All right, well, good morning, everyone, and thank you so much for being here.

So we're holding this event in the middle of what's already proving to be another record-breaking Arizona summer.

Just yesterday, we experienced the hottest day of the year so far.

Phoenix hit 118 degrees, breaking the daily high temperature record.

That kind of relentless heat is more than just uncomfortable.

It's dangerous.

And it's exactly why today's conversation is so critically important.

So it's my honor to introduce Congressman Greg Stanton.

As the former mayor of the city of Phoenix, he's experienced more than a few brutal Arizona summers, and he knows firsthand how important it is to protect those who work in the heat.

In Congress, he founded the bipartisan extreme heat caucus and is working to advance a national extreme heat awareness week in early July to help bring national attention to staying safe during high temperatures.

So once again, it's now my privilege to welcome Congressman Greg Stanton.

I thank you, uh Mayor, for putting this together.

Uh, this important information about extreme heat in the community.

We're gonna have a good discussion about what I'm doing in Congress and what the city of Tempe, who is leading the way here uh locally, Councilmember Keating and Hodge, thank you for your leadership.

I'm really proud of the City of Tempe and the actions that they have uh taken.

Uh in Arizona, we know that extreme heat is incredibly dangerous.

Late last month, more than a hundred million Americans around the country across 26 states were under extreme heat advisories, just like we are here in Arizona now, from New England to the heartland, and obviously here in our community.

This issue about the impact of extreme heat on our health and our infrastructure and our quality of life, it is not going away.

In fact, it is getting worse as the climate warms.

Right when we need officials at all levels of government taking real, meaningful steps to save lives.

The Trump administration is moving in exactly the wrong uh direction.

This is not a partisan issue.

This is just my strong feelings about the direction that the current administration is taking.

Federal employees, researchers, public health experts, administrators of grant programs have been caught up in mass firings by the current administration.

Experts on heat safety at the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health were abruptly fired.

They do incredible research on how Americans can best protect themselves or their employees from the heat.

That research informed the City of Tempe's worker protection ordinance, which we are here today to celebrate.

At the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, Division of Environmental Health and Safety and Practice, all 200 employees researching how climate change and extreme weather harm public safety were fired.

Restructuring at the Department of Health and Human Services eliminated the staff of the low-income housing energy assistant program, LIHEAT, which helps Arizona families pay their air conditioning bills during the worst of the summer heat.

Congress promised them that help, and it is unforgivable to let people's power shut off during one of the hottest summers on record.

And across the federal agencies, the Department of Labor, Energy, Interior, research on climate change and extreme weather has been trashed.

Every day, I'm hearing about grants and projects focused on resilience, heat mitigation, and public health that were canceled because they were part of the so-called Green New Deal.

This will set back our ability as Americans to understand and tackle the impacts of extreme weather by decades.

Now I lead the Congressional Subcommittee on Emergency Management.

It's clear to me that the dismantling of the National Weather Service, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, as we call it, and the Federal Emergency Management Administration, FEMA, will only make it harder to prevent extreme heat disasters.

These agencies collaborated on critical heat tracking programs like the National Integrated Health Heat Health Information System, which was led by top researchers here at Arizona State University and the University of Arizona, by the way.

Their mission was to raise public awareness of extreme heat and its dangers.

And as Republicans in Congress carry out Trump's budget cuts, we stand to lose even more.

We're going to lose on education on how to stay safe from the heat, that program gone.

Dollars that keep families air conditioning on, gone.

Early warning systems for heat waves, gone.

Arizona's gonna feel the impact worse than anywhere else.

It was a hundred degrees in April this year.

And as the mayor mentioned, just yesterday, we hit another record.

A early morning low of 93 degrees.

That was the low temperature all day yesterday, and of course, an afternoon high of 118 degrees, making it one of the hottest days on record in our history.

Arizona has always been hot, but we're seeing unbelievably high temperatures even at night for days on end.

We've lost more than 600 lives in Maricopa County just last year due to extreme heat.

It may have been more.

That's just the ones we know about.

That's a huge we saw more than 6,000 heat-related hospitalization statewide.

That's a huge impact on our workforce and on our economy.

Without a strong federal and local leadership on extreme heat, we'll be facing our hotter reality without critical resources.

That's why I launched the extreme heat caucus earlier this year in Congress.

We are championing smart bipartisan actions to combat extreme heat.

Things like making sure low-income families can pay for their air conditioning in the summer by protecting the light heat program, unlocking emergency dollars for FEMA for local communities to better prepare for and respond to extreme heat, directing FEMA to develop better guidance for communities during extreme temperatures, building roads and bridges that can handle longer, hotter temperatures.

Infrastructure resiliency and extreme heat go hand in hand.

We need to do more at the federal level.

And of course, protecting America's outdoor workforce from deadly heat exposure.

We're focused on making sure Americans are better prepared for deadly heat and temperatures, not just in Arizona and the Southwest, but all across the country.