Val T. Hoyle

Mr. Speaker, Positioning · 43 wordsat the beginning of the 119th session, I was ready to work with anyone to root out waste, fraud, and abuse in the government. We are here to be good stewards of taxpayer dollars, and we should want our government to be efficient.Positioning Claims · 75 wordsThat is not what happened. We started with a bipartisan congressional effort, and then President Trump appointed Elon Musk, who stood there with a chainsaw, brought in a bunch of unqualified DOGE bros, who said that they were going to make $2 trillion in savings from the Federal budget, ¹but made no meaningful impact in spending. They tortured and went after our public employees that cost the taxpayers $10 billion through the deferred resignation program.² Mr. Speaker, Claims · 47 words300,000 Federal workers were fired or urged to retire, including 100,000 veterans.³ This wasn’t done in a strategic way. People were fired without understanding what their jobs were. For instance, off the Oregon coast, they fired the people who knew how to operate the tsunami warning system. Reasoning · 8 wordsThat isn’t rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse. Claims · 116 wordsThey shut down promising innovations, like direct file, at the request of big businesses that stood to financially benefit. That hurt low-income and working Americans who now have to pay to file their taxes. They slowed response time to complaints made to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which had previously helped return $21 billion to Americans.⁴ They purged USAID by getting rid of 83 percent of USAID projects.⁵ Impact Counter estimates that 757,000 people died, mostly children.⁶ We lost the benefit of soft power that we had when we invested in this very effective program. They tried to end NIOSH and canceled $3.8 billion in NIH grants.⁷ They laid off 1,300 critical Federal workers from NOAA.⁸ Reasoning · 18 wordsIf you want to talk about government overreach and small government, that is not what happened with DOGE. Claims · 28 wordsThey gained access to personal data, like our Social Security numbers, our tax returns, and our health records. Waste, fraud, and abuse still exist in the Federal Government. Procedure · 2 wordsFor instance, ProcedureClaims · 50 wordsif we want to root out waste, fraud, and abuse, let’s start with the Pentagon that failed the last eight audits.⁹ There is a ton of waste, fraud, and abuse. They have awarded more than $208 billion in contracts to companies that have been cited for repeated or willful violations.¹⁰ Positioning · 24 wordsWhy are we not addressing that? We should want government to be more efficient. We should want to root out waste, fraud, and abuse.Positioning Promise · 9 wordsI will work with anyone to make that happen.Vague promise Claims · 64 wordsInstead, we gave a chainsaw to a trillionaire who made his money off of Federal grants, Federal research, and Federal projects, and we cut critical investments to make our government work better for the working people. On July Fourth, DOGE shut down.¹¹ It doesn’t intend to publish a final report because they would have to report a giant failure that cost taxpayers $10 billion. Aside · 5 wordsI say, good-bye, good riddance, AsideThe ask · 6 wordsand let’s not do this again.