WASHINGTON – In a joint letter to the Secretary of Homeland Security, Senate and House Judiciary Committee chairmen Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) and former Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) urged the swift implementation of regulations that would drastically curtail the amount of fraud and abuse that has become common in the EB-5 regional center program.
“As we have noted several times since the publication of these proposed regulations, they would, if finalized, dramatically reform the EB-5 program and re-align the program with what Congress envisioned in 1990. We were, and remain, supportive of these regulations,” the group wrote.
In their letter to Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, the lawmakers noted their longtime, good-faith efforts at finding a legislative fix for the fraud-ridden EB-5 program, but also stated that those efforts have collapsed because of special interest groups. The lawmakers ask Secretary Nielsen to continue to do everything within her authority to clamp down on abuse of the program, and encourage her to issue the regulations without further delay.
Last month, Grassley and Goodlatte called on the Department of Homeland Security to finalize and implement these regulations after Congress failed to reform or end the regional center program. The recently-passed omnibus spending bill included a clean extension of EB-5, and did not include any reforms to crack down on well-documented fraud, abuse and national security concerns.
These lawmakers have worked for years on potential reforms to the EB-5 program. Grassley delivered a speech to his colleagues last month outlining this work and why the program should now be ended outright.
Full text of the letter from Grassley, Goodlatte and Leahy follows.
