US SENATOR MIKE ROUNDS
WEEKLY ROUND[S] UP:
December 9-20, 2024
Welcome back to another edition of the Weekly Round[s] Up after a busy couple of weeks in Washington. As I’m sure you’ve seen, we spent most of this past week discussing government funding. Last Friday evening, the Senate and House voted to pass a continuing resolution to avert a government shutdown. This bill was far from perfect, but it delivered several key wins for America: keeping government open (meaning our troops and other essential personnel get paid through the holiday season), delivering relief for our farmers and bringing disaster relief to communities devastated by hurricanes this fall.
While the government spending discussions stole the show, this past week we also sent the Fiscal Year 2025 (FY25) National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) to the President’s desk to be signed into law. This bill contains several provisions to support our national security, which you can read more about below. In between all of our important votes this past week, I took time to meet with South Dakota groups, as well as several of President-elect Trump’s nominees. I also received my committee assignments for next Congress, which you can read about below. It’s been a busy month out here in DC and it’s about to get a whole lot busier as we prepare to hit the ground running in January. With a Republican trifecta in the Senate, House and Presidency, we’re ready to get America back on track. Here’s my Weekly Round[s] Up:
South Dakotans I met with: Jim Dover, CEO of Avera and his son Patrick; members of the Great Plains Tribal Chairmen’s Association, including Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate (SWO) Chairman J. Garret Renville, Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Chairwoman Janet Alkire, Crow Creek Sioux Tribe Chairman Peter Lengkeek and Oglala Sioux Tribe President Frank Star Comes Out; members of the South Dakota Science and Technology Authority; and Nikki Gronli, State Director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s South Dakota Rural Development team.
Met with South Dakotans from: Dell Rapids, Ft. Thompson, Pine Ridge, Rapid City, Sioux Falls and Sisseton.
Cabinet nominee meetings: I met with Tulsi Gabbard, President-elect Trump’s nominee for Director of National Intelligence (DNI). We had an excellent first meeting. As a member of the Select Committee on Intelligence, the committee her nomination will go through before heading to the full Senate, I am looking forward to working with her as she continues to move through the confirmation process.
I also met with John Ratcliffe, nominee for Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). John formerly served as DNI under President-elect Trump which has prepared him well for this role. His nomination will also pass through the Intelligence committee. I’m happy to work with him through the nomination process.
I met with Scott Turner, nominee to lead the Department of Housing and Urban Development. His nomination will go through the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs. I look forward to working with him to reduce the regulatory burden for individuals trying to achieve the American dream of homeownership.
Kash Patel, nominee to lead the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was also in my office for a meeting this week. We had a very good conversation about his vision for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I believe Mr. Patel will restore the confidence of the rank-and-file team members within the FBI who work day-to-day to solve crimes in this country. I am confident in President-elect Trump’s choice of Mr. Patel to help the FBI move forward in keeping Americans safe.
I also met with Russell Vought, nominee to lead the Office of Management and Budget, and Paul Atkins, nominee to chair the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Other meetings: Michael Tackett, a journalist who covers national politics; Senator-elect Lisa Blunt Rochester from Delaware; Bruce Byrd, Executive Vice President and General Counsel at Palo Alto Networks; Harold Hamm, Executive Chairman of Continental Resources; Tim Teter, General Counsel at Nvidia; Roselyn Tso, Director of the Indian Health Service; Lt. Gen. Burt Field, CEO of the Air and Space Forces Association; a group of veterans and active duty military who were on Capitol Hill to talk about the issues they’re facing; General B. Chance Saltzman, Chief of Space Operations within the U.S. Space Force; and Anne Neuberger, Deputy National Security Advisor for Cyber and Emerging Technology. I was also a keynote speaker at the Wharton Future of Finance Forum.
I hosted Senate Bible Study in my office for the past two weeks. Our verses of the week were Philippians 2:16 and Luke 2:10-11. I also attended Senate Prayer Breakfast both weeks.
National Defense Authorization Act: This past week, the Senate and House passed the final version of the FY25 NDAA and sent it to President Biden’s desk. This piece of legislation, which I helped craft as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, contains several wins for our national defense. These provisions are designed to support our men and women in uniform by doing everything we can to make certain they never enter a fair fight and always have the upper hand over our adversaries.
The list of these provisions is long, so I won’t put them all here, but two of our major wins for South Dakota are $282 million authorized for construction projects at Ellsworth Air Force Base and $2.6 billion authorized for procurement of B-21s. You can read more about the bill and view a full list of my provisions here.
Continuing Resolution: As I mentioned, the Senate passed a Continuing Resolution late on Friday night to avert a government shutdown. The final bill set the next funding deadline at March 14, 2025 and included disaster relief funding, particularly for states affected by the devastating hurricanes this fall, and relief for farmers. Our budget and appropriations process in Congress has been dysfunctional for far too long. It’s my hope that come next year, we can return to doing appropriations the way we should: working through the committee process and bringing these bills to the floor before the end of the fiscal year, instead of continually kicking the can down the road with a series of CRs and shutdown threats.
Committee assignments: Speaking of appropriations, last week we received our committee assignments for the new Congress beginning in January. I will remain on the Armed Services, Banking, Intelligence and Indian Affairs Committees. I’ve also added one new committee: the Senate Committee on Appropriations. It’s been almost 30 years since Congress passed all of its required appropriations measures on time. I look forward to working with my colleagues on Appropriations to promote returning to regular order for our budgeting process and return to commonsense fiscal conservatism under a Republican trifecta in the 119th Congress. With this new assignment, I will no longer be serving on the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee, but I will continue to work on Veterans issues. You can read more about my committee assignments here.
Votes taken: 23 – we once again had several controversial Biden administration nominees. These nominees were for judge positions in Georgia, Pennsylvania and California, as well as positions on the National Labor Relations Board and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
We also voted on the CR and NDAA, which I’ve mentioned above. In addition, we voted on the Social Security Fairness Act. I voted no along with 22 of my colleagues. This bill costs $196 billion and impacts only 4% of Social Security beneficiaries. It directly increases our mandatory spending and accelerates Social Security’s looming shortfall by about six months. We must act to make Social Security solvent long term without harming the current beneficiaries.
Hearings: I attended five hearings over the past couple of weeks. Four of them were closed hearings with the Select Committee on Intelligence. The other was a Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee hearing where we heard from Rohit Chopra, Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. You can watch a clip of my questioning here.
Classified briefings: I attended three briefings, two of which were classified: one classified briefing on Anomalous Health Incidents and one classified briefing on the Next-Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) program. A third briefing on Dataminr was a briefing only – not classified.
My staff in South Dakota visited: Aberdeen, Custer, Deadwood, Dupree, Hot Springs, Huron, McIntosh, Philip, Pierre, Timber Lake, Wall and Watertown.
Steps taken this past week: Week 1: 47,799 steps or 23.92 miles, Week 2: 49,041 steps or 24.37 miles
Video of the week: I joined NewsCenter1 after the NDAA passed to discuss the bill: