[Congressional Record Volume 168, Number 55 (Tuesday, March 29, 2022)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1839-S1840]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                     NOMINATION OF ALVARO M. BEDOYA

  Ms. CANTWELL. Madam President, I thank the leader for mentioning the 
move to have a vote on Alvaro Bedoya to be Commissioner of the Federal 
Trade Commission. This is such an important task, and I know that the 
leader probably knows that Mr. Bedoya hails from New York, but it also 
must be a very proud moment for him as well.
  The FTC is the security guard for America's consumers. If a company 
is lying to its customers about their products and what they can do or 
teaming up with competitors to keep prices high, the FTC is the 
policeman on the beat, saying those things are not allowed here.
  Mr. SCHUMER. Would the Senator from Washington yield for a minute?
  Ms. CANTWELL. Yes.
  Mr. SCHUMER. I want to thank the Senator for her leadership on this 
issue.
  We all know that we have seen prices go way up. We also all suspect 
that a lot of it is due to different kinds of gouging and manipulation. 
The FTC is

[[Page S1840]]

about the best Agency to look for this, but without Mr. Bedoya on the 
FTC, the chair and the members would be handicapped in moving that 
forward. This is a really important motion to discharge.
  I hope anyone who cares about inflation and rising prices and 
collusion and all kinds of manipulation to prevent those prices from 
coming back down should be voting for this motion to discharge and the 
nomination.
  Once again, the Senator from Washington has led the way on this 
issue, and I salute her. This is a very, very important motion to 
discharge.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Washington.
  Ms. CANTWELL. Madam President, I thank the majority leader for that 
concise documentation of what really the FTC is about. It is about 
getting somebody on there who is going to fight to protect consumers on 
issues.
  We know that we need the FTC now more than ever. We needed their 
muscle during the COVID pandemic, as opportunistic scammers stole $5.9 
billion out of the pockets of Americans, and that is just the reported 
amount. That doesn't include people who never knew that they were 
scammed or were too embarrassed to report what happened.
  So Congress, on a bipartisan basis, pumped up the FTC's power, and at 
the end of 2020, we passed the COVID-19 Consumer Protection Act to help 
root out promoters of dangerous, fake treatments and cures.
  Second, we gave the FTC $30 million in the American Rescue Plan to 
promote and protect Americans against scams that targeted their COVID 
stimulus payments.
  Last year, we confirmed the FTC Chair, Lina Khan, with support from 
21 Republicans in this body, and today we are talking about the next 
important step in protecting consumers, and that is moving to confirm 
Mr. Bedoya to fill the last seat on the Federal Trade Commission.
  Mr. Bedoya has the right experience we need to tackle the problems 
that we are facing right now--some of the most complicated and pressing 
issues regarding how to protect our privacy and protect children's 
online privacy. I say that because I heard comments from my colleague 
about Mr. Bedoya and the fact that he issued various tweets about this 
or that in his time in the private sector.
  I guarantee you that if we voted for people based on what their 
tweets are, there would be a lot of people who wouldn't be approved at 
all, including some of the people who have been through this process.
  Mr. Bedoya served as the chief counsel of the U.S. Senate Judiciary 
Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and Law. So I would say that as it 
relates to the FTC's ability to do something about reining in some of 
the bad practices that we see online, I think he is a very qualified 
person and individual.
  Mr. Bedoya graduated summa cum laude from Harvard and holds a law 
degree from Yale, where he served on the Yale Law Journal and received 
the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans.
  So I think that Mr. Bedoya is a person who has dug in on a variety of 
issues and has the experience and leadership in one of the most 
critical areas--technology--that the FTC is dealing with today.
  So I encourage my colleagues to support him. That is why he is 
supported by the current Republican FTC Commissioners. They also 
support his nomination. They say they recognize his willingness and 
expertise and ability to reach across the aisle and find common ground 
on solutions that work for people.
  It is that skill set that we are looking for at the FTC to help hard-
working Americans get a fair shake in the marketplace, whether that is 
at the pharmacy, the gas pump, or online.
  And I know that as a proud immigrant, Mr. Bedoya will also use his 
role to expand the FTC's work in underserved communities.
  The FTC needs to be able to protect all Americans, and to accomplish 
that, we need to have a Commission that is not deadlocked now but has 
somebody like Mr. Bedoya, who can help us move ahead on these issues.
  He has experience working, as I said, in the Judiciary Committee. In 
2009, he cofounded the Esperanza Education Fund, an immigration status-
blind college scholarship for immigrant students, and has been working 
on various issues within the community.
  Right now, we need an FTC that is going to look at market systems and 
make sure there is fair competition to make sure that consumers are 
protected and that there is a level playing field.
  I think his experience here on the Hill lets him understand exactly 
what that is. He has testified before Congress and State legislatures 
and appeared in numbers of publications about these critical issues on 
privacy and on the online world in which we need to have more 
oversight.
  So, finally, Mr. Bedoya's experience on, as I said, data privacy 
specifically, the internet and making it a safe place for children--he 
exposed racial bias in facial recognition software, helped to protect 
innocent people from prosecution and companies that have already 
collected data on millions of Americans. We need that kind of expertise 
that Mr. Bedoya knows and understands how we are using that today and 
what we can do to better protect the American consumer.
  I hope that my colleagues will join us to approve and move quickly to 
discharge the committee of Alvaro Bedoya's nomination to be a 
Commissioner of the FTC and support his nomination as we get this to 
the Senate floor.
  I yield the floor.

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