Henry Cuellar: “I thank the gentlewoman for yielding time to me, and I thank our ranking member, again, for trying to work together.…”

“I thank the gentlewoman for yielding time to me, and I thank our ranking member, again, for trying to work together. Again, I respectfully support H.R. 50, the Unfunded Mandates Information and Transparency Act of 2017. This is an issue that I have been working on since the 1990s in the State legislature. In fact, I was the author of house bill 66 when the Democrats controlled the Governorship, the House, the Senate, and the State legislature. I was able to pass the first unfunded mandates bill in the State of Texas. This particular issue in Congress started in 1995 under the Clinton administration. Again, with a Republican Congress working together, the Congress passed the Unfunded Mandates Reform Act in 1995. This legislation was designed to prevent the Federal Government from imposing unfunded mandates on States and local governments, or private businesses, without policymakers or the public knowing the cost of such policies. This legislation ensured public awareness of the financial burden of Federal mandates on small-business owners and on State and local governments. However, this unfunded mandates bill has not been amended since 1995, and some of those changes are necessary to preserve and improve the act's initial purpose. This bill closes some of the loopholes by removing independent agency reporting exemptions, setting forth detailed assessment criteria, and allowing judicial review of agency assessments.…”