MIKE CRAPO:
00:02:37
I apologize to you for that outburst, Secretary Kennedy. I would notify everyone else in the audience, comments from the audience are inappropriate. If there are any further disruptions, the committee will recess until the police can restore order. Mr. Secretary, please proceed. As I was saying, prior authorization, information blocking, and healthcare interoperability. We are ending gain-of-function research, child mutilation, and reducing animal testing. We are addressing cell-phone use in schools, excessive screen time for youth, the lack of nutrition education in our medical schools, sickle cell anemia, hepatitis C, the East Palestine chemical spill, and many, many others. At FDA, we are now on track to approve more drugs this year than at any time in history. I'm also proud to say that HHS under President Trump is doing more with less. We have taken measures to fight waste, fraud, and abuse. Just by eliminating duplicative enrollments in CMS, we are saving taxpayers $14 billion a year. Meanwhile, we are expanding access for people who need it. We are ending racist diversity, equity, and inclusion practices and instead focusing on aiding low-income and vulnerable families, regardless of their race, which was the original intent of Title X. We're also pouring a billion dollars into Head Start and the Administration for Children and Families. Compassion need not be the casualty of efficiency. I'd like to highlight some issues that have not gotten media attention. First, we are doing our part to fulfill the president's commitment to stop human trafficking, especially of children. We inherited a terrible humanitarian crisis from the previous administration with its open border policies, which allowed the appalling loss of 476,000 unaccompanied children. We have implemented policies now to ensure that that appalling tragedy can never happen again. We have knocked on 82,000 doors and located 22,000 of those children. I promise you that we will do more in the next three years. We are also addressing the disastrous health conditions in tribal communities on Native American reservations. I've met face to face with tribal leaders in dozens of communities and tribes in Alaska, Arizona, Idaho, New Mexico, and elsewhere, and I look forward to making HHS resources more available to those communities. One of the most significant initiatives under President Trump is the Rural Health Transformation fund, part of the president's big, beautiful bill, which will provide the greatest investment of federal money into rural health care in history. Finally, I would like to address the recent reason shakeups at CDC. These changes were absolutely necessary adjustments to restore the agency to its role as the world's gold-standard public-health agency, with the central mission of protecting Americans from infectious disease. CDC failed that responsibility miserably during COVID, when its disastrous and nonsensical policies destroyed small businesses, violated civil liberties, closed our schools, caused generational damage in doing so, masked infants with no science, and heightened economic inequality. And yet, all of those oppressive and unscientific interventions failed to do anything about the disease itself. America is home to 4.2% of the world's population, yet we had nearly 20% of the COVID deaths. We literally did worse than any country in the world. And the people at CDC who oversaw that process, who put masks on our children, who closed our schools are the people who will be leaving. And that's why we need bold, competent, and creative new leadership at CDC, people able and willing to chart a new course. As my father once said, progress is a nice word, but change is its motivator, and change has its enemies. That's why we need new blood at CDC. That's also why it's imperative that we remove officials with conflicts of interest and catastrophically bad judgment and political agendas. We need unbiased, politics-free, transparent, evidence-based science in the public interest. Those are the guiding principles behind the changes at the CDC, and that is what you can expect all across our agency for the next three years.
