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Source: Congress.gov
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Unknown (SPEAKER_03)
Let's convene the Members Day meeting of the Homeland Security Subcommittee. Committee will come to order. Good morning and welcome to the Homeland Security Subcommittee's Member Day hearing. This morning we will hear from members about a variety of topics that fall within the subcommittee's jurisdiction. Thank you and to each of our colleagues for taking time out of your schedules to discuss the projects and programs within the Homeland Security Bill that are important to your districts. Your input is important. I look forward to working with Ranking Member Underwood and the members of this subcommittee to pass the Fiscal Year 26 Homeland Security Appropriations Bill. I will now recognize my colleague, Ms. Underwood, for her opening remarks.
Well, thank you, Mr. Chairman, for holding this hearing to kick off Fiscal Year 2026 appropriations season. I'm grateful that we're hearing testimony from our colleagues as we've done in the past so that they can highlight areas of importance for the constituents that they represent. Mr. Chairman, before we hear from our members, I'd be remiss if we didn't take a moment to raise my concerns with the unconstitutional decisions this administration has been making with the funds provided to the department by this committee, including the sudden and unexplained termination of DHS grants to states and nonprofit organizations, the cancellation of the disaster relief funds building resilience infrastructure and communities program, and reductions in force of parts of the department, such as the Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties and the Offices of Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman, as well as the Immigration Detention Ombudsman, not to mention serious questions about the short cutting of due process and immigration reviews. These unconstitutional actions put DHS employees, American citizens, and our national security at incredible risk. Federal disaster relief funding is what makes it possible for communities across the country to recover from flooding to wildfires. The Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties protects the DHS workforce and upholds our values as Americans. These are non-negotiable priorities. As we focus today on our members' funding priorities, we must also acknowledge that there are serious concerns with how DHS is executing the funding that we have provided. And I hope that we can work together to address some of these issues in our oversight role. Now I look forward to discussing the homeland security priorities our colleagues are bringing to us today, and I thank them for taking the time to appear before us. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for holding this hearing, and I yield back. Thank you, and I share your concerns about several of those things, so we'll look forward to working together on those to see what we can do.
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Unknown (SPEAKER_02)
Mr. Moskowitz, the floor is yours. Well, good morning. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Ranking Member. I want to appreciate the opportunity to come and talk to you. So I just want to quickly just give you a little bit of my background. So before I got to Congress in another life, I was the Director of Emergency Management for the State of Florida for Governor Ron DeSantis, so a completely different party of mine, and did that job for two and a half years and was in charge of the Hurricane Michael cleanup in the Panhandle, along with the entire COVID response for the State of Florida. You look young for having done all that. It aged me in ways, Mr. Chairman, I can't describe, which is why I left that job, okay? Yeah, Congress, much easier. Smart guy. Yeah, much easier than that job. But I want to talk about FEMA. So obviously since this is an appropriations committee, obviously I want to make sure that we fully fund FEMA. But I also want to raise the point that you can't fund something that may not be there. And the FEMA situation is in way worse shape at the moment than the public knows what's going on behind the scenes at Homeland Security. So, I mean, look, I have a bill out there that would remove FEMA from Homeland. It would basically restore it to the way it was before 9-11. It would give it back to the White House. which would shrink the agency because right now FEMA is doing all of the grants for the other 22 agencies plus in Homeland. We want to know why is FEMA doing all this immigration stuff as they're being directed by Homeland General Counsel to run all of those grants. And so if it looks like FEMA is not as good as they used to be at response and recovery, it's because they've become a bloated grant agency because of Homeland's direction. So Byron Donalds and I have that bill to remove it from Homeland and give it back to the President. In the Senate, Tom Tillis and Senator Padilla have that bill. So we have a bipartisan bicameral bill to try to do that with FEMA. And I know giving up an agency is always hard, but I'm really worried about trying to save FEMA. What's going on in Homeland, there are discussions right now, Mr. Chairman,
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