Endless Frontier Act--Resumed
Floor Speech
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Ms. CANTWELL. Mr. President, I call up amendment No. 1527.
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Ms. CANTWELL. Mr. President, we come to the floor today after a lot of hard work by the Commerce Committee to pass out the Endless Frontier bill last week--24 to 4. I know my colleagues from the committee will be out here to speak on this important legislation, as will the majority leader, Senator Schumer, who authored this important legislation, and our colleague from Indiana, Senator Young. We thank them for kick-starting what is a very important national discussion about how much we should be investing in research and development or what I would say is American ingenuity or, to put it a little more simply, I just say American know-how, because we are a nation of people who know how to innovate, who know how to use science to transform our economy, and we have done it over and over and over again.
I don't know. Maybe it came with, in getting in a boat and coming all the way across the ocean, you had to be an adventurer to begin with. If you had to settle the frontier, you had to be innovative in your own right. If you had to continue to expand our country, you had to have a great ability to take risks in order to calculate and move forward.
Yet, somehow, in the United States of America, we are blessed with ingenuity in our DNA. We as a nation are a nation that has figured out that if we continue to partner together with those great, creative minds, that the investment by both the public sector and the private sector and through our universities and now our community colleges and now research centers--that we can grow our economy, compete on an international level, and protect opportunity for future Americans.
So it has been many eras of innovation. When I think about it, I think about Thomas Edison and the light bulb, I obviously think about Henry Ford and automobiles, and in my part of the world, we think about Bill Boeing and aviation. Innovation is so much part of our DNA that I don't think we sometimes absorb the littler things that we might not know about.
People probably don't know about Nathan Stone Stubblefield, a Kentucky inventor who in 1902 demonstrated the first wireless transmission of communication using magnets. I know we have a big wireless industry today, but people probably don't know that, in 1902, a Kentucky inventor basically helped to turn the page on a new generation of technology. People probably don't know that a Louisiana professor, J. Lawrence Smith, in 1850, invented the microscope. Think about how much that led to the important discussions of science and healthcare for us as a nation. People probably don't know that, in Indiana, a State police officer invented the breathalyzer test, a gentleman named Robert Borkenstein, who basically just said, ``We don't know what is happening here,'' and he introduced and created the breathalyzer test.
That is what America is. America is the spirit of know-how and getting things done.
In fact, a report read:
Americans prioritize being a world leader in scientific achievements more than other global [communities].
That is from the Pew Research Center report by Cary Funk and several other authors last September.
The report goes on to read:
[S]even in ten Americans believe it is very important for the United States to be a leader in scientific achievements.
Clearly, what makes us different than other nations is that we are willing to put significant American tax dollars on the table to ensure that the national investment, the research in science, and the development of our ecosystem take place. That investment is matched with a good education system, capital formation, and, as I said, private sector investments in research and development. All of that has continued to make us the world leader in science and technology innovation. It also helps us create job growth here at home.
The question before us today is, How much research and development should our government be doing given how important th practical sciences and engineering are to the next generation of Americans?
We are here to discuss this proposal by Senators Schumer and Young, who, as I said, have been working on this concept for years because, no doubt, we have fallen off the pace--that is to say, the pace of scientific research investment at least as a percentage of the GDP.
Even though President Bush, in his second term, tried to signal the importance of this investment, he issued a report basically calling the American Competitiveness Initiative the leading world innovation agenda. That was in February of 2006.
In fact, at that time, President Bush said:
[T]he role of government is not to create wealth; the role of our government is to create an environment in which the entrepreneur can flourish, in which minds can expand, in which technologies can reach new frontiers.
George Bush had it right. He knew that this competitiveness issue was starting to challenge us from a competitive perspective, and he knew that we needed to make a bigger investment.
Unfortunately, with the two attempts that we had--the America COMPETES Act in 2007 and the America COMPETES Act in 2010--it really was a goal by us to basically double the NSF budget within a 7-year window. While we started out in the right direction, we had a huge economic downturn, and these goals were not met. If we had kept our promises to these science agencies, we would have invested $80 billion more in innovation investments over the last 14 years than we have done today.
The challenge that we face now is that, after decades of not living up to what had been outlined for America COMPETES, we now know that it is an environment in which we are facing much more aggressive competition. We have to think about the lack of investment that we did not realize in the context of how long it takes to do technology breakthroughs.
Look at just one example, the internet as we know it today. Literally, in the 1960s, the ARPANET was first talked about. It took us to the 1990s to really, with the University of Illinois and Marc Andreessen, to affect what we would later know as hypertext links and a browser. Today, what it means to us is more than $2 trillion annually to our economy.
When you think about the investments we are asking our colleagues to make today, we have to consider that, in fact, Federal dollars for R&D is near its lowest point in 60 years as a percentage of the GDP. I can't say that we are going to discover the next internet, but I can say that, if we continue to underinvest in this, we will be shortchanging generations of innovation.
There is no doubt that key investments in research and development in other parts of the world are certainly getting attention. Since 2000, research and development in China has grown by 1,600 percent; in Taiwan and Korea by 400 percent; while, in the United States, just by 150 percent. That is in a 20-year window of looking at this issue.
Americans believe that competition is good, and we believe that competition helps to drive innovation. So you won't find me as one on the floor who is obsessed about other nations as much as giving a perspective here about what the world market opportunity represents. If we are not making the investments here in science and technology and innovation, not only are we missing opportunities in our own country, we are missing opportunities around the globe. The rest of the Nation, in an information age, is not going to sit by idly, so we have to think about how we move ahead on critical technology that helps us in all sectors of our economy--how it helps us with supply chains and, certainly, how it helps us with national security.
What we are talking about here, with this bill proposed by our colleague Leader Schumer and Senator Young, is more than a doubling of NSF's budget in 5 years; it is the start of trying to catch up. It is also a $17 billion investment in energy innovation--a key sector of our economy in which we need to make continued transformation. That represents a 28-percent increase in some of the projects from the Office of Science and things like ARPA-E that could see investment.
What we are also investing in, which our colleagues were very adamant about and very convincing, is a new tech directorate--that is to say that our research is very good with basic and very good with applied but that we actually have to get better with the user implementation of our science and spur more innovation in a more rapid fashion. So we are investing, between this new tech directorate and tech hubs, nearly $39 billion to help stimulate the faster translation of our advancements into real innovation. This is something the committee thought long and hard about, and we took testimony from experts who have worked on innovation issues for many years.
In this bill, we also increase the protection of intellectual property from our universities.
We are helping our universities do better tech transfer but also protect their intellectual property. In an information age, when so much is published online, if other nations, hungry for development, can read our research and act an effect on it because we haven't patented it, then we need to do a better job of patenting our innovations and helping our universities.
Our universities are unbelievable research institutions, and helping them spend more time on tech transfer is something that we have done in the Pacific Northwest. A new program ushered in there literally led to 20 startups from research that had been done but just hadn't been translated into new areas.
We also are trying to help get more regional diversity to our research and investment dollars. There are about 25 States in our Nation that previously qualified for a program that says they should get a share of research dollars. This legislation says all the money being spent here, 20 percent of it should go to that, what is called EPSCoR efforts, which is expanding research and development into those States.
And for the first time, we will have over at NSF an office of diversity--an office to focus on the lack of women and minorities in science and to make real progress on this issue.
People see the chart behind me, and, yes, it is no mistake, the picture we picked.
The point here is that we know from NSF's own research that we can't be passive about this. Literally, the University of Washington got an NSF grant that helped them study why we are not making more progress with women and minorities in science and innovation, and they came back with: It can't be passive. You can't just put dollars on the table for STEM. You can't just put a few programs in place. It has to be an active approach to changing many aspects to the way we educate in science.
I am very proud of the University of Washington on this point because they made changes, and now of those who are teaching in what are considered STEM sciences at the University of Washington, 70 percent of them are women or people of color. So we have changed what the face of teaching science looks like at the University of Washington, and now we have to change some of the criteria and curriculum so that we can continue to attract more people. This bill is a very good step in that direction.
So what are we trying to achieve? We are trying to achieve what NSF Director Panchanathan is saying. He is saying that we need, in this next decade and in decades to come, innovation everywhere, tied to opportunity everywhere, tied to our universities. That is what we are trying to do in advancing this legislation.
We processed over 100 amendments in committee and a broad range of input from our colleagues. We will, I am sure, here in regular order process many more, but, hopefully, these amendments and more of the substance of this underlying bill we will go into in detail. We have to remember what our goals are with this investment--to stay competitive, to create future jobs, to help our economy by unleashing innovation, to protect our national security, and do what Americans know how to do best--that is, use that ingenuity to help create a better future.
I will see if my colleagues want to speak, but we will be coming back to expand on many other layers of this legislation. We will be back to talk about semiconductors. We will be back to talk about the new tech directorate. We will be back to talk about NASA funding. We will be back.
And that reminds me. If anybody at home is saying, ``Well, you know, OK, that was interesting; I don't really know about this; what is American innovation?'' just go and Google two things. You can either look at SpaceX rocket return, which they did in 2015, or Blue Origin. In both of those--the New Shepherd and the Falcon, two different approaches--there are literally engineers who said: If we are going to go to space, if we are going to go to the Moon, if we are going back to the Moon and go to Mars, we need to figure out how to have returnable rockets.
Just go Google those two clips, and you will see alive and well the spirit of American ingenuity when those engineers see that rocket returning from outer space and reland because they have pulled off an incredible achievement. You will see jubilant joy and excitement over that accomplishment.
I guarantee you, we will not see everything that this bill will unleash, but I guarantee you it will unleash things that will deliver that kind of excitement for Americans in the future, and we will have to be very thankful that this Congress set the record straight on the level of investment we need to achieve to keep us competitive.
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