Rosa DeLauro is the Congresswoman from Connecticut’s Third Congressional District, which stretches from the Long Island Sound and New Haven, to the Naugatuck Valley and Waterbury. Rosa serves as the Chair of the House Appropriations Committee and sits on the Democratic Steering and Policy Committee, and she is the Chair of the Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Appropriations Subcommittee, where she oversees our nation’s investments in education, health, and employment.
At the core of Rosa’s work is her fight for America’s working families. Rosa believes that we must raise the nation’s minimum wage, give all employees access to paid sick days, allow employees to take paid family and medical leave, and ensure equal pay for equal work. Every day, Rosa fights for legislation that would give all working families an opportunity to succeed.
As Congress works to address our nation’s budget and economic challenges, Rosa is committed to ensuring that we do not balance the budget at the expense of America’s most vulnerable, including working families, children, and seniors. Rosa continues to fight to ensure that we are making smart investments in our future, and that our budget reflects our values.
Together, we must ensure that our schools are able to raise academic standards, we close the achievement gap, and that all students have a highly qualified teacher. We also need to do more to make higher education affordable for all Americans. A quality college degree has always been the cornerstone of the American dream, opening the door to job opportunity and the chance to move up in society. As the senior Democrat on the Appropriations subcommittee that funds the U.S. Department of Education, our children’s education is one of Rosa’s top priorities.
Supporting Early Childhood Education
Investing in our children in their early years enhances their development and leads to success in later years. Rosa has fought to increase funding for Head Start, the most effective early childhood development program ever developed. Head Start has provided comprehensive development, literacy, and family services to more than 20 million pre-schoolers from working families. She has also worked to promote an early learning focus in the Race to the Top program and has established the bi-partisan Congressional Baby Caucus to focus public policy on the healthy development of infants and toddlers.
Increasing Federal Funding for Elementary and Secondary Education
Rosa believes that ensuring our public schools are given the resources and the support they need is among government’s central obligations. She has worked hard to prevent teacher layoffs and fully fund Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the Individual with Disabilities Education Act, and afterschool programs.
Rosa believes that educating the whole child means more than teaching to meet the requirements of a test. She fought to reform the No Child Left Behind Act to provide states with more flexibility in measuring student achievement and last year voted to enact the Every Student Succeeds Act to help our students in greatest need of support. Rosa strongly supports teachers, which includes providing teachers with strong preparation and professional development and valuing the work that they do each day.
Expanding Access to Higher Education and Making It More Affordable
To make college more affordable, Rosa has fought to raise the maximum Pell Grant award. Due to increases in tuition and fees, Pell Grants do not cover as many credit hours as they did previously. The Pell Grant provides funds to more than nine million low-income undergraduate students, with over 75 percent of recipients having family incomes below $30,000. With Rosa’s support, the maximum Pell Grant award is now $5,815, up more than $1,500 since 2008.
Rosa has also worked to curb the rise in student debt by calling on Congress to keep student loan interest rates low and close financial aid loopholes being exploited by for-profit institutions.
Apprenticeships
As more students and families are concerned about the rising cost of higher education, apprenticeships are a valuable resource for students and employers. Not only do students receive on-the-job training while earning a paycheck, they come into the workplace with fully developed skills that are beneficial to employers. Rosa strongly supports expanding and growing apprenticeship programs to enable more students to participate and has fought for additional funding in the Appropriations process.
The U.S. needs a comprehensive energy plan that shifts our economy away from heavy dependence on oil imported from unstable regions, to domestic energy sources that create jobs here at home. That is why Rosa supports the responsible development of American natural gas, investing in the next generation of clean and renewable energy sources, and reducing our energy waste through efficiency improvements.
Clean and Renewable American Energy
Currently, 83 percent of the energy used in the U.S. comes from fossil fuels—leaving our economy largely dependent upon foreign energy imports. For economic, national security, and environmental reasons, we need to shift away from fossil fuels and diversify with investments in the next generation of clean and renewable energy technologies.
Shifting toward domestically produced energy will also create good paying jobs here at home and increase our nation’s energy security. Rosa strongly supports the 1603 Grant Program for Renewable Energy and the Advanced Energy Manufacturing Tax Credit to encourage new renewable energy projects and the expansion of manufacturing facilities that are critical to improving energy efficiency and renewable energy projects.
One common barrier faced by many renewable energy companies is financing, which is one reason why Rosa introduced the National Infrastructure Development Bank Act. This bill would provide financing for a wide range of energy projects, including energy transmission, energy efficiency enhancements for existing building, renewable energy, and energy storage.
Responsible Development of American Natural Gas Reserves
America has some of the most plentiful natural gas reserves in the world, and it is important for our economy that we develop them, while also protecting the environment and water quality.
Rosa supports the Fracturing Responsibility and Awareness of Chemicals Act to require all companies that drill for natural gas on public lands to disclose the chemicals they use in the hydraulic fracturing process. She also supports the Keep American Natural Gas Here Act to reduce energy prices and create a new fuel for the next generation by ensuring that the natural gas recovered in America stays in America.
Rosa is also a co-sponsor of the New Alternative Transportation to Give Americans Solutions Act, which would provide tax credits to individuals and businesses to encourage the purchase of natural gas vehicles and the installation of additional natural gas refueling infrastructure.
Rosa is determined to make health care more affordable for all Americans and is a strong supporter of the Affordable Care Act. As the senior Democrat on the subcommittee responsible for funding the Department of Health and Human Services, Rosa seeks to ensure strong funding levels for programs that help improve access to quality, affordable health care.
The Affordable Care Act
The Affordable Care Act has helped millions of Americans access more affordable health care, while reducing long-term health care costs. Insurance companies will now be held accountable – it is no longer acceptable to deny care and coverage for pre-existing conditions, impose lifetime coverage limits, or enact excessive premium increases. Recommended preventive care services – things like mammograms, colonoscopies, and cholesterol and diabetes screenings – are covered by insurance with no out-of-pocket costs. These services and the other changes because of the new law have the potential to save lives, and to transform our health care system.
Biomedical Research
A 30-year survivor of ovarian cancer, Rosa is a leading advocate for funding biomedical research, including studies supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). She works with colleagues to raise awareness of the need to invest in this work to save lives. This research is also critical to job growth, as every $1 invested in the NIH has been found to result in an additional $2 of business activity. This includes research supported by the NIH, surveillance supported by the CDC, grants that support graduate and professional school education, and numerous other critical programs.
Women’s Health
Rosa worked to reauthorize Johanna’s Law, ensuring women and their health care providers have access to information about gynecologic cancers, enabling earlier detection of these cancers in an effort to save lives. She introduced the Birth Defects Prevention, Risk Reduction, and Awareness Act to ensure that women and their health care providers have information about the potential impacts of medications, chemicals, foodborne illness, and other exposures to themselves and their infants. Rosa also introduced the Breast Density and Mammography Reporting Act which would ensure that women and their health care providers have access to the information about an individuals’ breast density to make informed health care decisions. She also continues to advocate for passage of the Breast Cancer Patient Protection Act, a bill that would ensure that decisions about a woman’s hospital stay are made by the woman and her health care provider, not an insurance company.
With over 13 million unemployed across the country and a high unemployment rate in Connecticut, Rosa’s top priority continues to be putting people back to work. Only by creating good middle class jobs and setting a new direction for our economy can we hope for sustainable economic growth that allows us to compete in a 21st century global economy.
From supporting innovative small business and our manufacturing base to investments in education and scientific research, we must address the immediate jobs crisis and lay the foundation to create good, sustainable middle class jobs that cannot be outsourced and will lead to long-term economic growth.
According to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, middle-class and working-class Americans have seen their wages stagnate and median income fall over the past thirty years, even as the top 1% of Americans have seen their income triple to 23% of the total. Meanwhile 1 in 6 Americans are living in poverty.
We are also seeing more and more good jobs shipped overseas. According to the Economic Policy Institute, we have lost over 31,000 jobs in Connecticut, including 6,000 jobs in the 3rd District, over the last decade due to our trade deficit with China alone. At the same time, our infrastructure, the lifeblood of any economy, is crumbling with the American Society of Civil Engineers noting that, among other things, 35% of Connecticut’s bridges are structurally deficient or functionally obsolete, 47% of our major roads are in poor or mediocre condition, and we need an investment of $653 million over the next 20 years in our drinking water infrastructure.
Rosa’s plan aims to create jobs now and well into the future; preserves existing jobs and prevents unjust barriers to employment; builds the foundations for long-term growth by rebuilding our infrastructure and reviving the manufacturing sector; and helps working families to ensure they get the pay and benefits they deserve. Support for small businesses, innovative research and education is critical to creating jobs.
The brave men and women serving this country deserve not only our gratitude, but also strong benefits including a living wage and health care for themselves and their families. This support should include providing the best equipment, much of which is manufactured in Connecticut. At the same time, the decision of whether to go to war is the most solemn decision a Member of Congress makes, and our troops deserve thoughtful consideration of when, where and how to deploy our military to meet our security challenges.
Supporting Connecticut’s Defense Industrial Base
From early 19th century production of firearms to today’s manufacturing of helicopters, jet engines, submarines, and more, Connecticut has always played a central role in providing our troops with the equipment they need. Defense manufacturing today is a critical source of high skilled jobs in Connecticut’s Third District.
Rosa has always supported defense programs that maintain jobs in Connecticut, including the Black Hawk, Marine One Presidential, Combat Rescue and CH-53K heavy-lift helicopter programs, as well as the procurement of engines for the C-17, F-22, F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and other aircraft. Rosa as been an advocate for the Joint Strike Fighter primary engine, with testing and assembly of that engine taking place in Middletown, and played a lead role in terminating the alternate engine program.
Rosa is also a leader in ensuring that our military is procuring American-made equipment. She fought for re-bids of contracts for both the Marine One and Air Force Aerial Refueling Tanker originally awarded to European companies. The final Tanker contract was awarded to a U.S. company which will create jobs in Connecticut and the Marine One is now scheduled to be re-bid.
Rosa is also fighting to end the Defense Department’s no-bid purchases of helicopters for the Afghan Security Forces from the Russian state arms dealer Rosoboronexport. That firm is providing weapons to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad allowing the regime to commit atrocities against innocent men, women and children. Rosa successfully led an amendment to the 2013 Defense Authorization bill that would prohibit the Defense Department from entering into such contracts and requiring any such future contract to be competitively bid.
Ending the War in Afghanistan
Our combat troops, including service members from Connecticut, have now been in Afghanistan for over ten years. Over two thousand brave American men and women have perished in what has become the longest war in our history. Their sacrifice, hard work, and dedication have resulted in the weakening of Al Qaeda, and Osama Bin Laden has been brought to justice. Rosa believes it is time to bring our military involvement in Afghanistan to an end.
President Obama and NATO leaders announced an end to combat operations in Afghanistan in 2013, and a transition of military control to the Afghans in 2014. Rosa believes we should expedite our troops’ return and speed up the transition to having Afghans in charge of Afghanistan. She supports legislation requiring a responsible end to the war in Afghanistan by ending combat operations while providing for a safe and orderly withdrawal from the country.
Rosa believes we can protect the American people with a smaller military footprint in Afghanistan. Rather than spending $130 billion a year rebuilding Afghanistan, our long-term position and security in the world will be most enhanced if we focus on investing in jobs and rebuilding the American economy.
Rosa stands with Connecticut’s seniors and is a strong supporter of Medicare and Social Security.
Protecting Medicare
Rosa supports a strong Medicare program to ensure we meet the health needs of seniors and opposes policies and budgets that would weaken Medicare. She supported provisions of the Affordable Care Act that improved the program, such as:
Strengthening Social Security
Rosa believes that preserving Social Security is part of our moral duty to keep retired Americans from falling into poverty. Social Security was founded on a promise: if you work in America, America will guarantee you a solid foundation for retirement. That is why Rosa works to strengthen Social Security and opposes privatization critical American cornerstone. She also introduced the Rebuild America Act which will increase Social Security benefits while strengthening the Social Security Trust Fund, ensuring its solvency for generations to come.
Social Security was always meant to be the bedrock of a balanced retirement plan. It guarantees Americans a dignified retirement, even if pensions, investments, and savings fail. Privatization would eliminate the last secure pillar of retirement in America. Rosa believes we must encourage Americans of all ages to save more of their income for the future, but that these efforts must complement Social Security, not threaten it.
Keeping Seniors Out of Poverty
Social Security has prevented over 50 percent of seniors from falling into poverty. However, women still face greater financial pressures, especially later in life. Seventy percent of the elderly in poverty are women, mainly due to income inequity and lost benefits over a lifetime that result. Rosa has fought to close the gender wage gap that reduces women’s economic security and believes in valuing all of the work that women do over a lifetime, including caregiving, in determining retirement benefits. She also fights to ensure that critical programs, such as Medicaid and anti-hunger programs, have enough resources to help eligible Connecticut seniors.
Rosa supports a tax code that bolsters middle class families while asking the wealthiest Americans to pay their share. Rosa also believes in a tax code that lays the foundation for small businesses to succeed while providing incentives for corporations to invest in the United States rather than overseas.
Individual Tax Code
Rosa supports tax cuts for middle class families on income up to $250,000, while allowing the tax rates for the wealthiest 2% of Americans, to return to the Clinton-era rates. Ending tax cuts for the richest 2% would reduce the deficit by $930 billion over 10 years.
Rosa also supported an extension of the payroll tax cut in 2012 to ensure that 160 million American workers, including 2 million people in Connecticut, did not see an average $1,500 tax increase. She also supports legislation, the “Buffett Rule”, ensuring the highest-earning Americans with an annual income of over $1 million do not pay a lower tax rate than everyone else.
Rosa believes in a progressive tax code that supports working low income and middle class families. Throughout her career, Rosa has fought to expand the Child Tax Credit (CTC) to provide greater tax relief to working families. In 2009, Rosa fought to decrease the eligibility threshold for the CTC from $12,550 to $3,000 providing an increased credit of up to $1,432.50 to the families of 15.9 million children, including 5.5 million newly eligible children. In Connecticut, 116,000 children are benefiting from the expanded credit.
Small Business Tax Cuts
Rosa supports maintaining and expanding tax cuts for our small businesses. She supports legislation to help small businesses quickly recover the cost of capital expenses by writing off up to $250,000 for purchases of new equipment of up to $800,000. Rosa also supported legislation that eliminated the capital gains tax for small businesses and increased the amount of start-up expenditures entrepreneurs can deduct from their taxes from $5,000 to $10,000.
Rosa also introduced the bipartisan Manufacturing Reinvestment Account Act, which would allow manufacturing firms to establish a manufacturing reinvestment account (MRA), similar to an individual retirement account (IRA), in a community bank and to make annual pre-tax contributions of up to $500,000 that may be held in the MRA for up to 7 years. Amounts distributed from the MRA are effectively taxed at a low 15 percent rate and must be used to purchase equipment and facilities or for job training.
If a small manufacturing business invested $500,000 a year for 7 years in an MRA bearing a 5 percent interest rate, it would have an estimated after-tax balance of approximately $3.6 million to invest in equipment, facilities, and job training at the end of the investment period. That amount would represent approximately $1 million more than had the same amount initially been invested in a taxable account.
Corporate Tax Code
Rosa believes that incentives and loopholes in the tax code that encourage multinational corporations to ships jobs overseas and pursue strategies to avoid U.S. taxes hamper U.S. job creation and economic growth. She believes that corporate tax reform should level the playing field for all our businesses and be implemented in such a way so that U.S. multinational corporations that have outsourced jobs and investment overseas are incentivized to invest in American workers to create good, well-paying middle class jobs at home.
Rosa introduced the Rebuild America Act, which would eliminate tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas. She is also a co-sponsor of the Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act, which would curb abuses of the international tax laws that cost hardworking middle class families and small businesses who play by the rules nearly $100 billion a year. Rosa also successfully fought for legislation to bar corporations that incorporate in overseas tax havens from receiving Federal Government contracts.
Connecticut has approximately 222,000 veterans, and 600 active duty, National Guard and Reserve troops, including over 100 from Connecticut’s 3rd District, have been deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq. Rosa believes that as a nation we have an obligation to ensure that these brave men and women who serve our country, as well as their families, have access to the medical care they need, an affordable education and opportunities for a good, well-paying job.
Health Care
As an appropriator, Rosa supported the 2008 Military Construction and Veterans Affairs Appropriations bill which provided the largest single increase in the 77-year history of the VA, as well as subsequent bills through 2010 that provided a 70 percent increase in funding for veterans’ health care and benefits. Rosa has since supported appropriations that build upon that effort, including the 2013 bill passed by the House, which will provide quality medical care to more than 6.3 million patients in 2013, including 610,000 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. As Congress addresses the deficit, Rosa will not support any measure that seeks to reduce the deficit on the backs of our veterans.
Rosa is also especially concerned with the quality of mental health care available to service-members and veterans. Accordingly, Rosa introduced legislation to, among other things, ensure that troops deploying to combat theaters get the mental health screening they need before and after deployment. Rosa successfully led an effort to amend the Fiscal Year 2010 Defense Authorization Bill to create a post-deployment mental health screening program, and the final bill included language instituting such a screening program across all services.
Rosa recognizes the need to continually improve the conditions at the West Haven Veterans Affairs Medical Center, and has worked to secure construction funding for the facility. Rosa also brought Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric K. Shinseki to see the Center’s conditions first hand and to take part in a roundtable discussion on the various issues facing veterans today with local Veterans Service Organizations, Connecticut VA representatives, members of the state legislature, and other veterans’ advocates.
Education
Rosa co-sponsored the Post-9/11 G.I. Bill, greatly expanding educational benefits for our post-9/11 veterans. The law offers the men and women who have served in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan educational benefits on par with those provided to veterans of the World War II era. Among other things, the law provides these veterans, including Guard and Reservists, who served 3 years on active duty, benefits to cover the costs of a four-year education at the most expensive in-state public school, along with a stipend for housing, books and other expenses.
While many veterans are taking advantage of these benefits, those pursuing on the job training and apprenticeships were not be provided an equal benefit in the bill. In order to close this loophole, Rosa introduced the Post 9/11 Veterans’ Job Training Act to expand the opportunities under the Post-9/11 G.I. Bill to include a subsidy to help veterans participating in on the job training and apprenticeship programs to help cover housing costs, tutoring, testing and certification fees, and relocation and travel expenses. Similar legislation was included in the Post-9/11 Veterans Educational Assistance Improvements Act signed into law in 2010.
Rosa is also a lead co-sponsor of the bipartisan Military and Veterans Education Protection Act, which would address the misuse by for-profit colleges of tuition benefits afforded to veterans and service-members through the Post-9/11 G.I. Bill and other Defense Department tuition assistance programs. Currently, proprietary schools are exploiting a loophole that allows them to receive all of their profits from financial aid, and they are trying to enroll as many veterans and service members as possible, often under false pretenses, to inflate profits. In the 2010-11 school year, for-profit schools collected $1.5 billion in Post-9/11 G.I. bill tuition payments equaling nearly 1/3 of total disbursements made by the VA. Yet, a loophole in the 90/10 funding formula meant to ensure for-profit schools derive at least 10% of their tuition funds from private sources, allowed the for-profit institutions to consider all $1.5 billion as privately funded. This bill closes that 90/10 loophole.
Employment
In 2011, the average unemployment rate for new veterans – those serving since September 2001 - was 12.1%, compared to an 8.7% annual average for non-veterans. In 2011, the unemployment rate for new veterans aged 18-24 was a staggering 30.2 percent, almost double the 16.3% unemployment faced by non-veterans in this age group. With a projected one million more men and women returning to civilian life in the next five years, Rosa believes we have to be sure we are doing everything we can to facilitate the transition from the battlefield back to the job market.
As the Senior Democrat on the Labor-Health and Human Services-Education Appropriations Subcommittee, Rosa supports funding programs at the Department of Labor that help veterans maximize their employment opportunities. These funds have supported efforts to develop veterans’ jobs skills by The Workplace, Inc., one of nine Regional Workforce Development Boards in Connecticut that assesses regional employment and training needs and coordinates workforce development policies and programs to meet them.
Rosa also supported the recently enacted Veterans Opportunity to Work (VOW) to Hire Heroes Act, a bill signed into law that provides businesses with tax credits to encourage them to hire service-members and veterans with service-related disabilities while overhauling the military’s Transition Assistance Program to provide veterans with baseline training for getting work in the civilian job market and creating a job training program for unemployed older veterans.
Veterans Advisory Council
Rosa established a Veterans Advisory Council made up of local veterans and veterans’ advocates in order to ensure local concerns are being addressed.
For too long, the lack of available parking at the West Haven VA Medical Center made it unnecessarily difficult for veterans to access their health care benefits. Having heard from the veterans of her district and witnessing the situation herself, Rosa strongly advocated for the implementation of the valet parking service, which the hospital now offers for free. To take advantage of the service, veterans need only to arrive at the main entrance of Building 2 where they will be greeted by a uniformed attendant who will park and retrieve their vehicles. The service is available weekdays from 6:30 am to 6:00 pm.
Rosa in June 2012 announced the opening of a new veterans’ Office of Advocacy and Assistance in the Parsons Government Building in Milford. The new office replaces one in West Haven that had to be shut down due to building damage from Tropical Storm Irene. The work previously done in the Third District had been split up between Bridgeport and Newington after the West Haven office was closed. The Connecticut Department of Veterans Affairs has a veterans’ service office in each Congressional District.