place in the administration: the $400 million jet gift of a foreign government; the digital schemes that were reported recently where the Trump family profited $500 million, while investors--I use that term loosely--in those schemes lost out, every one of our constituents; the no-bid contracts awarded to close political allies of former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem; and the credible allegations that Corey Lewandowski had to be paid off before contracts could be awarded at DHS.

There is corruption, fraud, and abuse, and we hear nothing from the majority about it in this Chamber or on the Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

With respect to the PRAC--and I believe that the gentleman from Texas is sincere in his view that this bill would be an improvement--I want to share, again, my concerns. We agree that the PRAC works. It is one thing that maybe we agree on today.

Why does it work? Why has it worked better than other tools that we have? I will give you three reasons, Madam Speaker.

One, PRAC has multiagency ownership because it is housed at CIGIE. It can bring together the judgment of IGs across the government, all the IGs. CIGIE is uniquely positioned to allow for all of those perspectives to be brought to bear on the PRAC's work.

Second, it has institutional independence. It is independent of the White House and independent of any agency or department, which allows it to speak truth in a way that, right now, other IGs don't feel they can do.

Third, it is separate from the payment system. It is separate from the payment system, so we can look from above and outside on what is taking place in the payment system to help prevent fraud.

This bill would put the IG overseeing the payment infrastructure inside the very agency that runs that payment structure. I think that weakens it.

I respect that the gentleman from Texas believes that strengthens it. I think the record is clear. If we agree that it works, then why do we want to risk disrupting it?

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Mr. WALKINSHAW. Madam Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time.

Madam Speaker, as I said, this bill would undercut independent inspectors general, which is one of the most powerful tools we have to combat waste, fraud, and abuse.

I highlighted the three ways in which I fear it would break the PRAC program that is not broken. We agree, both sides, that the PRAC is working. Why we would want to disrupt it, I don't comprehend. I struggle to comprehend.

I think this bill would be a mistake, and I fear that it would advance the Trump administration's efforts to further undermine and weaken our independent inspectors general, who are our key tools to combat waste, fraud, and abuse.

Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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Mr. WALKINSHAW. Madam Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

The yeas and nays were ordered.

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