[Congressional Record Volume 166, Number 3 (Tuesday, January 7, 2020)]
[Senate]
[Pages S40-S41]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                     Nomination of Jovita Carranza

  Mr. RUBIO. Mr. President, I am very happy that our first votes, not 
only of the session but of this decade, are going to be focused on 
supporting small businesses.
  In America, we tend to speak about businesses with a sense of 
reverence that I think is absent in other countries, and there is good 
reason for that. So many of the great companies in this Nation started 
out as small businesses, and some of the greatest companies in America 
today are small businesses. We also have just under 60 million 
individuals who are employed by over 30 million small businesses 
throughout the country.
  The Small Business Administration can play a very important role in 
our success and in the success of these businesses by providing 
entrepreneurs and firms with technical assistance and access to 
capital, so it is critically important for the country.
  Today, as we consider the nomination of Jovita Carranza to serve as 
the SBA Administrator, I thought it was an important point to make. 
There are some additional points I would like to make.
  First of all, the position of Administrator is really crucial to 
ensuring that the agency is functioning well and is successful. It is 
also important that the Administrator be someone who is open to and 
supportive of the need to modernize the Small Business Administration 
and its many programs.
  As we move into this new decade, it is really important that the 
agency evolve to meet the unique and special needs of the entrepreneurs 
of today at a time in which we have ever-changing and increasing global 
and business climate adjustments that are occurring.
  I think we sometimes forget that businesses today face a very 
different environment than we saw 10, 20, or 30 years ago. So as we are 
aware of these changes, it is important that, as policymakers, we have 
an obligation to identify the goals that achieve our national interests 
and that provide for our national defense, that create good jobs for 
American workers, and then that organize the laws that we propose and 
the reforms that we propose around those important items of national 
interest and how to achieve furthering them.
  The last time the Small Business Administration was fully 
reauthorized was 20 years ago, in the year 2000, when just 42 percent 
of households, for example, had internet access. Nearly everyone was 
still using dial-up phones for access. It would be another 6 years 
before the iPhone even existed. Back in 2000, Americans bought fewer 
than 10,000 hybrid electric cars. From 2000 to 2020, those are the 
changes we have undergone, and that was the last time the SBA was 
reauthorized.
  By the way, it also happens to be the year when China became a member 
of the World Trade Organization. I say that because, today, American 
small businesses--if you think our big businesses face unfair 
competition, imagine the unprecedented threat in competing against the 
Chinese Government and its Communist Party's systematic industrial 
espionage and coercion, its large-scale subsidies for their own 
industries, and its sweeping obstruction of market access to its own 
country.

[[Page S41]]

The challenges are extraordinary, and they require resources that allow 
our small business sector to compete against these conditions and to 
operate dynamically, to grow, to be innovative, and to be creative.
  Small businesses need access to services and programs that better 
position them to support not just our Nation's competitiveness on an 
international scale but particularly with regard to Beijing's continued 
economic aggression toward our Nation.
  Just as the SBA was critical in building the technologies and helping 
to spur the creation of the technologies that allowed us to be 
successful both in the space race and, ultimately, in the Cold War, I 
believe the SBA can play an important role in our efforts to compete 
with Chinese economic hostility.
  In that regard, it is important to note that the status quo is just 
not enough. We need an agency that incorporates new and creative 
programs, that focuses on spurring investment, supporting advanced 
manufacturing, promoting innovation, and expanding our export 
opportunities.
  It is important to note, as I said earlier with regard to the SBA's 
role during the space race and the Cold War, that innovation 
breakthroughs we have often seen in our history have often been 
contingent on private-public collaboration, especially in the space 
program that also happens to have a commercial obligation and also 
furthers our national security.
  Small businesses and startups have historically always been essential 
to developing the technologies and the commercialization of products 
that often come out of those partnerships. But unlike what we have seen 
in Silicon Valley--startups that venture capital firms tend to 
gravitate toward over there--these technologies--the ones that are in 
our national interests, which I just spoke about--require significant 
time and resources to finance.
  So on the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee, we are going 
to continue to work toward a comprehensive reauthorization of the Small 
Business Act and the Small Business Investment Act to achieve these 
ends that I have just outlined. But the leadership and the guidance of 
a forward-thinking SBA Administrator is going to be essential, not just 
to get it passed but to make sure that modernization works.
  As the chairman of the committee, I am very eager to see the position 
of Administrator be filled. President Trump nominated Ms. Carranza to 
serve in this critical role back in August of last year. She has a long 
and successful career, having spent many years in both the private 
sector and government service.
  She started her service at UPS. After 29 years, she retired from 
there as vice president of air operations. Then she was nominated by 
President George W. Bush and was confirmed by this body--the Senate--to 
serve as SBA's Deputy Administrator back in 2006. She served there for 
2 years and then went back into the private sector until returning in 
June of 2017, when President Trump named her Treasurer of the United 
States.
  Last month, the Senate Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee 
held a hearing to consider this nomination, and we voted favorably to 
report her nomination to the Senate floor.
  In that hearing, Ms. Carranza made a commitment to work with 
Congress--to work with each of us--on the pressing issues that are 
facing the SBA and the program. She assured us--myself, ranking member, 
Senator Cardin, and other members of the committee--that she would 
address the management challenges in the Office of Investment and 
Innovation to ensure the integrity of its programs but, most 
importantly, that she would appear before the committee after her 
confirmation to provide an update on how she is addressing these 
challenges.
  She has committed to do other things that are important: to assess 
the far-reaching rule governing the agency's critical access to capital 
programs so that it is not restricting access to capital for small 
businesses; to be communicative and transparent with us on the subsidy 
models and calculations they are using for the Federal credit programs; 
to fill the backlog of staff that is needed to properly run the SBA's 
innovation programs; to ensure that Federal grant dollars are being 
properly used--the dollars especially associated with the 
entrepreneurial development programs to modernize the agency's disaster 
loan programs; and to establish better controls to prevent waste, 
fraud, and abuse. She committed to expeditiously establish a women-
owned small business certification program and to provide responses to 
Congress on several of our past communications to the agency outlining 
proposals to aid small businesses against cyber threats, which is a 
critical threat facing many of the small businesses in this country 
today.
  In the business meeting we had after the hearing, we considered her 
nomination. I was pleased to see that the overwhelming majority of our 
members on both sides of the aisle, including the ranking member, 
supported sending the nomination to the full Senate because there is a 
lot of work to be done. Restoring and expanding the SBA's historic 
legacy of assisting businesses and meeting the international challenges 
at hand are very important and very crucial.
  I look forward to working with Ms. Carranza to modernize our existing 
programs to meet the challenges we have before us and working toward 
solutions that ensure that small businesses have access to the 
resources they need to start, to grow, and to empower our Nation at 
large.
  I urge all of my colleagues to support this nomination when we have a 
vote in a few minutes.
  Thank you.
  I yield the floor.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Cruz). The clerk will call the roll.
  The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. RUBIO. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.