Technology Revolution Happening Around Us

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHWEIKERT. Madam Speaker, last week I promised I was going to do something a little more positive tonight. It is complicated because I basically have a compulsion. Being from Arizona, I sit on an airplane 10 hours a week; 5 there and 5 back.

I use these news aggregators, and I collect articles. Afterwards, my staff and I do follow-up and research. I just gathered up some of them the last couple days. These are positive things happening in our society, but one of the number one reasons I am going to show them is they are things that actually could make our lives better, make us healthier as a society and assist with, as you know, my fixation on the debt.

Before we start to actually focus on the debt and deficit--and I am going to try to minimize my sarcasm, but you have got to give me a moment here--we should be very proud of ourselves. We did something very special today that we have never done before other than in the middle of COVID.

Over the last 2 months, our borrowing has increased so much that we are at $80,600 a second. We did it. I am so proud of us. I knew we could actually spend ourselves into oblivion. We did it, we crossed $80,000. We are at $80,000 a second, and we are only a few ticks away from getting to $7 billion a day.

When I think about the fussing that goes on here on the floor where we are knifing each other for this or that, unless it is covering almost $7 billion in savings, that day we actually went negative. Just a point.

Interestingly, the data shows since the beginning of the fiscal year--we are 2 months and a week or so into it--Social Security is number one. Social Security is always going to be number one.

I have gotten picked on a little bit for bringing my charts showing that we are going to have $1 trillion this year in gross interest. Some folks say, well, that is not fair, you are paying interest to the Social Security trust fund. Okay.

Well, guess what? Even if I use what they call net interest, which is only the interest we pay out to people who bought U.S. bonds, interest is still, so far this fiscal year, the second biggest expenditure in this government. Social Security is first, interest is number two, then defense, then Medicare, then Medicaid. Just a little bit of fiscal housekeeping there.

All right. As a body, as Members of Congress and our staff, I need all of us to start thinking. We live in a time where there is a technological revolution happening around us. How do we use that technology to make people's lives easier, better, and give them more time?

I am going to start with one example that I think is so incredibly obvious. I chair the Oversight Subcommittee for the Ways and Means Committee, so I have the IRS. We have come up here a number of times just enraged that during the Inflation Reduction Act Democrats moved an additional $80 billion to the IRS. They tell us, well, it is for collection and customer service.

What would happen if I came to you today and said, have you ever tried calling the IRS and sat on hold forever or got their response saying: Hey, could you call back another day? Or, give us your phone number, and we will get around to calling you back? I am going to give them credit here; they tried an experiment.

The IRS actually did an experiment this last tax season, and it served 13 million people, and it was a chatbot. Most people say: Oh, I don't like AI. However, think about this: When you call an airline today, most of the time do you think you are actually speaking to a real human? What if I could call the IRS and actually have the phone picked up right then, and I can ask a certain question: What do I put on this line? I have this issue, where do I find the document for this? Is there a YouTube video I can watch on how to fill out this form?

The experiment worked. It was actually incredibly positive. I have had their technology people in my office multiple times, even last week, and I am told it is going to get expanded for this next tax filing season. You are going to get the phone answered.

What happens if the ability to do a chatbot at a government agency could mean better and faster customer service and, let's be honest, save a lot of money because you don't have to hire as many government bureaucrats? It is a moment where those of us who are very concerned about that additional $80 billion going to the IRS could actually say: Okay, there is an argument. We have got a real customer service problem, how about using technology? Well, the experiment is working.

How do I get my brothers and sisters here when we do our oversight, when we think about our job of making government faster, more efficient, more affordable, and less borrowing--oh, less borrowing--to say what other agencies could basically get rid of buildings full of people answering the phone and move to technology that is crisper, faster, better, cheaper, more accurate, and can actually give you the link so that you can see the video on how to fill out the form.

That is where this discussion is going. There are positive things happening, or at least possibilities if I can get this body to think.

Let's actually go on to one of the other ones that I am absolutely fascinated with. I have actually worked on this for years. There is this thing called carbon capture. Most of the left despise it because it would allow you to continue to use, particularly, natural gas, and yet there are breakthroughs in the technology right now to capture the carbon, sequester it or convert it into other products.

I actually have functionally a whole library of MIT and others who have had breakthroughs on how to do it. This one is about facilities being built.

There are even crazy experiments going on around the country and in the world on what they call ambient carbon capture. Where the concept is what happens when you can actually start to capture the carbon right at the point source, turn it into another fuel, sequester it in the ground, use it for extraction of other hydrocarbons. There is a solution here. The problem is it doesn't fit the narrative of my brothers and sisters on the left.

However, if you actually look at the math, particularly with 45Q, which is an incentive to capture this carbon--look, one of the biggest emitters you have in the country is making concrete. Okay. What if you would grab the carbon and put it in the concrete? Yeah, the concrete turns gray, but it is the sequestration of it. There are positive economic growth solutions for our brothers and sisters on the left who have climate change concerns, but yet we talk past each other.

I have saved article after article on topics, including speaking about new technology that could capture carbon and water out of thin air. This is ambient carbon capture. It is out there. It exists.

How do you get this body to start reaching this century of technology? Instead, we often sound like it is still the 1990s.

It is here. We have actually had some of these experts, some of the researchers, the one on MIT's breakthrough from almost 2 years ago. I bring this because this is a particular subject area where the left wants one thing, we want one thing, and I argue there is a technology that actually solves both of our problems.

Part of my point tonight was instead of just talking about the dystopian terror I have of the speed and growth of debt--and the fact of the matter is that no one wants to have the conversation with me that from today through the future most of our debt is going to be healthcare costs, and if in 9 years we start to backfill Social Security, it is demographics.

What do you do to create as much economic growth, as much prosperity as possible?

One of the number one things we have to do in time is start to talk about not how you finance the price of healthcare, but, rather, how to disrupt it.

I am going to jump around a little on this. The ACA--ObamaCare--a decade ago, wasn't a healthcare bill. It was a financing bill basically saying you cover this, and here is how you get subsidized and here is who has to pay. The Republican alternative was a financing bill, here is who has to pay and here is who gets subsidized. Medicare for All is a financing bill, they are not about what you pay. What is the actual cost?

What if I came to you and said, let's actually think about the things we can do to make our society healthier, make our society so we don't need the same level of healthcare services?

The next board I am going to show you is a fairly radical thought. Let's actually walk through this because I have been collecting articles on this concept for a while.

This last year, somewhere close to 100,000 of our brothers and sisters in America died of a drug overdose. Number one was fentanyl. Come to Phoenix, Arizona, in Maricopa County, Arizona, we have three people who lose their lives every single day due to fentanyl.

What if I came and said, hey, there is a healthcare solution. Turns out we are on the cusp of having a vaccine. I am not an expert on this, but I have read the articles, and apparently fentanyl, because it is a synthetic, is remarkable at capturing the receptors in your brain and just dramatically changing your brain chemistry.

It turns out there are scientists all over the world working on the concept of filling those receptors. If anyone is industrious enough, google right now or use your search engine ``vaccine for cocaine.'' It is a different formula. It is a binding to a protein.

I started following this a couple of years ago when there was an article about a vaccine for alcohol addiction. We scream at people and say: ``Just tough it out. Go to your meetings.'' You should do both of those, but what would happen if you could start to remove the high from some of these incredibly addictive drugs? Remember, these things are chemicals. They are not plant-based.

This world is so much more dystopian. What change would happen with the homelessness in our urban areas if this was available? How many people out there could you help back into society?

It is a tough conversation. There are some really tough ethical questions where you have someone who comes in off the street. They are addicted to fentanyl. There is a fentanyl vaccine available.

Do they have to be able to choose it themselves? Probably. When are you in your right mind that you can make that type of decision?

This is on the cusp. This is projected to be here potentially next year. Are we intellectually, ethically, and financially ready to deal with the opportunity of a disruption of something that is tearing many of our cities and communities apart?

This is optimistic. This is loving people. This is also trying to figure out a way to take on human misery.

How many times have you had an idiot like me come to the floor of the House and say maybe we should start to think about policy if there are now going to be vaccines coming that actually block the receptors for these types of drugs? Would that be good for society? If it would be good for society, how do we carry it out?

I think this is just moral, besides the fact that if you actually look at the 10-year cost of it, it may actually be a huge economic benefit and saver to municipal governments, city governments, State governments, and also our Medicaid subsidies. It just may be the right thing to do.

There should be hope. There should actually be excitement about these sorts of things.

As we walk through a few more of these--and forgive me. There are so many subjects here. I am going to bounce around on this one only because this is one I have been collecting for years.

A couple of years ago, I came across an article by some scientist who actually had been focusing on methane. For those of you who care about math, methane apparently has a substantially higher impact, according to formulas we are given, but a much shorter life span in the atmosphere.

The capture of methane was going to cost a fortune. Some of the early Biden administration rules are that they wanted costs upstream and downstream of the production of natural gas.

Scientists wrote this article saying: Did you know that clay, when it is also adjusted, I believe it was with copper oxide--you get the joke here if anyone actually has a scientific brain. Clay and kitty litter with copper oxide acts like a methane sponge. It is incredibly inexpensive.

I proposed it to some of my Democratic colleagues who claim to really care about climate change, methane, and all those things. They just looked at me like I was a heretic because I was giving them a solution that didn't require massive government subsidies.

Here we are, a little bit later, and the articles continue on with the ability to do the capture, and even the ability to use that methane capture in agriculture, and the fact that there are actually even some new attempts to do it. You don't have to bankrupt us.

Is it enough to come and give speeches about how much you care about climate change and then not actually understand the science that makes it so you can do something without crushing people's livelihoods, crushing your retirement, and leaving your future generations in debt?

Call my office. We have dozens of these articles we collect. We subscribe to some really crazy blogs and scientific publications. In this place, does anyone actually read the literature?

This is supposed to be a happy, optimistic speech, so forgive my exasperation. Let's talk through some of the other things that are going on.

I know everyone was reading and enthusiastic about the first CRISPR drug that made it through the final bit of its process and apparently is heading to the streets now. The FDA has approved it for sickle cell anemia. It is incredibly painful. This drug will be outrageously expensive, and we need to find, for just basic morality's sake, how we make it available. The point here is that it works, finally.

We have talked about CRISPR and the ability to alter a genome and add some gene sequencing. It is here. It has been done. It is approved. It is available. One of the miseries in our society actually now has a cure.

We have proposed ideas of a healthcare bond, the ability to be able to buy the units, cure our brothers and sisters, and then use the future healthcare savings, because they no longer have that affliction in the future, to pay it back.

If someone else has a better financing mechanism other than just borrowing money, let me know, but get ready. There are dozens of these types of pharmaceuticals--genetic, bio, other things--that are in the pipeline that we have almost a moral obligation--if it ends misery and also allows our brothers and sisters to once again fully participate in society and the economy, we have to deal with these.

This is optimistic because we actually have been trying to find a cute way to say cures are the solution. This is where I often get in a fuss. I am going to spend a bunch of time at the end on diabetes.

A fuss I have with a number of our Democratic Members--we go at each other pretty hard here because their version of morality is to put up more clinics to help manage misery.

I keep looking at them and saying: Will someone read the scientific literature? We are on the cusp of cures. What is more moral? To spend money to build more clinics, or to spend some money to get more economic growth because you have ended the misery?

How do I get this body to see that vision, that it is great economics, great growth, and also moral?

Let's walk through just a few other of these things. This is another one I am really interested in. It is in phase 1 right now. How would you feel about a vaccine for breast cancer? This is a brand-new board. I only have a couple of the scientific papers on it, but so far, it looks like it is working.

What would this mean for society? What would it mean for testing? What would it mean for mammograms? What would it mean for expenditures in the future? What would it mean for people like my wife who have gone through some misery here?

Is this the right thing to pursue? Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't, but they are well into their phase 1, and their early data is great.

Think about it. You see, I am trying to create thinking here. What happens if one of the ways we reduce future debt and spending is that we ended misery, disease? Cures.

These are the sorts of things I wish we actually brought in front of our committees and talked about, that we actually had staff who would understand the basic science.

I have brought versions of this next one to the floor for about 3 or 4 or years. We even had a debate yesterday in the back of the room here when we were doing a piece of legislation that I thought was purely theater and saying: What is the simplest thing you can do tomorrow that, by the end of next year, you could have a major change in spending on healthcare?

People look at you and don't know. What if I told you 16 percent--and this has been peer-reviewed multiple times--16 percent of U.S. healthcare spending is associated with people not doing their pharmaceutical maintenance?

It is someone like me. I have hypertension. Can you believe that? As long as I take my calcium inhibitor, I am most likely not to have a stroke.

Someone that takes a statin, those pharmaceuticals are incredibly cheap. They have been around for 50 years. It turns out--and this board is now 3 years old. Our latest number is over $600 billion. That is 16 percent of U.S. healthcare spending in a single year.

You are not going to get all that, but what happens if you could get 10 percent, 20 percent of it by just a pill bottle cap that beeps at you in the morning or a text message you would get on your phone asking: Did you take your statin? It is worth thinking about.

How many people do you know who don't follow their regimen on insulin?

We have technology to help each other stay on the program within a year by just saying that we want a pill bottle cap that beeps if it is the type of thing you use for maintenance.

For grandma, it is the type of thing that if she has to take these in the morning and these in the afternoon, it drops the pills in the cup. It already exists. It has existed for years.

We have done presentations to the committees around here saying the day is here. We all agree this is real. Why is it so hard?

We had someone come to present us with a package, saying: Do you realize there are certain pharmaceuticals that are so incredibly expensive? Put them in sterile blister packs, and when someone has gone through their treatment, don't throw away what is left. If it is in sterile packaging, why can't it be given to a Medicaid system or helping the poor?

We just don't think here. We are so used to saying we will just spend more money. Please, give this some consideration. Is this Republican or Democratic? It is neither. It is just technology.

It would be a partial solution. If it is 16 percent, that means this is, like, 34 percent more effective than the piece of legislation we jumped up and down and made a big deal about passing yesterday on suspension. One is theatrics; one is actually a solution.

We need to learn math. Here is where I start to soak myself in kerosene and play with matches. It is math. The math will always win.

I have no intention of hurting someone's feelings, but we really should start to talk through some of this. This has been incredibly well vetted. It is in article after article.

Mr. Speaker, 5 percent of our brothers and sisters are actually over 50 percent of our healthcare spending--actually a little over 50 percent of all healthcare spending.

These are folks with multiple chronic conditions. Many of them have a miserable life, but our ability to change this 5 percent here is a remarkable savings on debt and spending, and the morality of people having a decent life.

Why is it so hard to focus on this?

We actually have article after article that we have been collecting on the ability to use AI to discover cures. This is happening all around us.

Why haven't we updated our policy?

Why haven't we worked with the FDA, saying, hey, AI can reduce parts of your population statistics. So you go into your phase 1, you get certain data back, you can use AI to model your populations. You can cut the time bringing solutions and cures to market.

The ability to actually change what the concept of telehealth is. Is telehealth grabbing your phone and FaceTiming someone, or is it the things you have on your body?

Is it the wristwatch you have?

Soon we will have blood glucose and oxygen and heart rate and those things. You will functionally have a medical app on your body.

You should be allowed to take that data, run it through, and if it can be certified by the FDA, it should be allowed to prescribe.

Now this is heresy I just said, but the fact of the matter is if you update it on your body--or like that flu kazoo I came here and showed on the floor years ago; the thing you blow into. It is a breath biopsy that within a couple moments says, hey, you have this virus. We are bouncing off your medical records.

So it bounces off your phone: Here are your medical records. You are not allergic to this antiviral.

We are going to order that antiviral, and maybe Lyft or Uber drops it off at your house in a couple hours.

That would be a good thing, except for the fact that we functionally keep that illegal, and if we don't make it illegal, we make it so it can't be reimbursed.

It is a solution. Remember, part of this discussion is what did we do to change the cost and the ability to be healthy, not who is going to subsidize your healthcare premium, your insurance premium.

We have article after article. There are actually some miracles happening here in starting to understand cell dynamics, which is a big deal if it starts to come around in the next few years.

Remember, we have a certain misery in this country we have to deal with.

This sort of goes back to my fentanyl vaccine. We may be able to walk into a fifth year of life expectancy falling, particularly for prime- age males.

It is bad enough you live in a country that in about 18 years we will have more deaths than births, but what happens when life expectancy in this country is shrinking?

We are going to get to one of the reasons for that.

How about this. What would happen if there was a universal flu vaccine; instead of playing this game every winter saying, did they get the mixture right?

Well, it is only about 30 percent effective because it turns out that the genome of the flu that actually started to circulate wasn't the one they expected.

What if they figured out a way to do the snip on the protein?

Have you ever seen the data of the economic impact of a major flu season; how many people don't go to work?

It is really good economics. I will argue, it is embracing science in a way that is good for all of us.

Look, I have article after article of these breakthroughs that are actually not in the lab right now. Many of them are actually being tested.

Why can't we get this body to say, hey, that one should be getting an XPRIZE, because if they can bring that to market 1 or 2 years sooner, think of the misery we can end. Oh, and it is really good for the budget deficit.

Hey, this one we need to work with the FDA, if we actually have to move someone over here to be able to do the review process instead of it being piled up on some overworked bureaucrat so it sits there for a year.

We need to think through the fact of the timing of a cure. The faster it comes is moral, and it is also great economics.

Let's actually now go where it gets even more uncomfortable.

The amount of mocking I took a couple of years ago, and then the science actually turned out right, but I never got that reporter--and, look, the DCCC is always going to attack us, but you would think they would actually see the morality in ending misery in people's lives.

Diabetes is the single most expensive disease in America. It is 33 percent of all healthcare spending. It is 31 percent of Medicare; 31 percent of Medicare is associated with diabetes.

A few months ago, we actually had a Healthcare Innovation Summit downstairs. We actually got six Members of Congress to show up. We invited all of them, but six showed up to meet the company that looks like they have a cure for type 1 diabetes. The other company sitting next to them looks like they had a path for type 2. There are four or five companies.

If type 1 is an autoimmune disease, what happens if you could teach your body not to attack itself? That one is actually, I think, heading towards its phase 1.

If these things are so expensive in society, why can't we actually fixate on them?

Of the $327 billion spent on diabetes in 2017 by insurance and government, we are going to knife each other around here for a few hundred million, maybe several billion dollars in savings. Incremental changes here on just helping our brothers and sisters if we could get to a cure for diabetes.

Now here is where it gets politically even trickier.

Researchers exploring the use of gene therapy to show promising results for diabetic retinopathy.

Madam Speaker, I represent a Tribal population that apparently, I have been told, is the second highest per capita population of diabetes in the world.

It is not a poor Tribe. They are incredibly well managed. They are prosperous.

As we have learned now, because of the GLP-1s, obesity really has a huge genetic component. The hormones you produce to know you are full are different between you and I.

What happens to our brothers and sisters who are going blind because of diabetes? We are on the cusp of a cure there.

I would actually go even more creative.

If anyone is willing to read something that is a little bit complex, about 6 months ago, the Joint Economic Committee Republicans--a couple of them have Ph.D.s in economics--wrote a response to the President's budget. But we took it further.

We said, think about what we could do for society if we were willing to actually do something about obesity in America.

Remember I just showed you that 5 percent is 50 percent of healthcare spending? Some of the data from the economist came back and said, hey, almost half of healthcare actually has an association with obesity in America.

This is where it gets tricky, but math is math.

In that, they did very conservative math. They were coming up with saying, hey, at the end of 10 years, that is $5-plus trillion dollars of savings. And if you did the multiplier effects, you might actually be able to work, family formation, labor force participation, life expectancy. You start to add in those other benefits, it could be several trillion dollars, besides the basic morality.

So how do you get there?

How do you come here and actually have a conversation without someone accusing you of nasty things because you showed you cared?

Well, we have some new categories of drugs, the GLP-1s. One apparently goes off-patent next year.

Could we actually, as a policy here in Congress, encourage a co-op? Make the one that is off-patent, add competition, crash the price?

The fact of the matter is, someone like me who comes and fixates on the debt--and the Democrats over there fixate on wanting to tax people more--for the last couple months, I have come here and shown you the academic literature over and over that says you can raise rich people's taxes all you want; you hit the economic ceiling and you get about a point and a half; maybe if the sky opened up, you can get up to almost 2 percent of GDP.

Over here we have talked through almost everything we were able to cut, and there are only a couple of percent of GDP that we could ever cut and survive, just get the vote.

The problem is if you take away the fraud of crediting back the administration the student loan money, if you add it all up, we borrowed almost 8.4 percent of the economy last year. So borrowing last year was 8.4 percent of GDP.

Did you hear my math? If taxing rich people only gets you a couple percent of GDP and the cuts we want to talk about--and many of the cuts I am absolutely going to vote for, but it is only a couple percent of GDP.

Does someone see a problem in the math? It has to happen through policy.

Is having a healthier society that needs dramatically less healthcare moral? It is surely great damn economics.

The point of tonight's presentation is actually clear: There is hope. We have calcified intellectually. The left somehow thinks there is a path to tax your way to prosperity.

I have tried to show repeatedly that if we did every tax the Democrats talk about to save the Social Security trust fund, you get close, you still actually have very substantial cuts.

I mean, we have tried to model it, but let's say it covered everything. You have just used up all your gun powder.

If two-thirds of all future borrowing is functionally Medicare, where do you get the cash for that, because you have used it to shore up the Social Security trust fund.

That is actually part of the intellectual vacuousness of this place.

It is, we will just tax more. There is not enough money, but we are not going to tell anyone that because it doesn't fit with what we said on the campaign trail.

How many times have some of my brothers and sisters on my side said it is foreign aid? Then you show the chart that every dime of foreign aid is about 11 days of borrowing.

Remember, we are on the cusp of borrowing $7 billion a day. We are over $80,000 a second now. We are going to have to change through policy.

I have done videos on how you could have a revolution on environmental data by crowdsourcing the data. I even made a whole cartoon. It is on YouTube somewhere about crowdsourcing environmental data; that if you did that, you don't need the current enforcement mechanism. If you have enough data, you will catch the bad actors. It would open up the economy, promote growth, and you would catch the clowns that are breaking the rules.

I have shown that to people in here that have said, oh, but that would cut a whole bunch of jobs at the EPA.

That is the point. It is better, faster, and better for the environment and a hell of a lot cheaper and fairer.

I guess my rambling in my closing, Madam Speaker, is that there are solutions. There is hope, but they are only going to come about if we have intellectually a fairly dramatic change in how we have sort of calcified on policy, because all these things are disruptive.

All these things are going to have armies of lobbyists who do not like them because you are changing their business model, or armies of bureaucrats showing up in your office explaining that you are changing the laws.

That is the point.

There is hope. It just requires us to change.

Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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