David Trone

Budgets communicate priorities, and it is clear by this request that the President's priority is not securing our border.

I would be happy to support that as you move forward and you put that to the top of your list.

Your unfunded priority list includes a need for a facility in Baltimore. Can you discuss the importance of this facility and your plans on any funding for future appropriations?

If you don't take care of the family, the member--the guard is not going to be successful, no question about it.

The Coast Guard has been underfunded for years.

Your folks are on the road and looking at tremendous emergencies and human devastation.

You know, ask for what you think you need. You know, don't be shy.

The cost of these natural disasters, $171 billion. That is what NOAA estimated in 2022.

So there hasn't been a partnership, so to speak. And I think a lot of Americans are fed up with it. We are fed up with 100,000 deaths.

The government is willing to tolerate having the heads of the cartels run the cartel. We know where they are, we know who they are, and they are OK with that.

Certainly, we have asked the Mexican Government to help us on fentanyl, they have not been helpful.

I have heard about the administration's considering restarting the detention of families. While some had posed a public safety risk, I get it.

If you take care of your people, all the other stuff is going to work much better.

I don't call that partnership. That is a different word. It is hardly partners when they don't partner the whole way up to the top.

But we need certainly to protect the budget where it deals with fentanyl. We can't let it continue to come.

Your budget request in 2024 has asked for an increase in the tools to assist in stopping these networks in human smuggling, fentanyl killing 100,000 Americans every year.

A revenue problem, a revenue problem, which the Wharton Econometric study and everybody else estimates at $2 trillion over ten years.

I think it is lower than that. I believe he is wrong on that point, but we can follow up on that and get back and I would appreciate that.

Talking about a rate that nobody pays, that is just BS in my mind.

I take exception that we have a point, that we do have a revenue problem. We blew a hole in the revenue problem when we dropped that corporate rate from 35 down to 21.

Our country seems to be headed for a debt crisis, and as my colleague said earlier, this is not the first time that we face this dangerous brinksmanship, and it is wholly disingenuous.

I am not going to hold my breath. The Mexican Government has a lot of reasons not to be invested in this, given the power of the cartels in the country and the lawlessness that how the whole country is run.

President Obrador has adopted a policy of 'Hugs, Not Bullets.'

We concluded at the end of the day that, quite frankly, we were not going to stop the precursors from China because China wasn't helping us.

I lost a nephew. He died of a fentanyl overdose in 2016.