Rep. John Dingell (D., Mich.), the former longtime chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee, explained his committee’s jurisdiction by pointing to a map of the earth: “If it moves, its energy, and if it doesn’t, its commerce,” he said.
Congressman Brett Guthrie (R., Ky.), who is running to chair the Energy and Commerce Committee, has a similarly broad vision for the committee, which has recently acted on wide-ranging legislative topics such as the divestment from Chinese Communist Party-owned TikTok and divisive child data privacy bills. “What happens in the House of Representatives affects people in their houses,” the Kentuckian told the Washington Reporter in an extensive interview.
Several of his priorities build off of his work from this Congress, like advancing permitting reform, and becoming energy independent, which he says affects Americans across the nation: “whether it goes across the country on a truck or arrives the last mile on a truck, every product someone buys makes it somewhere on diesel fuel, and that just continues to add to the expense,” he said.
The Biden-Harris administration policies of “restrict[ing] supply, whether it’s the LNG export ban, fracking, not permitting” are passing costs onto consumers. While Vice President Kamala Harris is trying to make price gouging a focus of her campaign, Guthrie said that the real problem is that her administration is “spending too much money, and they’re making energy prices so high. If she just deals with that, I think inflation will take care of itself.”
Guthrie is in a pole position to take over the committee since Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R., Wash.) is retiring; Guthrie has transferred more money to the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) than any other lawmaker, which may aid his bid to replace her.
“There’s a big difference between chairing a committee and being ranking member,” he said. “I’ve sat in the majority and I’ve sat in the minority, and it’s frustrating..they set the agenda. And so my dear friend, Leader Mitch McConnell, always says he’s been the offensive coordinator and the defensive coordinator, and it’s a lot more fun being the offensive coordinator.”
If Guthrie’s efforts to elect Republicans, which said he’d “put money on,” prove successful, he’ll “get to call the plays” if he becomes chair — and he’ll rely in part on his time in the military and in working in his family’s business when it comes to parceling out roles.
“I’m used to leading small teams, leading people,” he added. “And being in business is helpful. When we talk about things, particularly on Energy and Commerce, like our supply chains, I have that experience. My family had an automotive supply business.”
One of Guthrie’s priorities as chair would be delegation. “A lot of members of the committee just have different issues that they focus on…so my focus is, let’s empower people. Rep. Buddy Carter is a good example,” he said. “It’s well-known that he was an independent pharmacist.” Letting Carter guide the committee on “streamlin[ing] the bureaucracy to make it fair to the people selling the pharmaceuticals” is a no-brainer to Guthrie, who wants to “empower members like that who have specific niches and specific interests, to let them lead on the committee, and then get everybody together to support them to get it done.”
Guthrie has been running hard at the committee chairmanship for several months now, but his committee’s work is far from done this Congress — and he predicted that the lame-duck could still see major action on several high-profile pieces of legislation, including the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) and Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA).
“Hopefully, by the end of this session in the lame duck particularly, we’ll have KOSA and COPPA done,” he said. “I think there’s a pathway to make that happen, and I think leadership and the chair, hopefully, can work together to come up with something to resolve their differences and make that happen.”
Should Guthrie become chair of Energy and Commerce, he said that he already has at least one high-profile hearing in mind. “I would love to have [Anthony Fauci] testify,” he said.
Below is a transcript of our interview with Rep. Brett Guthrie, lightly edited for clarity.
Washington Reporter:
Let’s start off with your career before politics. You had a great career in business, and you decided to make this shift. Why did you do that? And how has that informed your work, especially on the Energy and Commerce Committee?
Rep. Brett Guthrie:
It goes back to when I was in high school when I got caught up in Ronald Reagan’s Morning in America. I always knew we had the greatest country in the world. But how can I contribute to it? At the time, the Russians were the Soviets, and it was a tough time in America. I thought I was gonna do a career in the military. So I went to West Point, kind of on Reagan’s call, served in the military, until the Berlin Wall came down, and then it looked like the army was going to be boring for the next 20 years, which ended up being anything but the case. But in the 1990s, you would have thought. At that time, my dad had started a business, so I decided to get out of the army and join the business. But I always thought maybe there’s a chance I could serve somehow, and I wasn’t native of Bowling Green, so I just thought getting elected in politics was not really an option. But it turned out that was not the case. So even though I was in business, I always wanted to serve in some capacity. So I ran for the state Senate. Then had the opportunity to come here. It’s interesting, you have people that go from staffing on Capitol Hill to running for office, and everybody just brings something different from their background. So you have people from business, you have people from government, you have people that did other things. In addition to my business background, I bring the military side. I’m used to leading small teams, leading people. And then the second thing, being in business is helpful. When we talk about things, particularly on Energy and Commerce, like our supply chains, I have that experience. My family had an automotive supply business. So I understand supply chains. I understand global supply chains. I understand that when you talk about making 15 million cars in America, how important that is to our economy. I’m used to standing and watching a part get made and know that we made this. We make one bracket for a steering power pump on the 44 and we make one every minute. And every time the one would go down the aisle, I would look at it and go, ‘that little bracket, for that one bracket, there’s four tires, windshield, side panels.’ And so how big our economy is, and how much the automotive business matters, is personal to me. And so when it comes to Energy and Commerce, the commerce side, particularly the energy side, is based on, how do we have a low regulatory environment so our businesses can succeed? So I bring that to the table.
Washington Reporter:
What are your goals as chairman? What is your bumper sticker pitch you’re giving people?
Rep. Brett Guthrie:
I lead teams. I can be a team leader. I believe we have an extremely talented committee, and one of the things Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers has done as chair, is to continue to get our committee members to be leaders.
Washington Reporter:
E&C has had a lot of action this Congress. What do you see as your top priorities that you want to bring to the table moving forward?
Rep. Brett Guthrie:
There’s a couple of areas that are most important: dealing with our economy and budget deficit and the interest. So the number one issue of doing that is obviously becoming energy independent. I think that’s important for international affairs, inflation, everything, whether it goes across the country on a truck or arrives the last mile on a truck, every product someone buys makes it somewhere on diesel fuel, and that just continues to add to the expense. And so that’s embedded in inflation, that’s part of the cost. And President Trump has said that one of his biggest focuses on getting a handle on the budget deficit is producing more revenue through becoming energy independent again. Energy independence number one, permitting, making sure that we have the generation capability with with our generating electricity. I know we’re going to talk about AI in data centers, just the demand for electricity is increasing. Demand for energy is increasing. And the current Biden policies restrict supply, whether it’s the LNG export ban, fracking, not permitting. Take the power plan. This takes existing power offline, and it is going to restrict supply at the same time you have demand. You don’t have to go to University of Chicago to understand that if you restrict supply while you’re increasing demand, it is going to have pressure on prices so inflation is going to continue to rise. Vice President Harris is using these price gouging comments, but the problem is, they’re spending too much money, and they’re making energy prices so high. If she just deals with that, I think inflation will take care of itself.
Washington Reporter:
Or Yale for that matter, as you did.
Rep. Brett Guthrie:
But the University of Chicago is more pro-free enterprise than Yale is.
Washington Reporter:
We’ve seen the Energy and Commerce Committee butt heads sometimes with the House GOP leadership on privacy related bills this Congress. Do you think that these bills that have divided Republicans like KOSA, COPPA, and APRA have legs moving forward?
Rep. Brett Guthrie:
I do think they have legs moving forward. Hopefully, by the end of this session in the lame duck particularly, we’ll have KOSA and COPPA done. I think there’s a pathway to make that happen, and I think leadership and the chair, hopefully, can work together to come up with something to resolve their differences and make that happen. It’s a Senate bill over here, so it’s up to us to come up with a bill that we can all support, pass them, hopefully the Senate can accept and go to the president to be signed. I know the chairwoman is extremely passionate about this bill and these bills, and we want to get them done. I think there’s a path forward on those bills.
Washington Reporter:
You have given more than any other Republican to the NRCC this cycle. Talk about why that’s important to you, and how do you think you see this election shaping out in the final weeks?
Rep. Brett Guthrie:
There’s a big difference between chairing a committee and being ranking member; I’ve sat in the majority and I’ve sat in the minority, and it’s frustrating. The way the House works is it’s majority rule, and even if it’s a one or two vote difference on a committee, you can’t stop anything. They set the agenda. And so my dear friend, Leader Mitch McConnell, always says he’s been the offensive coordinator and the defensive coordinator, and it’s a lot more fun being the offensive coordinator. You get to call the plays and there’s no joy in saying that we did everything we could and we’re in the minority. We want to do everything we can and be in the majority. And so that’s my task, is to make us have the majority first and then campaign to be the chairman of the committee. And how I see it breaking out? We have some really promising spots. We’ve got some really good opportunities to pick up seats in North Carolina, just due to redistricting; our incumbents are raising money. We’re helping them as well, and we have some incumbents in some extremely competitive races, but I feel good. They’re good, strong, solid incumbents, and I think they’ll do a good job. And then there’s pick up opportunities scattered throughout the country, particularly the Great Lakes in the Midwest. And I think we have an opportunity to grow our majority. I don’t think it’s going to be a big sweeping win, I think most people say it’s not going to be one of those wave elections when you pick up dozens of seats, but I think we can hopefully grow our majority; maintain our majority first and then grow it as big as we can get to make it happen. And I don’t have a prognostication for how big it will be, but I think if I was betting, I put money on us to maintain the majority.
Washington Reporter:
And are you hitting the trail in October?
Rep. Brett Guthrie:
Yes. I know I’m going to Kansas, California, Oregon, Washington, and will also be working with our incumbents in New York. So I’m going to go from the Atlantic to the Pacific, at least once, if not twice. And it’s because, in my area in Kentucky, we’ve worked hard and made my district fairly Republican. I don’t take anything for granted, but I think almost all of my counties are a majority Republican, which wasn’t the case a decade ago. As a matter of fact, it was far from it a decade ago. And while I take nothing for granted, it does free me, and I think the people in my district want me to be out trying to win the majority.
Washington Reporter:
Let’s look at some policies on E&C. You’ve done a lot of stuff on permitting reform. We’ve published op-eds from you on permitting reform. What do you see moving forward as areas that still need further work there?
Rep. Brett Guthrie:
Well, we absolutely have to have permitting reform, and for permanent reform, we have to have transmission, but it also needs to be pipelines. You can’t even if Vice President Harris claims she’s not for banning fracking in all cases, I think that’s how she she qualifies it, or something like that, you have to be able to move it. And what we’ve seen is that people tie up pipelines because they realize that if they can’t ban fracking, they can use the process to prevent pipelines from ever being created or put into place. You’re not gonna drill for oil and gas if you can’t move it. And so that’s become a big fight. I think another one is, I’ve talked to people in the Permian Basin, which has private land, but there are public lands in the west, but it’s extremely difficult to get drilling permits. It’s not just transmission, which I think some of the Senate, the Barrasso-Manchin effort, for example, is focused on transmission of electricity. It also needs to be pipelines, but it also needs to make sure we have reform in drilling, the ability to drill oil and gas, and also in building new energy infrastructure. Nobody can hardly ever get permitted a new energy source, generation of energy. And you can have all the transmission lines that you want, but if you don’t generate the energy, there’s nothing to transmit. So it’s opposite of what’s going on with fracking, where they’re fighting pipelines, and now when they’re going to do transmission of power sources, but not create new power sources. That doesn’t make sense, it’s nonsensical, and we’re going to go for all of it.
Washington Reporter:
One of the issues you’ve taken leadership on is the flood of illicit nicotine from China. Do you think this is deliberate sabotaging of American industry by China? What do you see as the threat coming from these products?
Rep. Brett Guthrie:
Let’s go back to your bumper sticker question here. One of the things I said in my video when I first ran tied back to my family’s business, and I saw people in authority make decisions that affected people at the table. So what happens in the House of Representatives affects people in their houses, and you see that clearly with the Energy and Commerce by how much we regulate. We make you change your light bulbs, we tell you you can’t use the right dishwasher anymore.
Washington Reporter:
Well, hopefully you’re not doing that.
Rep. Brett Guthrie:
No, no, no. That’s my point: decisions made on Energy and Commerce do affect people, and so we want to be mindful of that. It’s not just really illicit nicotine. It’s also licit. And so the fact that we allow China to do what they’re doing is just another failure in the Biden-Harris administration. What happens with the illicit nicotine is there’s not enforcement by the FDA, so a lot of these stores will have nicotine that’s not approved to be sold, but they’re sold without enforcement. People are just selling it. And then the other thing that’s really important is the FDA is not approving new sources of non-combustible nicotine for harm reduction purposes. So like Zyn, which is is a nicotine delivery system, I guess it’d be similar to Snus, but it’s not tobacco. It’s made in my district. They can’t get certain levels of it approved. The reason it’s made in my district is why I know about it. We need to, one, enforce the law to make sure these illicit nicotine products aren’t on the shelves, which they are. That’s just an enforcement issue that FDA needs to do. Of course, they say they don’t have the manpower, but if they would approve legal or, make legal, and approve people who are trying to do it correctly, then I think that would take pressure off the illicit sources. By not doing what they’re supposed to being doing, the FDA, they’re letting China fill the vacuum.
Washington Reporter:
It’s a long bumper sticker, but, but a good one.
Rep. Brett Guthrie:
My bumper sticker is: what happens in our House matters in your house. So I understand that the decisions we make affect real people.
Washington Reporter:
You were talking about being a team player and we just wrote a story on the CRA you wrote to rein in Biden regulations that seemed to be flying under the radar. You had a bunch of E&C members sign on to that with you. How do you see that as being illustrative of your team player approach?
Rep. Brett Guthrie:
What’s important is that a lot of members of the committee just have different issues that they focus on, it’s what makes it interesting. We have different members who have different interests and different backgrounds. And so my focus is, let’s empower people. Rep. Buddy Carter is a good example. It’s well-known that he was an independent pharmacist. All of the red tape and getting a drug from a manufacturer to the customer, there just seems to be a lot of bureaucracy in between the two, and how do we streamline the bureaucracy to make it fair to the people selling the pharmaceuticals? And so my view of it is, you empower members like that who have specific niches and specific interests, to let them lead on the committee, and then get everybody together to support them to get it done.
Washington Reporter:
And that’s a great tie into health care. There’s a ton that E&C does there. What do you see your priorities being in that space?
Rep. Brett Guthrie:
Well, the cost of health care. The biggest failure of the Affordable Care Act, in all the Affordable Care Act is done, is subsidize rising costs of health care to try to make it affordable for people, but it squeezes out the middle class. You’re talking about colleges a minute ago, I think it’s just like college tuition. The higher it goes, the more we subsidize it, the more we subsidize it, the higher it goes. And hopefully we can pass this session, Chairwoman Rodgers’s bill, Lower Cost, More Transparency Act.
Washington Reporter:
You have a SUPPORT Act also to help Americans with substance abuse problems.
Rep. Brett Guthrie:
I have a SUPPORT act as well. People want to know what the cost of health care is. The question is, once you get the cost of health care handled, how does that react to the marketplace? I would like to think there’d be millions of people calling around trying to find out, but I do think big employer groups who have sophisticated human resource departments are going to realize that they’re probably paying more for health care than they should be paying for health care, and they are going to react to it. I think it’ll bring in the disruptors, people like Mark Cuban, who has been working on this; if there are excess profits in the layers of healthcare, then once that’s exposed, people are gonna figure out how to compete. Mark Cuban right now is wanting to compete with PBMs with the Cost Plus system where they say ‘here’s the cost of the drug, I’ll do an administrative fee, and we won’t have all of these layers of bureaucracy in between me and the customer, and take out cost, take out the inefficiencies.’
Washington Reporter:
Are bills like your SUPPORT Act priorities for you in the next Congress if they don’t get done this year?
Rep. Brett Guthrie:
That’ll be a priority, because that deals with substance abuse disorder, mental health, and I think that’s a priority. And when it comes to the Lower Cost, More Transparency Act, hopefully we will pass it, I expect that we will, but I think that bill is so important that we need to get it done now. Because every time we see a problem in health care with costs, particularly the Democrats, all focus on the Inflation Reduction Act. They say ‘we think this cost too much. We’re just going to say you can’t charge X, Y or Z.’ But price controls lead to shortages and lower quality, as we’ve seen. We see it a lot in that area. And so what I want to do is let’s have the data. Let’s have the information. Let’s see if the marketplace reacts to it. Government puts a lot of money into health care, particularly Medicare, Medicaid, Medicare Part D, and all the others, and the government needs to react to it as well. But I think the market can adjust for it, and people can come in and see if there are excess profits in certain areas of the health care system that are hidden because it’s non-transparent, and that’s going to generate, I think a more efficient solution.
Washington Reporter:
You just mentioned Medicare Part D; these premiums have been skyrocketing since Biden took office. Do you see any path towards lowering them?
Rep. Brett Guthrie:
Remember they were lowering when Trump was in office. The thing is, they mandate benefits. So when you mandate different costs and different benefits, then you increase increase price. But the one thing that they did, remember, they did the Inflation Reduction Act and they took money out of Medicare Part D, to subsidize the Green New Deal, and what I would like to do anytime we pass any kind of bill, is if there is money saved in Medicare, it either goes to deficit reduction or it goes to reinforce Medicare. It doesn’t go to subsidize Green New Deals or other products, and that’s what they did with it. That’s what they do with the money.
Washington Reporter:
Can you talk about the oversight you’ve already done during your time in Congress? Something I think is very interesting is the organ donation reform from last year. But what do you see in the health care oversight more broadly?
Rep. Brett Guthrie:
Topics like that are important to do. What I would like to take the Oversight Subcommittee in the direction of is, now that we have Chevron difference, hopefully, as many bills as we can, we can adjust. The REINS Act, for example, where it says, if a rule issued costs more than $100 million, it’s got to be approved by Congress. So essentially, it says that Congress can issue rules. I think that brings back legislative authority.
Washington Reporter:
It means Congress has to do its job.
Rep. Brett Guthrie:
If you don’t have the 60 votes in the Senate, I want to use oversight to build the congressional intent case in these Chevron deference cases. So a good example would be net neutrality. If we can’t overturn, because we don’t have the votes in the Senate, or the president, the net neutrality rules coming out from the FCC, this becomes highly relevant. You think about what net neutrality is, they want to regulate the internet. Congress said no. So they go back to a law from 1934, and they assume that, since Congress gave the FCC the authority to regulate telephones, and you can do voice over the internet, therefore it’s a telephone system so they can regulate it. And we want to make the case that that’s never what Congress said. Congress says no for a reason. Look at the VALID Act. We’re trying to pass reasonable lab reform, but now the FTC is trying to go forward with lab reform. The FTC said that if Congress doesn’t pass the VALID Act, we should do it, and we just think that’s wrong. Remember, President Barack Obama said, if Congress doesn’t do his job, I have my pen and my phone. And people need to understand when Congress says no or Congress doesn’t take an action, it’s a legislative action. If there’s a if the internet is growing, and Congress chooses not to give specific authority to regulate it, doesn’t mean the FCC, because they want to can do it, can do it. And so I want to use oversight to build the case for congressional intent, to have hearings to build a body of work, so when people go to court, they argue that these agencies are acting outside of their bounds, then they can argue this. We know what congressional intent is, because of the work of the Oversight Committee.
Washington Reporter:
What is your theory of Congress’s role in dealing with the big tech industry in general?
Rep. Brett Guthrie:
Well, we have to make sure that, as the internet has grown and has expanded, we have to look at targeted areas like Section 230 to where the internet is responsible; I want to take drug dealers off the internet. We know that people are using Internet for various reasons, and so I think we have to exempt, like the child trafficking, I think Ann Wagner had a bill a couple years ago to do that. So there are specific areas to hold the big tech companies accountable. We did it with TikTok, but we did that through foreign ownership. And so my view of it ties back to the need for oversight. So when, for instance, you were banned from Twitter if you said that COVID came out of the lab. Well, we now more likely than not know that it did. I asked Dr. Fauci and Dr. Collins about this, and they told me behind closed doors ‘maybe it did come from the lab, well, we can’t rule out that it came from a lab.’ And then Twitter dropped the ban. That happened around April of 2021, and and so when you look at it, what’s frustrating for people on my side is that my natural instinct is to let the market work work itself. But then you see where it’s obvious that where people are getting their information is being skewed by what’s coming out of Washington, and it’s improved with some of the records that Elon Musk got about he bought Twitter, it was working with the administration to prohibit certain speech, and we have to have vigorous oversight.
Washington Reporter:
What lessons did you learn from the way in which the TikTok bills were handled that would inform how you want to run things as chairman?
Rep. Brett Guthrie:
Well, that was a really brilliant way that Cathy McMorris Rodgers did it. At first we started with, we know TikTok is horrible. The best example of that, particularly for kids, is the day we were going to have a committee hearing about this. If the person in my district wanted to go on TikTok, and you know the story. In order to get on TikTok, they had to automatically call my office, so they could get on TikTok. And so we literally, literally had people here listening to school teachers teaching. So kids are in the classroom trying to get on TikTok, they call our office because they have to, and you can hear the teacher in the background teaching while kids are trying to get on TikTok. So the lesson learned was we said, ‘that’s not good. Let’s ban it. And I think most people would agree.’
Washington Reporter:
Did your office get death threats?
Rep. Brett Guthrie:
I’m not sure of any.
Washington Reporter:
Your constituents are more polite.
Rep. Brett Guthrie:
But if you look at where that starts, with us saying ‘let’s ban TikTok, everybody knows it’s bad,’ that we get together. We’re constrained, and obviously so, by the by the Constitution. So what’s in the First Amendment, and what’s not? Some people said that some of these others are as bad as TikTok in terms of content and what it does to children. But we’re saying, ‘but this is a foreign entity doing it,’ and so Cathy spent a lot of time visiting with constitutional scholars. ‘How do we frame this in a way that passes constitutional muster? How do we how do we put this bill forward?’ So there was a lot of legislating to come to it. It was a lot of expertise that came to it. And so finally, we came down essentially to the same rule that a foreign entity can’t buy a newspaper. A foreign entity can’t buy a broadcast television station. China can’t buy WBKO, a Bowling Green news station. And so it was the same thing that a foreign entity can’t control a news organization, essentially, in the United States. And we think that passes constitutional muster. I thought it was a really brilliant job for her to put it together the way that she did it.
Washington Reporter:
Do you think it would have made sense then to just go right to the version that did end up passing broadly instead of trying to initially pass the outright ban?
Rep. Brett Guthrie:
That’s how the process works. You have hearings, you have meetings, and then we pass it, and then all of a sudden you start hearing that this might not hold up in court, because we didn’t want to pass something and say, ‘hey, we did it.’ We wanted to keep the Chinese Communist Party from having access to our kids, like they proved they had on the day that we had the hearing. And so the best way to do that is not to ban TikTok. We didn’t ban TikTok. We banned the Chinese Communist Party from owning TikTok, and it got to the right place where kids can still have TikTok if they want it, and parents have to be mindful of what’s happening there, but what can’t happen as a foreign entity can’t use that to influence.
Washington Reporter:
What do you view as the future of artificial intelligence? There’s obviously a task force in Congress on this, but it’s something that you’re going to be dealing with on E&C.
Rep. Brett Guthrie:
What’s going to come out of the task force is going to be important. I think Rep. Jay Obernotle, who runs it, is maybe the smartest guy here.
Washington Reporter:
Well, present company excluded.
Rep. Brett Guthrie:
I don’t want my 434 other colleagues get mad at me, but Obernolte is certainly one of the smartest guys here. I think what he’s going to bring out is going to be important to where we go next, but we have to be mindful of it. AI is a broad term. AI is massive amounts of data, massive amounts of data sets. So how are massive amounts of data sets are going to be used? Currently, I know there’s some movement on the Democratic side to regulate the use of AI without really clearly defining what that even means. My view of it is, let’s see. Let’s let the task force do its job. Let’s see where this goes. And then if we have to regulate, we have to be smart. We have to use a scalpel and not a mallet to regulate. Because AI, the thing is, you might kill potential that you don’t even know is there. Because even though I said Jay’s smart, even if the smartest people in the room really are the smartest people, they can’t think of everything. And so we don’t need to regulate AI where it can grow and be important, like coming up with ways to treat cancer through massive amounts of data. But the one thing that we’re going to have to do if you want AI to exist is have more energy. It’s massive amounts of data. It requires massive amounts of energy to run these data centers. I was at Microsoft in August, and they said one of their data centers requires more energy than the city of Seattle, and people don’t realize the cost, how much that takes. And I believe that Microsoft just announced they’re looking at buying a power source. And so we have to be mindful of that too. So it kind of gets back to where we started, we have to onshore the businesses. We got data centers that are growing. We got demand for energy growing at the same time that the Biden administration’s shrinking supply and they’re betting on solar and wind, which we know is not baseload power, it’s not consistent, and it’s going to continue to restrict supply despite the growing demand. You don’t have to go to the University of Chicago and be a free marketeer to know what that does to energy prices, which affects food. So if we’re going to get a handle inflation, we have to be able to permit growth. That’s totally our top priority.
Washington Reporter:
Let me jam everything into one final question. How on earth did you get interested in congressional oversight as a concept and learn to be effective in that? You’ve done a lot of oversight on EcoHealth Alliance, for example. What do you want to do to bring Americans’ totally plummeting faith in public health agencies back?
Rep. Brett Guthrie:
With oversight, well, I got interested in it because I was really interested in Medicaid policy, being in state government. Once I got on Energy and Commerce, got a Health Care subcommittee, and as I was looking at our budget, and I know we’ve got to get a handle on the deficit, and you’re looking at it, and you realize innovation is coming and it’s not just going to stop. You have to innovate your way out. Rep. David Schweikert talks about this a lot. With these innovations, we can cure sickle cell now, there’s a potential that diabetes in the next decade is going to have cells that produce insulin. I’ve seen them in Boston. They’re in some people, and they’re working. And so all of this is coming, but it’s expensive. So how do you deal with it? AI is going to be important to make sure the right person gets the right treatment. So you can tailor treatment cheaper if you simulate it on the computer before you do it. All of those things tie in together and are important. So value-based agreements are important to me. How do we have a system to pay, if it’s an upfront cost, like curing sickle cell, and not only does it cure sickle cell, but you have savings over time, and how do you capture those savings over time when you have up front costs? That’s value-based agreements, something Markwayne Mullin and I worked on. So how’d I get myself interested in oversight? It’s been being plugged into public policy, and it kind of gets back to what’s going to affect people’s lives the most, and having people have access to treatments that cure sickle cell, hemophilia, those are blood diseases. But as you see it in cancer, as it’s expanding, how do you have these miracle cures? I saw in Boston that there are cells that are producing insulin that maybe in a decade, will be in people’s bodies, and so that’s what gets me excited. That’s why I want to lead. How do we beat China? China wants to be number one. That’s their goal. China thinks ‘we’re the center of the center of the universe, and everything flows from us.’ On the American side, we believe in economic freedom and opportunity, and we have to stand for that. If we don’t, they will overtake us, and we have to continue to believe in the American people and empower them to come up with the best solutions, which don’t come from Washington. That’s why I think they’ll fail in the end, because everything has to be controlled by the government there, and what we need to do is unleash the potential of our people, and I think that Energy and Commerce is a committee that can help there.
Washington Reporter:
And how are you going to get that public health confidence back?
Rep. Brett Guthrie:
I think the oversight is going to be so helpful. I met with Dr. Mandy Cohen from the CDC, I met with Dr. Monica Bertagnolli, who’s the new NIH director, and I talked to both, and we need to have hearings where they can come before us and discuss these issues, because you’re right, there may be another pandemic. There might be another pandemic, maybe even while I’m serving as chairman, hopefully not in the next six years, but it could, and there’s obviously going to be research we need, and people need confidence that when things are coming from these agencies, that people can believe in them. There’s a group of people who want to say that the reason people don’t believe in these agencies is because of disinformation, but the disinformation was really coming from the ages. When you have Dr. Fauci and Dr. Collins, they say they never said yes, but certainly insinuating, that COVID could never come from the lab, and that it came just purely out of nature, and then we know that not to be true. We have bans on technology, we know that not to be true — and I was vaccinated — but there are concerns about vaccines, they just dismiss people’s concerns about and say, ‘okay, there are some concerns with this, but if you’re high risk, you need to get,’ and the masking policies of kids. All of that is what lowered the ability for people to have trust in these agencies. And so it’s not something which can be built up overnight, but I think that we have open and honest discussions in public, in hearings, so they can explain whatever case or whatever’s coming, so that people can have faith that people like my side or the aisle are trying to get to the bottom of it. So when something comes out of CDC, or something comes out of NIH, people can believe it.
Washington Reporter:
Do you want to have Anthony Fauci back to the Energy and Commerce Committee when you’re there?
Rep. Brett Guthrie:
I would love to have him testify. I was talking about that when I was running for majority and as I’d campaign I said, ‘if we win, I’ll be chair of the health subcommittee and have Dr. Fauci in.’ But then we appointed the select committee on COVID origins so I didn’t have the chance to do that. But I’d love have the opportunity for the committee.
Washington Reporter:
Thank you so much for chatting.
Rep. Brett Guthrie:
This was great.