Fiscal Year 2026 Public Witness Day Hearing
2025-04-09
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Source: Congress.gov
Participants
Transcript
OK, the committee come to order and I want to say good morning to everyone. It's my pleasure to welcome everyone to the subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services and Education. And for what is our hearing to hear from outside experts and the public. This is our public witness day. It's an opportunity for members of the public to come before this panel and to draw our attention to issues of importance to them. I look forward to hearing from our witnesses this morning as we learn more regarding the challenges facing our constituents and also communities across the country. And at the end of the day, what this subcommittee can do to try to be of help. For our witnesses, a five-minute clock will be the countdown on the microphone box that will be in front of you as you take the chair. And you'll have one minute remaining when the light turns yellow. That'll, of course, just be an indication, a signal that you to begin to wrap up your testimony. Remember, of course, all of your testimony, your written statement will be submitted to the committee and will appear in the hearing record. So, know if you don't get to all of your comments, they will be submitted for the record. But before we begin, I'd like to turn to the ranking member of the full committee and the subcommittee here. Rosa Delora, for any remarks that she would like to make.
Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. It's a pleasure to join with you this morning, and thank you for holding this hearing with our wonderful public witnesses to discuss the 2026 budget. To our witnesses, we just offer a welcome to you, to the Labor, Health, Human Services, and Education Subcommittee of Appropriations. I want to express my sincere gratitude to all of you and appreciation for the work that you do and on whose behalf you do it. You're such wonderful, wonderful advocates. And we thank you for the written testimonies, for the record. Your advocacy and your testimony is invaluable to us and to the subcommittee's bill. I have said so many times in the past Today's hearing is really one of the most important parts of this subcommittee's process. The programs in Labor HHS, in this bill, they level the playing field for low-income children looking to get a good education. They equip our nation to deal with public health emergencies. They fund life-saving biomedical research. And they help Americans get the skills that they need to be able to find a job. And the list goes on and on and on, because the programs directly impact the lives of every American across our country, especially children, workers, middle-class families, seniors. We are challenged these days with the future of some of these programs, as there have been, as you know, illegal freeze payments. which take funds from programs that I believe American families and businesses rely on, and especially in the area that we're looking at that are under the jurisdiction of this subcommittee in both education, which we know there is a move to
to eliminate the Department of Education. And really, for me, that's about eliminating public education, which is so critical to our children. And the Department of Health and Human Services is undergoing this rapid transformation with the loss of potentially up to 20,000 people. So, we know that Thousands of federal workers have been fired, billions of dollars canceled in funding for education. With regard to education, we would look to, if you eliminate Title I of education, we would lose 72,000 teachers across the country, and then there will be more to come. I'm very troubled by what is happening at HHS because of what is happening the threat, the threat to destroy the agencies that protect America's health. That includes the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration. 20,000 workers, as I've said, have been fired at HHS. That's one fourth of their workforce. $12 billion in funds provided by the Congress for public health and substance abuse treatment. I believe what we will see next is the Department of Labor. already terminated funding for the Bureau of International Labor Affairs, or ILAB, an agency whose mission is to ensure American workers are not put at a disadvantage by countries who violate their labor commitments under our trade agreements. We expect the acts to fall on the Department of Labor's worker protection agencies, the Wage and Hour Division and OSHA, that are responsible for protecting worker safety and hard-earned wages.
The American people are calling our offices every day asking about this spending freeze and what has happened to already appropriated funding. American people are concerned, and there is a lot of fear out there. We have to address that.
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