Ron Wyden

Congress needs to make more than token investments in IT at the IRS.

It is my view that streamlined critical pay authority is a key part of the solution.

Taxpayer information is under assault every single day, but the IRS does not have the legal authority it needs from the Congress to build a cybersecurity team that can beat back the crooks.

When it comes to blocking hackers, Congress has done next to nothing while the IRS loses its ability to hire the experts who can keep taxpayer information safe.

There is simply no excuse for this.

In my view, taxpayers have been failed by the agencies, the companies, and the policymakers here in the Congress that they are counting on to protect them.

We are dealing with a steel overcapacity that would really cost us family-wage jobs, family-wage jobs in Oregon and across the country.

We care a great deal about enforcing the trade laws on this committee, particularly the ENFORCE Act and the Leveling the Playing Field Act.

Thank you for assistance in this matter.

This bill contains a number of common sense solutions, as I said, to issues that have gone on for, this feels like the longest running battle since the Trojan War.

It is hard to overstate the value and the strategic necessity of approving the agreement.

It is time, in my view, to actually get some resolution. These relationships are extraordinarily important.

What I think is important is that, to do bipartisan work, we have to move away from, first, the past, because everybody has acknowledged that the first few months were botched.

Look, I do not know how many times I have said in this committee that when there are big, important issues--and certainly the Affordable Care Act is right at the top--we need to work in a bipartisan fashion.

CMS recovered the HealthCare.gov website for high consumer use within 2 months and adopted more effective organizational practices.

I so admire the professionalism of the agency, and I think you heard me say I do not take a back seat to anybody when it comes to cracking down on actual real-world fraud.

The initial rollout was botched

I want to express my appreciation to colleagues on both sides of the aisle, because I think we are on the cusp of being able to make real progress on a huge opportunity for older people in our country.

I am not going to be participating in any celebration of people suffering, because the CO-OPs were tied up in a congressionally induced economic straightjacket.

With so many CO-OPs now in financial jeopardy, I believe that CMS should work with, not against States, to safeguard taxpayer dollars.

It is old news that the rollout of HealthCare.gov 3 years ago was botched.

Now, that is the new news. That is just a few weeks old. That is new news, and I want people to hear that, and I want people to hear that there were no actual real-world cases of fraud uncovered.

I think that, as is always the case, you all are right to talk about various issues that ought to be part of the debate.

So let us go then from last year when there was not one single real-world example of fraud to where we are now.

What we have said is that we want to work in a bipartisan way to improve a variety of sections of the Affordable Care Act.