Taxes and Spending

$1.74 billion for Community Health Centers to serve rural communities; $515 million for the Payments in Lieu of Taxes (PILT) program so counties can fund education, law enforcement, and infrastructure; $48 million for the U.S. Forest Service to address the bark beetle infestations ravaging Colorado and to actively manage our forests; $10 million for the Indian Irrigation Fund for the benefit of the Southern Ute Tribe; $1 million to compensate farmers for livestock lost to wolves; important pro-life protections like the Hyde and Weldon amendments; preventing the greater sage-grouse from being listed as an endangered species; important federal resources for NASA and Colorado’s space program; and exempting livestock haulers from burdensome Department of Transportation electronic logging device mandates.

With annual deficits exceeding a trillion dollars and total debt surpassing $30 trillion, now is the time to tack action to rein in wasteful government spending. We need a Balanced Budget Amendment to get our fiscal house in order and help tame inflation, not $1.5 trillion bills that are more than 2,700 pages that Members have less than 22 hours to read.

The Forest Service’s proposal to significantly increase fees for communications towers utilized by counties appears to be a top-down, one-size-fits-all mandate drafted by some bureaucrat in Washington that doesn’t understand the West or rural communities. County emergency managers depend on affordable access to their emergency communications towers to assist rural communities when disaster strikes, including helping fight forest fires on Forest Service land. The existing proposal is not well thought-out, needs revised, and the current comment period should be extended as a result.

Nancy Pelosi’s China bill does exactly what she has told American Olympians to do while at the games—it plays nice with the CCP. Instead of competing with China, the COMPETES Act sends $8 billion of taxpayer money to Beijing after being laundered by an unaccountable U.N. climate change slush fund that has already given over a hundred million dollars to China.