Waters’ Opening Statement at Markup of Legislation to Hold Regulators Accountable and Support American Workers and Small Businesses

As Prepared for Delivery

Good afternoon. At today’s markup we will consider four bills, as well as approving subcommittee assignments for Republican members. At the beginning of this Congress, I made clear that I would be looking for opportunities to work across the aisle on commonsense legislation. I am pleased to say that each of the measures we will consider today have bipartisan support.

We will consider H.R. 4634, the Terrorism Risk Insurance Program Reauthorization Act of 2019. This bipartisan bill provides a simple long-term reauthorization of the Terrorism Risk Insurance Program. Without a reauthorization, the program would expire at the end of 2020, but we could experience the harmful effects of a failure to reauthorize as soon as January of 2020. I am very pleased that I have reached a bipartisan compromise with Ranking Member McHenry on this issue for a seven-year reauthorization of this very important program. I hope all Members of the Committee will support this approach.

We will also consider H.R. 4863, the United States Export Finance Agency Act, my bill to reauthorize the Export-Import Bank for ten years, which also increases the agency’s lending authority from $135 billion to $175 billion over a seven-year period, and makes a series of key reforms to improve the agency. I worked long and hard to reach a compromise with Ranking Member McHenry on this issue, and I can tell you that we entered our negotiations earlier this year with trust and in good faith. But ultimately there were certain provisions that the Ranking Member felt strongly about that undermined the goal of reaching a broad bipartisan consensus in the Committee. I am hopeful that the bill we’re considering today will have broad bipartisan support.

We will also consider H.R. 4841, the “Prudential Regulator Oversight Act,” a bipartisan bill introduced by Representative Phillips which requires the federal prudential banking regulators to provide annual testimony to the Committee, along with semiannual reports on their supervisory and regulatory activities.

In addition, when reasonable legislative proposals originate from the other side of the aisle, we will try to consider them in Committee. Today we have a good example. We will consider H.R. 4458, the Cybersecurity and Financial System Resilience Act, a bill introduced by Ranking Member McHenry that would help strengthen cybersecurity at the prudential banking regulators as well as the financial institutions they supervise. The amendment in the nature of a substitute for this bill includes improvements that I recommended, and I believe with those changes this is a stronger bill that all Members of the Committee can support.

I am very pleased that these four bipartisan bills will receive consideration by the Committee today, and look forward to advancing the measures with broad support.

I want to thank the Members for their outstanding work on the bills before the Committee today.

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