WASHINGTON – Congressman Byron Donalds (R-FL) joined the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform for a full committee markup hearing entitled "Full Committee Business Meeting."

During the hearing, Rep. Summer Lee (D-PA) disparaged President Trump's America First Agenda, arguing that Republican policies "are hell-bent on beating Americans down, not lifting them up."

Congressman Donalds took exception to the Congresswoman's remarks, subsequently asked to be recognized, and defended President Trump's America First Agenda before the assembled members of the committee.

Watch the full exchange here.

Read transcript of the Congressman's full remarks below:

"Thank you, Mr. Chairman. A couple things, um, my colleague went through a lot of items, so I'm gonna try to address them. Let's start with housing, if you’re gonna really talk about housing, one of the big things we have to fix in our country is accessibility to building materials. The reason why accessibility to building materials in the United States continues to rise is because of the overregulation in this town by this Congress over decades in Washington D.C. So if you want to address housing, and the affordability of housing, and the attainability of housing, maybe Republicans and Democrats, we can work together on something like NEPA reform and other regulatory reforms to make it easier to get the materials to build housing in the first place. I wonder if my Democratic colleagues would like to go along with reforming a regulatory process in this town, which increases the financial burden on companies that have to procure the material to even build the housing to deliver it to people. Education, I already know where they stand on this one. Republicans, we have long since stood for school choice here in the District of Columbia and all across the United States. If you examine academic attainment in areas that do not have school choice, versus those that do like my home state of Florida, it is clear that kids, even at the bottom, are learning at faster rates than they are in other jurisdictions where they don’t allow school choice. D.C. has been a tug and play with school choice. Democrats want to get rid of it. Republicans come back into power, we actually want to provide it. Go talk to the moms in D.C. They want to have a say on where their child goes to school. They want to have an opportunity for their child to succeed. Let’s talk about another issue, adding to the costs, because if you want to talk about homelessness it's housing, and it’s also costs. Energy, my Democratic colleagues, all they want to do is have more regulation in the energy space. They want to have us buy solar panels and windmills from China, as opposed to drilling for oil in the United States, building nuclear power plants in the United States - which is cheaper and readily available energy for everyone. You want to lower the costs of what it takes for somebody to live in an apartment in D.C. or anywhere else in the country? How about working with us to lower the per kilowatt hour because everybody’s got to deal with that - rich, middle income, poor. Let’s talk about public services, this is a good one. I like talking about this one, let’s talk about this one. Republicans, we have long since believed that people who are really destitute they should be able to get the help that they need, but what we will not support are bloated programs where we know there is waste, fraud and abuse. And when we go to our Democratic colleagues and we say: hey, let’s just make sure that the people who qualify are the people that qualify, they say no. They would rather just have more money go out the door knowing that it is going to people who are not qualified for the programs. That doesn’t make any sense, it just doesn’t. I heard the talk from my colleague, but again it was all talk. What was her solutions? Universal healthcare? That’s not a solution, universal healthcare has failed in every country that it is tried. People want to say oh but what about Canada? Canada, yes, they have a universal system. You know what they also have? They have a private system layered on top for people who are rich and in some of their people come to the United States to get the procedures they can’t get in Canada. That’s not a solution. You see, folks, let's talk about government spending. This is a good one. There is a false notion in politics and in this town, that if you just spend more money, everything’s gonna be okay. The truth is, you can’t spend more money. When we go as a government to the treasury markets because we have to borrow the money that doesn’t come in taxes. We borrow that money, and when you go borrow that money, what you actually do is decrease the purchasing power of every other dollar in circulation. So the very people that you try to lecture us about saying you want to help, you're hurting. Because when you devalue the purchasing power of every American dollar, the rich guy's gonna be alright. It's the poor who suffer when you devalue our currency because you continue to spend too much and borrow too much. So there are solutions, I say let's work on 'em. But the left wing solutions that have been brought to this town, year over year over year. Oh yeah, they sound good, they sound great in TV ads, but they do not work. I yield."

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