Today, Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-CA), the top Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, took to the House floor to oppose H.R. 9456, the “Protecting American Agriculture from Foreign Adversaries Act of 2024,” which is a bill that makes harmful and substantive changes to existing law in a way that will increase risks to our national security and concerns about racial profiling. Specifically, this bill would significantly expand the kind of transactions that the Secretary of Agriculture is required to report to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., overloading the Committee with frivolous transactions, most of which will have nothing to do with national security.

Before I begin, I’d like to take a moment to acknowledge the 23rd anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attacks. Today will serve as a reminder that we should work hard to guard against terrorism, and always stand against hate.

Moving to the debate on H.R. 9456, I would like to start by noting that Democrats, especially those serving on the Financial Services Committee, have a strong record of working with Republicans to counter threats from the People’s Republic of China. In fact, just yesterday, the House passed two bills from our Committee.

Unfortunately, H.R. 9456 is not an example of that kind of bipartisanship. In fact, this bill undermines a bipartisan law that we passed just six months ago.

Yes, it was six months ago that the House and Senate worked across the aisle and with the Biden-Harris Administration to pass legislation that would protect our national security from adversarial countries like China acquiring critical agricultural land in the U.S. To help review foreign investments involving U.S. agriculture, this bipartisan law added the Secretary of the Department of Agriculture to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS, which is the interagency committee that determines whether a foreign investment in a U.S. company or asset could pose a threat to our national security. That law further codified reporting and coordination between the Secretary of Agriculture and CFIUS. I mention this law, Mr. Speaker, because I think my Republican colleagues have forgotten what we did only six months ago, and in their rush to pull together bills for their so-called “China Week,” they appear to have brought up a poorly drafted copy of legislation we already passed.

However, in the frenzy to bring this bill to the floor, H.R. 9456 doesn’t duplicate the law; rather, it results in the Secretary of Agriculture having to report countless transactions to the Committee that have nothing to do with our national security.

Currently, the law provides to the Secretary of Agriculture the support of the U.S. Intelligence Community to identify those transactions that may pose a threat to our national security. Inexplicably, H.R. 9456 removes that Intelligence Community assistance, leaving the Secretary to guess which transactions might pose a threat to our national security.

Further, unlike the law that was passed just six months ago, the bill broadens the scope from “foreign governments and entities of concern” to now include “foreign persons,” which means all individuals and entities of China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea. This means anyone with citizenship of those countries, including refugees or people who are here in the U.S. with green cards or other visas. The bill’s broad-brush approach of targeting individuals from China, North Korea, Russia, and Iran amounts to racial profiling. This bill’s focus is similar to the restrictive, xenophobic real-estate laws passed in a number of states, like Florida, where citizens of the same countries are banned from buying property and which has resulted in numerous instances of discrimination.

It is for this reason that this bill is opposed by the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, the National Iranian American Council, Stop AAPI Hate, Asian Americans Advancing Justice, the National Council of Asian Pacific Americans, the Asian American Scholar Forum, and the American Civil Liberties Union.

The Biden-Harris Administration has also put out a statement of administration policy, opposing the, saying that it is “inconsistent with CFIUS process and would not be implementable as drafted.”

Mr. Speaker, these deficiencies, taken together, will divert precious resources from CFIUS’ targeted national security reviews. This is a bad bill that harms the bipartisan work we already passed this year and would sow divisions among neighbors across America. For these reasons, I will vote no, and I reserve the balance of my time.

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