View Kennedy’s floor speech here.

WASHINGTON – Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) condemned the Biden administration and the Department of Energy for their proposed rule on dishwashers today in a speech on the Senate floor. The new regulation could make dishwashers more expensive and less effective—all to the benefit of the Chinese manufacturers that produce the majority of all new dishwashers. 

“I want clean air. I want bright water. We all do. But this new proposed rule by the Department of Energy is not going to help anything or anybody. It's only going to make the American people have to spend more money on less efficient machines. The costs dramatically outweigh the benefit,” Kennedy said.

“In the past few months, the Biden administration has proposed new regulations for electric motors, for beverage vending machines, for microwaves, for ovens, for refrigerators, for furnaces, for air conditioners, for lightbulbs,” he later added. “In fact, the Biden administration added more than 110 regulations since being in office on appliances and equipment during past two years. For most of these policies, if you weigh the costs and the benefits, it makes no sense. Not in terms of CO2 emissions. Not in terms of energy savings. Not in terms of water savings. And certainly not in terms of the pocketbook of the American people.”

“President Biden and his administration are saddling Americans with harmful, maybe even hateful, regulations because they care more about what the activists say on TikTok than they do about the quiet suffering of everyday families in America and all over this country,” Kennedy concluded.

“They have a blind spot for the lives and concerns of ordinary Americans. And it's why this administration is more worried about dishwashers and gas stoves than the fact that the average Louisiana family is paying $740 more a month—not a year—because of inflation,” he said.

View Kennedy’s full speech here. ­

WASHINGTON – Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) today introduced a Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolution of disapproval to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s (CFPB) rule to implement Dodd Frank Section 1071, which amends the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA).

Rep. Roger Williams (R-Texas) has introduced the resolution in the House of Representatives.

“By collecting and publishing personal demographic and other information, the CFPB is putting small business owners at risk of having their private financial affairs exposed to a watching world. Reporting these personal details is an invasion of privacy and a waste of resources aimed at furthering the woke agenda. The practical impact of this rule could hamstring lending to Main Street,” Kennedy said.

“The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s (CFPB) new rule is a continued attack on Main Street America. Each day, small businesses struggle with rising costs, increasing interest rates, and ongoing labor shortages, and this new rule only builds on those issues. We cannot allow the CFPB to continue to add burdensome requirements without any consideration of their impact on small businesses and lenders. I am proud to stand by my commitment to protect Main Street America from costly over-regulation by unelected bureaucrats,” said Williams.

Kennedy’s CRA would ensure that the CFPB’s final rule on Dodd-Frank Section 1071 does not go into effect. 

Background: 

On March 30, the CFPB promulgated the final rule implementing Section 1071 of the Dodd-Frank Act, which amends the ECOA. The rule was published in the Federal Register on May 31, 2023.

Section 1071 requires covered financial institutions to collect and report certain personal information on small business loan applicants and report that to the CFPB. The CFPB may then make certain parts of that information public, including data that could publicly identify the small business credit applicant.

In order to comply with the Biden CFPB rule, financial institutions would have to collect information about applicants, including the applicant’s census tract, North American Industry Classification System and years in business, among other information. Further, banks are required to report the owner’s race, ethnicity and sex; and whether the business is minority-owned, women-owned or LGBT-owned.

• The rule applies to financial institutions that originated at least 100 small business loans in each of the two preceding calendar years. 
• Based on the number of credit transactions for small businesses, covered financial institutions must comply with the final rule beginning October 1, 2024; April 1, 2025; or January 1, 2026.
• A small business is defined as a company with $5 million or less in revenue from the previous fiscal year.

Among the many concerns about the CFPB’s collecting and storing such personal information is that the agency recently experienced a data breach including the personally identifiable information of 256,000 consumers and failed to properly inform them for two months. 

The implementation of this rule may reduce the availability and accessibility of small business credit by increasing compliance costs of lenders.

Text of the resolution is here.

WASHINGTON – Sens. John Kennedy (R-La.), Mike Braun (R-Ind.) and Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.) introduced a bipartisan bill to fix part of the Medicare billing structure that allows hospital systems to charge high hospital rates for care received at off-campus outpatient facilities.

“Hospitals are gaming the system to charge Louisiana patients and taxpayers more for out-patient, off-site care. That’s wrong, and I’m proud to work with Sens. Braun and Hassan to make it right by correcting Medicare’s billing policy,” said Kennedy.

“Hoosiers know our health care system is broken, and one problem we can fix right now is services at off-campus outpatient facilities being billed to Medicare at higher hospital rates. Fixing this problem will save taxpayers 40 billion over the next decade, and this bill will apply some of those savings to fixing our nursing shortage by creating a new program to pay for training,” Braun said. 

“Granite Staters who have been going to the same doctor for years are experiencing sticker shock when a hospital acquires a doctor’s office or clinic and all of a sudden starts charging extra fees for the same services. Our bipartisan bill takes on the health care industry to eliminate unfair fees, lower costs for patients, and save taxpayer dollars—and then we use those savings to invest in the health care workforce. Lowering health care costs for Americans is a bipartisan priority, and I urge my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to support this commonsense bill,” said Hassan.

Due to Medicare’s billing structure, even if care is received at an off-campus outpatient facility, patients can receive bills that treat the care as if it was provided at a main hospital campus. This means the providers are charging patients and Medicare higher “hospital” rates when patients aren’t receiving in-patient care. 

The consequences of this artificial price hiking are expanding as hospitals acquire more and more small physician-owned practices and off-campus facilities. In 2020, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that, over the next decade, taxpayers will pay close to $40 billion in excess Medicare costs due to exorbitant facility fee payments.

 A provision in the 2015 Bipartisan Budget Act makes these price inflations possible because that law established “site-neutral” payments under Medicare for services received at off-campus outpatient departments, but it exempted most hospitals.

The SITE Act would end the 2015 Bipartisan Budget Act’s site-neutral exceptions. It would also prevent off-campus emergency departments from charging higher rates than on-campus emergency departments when standalone emergency facilities are located in close proximity to a hospital campus. 

The bill would require health systems to establish and bill using a unique National Provider Identifier number for every off-campus outpatient department. It would direct the Department of Health and Human Services to treat outpatient departments as subparts of the parent organization and to issue these subparts unique provider identifiers. The SITE Act would also remove liability for services rendered for payers who are not billed in accordance with this section’s requirements.

The bill would use a portion of the overall savings from this fix to help fill the nursing shortage by creating a graduate nursing education program that would provide payments for training costs. 

Text of the SITE Act is available here.

WASHINGTON – Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) today introduced the Tracking Bad Actors Act to create a public database of people who have committed financial crimes or have civil liability for financial misdeeds. Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) is an original cosponsor of the bill. 

“Financial fraudsters prey on everyday investors like vultures, and Americans deserve to know who has a track record of breaking securities laws. The Tracking Bad Actors Act would help expose these offenders to protect American families and workers from financial fraud,” said Kennedy. 

“People in Wyoming deserve to know if their financial manager or accountant has broken the law. The Tracking Bad Actors Act  will give consumers much needed transparency into the financial sector. I’m proud to partner with Senator John Kennedy on this commonsense legislation to protect Wyoming investors from those with bad intentions,” said Lummis. 

The Tracking Bad Actors Act would require the federal government to create a public database of bad actors convicted or held criminally or civilly liable for securities violations. This database would allow investors and brokerage firms to guard against people known to have engaged in fraud. 

This information would be made available to the public, free of charge. To the extent practical, the bill would require the database to contain all enforcement actions agencies have taken. 

The database would be operational within three years of the bill’s becoming law. 

Text of the Tracking Bad Actors Act is available here.