Irs Success

Floor Speech

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Ms. DEAN of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, in the past year, you might have noticed a difference while doing your taxes.

If you called IRS with a question, you waited on the phone for maybe 5 minutes instead of 30 or more from years past.

If you got your tax refund in a reasonable amount of time, there is a difference. If you are one of the Americans who attempted to evade taxes and ended up paying your fair share, you can thank the Inflation Reduction Act for that.

This historic legislation has enabled the IRS to be better funded, better staffed, and better at getting hard-earned money back to the people.

My constituents have noticed. When we legislated $80 billion over the next decade to modernize IRS, Republicans set out spreading disinformation and fear: agents coming out to get you.

They were wrong. They knew that was not the case, but they wanted to demonize IRS anyway. Instead, what happened? We saw improvements.

In one of the most immediate results from a bill I have ever seen, wait times are down to 4 minutes across the country. Tax returns are arriving without months-long delays.

In my own office, we had more than 250 cases open at any one time, trying to help constituents. Now that number is below 60.

Again, Republicans launched an attack on IRS funding during their manufactured debt ceiling crisis of the last few weeks.

Thankfully, their success against IRS was limited. They were able to claw back only a small portion of that funding that we set forward.

Still, their opposition is incomprehensible. Republicans say they don't like government, that government doesn't work. President Biden and congressional Democrats reveal that when we fund government properly, it does work.

I thank the IRS team for their hard work on behalf of my constituents and Americans all across this country. A Scourge in America

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Ms. DEAN of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, every year in this country, 43,000 people, 44,000 people--in one year, as high as 49,000 people-- die of gun violence.

Every single day, we lose people in this country to gun violence. Mr. Speaker, 54 percent of that horrific number is gun violence suicide.

This week the Gun Violence Prevention Task Force held a hearing, and we had six, eight, nine folks testifying before us: folks who had survived mass shootings; folks whose family members lost their lives due to gun violence and suicide; and folks who had accidental shootings take place in their communities that harmed and took the lives of others.

When we asked for a committee room in this Capitol in order to host that testimony and to learn something more about it, guess what happened?

It was Monday, a fly-in day, when these committee rooms are not busy. There was no room in the House for that committee to be hosted, so we had to go to the Senate.

Committee chair after committee chair of the Republican Party, the majority party, denied us access to a committee room to simply hear the testimony of those who know something sad and tragic all too well about gun violence.

We had the benefit of the Senate giving us a small committee room where we were stuffed in: advocates, victims, researchers, professors, and others.

That should tell you all you need to know, America, about the shame of gun violence in our country and why we are so hampered in dealing with it.

Gun violence death is preventable. It is an extraordinary scourge here in America. Yet, we are blocked by Republican majority leadership who won't even give us a room to be heard.

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