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

Floor Speech

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Mr. MEUSER. Mr. Speaker, I thank the chairman for his leadership and his commonsense approach to what is a very serious crisis facing our country.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of Representative Fallon's antifraud resolution, H. Res. 1335.

Frankly, opposition to this bill is hard to comprehend. Making excuses, pretending that waste, abuse, and fraud do not occur, I can just hear anyone watching this on C-SPAN. I can feel their head shaking, wondering what this world is coming to.

This resolution is pretty simple. It condemns fraudsters and recognizes that governmentwide fraud and improper payment prevention reforms are necessary to improve the fiscal health of the United States. That is how it reads.

This includes all States. Let's not pretend it doesn't. From sea to shining sea, this resolution is all that, according to the Government Accountability Office. Nevertheless, according to the GAO, $1 trillion of improper payments occurred under the Biden administration. Secretary Bessent recently estimated that it was nearly $500 billion a year, so even more than $1 trillion. That is the reality.

The House Oversight Committee's recent report, whether you like it or not, found that Minnesota Governor Walz and his administration turned a blind eye to massive fraud schemes.

Two of the most notorious examples were the ``Learing Center''--I am sure you heard of it--and Feeding Our Future, which was set up to feed hungry young children. People, criminals, stole from it. We are here defending them? Fraud was allowed to grow for years while warning signs were ignored.

In Los Angeles, Mr. Speaker, investigators have identified roughly over $3 billion in hospice fraud. Thirty percent of the hospice bills were going to one county, an L.A. County, for the entire Nation. We have got people in this Chamber who are defending that somehow? In other words, as I just stated, we don't need any words: One-third of the Nation's hospice funds went to one county in the United States.

In my home State, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, where unemployment, by the way, sits at 3.6 percent, 15 percent of the residents are enrolled in SNAP. Yet, the program's recent error rate, by the way, was 15 percent, pretty much the highest in the country, making Pennsylvania one of the worst performing States in the Nation, particularly considering our lower unemployment. Mr. Speaker, $463 million per year, in Pennsylvania alone, is not going to needy families. It is being scammed.

From L.A. to Minneapolis to Pennsylvania, from sea to shining sea, taxpayers are being forced to fund fraudsters in and out of our government. It is stealing from every American who works hard and pays taxes. Equally important, we need to stop these criminals who scam the American taxpayer.

Mr. Speaker, as Chairman of the Financial Services Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, I have worked with banks, telecom companies, regulators, law enforcement, and consumer groups to fight fraud and scams.

I am working on legislation to strengthen criminal penalties for fraud, require states to repay improper payments, and establish a framework to better track fraud across the federal government.

Everyone in this chamber should be outraged by this level of fraud.

Anyone who is considering voting no on this resolution ought to think about if they are going to be part of the solution or part of the problem.

I urge passage and yield back.

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