Department of the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2018

Floor Speech

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Mr. Chairman, my amendment highlights the need to think about our future workforce and how it will change because of technology and to encourage the Bureau of Labor Statistics to accept a wider and more forward-looking range of inputs into its range of projections for its workforce of the future.

I co-chair the New Democrat Coalition Future of Work Task Force with my colleagues, Congressman Seth Moulton and Congressman Jared Polis. Congressman Jim Himes, the chair of the New Dem Coalition, has been active in the task force work and joins me in cosponsoring this amendment today.

Over the course of several months, the task force has held a series of forums to hear from experts on various areas that will require this body's attention in the coming years and decades. We have heard from historians, economists, and policy experts about how technological revolutions of the past have impacted social and political institutions and how lessons from those experiences and from current conditions can help us prepare for the future.

We have also heard from labor and business leaders who are pioneering the way they attract talent, retain their services, and develop skills for the increasingly rapidly change economy. It is nearly unanimous among our experts that the economy will change significantly and change faster, but it is less clear just how quickly the workforce will need to adapt.

For decades, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has been doing excellent and invaluable work to track our labor trends, and its projections have been proven very reliable and useful--to business and to our educators--in times of slower and relatively predictable technological development.

However, they are based on historical data and historical trends, and some of the anticipated changes in technology--such as robotics, self- driving vehicles, and artificial intelligence--could fundamentally change our economy in ways that haven't been seen before. So, in its current form, the way the Bureau calculates and estimates future development of the workforce may not be able to capture the dramatic changes that our future holds.

One panel convened by the task force suggested that it would be impossible to do projections in any single way to predict the workforce, but that, with additional resources, the Bureau of Labor Statistics could model for a variety of scenarios of different rates of technological change in different areas.

My amendment increases the BLS account by a dollar and decreases it by a dollar, and I intend it to mean that the BLS should submit to Congress an estimate of the resources it would need to make a range of forward-looking estimates, including consultation with those industries that are driving this rapid technological change and those that will be affected by that change to account for the increasing rate of technological job displacement.

It is hard to estimate by backward-looking extrapolations how the changes from self-driving cars and vehicles or artificial intelligence will affect the real jobs of the future.

Technological changes in the workforce are not new. The industrial revolution and the automation of agriculture transformed the way work was performed in our country and significantly improved, on the whole, our standard of living over time.

The results have not been uniform for all communities and all populations. Those transformations typically played out over generations, so our social and political institutions had ample time to respond. But today, development and deployment of technology is far more rapid, and Congress, business, and our educational system need the best possible data to evaluate policy proposals and to produce the workforce training needed for future employees and to develop educational curricula to ensure that our economy works for everyone.

Like in the industrial revolution, technological development presents the opportunity for a greatly improved standard of living, but it will also bring challenges to our workforce. Businesses, communities, and the government must work together.

Additional considerations in the projections made by the BLS will help Congress to anticipate these changes and to weigh proposed solutions. Objective projections based on empirical evidence are crucial to a debate that will be based on our different views of the role of government and its relationship with market forces. Those are the differences that should shape our ideas for helping Americans enjoy prosperous and full lives in the future.

I urge my colleagues to join me and vote ``yes'' on my amendment to begin to establish a range of scenarios for the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the future world that we will inhabit.

Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

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