Hoyer Remarks at Press Conference on the Introduction of the COST of Relocations Act
WASHINGTON, DC – Today, Congressman Steny H. Hoyer (MD-05) delivered remarks at a press conference hosted by Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) and Congressman Suhas Subramanyam (VA-10) to announce the introduction of the Congressional Oversight to Secure Transparency (COST) of Relocations Act. Below is a full transcript of his remarks:
Click here for a full video of his remarks.
"I’m here with my colleagues, and I want to say to you [that] Congress after Congress, after administration, after administration have decided the way you can make government more efficient is to make sure that there is a center core of administration of our government services. And by the way, large businesses have decided the same thing for efficiency’s sake. Now, of course, they want to disperse government all around the country. They should know [that] government is dispersed all over the country, but what do they want to do with dispersed offices, like Social Security offices, which serve people in their communities? They want to shut them down. They want to eliminate them. So, they are at cross purposes with themselves.
“Like much of the Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and DOGE – which is a fancy name – have done these past few months have pledged – to move a hundred thousand people out of Washington, federal workers out of the Capital Region – [this] is not about efficiency. My colleague – my two colleagues – have mentioned Mick Mulvaney, a former Member of the U.S. House of Representatives and OMB Director, who said it clearly: ‘It was one of the best ways to reduce numbers’. Not disperse them so that they can serve the American people, just get rid of them. Rather, it's part of a plan that Trump's OMB Director Russell Vought described just over a year ago. Now he's been quoted by Senator Van Hollen but let me give you the full quote that he said in a private meeting – in a non-transparent meeting. He said, ‘We want the bureaucrats,’ used as an epithet, not a descriptor, ‘to be traumatically affected.’ Senator Van Hollen made that part of the quote, but here’s what he went on to say in that private meeting: ‘When they wake up in the morning. We want them not to want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as villains.’ That, ladies and gentlemen, is the secret but so apparent objective of their acts. Vought went on to say, ‘We want their funding to be shut down. We want to put them,’ as Suhas said, ‘in trauma.’ Well, they're accomplishing that objective. And so, in the pursuit of efficiency, what they've done is [now] every federal employee is now so worried about their own job, they're not looking at the job we want them to do. And we are getting thousands of calls from people who they have successfully traumatized. They want to force federal workers to uproot their lives, to take their children out of school to sell their homes, to break their leases, all with little or no advanced notice.
“The administration wants to isolate workers and agencies to make it harder for them to coordinate and fulfill their mission under law. Doing so makes our government less, not more, efficient. This administration claims these locations will cut down on costs. This legislation will require them to prove that when they're traumatizing and making people move. Now the reality is they won’t move. The reality is we will lose hundreds of years of experience, hundreds of years of people who have dedicated their lives to serving the American people. This bill requires them to do so. And this requires them to do the math to show us that that's what in fact they're doing. Everyone standing here, every one of my colleagues wants to get rid of fraud, waste, and abuse. Is that a worthy objective? Absolutely. But that rhetoric is a cover for an agenda that is perverse and contrary to the interests of the United States of America. If our colleagues across the aisle genuinely share that objective, they'll support this bill. And I thank my colleagues for introducing [and] fighting for it, and I invite every Republican to join us in this effort for cost effectiveness in the federal government.”