Congressional Black Caucus Hit the Ground Running in August

Floor Speech

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Mr. IVEY. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Virginia for yielding and giving me an opportunity to speak today in this august Chamber. I also thank the Congressional Black Caucus for the outstanding leadership that is shown on these issues, such as the March on Washington last Friday, and continues to do so as we move toward the elections in November.

I rise today because over the past month, really over the past 18 months, but in particular the last month, I have heard so much from my constituents about their struggles to keep their heads above water and the struggles with affordability across the board. We have heard a lot about that today. I have to mention some, but I will go back to some other topics, other aspects of that, as well.

The gas prices are hitting everybody. There is no question about it. In my district here in Maryland, gas is $1 a gallon higher than it was just 8 months ago.

That has meaning for people who drive for a living. I ran into a guy who is an Uber driver. In fact, he was driving me somewhere. I asked him about this, and he said: It is killing me, and it makes it almost so that it is not even worth doing this.

That is because he spends so much of what he makes putting gas in the car.

I can sympathize with that. At the gas station just a few days ago, it almost cost $80 to fill up my car, and I don't drive a really big SUV, but it still costs that much. Other people who have to drive for a living, people who drive trucks, the cost of diesel, for example--I don't have many farmers in my district, but for them, diesel is up $2 a gallon. You know that is hurting them, Mr. Speaker. That is passed on and leads to higher grocery prices that my constituents are seeing in the grocery store, too.

Schoolbuses are back for schools in most places across the country, and most of those run on diesel fuel. Guess who is going to end up paying for that, Mr. Speaker. It is the taxpayers. Their bills are going to go up.

We have hundreds of schoolbuses in my district. We have 136,000 kids who go to public school in Prince George's County. Many of them need the schoolbus to get there. That is true for the other counties surrounding the D.C. area and across the country. It is going to lead to millions of dollars in cost increases, which were not expected when they set their budgets last year in paying for these schoolbus costs that have gone up.

I also had a real tough stretch with government employees in my district. We know that. The Trump administration attacked the government employees from the beginning, forcing them out. I have many people in my district who answered the call to service and focused their careers on serving in the government, just like many of my colleagues here and just like the staff that does such outstanding work here in the House of Representatives, in the Capitol, and in the Federal Government across the board.

Most of them aren't doing this because it is paying the big dollars because it doesn't. Most of them are doing it because they really enjoy serving the country. Most of them were doing it because they knew it was important and needed.

I had a couple of constituents--this happened a little while ago--and one of them worked at NIH doing clinical trials for Alzheimer's. She had a Ph.D. and a specialty degree, and she had been working on this for years. They forced her out and shut down the clinical trial.

Now, clinical trials are not light switches. You can't bring somebody back in a little bit later and just start from where you left off. You have to start from scratch.

We heard last week about the amazing discovery with respect to pancreatic cancer and how there is a new drug that might really lead to cures for pancreatic cancer, one of the most deadly cancers out there. I am a cancer survivor, so I pay very close attention to these kinds of things. That would have been derailed if that clinical trial had been shut down like this one had been. Fortunately, that was a private sector clinical trial that was being run there. Anything on the public sector side was in trouble.

I ran into another individual, a mechanical engineer, and he worked for the Federal Government. His job was to make sure that pacemakers and other medical devices were working before they were given to patients in surgery, to help keep them alive. Wouldn't it be nice to be sure that we had people there making sure that these products actually work the way that they were supposed to? He got fired. He got pushed out of the government.

We have grocery costs. I mentioned that a minute ago, but I want to come back to that because the tariffs have been awful in the impact that they have had on grocery prices.

In my area, hamburger--I am not talking T-bone steak; I am talking hamburger--$7 a pound and up? That is where it is. We have other costs going up, too. Milk is about $4.30 a gallon on average across the country. I am old enough to recall when they cost just a fraction of that. We used to get hamburger because it was cheap. When I was back in school, you could afford to get it. It is $7 a pound now. That is because the tariffs have caused grocery prices and other prices across the board to go up for no reason.

One of my colleagues mentioned earlier that the Trump administration and many of my Republican colleagues are telling you it is not the consumers that are paying these tariffs; it is the foreign countries that the goods come from.

Here is how you know that is not true. Remember a couple of months ago when the Supreme Court said that the Trump tariffs were illegal and had to be refunded? The Trump administration set up a program to refund the money. Guess who is getting the money? Not China, not Russia, but major corporations across the country. The Walmarts, the Targets, and those kind of folks are getting the money. Small businesses, like the one in my district that sells its product internationally and buys products internationally to make their product, can't get a refund. They are not eligible. Under the program that the Trump administration set up, small businesses are not eligible to get refunds. For consumers, who also paid these tariffs, taxes, and higher prices, there is nothing out there for them to get the money back that they paid that the Supreme Court said was illegal.

I want to move on real quick and touch on a topic we haven't said much about, and that is the impact on small businesses that the Trump administration has had. We had a hearing a few months ago, and the SBA Administrator came in. She is the head of the SBA. I asked her a couple of questions. One of the things we have seen in the first year and a half is that more than 60 percent of Federal Government contracts for small businesses have been terminated across the country.

Small business is supposed to be the engine that drives the economy. Small businesses are where we get the new jobs that people need in their communities. Small businesses are the places that train young folks to help them become productive, economic citizens.

They are wiping those jobs out. They call it termination for convenience. What that means is they don't terminate it for cause. They don't terminate it because you did something wrong. They terminate it because they want to, and they can't give a good reason to explain it.

Now, the impact on, for example, disabled veteran-owned small businesses, 6,435 of their contracts were terminated for convenience. That is 41 percent. Black-owned businesses, 3,208 contracts were terminated for convenience. That is 107 percent more than were terminated under the Biden administration. The same kind of thing has happened for other types of small businesses. I asked the small business administrator: What is going on with this? She said, well, we terminate some of these for fraud. Well, as I mentioned a minute ago, if it had been fraud, they would have terminated it for cause because you are breaking the law, and they would have referred it to the Department of Justice for prosecution.

I asked her how many of these she sent to the Department of Justice for prosecution, and how many of those have led to indictments. She didn't have an answer for that. Guess what. I think the answer is zero.

We know for sure that it is not about that. It is just about helping the bigger businesses, the ones that are already the billionaires, the ones that are already making lots of money, the ones that make huge contributions to the Trump administration and the families--huge contributions, I mean billions of dollars in cryptocurrency and the like. That is where it is going.

I won't get into the accountability piece. We will have to save that for another day because the selling of pardons is something like what would have made Richard Nixon pale.

Real quick, let me end up with this: The cost to people in my district, just like people across the country, people who are struggling, people who have done the right things, people who have worked every day of their lives, it is killing them. It really is. They are having to choose--winter is coming. Many of them are going to have to choose between heating and eating because these electric bills are going through the roof. Many of them are going to have trouble paying the rent. Many of them, if they have kids like me, are having trouble finding the money they can pull together to pay these skyrocketing mortgage interest rates as they continue to climb.

Inflation is going up. Interest rates are going up. Everything is going up, and this administration is not helping to bring it down. In fact, this administration, the Trump administration, and my Republican colleagues, unfortunately, are one of the key reasons all of it is going up, and they won't do anything to help you all. You American folks out there who sent us here to help you, they are pushing your heads under water.

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for putting this together. I also want to say this: The reckoning can come in November. When you look at those prices, remember to vote. When you look at that gas pump and what it costs, remember to vote. When you pay that rent, when you can't afford your healthcare, remember to vote in November.

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