[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

[[Page S3185]]

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.

                          ____________________