Ranking Member Kaptur Floor Remarks on Republicans’ 2025 Energy and Water Development Funding Bill

Washington, DC – RealEstateRama – Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur (D-OH-09), Ranking Member of the Energy and Water Development and Related Agencies Subcommittee, delivered the following remarks on the House Floor in opposition to the 2025 bill:

– As Prepared for Delivery – 

Thank you, Mr. Chair, I yield myself as much time as I may consume.

I would like to begin by thanking our diligent staff for all their hard work on this bill, including on both the majority and minority staff. Particularly, I would like to thank Scott McKee and Adam Wilson. And on my personal staff, I would like to thank Mayely Boyce and Margaret McInnis.

And I would be remiss if I didn’t note that this is Representative Kilmer’s last Energy and Water bill on the floor. Derek has been a stalwart, serious, and valuable member of our Energy and Water subcommittee for many years. I value his dedication and constant commitment to improving our nation for the sake of constituents. We will miss him greatly, but I know he will find a way to keep fighting to perfect our great union. We thank him for his honorable and diligent public service.

Energy and water undergird America’s way of life. They are not optional — but essential to sustaining life. Our nation is projected to grow to 400 million people by 2050 — three times more people than following World War II. Our bill must catch up to the future, not backpedal.

Sadly, this Republican Energy and Water bill does not meet our nation’s imperative for the future. America must become energy independent in perpetuity. Their bill slow walks our nation’s obligation to assure modern, dependable, affordable energy and clean water for millions of our citizens and thus fails to embrace a more secure future.

This Energy and Water bill cuts $1.5 billion — or 43 percent — from the Department of Energy’s Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy programs. These are essential to meeting our nation’s new challenges with weather-related disasters on the rise.

It revokes $8 billion from the Department of Energy’s Loans Programs. A cut of this size would immediately impact DOE’s ability to spur American manufacturing and innovation.

The bill also slashes the Weatherization Assistance Program, resulting in approximately 54 thousand fewer low-income homes receiving weatherization services.

Let me be clear — the cuts in this bill will absolutely jeopardize innovation to achieve American energy independence. These cuts will hurt US competitiveness. And these cuts will increase energy costs for millions of our fellow citizens, including families and seniors struggling to make ends meet.

While we have made great strides toward energy independence after half a century of effort. Our nation has not reached home plate and scored on US energy independence in perpetuity.

For example, the United States is fulfilling more of its crude oil needs with domestic supplies than ever before. Thankfully, US net crude oil imports are the lowest they’ve been since 1972. While decreased reliance on imports should give the US more control over prices, consumers are still not seeing those benefits in the price they pay at the pump.

With an adversarial Russia weaponizing energy to destabilize global markets, it is clear that America needs more energy innovation and diversification to reduce our dependence on any form of imported foreign energy supplies.

Further, we must not cede our solar and chip future to China. We know China is more than willing to dump product and components to wipe out domestic industries. We have witnessed this in steel, pharmaceuticals, electronics, and the automotive sectors.

In this new century marked by extreme weather events and increasing natural disasters, this bill endangers efforts to address the climate crisis. During 2023, there were 28 separate billion-dollar weather and climate disasters. In 2024, we’re already witnessing an escalation of events, heat waves across America, major flooding throughout the Midwest, wildfires burning in the West, and the most intense hurricane to form in the Atlantic so early in the year.

We have states hitting rainfall records, and June was the 13th month in a row to set a monthly temperature record. The Wall Street Journal reported property insurance premiums are rising significantly — or being completely cut off — across our nation.

The total cost from the billion-dollar disasters in 2023 was a record-setting $92.9 billion. We can either continue to pay more for disaster response. Or, we can invest now in climate mitigation and adaptation that will also lower costs for consumers, create jobs, and increase our global competitiveness. The pathway seems crystal clear to me.

Thus, I oppose the Republicans’ cuts to vital energy and climate programs. Shortchanging these advances pushes our nation backwards — slow walking energy innovation; failing to modernize our nation’s electric grids; failing to advance innovation relative to our global competitors in materials and manufacturing; and failing to build domestic end-to-end supply chains for jobs in the new energy economy.

In other areas of this bill, while I support many of the bill’s efforts to maintain a safe, secure, and credible nuclear deterrent and robust naval nuclear propulsion program, I am concerned how this bill cuts nuclear nonproliferation programs that reduce nuclear risks and counter the global challenge of nuclear proliferation.

Finally, the bill includes numerous controversial poison pill policy riders that sadly show extremist Republicans are not interested in bills that can gain bipartisan support and become law.

I appreciate working Chairman Fleischmann, and our colleagues, to develop and pass bipartisan bills, as has long been this committee’s practice, including last year. I am saddened that this vital subcommittee is being steered to return to a partisan process for this fiscal year 2025 House bill. Americans all witnessed how chaos and extremism played out last year. We all fully should know a bipartisan compromise is the only avenue to finalize these bills. Americans expect us to negotiate our differences, work together across the aisle, and do our jobs to find the “Big Middle.”

America’s future relies on the new age frontiers of Energy and Water.

America can and must do better. I urge my colleagues to oppose this bill.

I reserve the balance of my time.

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