There was a lot happening in Washington this week and around the world.  It was National Police Week in our capital, and it was also budget week in the House, where House committees, including mine, worked through the night debating budget bills.  I discuss that in more detail below. 

When we weren’t talking about the budget, people in Washington were processing President Trump’s announcement that he would accept a $400 million luxury private jet as a gift from the royal family of Qatar for use as Air Force One and to be transferred to the Trump Presidential Library upon the conclusion of his term.  The Constitution prohibits the President from accepting any gift of any kind from any foreign state unless the President has approval from Congress.  This provision is in the Constitution’s Foreign Emoluments Clause.  The President announced this gift without seeking approval of Congress.  Whether intended for the President’s personal use or official capacity, or as a donation to his Presidential Library, this gift from a foreign government raises major legal, ethical, and national security concerns. I have joined my House and Senate colleagues in expressing these concerns, as well as about the enormous expense in taxpayer funds to retrofit with the necessary equipment for presidential travel and to debug the plane. 

Also this week, Washington was focused on the argument before the Supreme Court concerning President Trump’s executive order purporting to amend the Constitution and end birthright citizenship and the subsequent court rulings preventing enforcement of the executive order across the country (nationwide injunctions).  The Trump Administration has appealed three rulings to the Supreme Court.  Last month, I joined an amicus brief to the Court in opposition to the appeal and to the President’s unconstitutional abuse of power. 

This week, multiple committees of the House of Representatives continued the process of marking up their respective portions of the House Republicans’ budget bill.  In addition to Energy & Commerce, discussed below, the other big markups took place in the Way and Means Committee and the Agriculture Committee.

The Ways and Means Committee, which is the committee with jurisdiction over taxes, began its consideration of their portion of the budget bill on Tuesday afternoon.  After many hours of debate, the Committee passed the tax portions of the budget bill on Wednesday along party lines.  The bill does several things and, importantly, fails to do others.  It extends some portions of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, expanding several individual and corporate provisions.  While the bill is not final yet, the projected cost of the bill Ways and Means passed this week is $3.8 trillion—$7.7 trillion in tax cuts and $3.9 trillion in tax offsets—over 10 years.  That number could change.  The bill also increases the statutory debt limit by $4 trillion. 

The Agriculture Committee also considered its portion of the bill this week, ultimately passing a bill that cuts $290 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly called Food Stamps, an essential federal program that helps more than 42 million Americans pay for food.  It is our country’s most efficient and effective anti-poverty tool.  These deep cuts come at a time when the cost of groceries is rising, and they will result in higher prices and less food for seniors, children, veterans, and people with disabilities across the country.

Today (Friday), the House Budget Committee met to put the bills passed out of Ways and Means, Agriculture, Energy and Commerce, and eight other committees into one “big beautiful bill,” as President Trump calls it.  The bill, however, failed to pass the Budget Committee.  All Democrats voted against it.  Several Republicans voted against it, too, but for different reasons than the Democrats; they generally argued that the spending cuts are not enough, the timing of implementation is too slow, and the increased debt is irresponsible.

For my part, I spent most of the week with my colleagues on the Energy and Commerce Committee preparing for and participating in our markup of the budget bill.  As I have explained before, our committee was asked to find spending cuts of at least $880 billion dollars from programs in our jurisdiction. 

We got the 208-page bill at 10:30pm on Sunday evening, with a notice we would mark it up (deabte and amend it) on Tuesday starting at 2:00pm.  And we did.  We began Tuesday at 2:00 and worked through the night, finishing up around 4:30pm on Wednesday—more than 26 hours!  While we covered a lot of ground, we were focused on the bill's provisions to cut health care access for millions of people, which I talked about in my opening statement at the beginning of the markup.

We began by addressing provisions relating to energy, the environment, and communications and technology before we got to health care in the middle of the night.

A very quick summary of some of those provisions here in the Energy section.  As you might imagine, I hear from energy industry professionals about the challenges and problems with the permitting process frequently.  The bill proposed several new ideas to add application fees ranging from $1 million to $10 million to expedite project approval. Another provision of the bill repeals and rescinds funding from the Methane Emissions Reduction Program’s incentives and delays the implementation of the program’s fee on excess methane emissions to 2034.  This budgetary gimmick will help pay for the President’s wish list of tax cuts, but will leave American energy producers with a fee hanging over their heads and no mechanism to help reach compliance.  Durable permitting reform must be bipartisan, and it must go through what we call “regular order.”

On the Environment, the bill strips funding for community-led efforts to improve their own public and environmental health, like the Community Change Grants Program.  Houston was selected for two awards under this program, $20 million for investing in community solar development, solar workforce development, planting 10,000 trees for flood mitigation, and reducing illegal dumping and $2.9 million for training communities how to engage in government processes related to permitting and land use decisions. (Both of these impactful grants were illegally canceled by EPA just last week.)

On Telecommunications, the bill calls for a spectrum auction (a sale of the rights to transmit signals over specific bands of government-owned frequency).  Last Congress, Republicans and Democrats agreed on the need for a federal mechanism to spur innovation and collect spectrum fees that would have funded Next Generation 911, upgrading emergency services to be faster and more resilient to better serve its users.  Instead, this bill calls for spectrum fees to lower taxes for some.

Another provision in the bill calls for a 10-year moratorium on enforcement of any state laws regulating Artificial Intelligence, many of which have already been passed in the absence of a federal law.  I probably don’t have to explain to you why this is such a bad idea.  While I support federal regulation here, this is not the incentive we need to get it done or the protection people need until it is.

After midnight, we got to the cuts to Medicaid—a lifeline that 1 in 4 Americans rely on for health care.  More than 70 million people—people in every state across our country—rely on Medicaid to receive the health care they need.  In our home state of Texas, Medicaid provides health care to 4.8 million people—more than 80,000 in our district and nearly three-fourths of them are children. Medicaid is also the largest source of funding for long-term care for seniors and people living with disabilities. In Texas it is extremely difficult to receive Medicaid coverage.  Only adults who are under 65 and either disabled, pregnant, or caring for a child or adult relative qualify for Medicaid no matter how low their income is.  So many people here do not qualify for Medicaid.  And, as a result, Texas has the highest uninsured rate in the country.

There was a lot of back and forth at the markup but the bottom line is that there are many provisions in the bill chipping away at Medicaid in various ways.  The independent, non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) determined that at least 13.7 million Americans will go uninsured as a result of the policies in this bill.

Some of my Republican colleagues kept saying they were just trying to take Medicaid back to its intended purpose in 1965—ignoring expansions of Medicaid over the years, including in the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare).   But since 1965, Congress has expanded Medicaid – with the ACA and again in the American Rescue Plan Act.  And the program has changed over time.  Medicaid today doesn’t look like it did in 1965.  And that is a choice we have made.  What we see in this bill is it is just another attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act by another name.

Cutting Medicaid spending does not save money, it shifts costs.  These cuts will drive up the cost of health care, hurt hospitals and nursing homes, and reduce access to health care even for people who do not rely on Medicaid for health insurance.  It’s bad policy.

Among the provisions was one that would take away all funding from Planned Parenthood for reproductive health care.  It’s not about abortion care—which is already excluded.  It’s about all the other things that more than two million people go to Planned Parenthood for every year–cancer screenings, pap smears, breast exams, wellness exams, birth control, STI testing and treatment, and more.  During the markup, I offered an amendment to the bill to strike the provision.  You can see my amendment introduction below.  I am sorry to report that my amendment failed.

We continued to debate the provisions of the bill until 4:30 in the afternoon.  In the end, none of the many Democratic amendments passed the committee, or even got one vote from Republicans.  In the end, the bill passed out of committee on a party-line vote.  This is not the end of the process, however, and I will continue the fight.  You can see my remarks near the end of the hearing here. 

In Washington, Team TX-07 held more than a dozen meetings with constituents and people advocating on their behalf, including National ACE, Houston Urban League, and Just Society, pictured below.  Back home in the district, our team was out and about across the district, helping constituents and attending community events, including Members of the Sugar Land Rotary Action Club and ROTC students from ILTexas Katy-Westpark High School, Timbergrove Manor Civic Club Meeting, Fort Bend Chamber Precinct 3 Update, the Kinder Children's Cancer Center launch, and the Greater Houston LGBTQ+ Chamber of Commerce’s Community & Connections Breakfast, pictured below.