Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), Chair of the House Appropriations Committee, delivered the following remarks at the Committee's markup of the fiscal year 2023 Financial Services and General Government bill:
Thank you, Chairman Quigley and Ranking Member Womack for your work on this bill.
When we passed the 2022 federal funding package, we showed how government can work for working Americans and for the middle class. This bill builds on those critical investments by growing opportunity and helping small business owners and middle-class families get ahead with a total of $29.8 billion for these programs, an increase of $4.3 billion.
Small businesses are the economic backbone of our nation, and this bill assists small business owners with $1.1 billion for the Small Business Administration, SBA. We are strengthening the work that small businesses do by helping them get access to the capital and the contracting opportunities they need. At the same time, we are supporting the Community Development Financial Institution programs that promote economic development in some of our most underserved areas.
We support working and middle-class families by increasing funding for consumer protection activities with $166.3 million for the Consumer Product Safety Commission and $490 million for the Federal Trade Commission.
We are also supporting working families by continuing to rebuild the Internal Revenue Service, the IRS. We saw their impact as IRS staff distributed more than 27.9 million advance Child Tax Credit payments to nearly 62 million children totaling nearly $94 billion. But improvement is still needed, which is why we are providing the IRS $13.6 billion to finally begin to crack down on big corporations and the wealthy who are not paying their fair share in taxes and to support their customer service for families navigating the tax system.
We are protecting our communities from the impacts of drug trafficking, combatting money laundering and terrorist financing, and promoting justice for victims of civil rights cold cases.
This bill protects our democracy with $400 million for Election Security Grants for states to ensure the integrity and the safety of our elections. And it protects our environment and confronts the climate crisis by providing funding to start the transition of the Federal vehicle fleet to electric and zero emission vehicles.
I’m proud of this bill. The investments within it strengthen our commitment to making government work for American’s working-class families.
I, finally, want to say a thank you to the Financial Services subcommittee for their work. On the majority side: Matthew Smith, Elliot Doomes, Laura Cylke, Marybeth Nassif, Aalok Mehta, and Alex Kilander. And on the minority side: John Martens and Jessica Powell. Once again, I thank the Chairman and Ranking Member. I urge support for this bill.
Subcommittees: Financial Services and General Government (117th Congress)117th Congress
Original source can be found here.
