[Congressional Record Volume 167, Number 88 (Thursday, May 20, 2021)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3182-S3186]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
LEGISLATIVE SESSION
______
ENDLESS FRONTIER ACT
Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate
resume legislative session.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Michigan.
Amendment No. 1518
Mr. PETERS. Mr. President, I rise to speak in opposition to the
Johnson amendment.
The amendment would force the continued payment of government
contractors to build an ill-conceived border wall.
Most of these funds were never intended for this purpose. More than
$10 billion was redirected from the Department of Defense. These funds
were intended for military missions and functions, such as schools for
military families and National Guard equipment.
The Biden administration is conducting a comprehensive review of
these contracts, led by the Departments of Defense and Homeland
Security. These decisions will be guided by what is best for our
national security, not well-connected government contractors profiting
off of hard-earned taxpayer dollars.
We need to move forward with smart, bipartisan investments to improve
border security that secure both our southern and our northern borders,
not look backwards at the former administration's boondoggle.
[[Page S3183]]
I urge a ``no'' vote.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Wisconsin.
Mr. JOHNSON. Mr. President, I ask for a minute to respond.
First of all, let me reiterate--the dollars will be spent regardless.
The dollars would be completely wasted and no wall whatsoever. Of
course, this reconsideration of their policies--we can already see the
disastrous consequences of what they have already done. God help us in
terms of what the results will be of future policies as well.
So, again, I ask that my amendment be considered.
Vote on Amendment No. 1518
I ask support for it, and I ask for the yeas and nays.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The question is on agreeing to the amendment.
Is there a sufficient second?
There appears to be a sufficient second.
The clerk will call the roll
Mr. DURBIN. I announce that the Senator from Massachusetts (Mr.
Markey) is necessarily absent.
Mr. THUNE. The following Senators are necessarily absent: the Senator
from Louisiana (Mr. Cassidy), the Senator from South Carolina (Mr.
Graham), the Senator from Kansas (Mr. Marshall), the Senator from
Kansas (Mr. Moran), and the Senator from Alaska (Ms. Murkowski).
Further, if present and voting, the Senator from Kansas (Mr.
Marshall) would have voted ``yea.''
The result was announced--yeas 46, nays 48, as follows:
[Rollcall Vote No. 199 Leg.]
YEAS--46
Barrasso
Blackburn
Blunt
Boozman
Braun
Burr
Capito
Collins
Cornyn
Cotton
Cramer
Crapo
Cruz
Daines
Ernst
Fischer
Grassley
Hagerty
Hawley
Hoeven
Hyde-Smith
Inhofe
Johnson
Kennedy
Lankford
Lee
Lummis
Manchin
McConnell
Paul
Portman
Risch
Romney
Rounds
Rubio
Sasse
Scott (FL)
Scott (SC)
Shelby
Sullivan
Thune
Tillis
Toomey
Tuberville
Wicker
Young
NAYS--48
Baldwin
Bennet
Blumenthal
Booker
Brown
Cantwell
Cardin
Carper
Casey
Coons
Cortez Masto
Duckworth
Durbin
Feinstein
Gillibrand
Hassan
Heinrich
Hickenlooper
Hirono
Kaine
Kelly
King
Klobuchar
Leahy
Lujan
Menendez
Merkley
Murphy
Murray
Ossoff
Padilla
Peters
Reed
Rosen
Sanders
Schatz
Schumer
Shaheen
Sinema
Smith
Stabenow
Tester
Van Hollen
Warner
Warnock
Warren
Whitehouse
Wyden
NOT VOTING--6
Cassidy
Graham
Markey
Marshall
Moran
Murkowski
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Van Hollen). On this vote, the yeas are
46, the nays are 48.
Under the previous order requiring 60 votes for the adoption of this
amendment, the amendment is not agreed to.
The amendment (No. 1518) was rejected.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Washington.
S. 1260
Ms. CANTWELL. Mr. President, I come to the floor today to continue
our discussion about the Endless Frontier Act and why America needs to
make more investment in the areas of research and development for our
Nation. This is critically important as we have gone through this
debate with some of our colleagues, to talk about why this is important
for the United States. I spent my time yesterday--maybe somebody from
the staff can come over and help me with the charts but, thank you--the
biggest reason we are doing this is because we believe in American
know-how, that is we believe in American ingenuity and we believe in
American know-how and we have discussed already how that has helped to
build our country over and over and over again, that we are a nation
of, if you will, explorers, of pioneers, and by necessity, inventors,
and that has continued throughout the history of our country.
So we are so proud to continue to make these investments in all areas
of science, certainly in the areas of healthcare, but we are more
specifically talking about the engineers of the physical science and
engineering. And we are talking about why we should make an increase in
both basic research with this underlying bill that continues to drive
dollars into curiosity driven early stage research, so that we can
continue to grow jobs and help our economy, and it also continues the
effort by saying we should make more investments in STEM education, so
the workforce that it will take for us to meet the job challenges of
the future. So we are excited that we are there with American know-how,
but we are also cognizant of this international debate that is going
on, the debate about other countries and what they are investing in
research and development. And one of the reasons why I like where we
are in the United States is because our research and development
ecosystem is really an ecosystem of many different agencies doing
research and development.
And not only are those research and development investments by these
various agencies helping in particular areas--because it is really
distributed as this chart shows, the United States works with the
private sector, it works with our public universities, and it works
with various agencies. Instead of a centralized approach that you might
find in other countries, the fact that we have this distributed
ecosystem with, you know, the Department of Energy may collaborate with
the Department of Agriculture, they may collaborate with the Department
of Defense, NSF may collaborate with universities, universities may
collaborate with the private sector--it is an ecosystem, and that
ecosystem is what is unique about research and development in the
United States. It is not hierarchical, it is not the majority driven by
the private sector, or by government, it is an ecosystem, and the fact
that it is so distributed. That means, almost like the competition in
various places, and the collaboration is helping us grow the innovation
economy.
So the one thing that we need to be cognizant of in this debate is
that we want to preserve that. We want to preserve the uniqueness of
our ecosystem. And that is why we are really talking today about this
NSF, the National Science Foundation, principally, and you can see from
this big pie we just had this debate, right, we had this debate, well,
let's increase the defense R&D--well, we are already doing a lot in
defense R&D, of course, our colleagues are talking about the budget
overall as it related to defense, but you can see that NSF, the numbers
that they are at today at 6.8 are not really at the--you know, you
might think this whole debate we are spending, you know, billions of
dollars to change the focus. This agency is a powerhouse, and it is a
powerhouse mostly connected with universities, and the R&D that is done
there has been in the basic research area.
But now, this bill by our colleagues Senators Schumer and Young is
about taking the basic research, continuing that, making a little bit
of investment in that basic research, but then also now trying to
accelerate all the research that we now have at our hands, our
fingertips, at our minds, and saying, What other user-based research
can we take, that basic and applied research, and actually put it into
use in commercialization in the United States?
So if you will, capitalizing on a faster tech transfer and a faster
deployment of these technologies--why is this so important? Well, it is
important because, in the information age, a lot of people can read our
published research and development, they can read what we are doing,
and they can continue their research and development. Other nations are
figuring out that research and development in an information age
economy really does matter. They are figuring out that the United
States has come a long way as a nation in building job growth,
maintaining competitiveness, national security issues, all because we
at the Federal Government level have said we believe in research and
development with the public taxpayer dollars and it has benefited,
whether it is the internet or the bio sciences and healthcare or on
national security, the American public gets that that research has made
us competitive as a nation.
So we have had two previous attempts to make investments in this
issue in America COMPETES, first started in the Bush administration in
[[Page S3184]]
2006 when President Bush published a report about America's
competitiveness and proposed this concept of that small NSF budget that
I was referring to, and articulated that we needed to double that
budget within a 5-year or 7-year window of time. They felt that, with
the level of change and transformation and innovation, that we wouldn't
be keeping pace on a global basis unless we made that investment.
So in 2007 we passed the America COMPETES Act which gave money both
to NSF and to DOE, and literally the first 3 years, we thought we were
going to double this DOE budget and an investment in DOE within 7
years. So there was a little good news, a lot of euphoria in R&D, a lot
of hope for STEM education, science, technology, engineering, and math.
And then, in America COMPETES, the same request basically of a 60/40
split between NSF and energy, people thought we would end up--well, we
are not on pace, where we want to be, but, oh, we will get there within
11 years. Well, we will put enough money into this innovation effort
that we will double our research and innovation budget as it relates to
NSF and our energy innovation efforts in 11 years.
Well, this is what really happened. We didn't do either of those
things. We are really on a track to have taken those 2007 numbers and
double them in 22 years. So when you look back at the history and you
say, Well, how did we--what happened? If we are so enthusiastic about
this, if we identify this--both a Republican President identified this
and then a Democratic administration followed up, why didn't we execute
on this? Why didn't we execute on this doubling of this number and
making this investment?
Well, we all know what happened, we basically hit a recession. And in
a recession of 2009 and 2010, we just didn't live up to this obligation
of funding the research and development that was in America COMPETES to
the aggressiveness that we had all hoped for. I am not sure everybody
even realizes that this effort fell short, that we didn't make quite
the level of investment that we wanted, that we were falling behind. I
don't think anybody really understood it until now, when people see the
incredible level of international competition. All of a sudden, as we
see this incredible investment from the international community, people
are starting to say, Well wait, what have we done on this effort?
So our next chart shows the fact that the United States has been a
leader in global research and development, and as I said, I mentioned
on the floor a report that was done by the Pew Charitable Trust--I mean
the Pew Research Center, that basically said 7 in 10 Americans believe
in public investment in research and development. We have a higher
regard for this than other nations, and we just do, I think, because
people get it here, I think they get that we have invented a lot of
things, they believe in that innovation, they know it creates jobs. And
so we have a higher regard for that, and consequently, we have been the
leader in world R&D for a very, very long time. But as this Information
age has come along, other nations get that R&D leads to job creation,
transformation, and certainly to security. So just since 1991, we have
seen China who was ninth in R&D--now, they are No. 2, and I am pretty
sure, at current trajectories, will end up being No. 1 sometime very,
very soon.
And so it is, you know, not everything about China, although many of
my colleagues here are going to discuss this is a China bill, I view it
as a bill about the future and making the investments in the future to
capture the economic opportunities. There are security issues here,
clearly national security issues here. There are clearly issues about a
supply chain and whether you can depend on a supply chain and whether,
if you have a concentration of an industry in one region of the world,
then are you really dependent on that one region of the world for that
particular product?
What happened to all of us in the last year and a half--and I am
saying now on a global basis--is the world community realized with
COVID, well, wait, supply chains really matter, product really matters,
where we get product in an emergency really matters, whether it does
what it says it does in an emergency really matters. And so all of
these issues about supply chains and who is building what and the
intricacies of it really got ripped open in the COVID debate, and now,
we are really, as the world community starts to look at this too, where
do we get our product, who is making it, is it made to the standard
that we want, is it secure? And obviously, you know, people have made
lots of decisions about supply chain based on just pure cost and
effectiveness of a product, but now, people are starting to realize
that it is way more complex, and it has led us to this current debate.
So again, why do we do this, why does America want to make an
investment in an innovation economy? Well, we don't have to go too far
to understand that from our past history. It enables competitiveness,
and if you just think about, you know these sectors-I will never forget
years ago we had somebody--this was in the '80s, visit Seattle, and
they said, Well, what is everybody going to do, make car phones and
computers? And in reality, there was a big decade or so of making what
then was supposed to be great technology of a car phone, and obviously,
we all know where we have now been with computers and operating systems
and how much it drives the economy of the future, but at the time when
we were seeing a transformation to that, people just thought, Well,
what are we all going to do? Is that what we are going to do? Well,
telecommunication, semiconductors, advanced materials, all were huge
things that enabled this competitiveness of our Nation-in automobiles,
in aviation, in the tech sector, in healthcare, in a whole variety of
things. And it drives our economy with this level of innovation.
The internet, just one example, is something we started working on in
the '60s, became a reality in the '90s, and today, it is $2.3 trillion
part of our national economy, and 12 percent of U.S. GDP. That is what
we got out of previous research. That is what we got out of saying we
are going to let scientists do basic research and figure out what they
think are the most important advances moving forward. The job growth,
millions of jobs, and national security today, we can see just from
this past week in a pipeline that was affected by a cyber attack, we
cannot afford to take our foot off of national security research and
development in the purposes of things like cyber security.
We have to continue to be a leader in this area of technology. It is
not as if you are not going to have intimidation of our Nation by
somebody maybe sticking the nose of a foreign sub in U.S. waters or
flying a spy plane over the United States, it is going to come in the
form of intimidation of our banking system, or pipelines, or other
senses of security and hacking. And so there is no doubt--no doubt--we
need to stay on top of the level of investment in national security. I
would say the underlying bill that we will be talking about next week
in detail relates to a very important aspect of national security, and
that is the area of semiconductors. We need to make an investment in
our competitiveness in semiconductors, and we need to make that
investment because it is going to be critical to our national security.
So let me talk about a few things that are in the bill, just so
people understand some of the priorities that Majority Leader Schumer
and Senator Young came up with as it relates to this legislation. As I
mentioned, it creates a new Tech Directorate in the office of NSF, the
National Science Foundation, so that it will be like a DARPA system,
that is, that they work with the private sector, they create technology
centers, they build partnerships between government and academia, they
support rapid technology demonstration, they advance the
competitiveness of the United States in important fields like
artificial intelligence quantum computing, biotechnology, and they
focus on these ideas, similar to how DARPA has done, where the
individuals involved are critical to the effort, that is to say, to get
the best and brightest minds who are working in these areas to be part
of this effort and concentration.
We also looked at and improved in this legislation the fact that
universities and academia provide a lot of research and development,
but oftentimes, don't even--in the academia world, people are focused
on publishing. Publishing their research, that
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is kind of how they get known, that is what they get basically almost
rewarded for at the university system, and you will be surprised how
little time they take to actually take that research, turn it into a
patent, and then turn it into a commercialized product.
So one thing we heard in our hearings is that we needed to give more
help to universities on tech transfer and patenting of information. Why
patenting? Because patenting helps us protect the science that we
already have developed. It helps us--say that somebody can't just take
that published science report and then go off in another country and
develop it because it is now protected under our U.S. law. So we feel
this is a very important effort, and we think that it also helps lead a
lot of research at universities to then be supported, developed,
exposed to the venture capital markets and thus actually helped turn
into commercialization.
So efforts at the University of Washington that specifically focused
on this, specifically hired somebody to come into the university and
kind of, if you will, shake the tree of the level of R&D that was being
done and say, What are we doing to actually patent this content, what
are we doing to actually transfer it into commercialization, had
outstanding results? Yes, it was a transformation of what our
universities do, but in the end, they came up with something like, just
in a few years, 20 companies that ended up becoming been, you know,
supported by venture capitalists and making it on to the markets. So we
are very excited that we will now, with this provision, be trying to
get more out of the research we do, by patenting it and doing tech
transfer.
Our colleagues Senators Young and Schumer also believe that
university research should continue to get investments, and that is the
major aspect of the provision here is to have the Tech Directorate work
on these 10 areas of expertise, work with selected universities around
the United States on this critical focus of technology. I mentioned
some of them: artificial intelligence, quantum computing,
biotechnology, and many others.
So the fact that the bill really is depending on our university
system, I think, is something that our colleagues should applaud and be
excited about. That chart that I showed at the beginning where
everybody is working together, this is just research dollars going to
the best universities in our Nation to continue to focus on this, but
now focus on it in partnership with experts in these sectors and with
industry so that we can actually get to a faster adoption rate and a
faster implementation into commercial markets. So I think we are
leaning in to our university system.
That is a good idea.
That is a good idea. What we are giving the university system,
though, is the tools, the tools to help accelerate that development.
And then, as I mentioned, we are also making a huge investment in STEM,
more than $10 billion into STEM education. The chart I showed before
talked about how we were going to do all these great things under
America COMPETES in STEM. We didn't quite get there. We didn't really
do that. I think this is like broadband. Everybody talks about it all
the time, we think we have solved it five times, and you still think,
Wait, I thought we solved broadband?
STEM is the same thing. You think we have funded STEM. We haven't
funded STEM. This represents a huge increase in our STEM education
budget, but I will just tell you, this is so that we can get the
researchers, the scientists, the fellows, if you will, at the higher
education level for STEM. We still need to go and build the pipeline at
our K-12 system so that we are putting more people into the pipeline.
But hopefully, with the STEM dollars here, we will be, if you will,
creating a new workforce for the innovation that we are trying to chase
with the investments of these dollars.
And we felt so strongly about this that we looked at the numbers and
we were just astonished. There are so few women and minorities in STEM
fields--so few. The underlying bill our colleagues, Senator Schumer and
Young, created a diversity office at, for the first time, over at NSF
so they can focus on this issue. We put more resources to it within
this STEM category so our colleagues and those at NSF could focus on
it. And we expect to really try to take a very aggressive role here.
That is what we heard from NSF in their research.
STEM education can't be a passive thing. It can't be just, We are
going to put some more dollars out for education. If we want to
diversify in the sciences, we have to have a very, very aggressive
approach. And so that aggressive approach means changing the faces of
those who do the education, changing some of the faces of people who do
investments, changing the dynamics of research. A lot of women were
hurt in the last COVID pandemic who were researchers because they were
juggling both taking care of their families or taking care of parents
and doing their research. And so they had extra strains on them that
made complexity to when they could get their research done.
So we know we have to think about STEM education from the perspective
of what are some of the challenges that face people going into those
fields. But no doubt, this underlying legislation before us will have a
big investment in that and continue NSF's leadership in trying to grow
a more aggressive workforce. So the bill also includes, I should say, a
few things about how one of our goals is to diversify innovation to
many different parts of the United States. The challenge there is, you
know, you are not going to sprinkle some dust on some magic words on
some region of the United States, and all of a sudden, something is
going to pop up-and nor do I personally expect it to. I always give the
example of Walla Walla, which is a real place, Walla Walla, WA. I had a
journalist ask once if that was a real place.
Yes, it is a real place. It is a great wine-making place. But
somebody might say, Walla Walla, WA, should be a research center. It
has got a university, an outstanding university, Whitman. People might
say it should be a tech hub or it should be a research center. Walla
Walla found its rightful place when research was done, and a university
professor at the University of Washington said, You know what, we can
grow wine grapes. That really wasn't that long ago. That was in the
1980s. He said we can grow grapes. We weren't growing grapes. Now, a
couple of decades later, we have over a thousand wineries in the State
of Washington. So not everybody is going to be a tech hub, but it
doesn't mean that you're not going to use science to the best and
highest use for a region of your State or the country.
It is about empowering. As Director Panchanathan, the head of NSF
says, it is about trying to have innovation everywhere, connected to
opportunity everywhere, connected to universities. The point is let's
build a better ecosystem that goes all throughout the United States so
more and more people can take advantage of technology and innovation.
So this is really, really important because we never know where the
next person is going to come from, who is going to play a critical role
in technology. And the more we build this infrastructure, the better.
So this allows money for regional technology hubs to help concentrate
in various parts of the country and expertise, more money for our
manufacturing institutes which help manufacturers all across the United
States focus on being competitive in their particular area, and it
supports $2.4 billion for manufacturing extension programs, which are
those things that really do work with, say, a particular sector like
automobiles or aviation or some other type of manufacturing and help
make them competitive. And as mentioned, it also, just like in the
former COMPETES Act bills, puts some money into DOE. In this case, it
puts about $17 billion into the Department of Energy so that its energy
innovation can move forward.
So let me talk for a second about this issue about national security
and where we are with semiconductors because I expect this will get a
bunch of focus next week as we talk about this legislation. The
underlying bill has about $52 billion of investment for the
semiconductor industry, so I am pretty sure people think, Well, wait,
this is a lot of money, but it is a very big sector.
It is essential to our defense, it is essential to navigation, it is
essential to
[[Page S3186]]
satellites, it is essential to healthcare, it is essential to consumer
products. And the United States has been a leader in this area. The
United States has been a leader in this area for a long time--or I
should say, was a leader in this area for a long time, when you think
of companies like Intel or others, even some of the companies that are
foreign investors who made huge footprints in the United States. But
the point is that we are no longer in this position--as this chart
shows, only 12 percent of a global supply.
A report recently done on the semiconductor industry by Boston
Consulting Group, I just want to read this one part: ``The U.S. has
been the long-standing global leader in semiconductors with 45% to 50%
share of the worldwide market''--45-percent to 50-percent share of the
worldwide market--``in the last 30 years. However, significant focus is
being placed on ending the U.S. share in semiconductor manufacturing
which now only stands at 12% installed capacity.'' This is a report
that I am pretty sure you could get online. That is the end of that
statement.
So we have gone from 45 percent to 50 percent, that is where we
started out, and over the last 30 years, now, we are down to 12
percent--12 percent. So I ask my colleagues, if you were 12 percent of
anything, how long would you be around to be competitive? How long
would you drive the supply chain? How long would you drive job growth?
How long would you continue to be competitive in this very, very
important sector that is important to all of these things?
And while I am somebody who supports continued growth of our global
economy because I think we build and make great things and we want
people to sell them to, this presents to us a very unique challenge,
the fact that something as critical to the information age as
semiconductors, we have gone from 40 percent to 50 percent down to 12
percent the question is what is going to happen next.
Well, the question of what is going to happen next is, if we don't
make this investment, very, very likely that that 12 percent is going
to, in the next several years, turn into 6 percent. It is going to turn
into 6 percent. So staying status quo right now, doing no investment,
it is very likely that 12 percent will turn into 6 percent, which means
people aren't going to want to locate their boundaries in the United
States. People aren't going to want to locate their research in the
United States--people aren't going to want to have their companies and
the supply chain and the workforce. Literally, this industry simply is
clusters, it is clusters. Seattle didn't get to be Seattle overnight.
Seattle didn't get to be the hub of the No. 1 STEM city in the United
States of America and certainly an epicenter of software and software
development overnight.
It took decades--decades. Literally, you know, even in the 1980s and
1990s, it wasn't that diversified. It has just been in the last 15
years that it has really diversified. But, yes, it took the work of the
University of Washington. Yes, it took the work of many companies being
there. Then it took the work of then people attracting a workforce who
would rather be there than, say, in Silicon Valley. And then it took
the efforts of universities to produce a workforce. Then it took
attracting venture capital.
Then once they got venture capital, then more companies wanted to
come there because then you have the entire ecosystem. You had
universities, you had venture capital, you had leading companies, you
had a workforce, and you had all of this stuff. Well, that is in
software, and software can continue to move forward, but if you didn't
have those things, you aren't going to be a cluster for semiconductors.
The United States of America--the cluster of semiconductor development
is going to be in Asia. It is going to be in Korea. It is going to be
in Taiwan, and it is going to be in China.
So we have to ask ourselves if we are only 6 percent of the supply in
the future and we can't really control the development and we lose our
edge in this and then basically we have to rely on a supply chain for
all the chips, you know, in the world, where is the supply chain that
we are going to rely on for the national security products and defense
technology and satellites and maybe some of these other consumer
products that then end up getting used for other purposes? That is what
this debate is about.
It is about that we went from 45 percent to 50 percent down to 12
percent. If we do nothing, we are going to 6 percent, and the epicenter
of a critical technology is going to move to Asia. So I personally want
to see us be successful in keeping a sector in the United States. I am
very proud that that same Boston report shows that we have 49 percent
of the aerospace manufacturing market in the United States. I am very
proud of that because we are an epicenter of that. Forty-nine percent
of the manufacturing market for aerospace is in the United States.
That represents, to my region, maybe 150,000 to 200,000 jobs in the
Northwest. To the United States, that is 2 million jobs--more than 2
million probably if you think about some of the other related sectors.
So being 49 percent of the supply chain in the United States for
aerospace really, really, really matters. And I don't want to see that
slip. You know, we have had a discussion about the fact that we have
the Jones Act.
Now, some of our colleagues might not support the Jones Act, but the
Jones Act is we decide, Well, we are not going to be all the
shipbuilding in the world. Shipbuilding is going to get built in other
places. But, oh, my gosh, we have to have enough shipbuilding in the
United States so if we are at war, products and services that we need
to support our military can be transported on U.S. vessels. That is why
we have the Jones Act because we decided that that sector was critical
enough to support.
And what we are saying here is that this sector is critical enough to
support, too. I don't know that we are ever going to be 49 percent like
aerospace manufacturing is--probably not, probably because it would
take a lot more money than we are talking about here--because the rest
of this world is chasing this market, too. They are chasing it fast and
furious. We have to ask ourselves, Do we want to end up at 6 percent,
or are we want going to try to reverse this trend and make an
investment and make it as smart as possible?
I thought we had one more chart, but I guess we don't. So I guess we
are back to this. Is this bill's investment worth taking the chance on
American know-how? Is it worth the history of our country and saying,
We have done a lot in research and development, and we know how to get
things done. When I think of some of the people in this story, I think
one of the guys on the GI Bill was one of the first contributors to
semiconductors. It is a guy who basically went to school on a GI Bill,
and if you think about the capital formation and capital markets we
have in the United States, it has contributed to allowing that
technology to move more rapidly. Our investment in higher education has
allowed this to move more rapidly.
So to my colleagues who aren't sure about this legislation or think
that it sounds like a lot or thinks that it sounds like, Oh, I don't
understand it, it is really quite simple. Do you want to make a bigger
investment in our contribution to American know-how with research and
development and let them compete to winning the next generation of
jobs? I do. I do.
I want to do that because I want to see what comes next. I think it
is one of the most exciting things about today and where we live today.
We are not in the agrarian age; we are not in the industrial age. We
are in the information age where everything can be created in the blink
of an eye and now distributed and transform our economy in such
significant ways. I want to see what comes next. But we can't do it by
passing legislation, authorizing things and then not appropriating the
money and then waking up in 10 years and finding that we are at the
lowest percentage of research and development to GDP in 60 years. That
is where we are, the lowest percentage. So we can't do that. We have to
make these investments and if we invest in American know-how, the rest
of this will take care of itself.
I yield the floor.
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