Executive Session

Floor Speech

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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. 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.
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