Pallone Opening Remarks at Full Committee Markup
Washington, D.C. – Energy and Commerce Committee Ranking Member Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-NJ) delivered the following opening remarks at a Full Committee markup:
This week, we will be marking up bills out of our Energy, Environment, and Health subcommittees.
We’ll begin with energy bills. I am deeply concerned about the impact that unrestricted data center growth is having on our communities. We need to be putting real, substantial guardrails in place to restrict their impacts on our air, our water, our power grid, and on our monthly power bills. If Congress doesn’t act to put sufficient guardrails in place, we may need a moratorium on data centers.
The bills before us today are a good start in addressing the impact that data centers have on our power bills, but they don’t go far enough to ensure that Big Tech and other data center owners fully pay for the energy use and demand they create. The bills finally put some meat on the bones of Trump’s empty promise – through an executive order – that Big Tech would “pay their fair share.”
I am pleased that we will be marking up a pipeline safety bill and thank the Chairman and his staff for their willingness to work in a bipartisan manner on this legislation. The compromise we reached is certainly not a perfect one, but it represents a huge improvement from the initial bill, and I look forward to conversations with our colleagues in the Senate and on the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee on how to make the final bill even better.
I am disappointed Ranking Member Castor’s bill to speed up the process to connect power plants to the grid was not included in this markup. Our nation’s grid is in crisis – we need more power. And Republicans have made the crisis even worse with their Big Ugly Bill that eliminated incentives to build cleaner and cheaper power. The Republican majority should work with Ranking Member Castor so we can move her bill forward soon.
We will also consider two bipartisan bills out our Environment Subcommittee. They represent a shared commitment to finding creative and efficient ways to boost our domestic critical minerals supply and reduce our dependence on foreign adversaries, namely China, for the minerals we need to power the transition to cost-cutting clean energy. These bills are a win for our environment and a win for the domestic supply chain, promoting resource efficiency and reducing the need to mine new minerals.
Turning to health, I am pleased we are marking up H.R. 9393, the Lower Costs, More Transparency Act, which I introduced with the Chairman. The bill brings greater transparency to the health care system by codifying and strengthening the requirements for both hospitals and insurers to display price information in easy-to-understand formats for consumers. This is going to help both consumers and employers save money on health care services.
I am also pleased with the inclusion of several bills that will improve transparency of the Medicare Advantage program by requiring insurance companies to report data on supplemental benefits and spending on medical services.
We will also consider several bills to help lower Americans’ drug costs. This includes legislation to align the Food and Drug Administration’s statute with the growing scientific knowledge about biologics to reduce costs and to enable more competition by bringing more products to market. This also includes efforts to prevent gaming that otherwise delays generic drugs from coming to market.
And I am pleased we are considering legislation that would require community health centers to offer behavioral health and substance use disorder services and provide funding for centers that don’t already offer these services.
I have some concerns about the measures targeting pill press machines. They share a common design: stricter sentences and a harder enforcement hand. But this strategy has never dismantled the illicit manufacturing trade. Instead, it has swelled the incarcerated population and left the drug market free to reshape itself while fatalities continued to rise.
I also have concerns with about H.R. 7970, the STOP Nitazenes Act. While I share my colleagues' urgency about these dangerously potent synthetic opioids, but public health and research stakeholders have raised serious concerns about how placing the entire Nitazene class permanently into Schedule I would subject researchers to complex registration and compliance rules. This would slow the very work needed to develop better overdose treatments and antidotes. Scheduling and prosecution alone will not solve the problem of illicit drug use. Communities need prevention, education, and treatment support.
And with that, I yield back the balance of my time.
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