America Last: How Foreign Aid Undermined U.S. Interests Around the World
Government Efficiency, Financial Management and Intergovernmental Relations
2025-02-26
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Source: Congress.gov
Participants
Transcript
Economic Growth, Energy Policy, and Regulatory Affairs will come to order. I just want to welcome everyone to the hearing. Without objection, the chair may declare a recess at any time. I recognize myself for the purpose of making an opening statement. Welcome to the first hearing of the Subcommittee on Economic Growth, Energy Policy, and Regulatory Affairs for the 119th Congress. It is a personal honor to serve as the chairman of this committee, and I look forward to working with Ranking Member Frost and my colleagues on this subcommittee over the course of this Congress as we tackle urgent problems facing the American people. Today's hearing topic concerns every district across the country, the state of America's energy reliability. Power demand is expected to grow dramatically, if not exponentially, in the coming years as new manufacturing facilities and data centers are built throughout the country. With the new demand comes a lot of questions. Where will this additional power come from? Are we doing enough to create more power generation and transmission? If we are not, are we setting our power grid up to crash? What will all this mean for the American people, and how can they be assured the energy bills won't continue to rise? New innovation, particularly in the field of nuclear energy, offers promising solutions, but it is often thwarted from reaching its full potential due to regulatory and permitting challenges imposed by this government. Reliable and trusted sources of power generation, such as natural gas and coal, are still fighting against regulatory obstacles created by the previous administration. Burdensome regulations have been the silent killer of economic growth and prosperity in our country and have lasting implications for U.S. industries, particularly the power sector. The Biden EPA power plant rule will, if left in place, force premature retirement of existing power plants across the country without providing a clear path forward for bringing new power generation online.
Last Congress, I introduced the Reliable Grid Act of 2024 to address this issue and ensure that Americans everywhere have access to affordable, reliable energy supplies. Under the Trump administration, significant steps are already being taken to revitalize our nation's energy sector. Recent executive actions seek to expand oil and gas production, reverse previous limitations, and unleash our energy independence. These initiatives, coupled with an ongoing regulatory reforms are to alleviate unnecessary burdens on energy development, are poised to modernize our power generation and transmission infrastructure, ensuring reliable and affordable energy supply for all Americans. Over the course of this Congress, I hope that this subcommittee can shed light on where reforms are needed and bring forth practical and hopeful bipartisan solutions to better serve the American people. I look forward to our conversation here today, and with that, I yield to Ranking Member Frost for his opening statement.
Thank you so much, Chair Lynn Burleson, and thank you to the witnesses for being here this morning. As someone who grew up experiencing increasingly frequent hurricanes and power outages, it is so important for our subcommittee to work on the issue of energy reliability, and I look forward to that. My constituents and many of our constituents are in danger because of the power outages after extreme weather. They cost families thousands of dollars in wasted food, medicine, create mold, mildew damage, and it's deadly. I introduced the bipartisan energy storage for resilient homes act so Floridians and folks across the country can install home energy storage batteries as part of FEMA's disaster mitigation support. Proper energy storage combined with clean energy means reliable electricity. One meta analysis of 11 studies shows that we can match energy supply and demand under any conditions with a 70 to 90% clean energy grid. Promoting clean energy is a key part of promoting reliable energy, and it has also been a huge benefit to the American economy. The support for clean energy that was found in the Inflation Reduction Act, including the home energy rebate programs, helped our energy supply, while also lowering bills and taxes for financially burdened families, upgrading our appliances, and protecting our homes from extreme weather. Despite those benefits, Unfortunately, President Trump has now frozen a lot of this funding. The law lowered emissions, employed half a million Americans, and boosted American manufacturing while shrinking costs for families. From hurricanes to droughts, the climate crisis is here, and it is our patriotic duty to do everything we can to reverse it. And right now, our government is stuck in a vicious cycle of working to produce more fossil fuels, which then increases pay at big oil companies, which then worsens the climate collapse, Then the government continues to subsidize the fossil fuels. And then we produce more fossil fuels. But unfortunately, we haven't seen these costs go down for working families.
And I do think we need to break this cycle. One of President Trump's first executive orders called Unleashing American Energy is supposedly aimed at restoring American prosperity through affordable and reliable energy. However, the methodology is extremely weak. We continue to say that we're going to be imposing tariffs on goods from Canada, including crude oil, but the U.S. is heavily reliant on Canadian oil because most of the oil produced here is not compatible with our refineries and vehicles. Tariffs levied on Canada will increase energy prices for Americans, and it's not just energy. Higher energy costs make it more expensive to transport nearly all goods and materials across the country. So from clothing to food, the cost of energy is important in every single thing.
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