WASHINGTON — U.S. Rep. David Schweikert (AZ-01) joined Fox Business to call on the House to keep advancing the legislative agenda, protect election integrity and use budget reconciliation to lower federal spending.

With Congress facing a tight legislative calendar before the August recess, Schweikert said Senate gridlock should not become an excuse for the House to stop working.

“There’s an intense sense of frustration,” Schweikert said. “But with that, there’s also so many things on the president’s agenda, the Republicans’ agenda, I would say America’s agenda we could get through.”

He urged the House to continue passing legislation, advance SAVE Act provisions that protect election integrity and make the Senate work.

“We should grab every good piece of legislation and throw it at the U.S. Senate and make them work,” Schweikert said.

The interview also covered budget reconciliation, which Schweikert said should be used to lower spending as the country faces growing fiscal pressure. He warned that the federal government was borrowing nearly $90,000 every second last week while Social Security and Medicare trust funds are a little over six years from being depleted.

“Reconciliation budgets should be lowering spending,” Schweikert said.

As chairman of the Joint Economic Committee, Schweikert also discussed the committee’s recent work on health care fraud. He warned that Congress must focus not only on bad actors, but also on bad program design, loopholes and creative legal interpretations that allow federal health care programs to be exploited.

He pointed to Medicare Advantage risk adjustment as one example of a complex but costly problem, where insurers and others can receive larger payments by coding seniors as sicker than they really are.

“How intensely frustrating this is,” Schweikert said. “One year ago my team, we introduced a piece of legislation to stop the stories you heard in Medicare Advantage of insurance companies and others saying Grandma’s much sicker than she really is and, therefore, getting what they call risk adjustments.”

Schweikert said Congress can find hundreds of billions of dollars in savings by fixing health care loopholes, but doing so requires taking on complex systems and entrenched interests.

Watch the full interview here.