Endless Frontier Act-- resumed
Floor Speech
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Mr. RUBIO. Madam President, I call up the Rubio amendment 1802 to the Cantwell amendment 1527.
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Mr. RUBIO. Madam President, I ask that the reading of the amendment be dispensed with.
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Mr. RUBIO. Madam President, I want to take a moment to speak on my amendment, and I won't take very long.
First of all, really, my comments are geared toward somebody who might be watching or will maybe watch a video of this later because usually there aren't a lot of mysteries here on the floor of Senate. And when these amendments come up, everybody kind of knows the way it is going to go. And this amendment that I am about to put forward here is probably not going to pass. I am pretty certain it won't or we wouldn't have gotten a vote on it. That is just the way it is.
But that is OK because--it is not OK, but it is OK in the sense that I still want to take this opportunity to talk about this and have a vote on it.
Let me just say this: If you go back 2, 3 years, I believe not the first but one of the first people here who talked about the need to do what much of this bill does was me. I have been talking now for 2 or 3 years about the need for the American Government to step forward and partner with the private sector. I have been talking about the need for industrial policy.
You can't compete with a nation-state if the nation-state is not involved in the competition. And that is what we are involved in--a nation-state competition. And it does involve a massive amount of Chinese investment in research and development.
And we have to step up to the plate. The days of believing that on some of these items the private market on its own will solve it, it is not possible at this scale and scope.
I point to Operation Warp Speed. Would the private market have eventually given us a vaccine? It would have. But we needed it now. We stepped forward. We provided the money. The private sector responded. And today we are standing around here with no masks on, and much of the country is getting back to normal because we have vaccines.
You could criticize a lot of things about what America did in the beginning of the pandemic, but we have done vaccines better than anyone in the world, and that would not have been possible without industrial policy, which is the partnership of government and business to solve an urgent crisis of a national concern.
Well, when it comes to research, development, technology, that is perhaps the single greatest requirement before us today in terms of the future. The 21st century is going to be defined by this definition between China--this competition between China and the United States. And it is a competition we simply cannot win unless we step forward and match it.
But another part of the Chinese approach to this is not simply to invest but to steal. As many of you know, I have been on the Intelligence Committee now for 10 years. I was acting chairman of it for a number of months and now the vice chairman in a committee that I think--maybe I am prejudiced in this view, but I think it is the best functioning committee here. I am sure some would disagree. But I think we do a lot of good work.
And it comes on topic--and I spend a lot of time reading all of the intelligence every single day. Let me just describe my experiences over the last few years. It is a horror show.
The Chinese are stealing our intellectual property. And it is not just, oh, they reverse engineered someone's software; they steal the money the taxpayers are investing in basic research and development.
We have a graph here. I have it up. The print is too small to see on camera, but I will describe it to you. Here is how they operate, use our universities. They prioritize--they steal priority technologies, leverage international openness of U.S. markets, universities, and institutes. They play scientists, researchers in universities, U.S. National Labs, for access to emerging and foundational research and access to dual-use export control technologies.
It goes on to say, Chinese state-owned enterprises' front and shell companies partner with universities for access to IP, research data, technology, penetrate U.S. company supply chains. This is their strategy.
Now, we were about to put $200 billion of American taxpayer money in more of that, in more of those activities. And you don't think that they are going to do all of that against us? They are. And so it is incumbent upon us to make sure that we have in place safeguards so they cannot keep doing this to us.
What is the point of putting up $200 billion of American public taxpayer money on pursuing all of this research if we are going to allow the Chinese to steal it? Nobody here wants them to steal it.
And I know there have been improvements done in terms of upping the security. What I want you to understand is that this is not a minor security threat. This is the No. 1 priority of Chinese intelligence. This is their No. 1 priority. This is what all of their agencies and all of their government is geared toward doing. And we are going to put all this money in there and hope that the safeguards we put in place are going to work.
I hope they do. But what if they don't? What if a year from now we find out, or you are going to read in an article 2 years from now, whatever, that says: The Chinese have stolen a quarter--25, 30 percent of the IP developed by the money that has been put forward in the bill that was passed? Then we are all going to feel pretty stupid around here.
That is the only thing I am aiming at. All I am asking in this amendment is that, at least in the initial stages of this program, that the Director of National Intelligence, the DNI, the DNI's office, and the FBI have an opportunity to review these grants to ensure that they do not have embedded, in the place we are giving the money to, a scientist, a researcher at one of these National Labs or that there isn't some shell company involved.
Now, I know the argument. I have heard the argument against it from those who want to do the research. This is going to slow it down. It is.
TSA slows down our ability to get on airplanes. Who wants to get rid of TSA? Cyber security slows down our ability to access our networks. But we need more of it, not less. Yes, security becomes burdensome. It slows things down. But I would rather do it slow or slower and own it than faster and have them steal it. And that is what this amendment does.
I don't know what the opposition to it is other than I understand that there are a lot who just want to get their hands on this money, and they want to get going very quickly. That is what they want to do, and that is great. That is what researchers want to do. They want to move fast. We need them to move fast. But our job is different. Our job is to see the problem holistically and understand, let's move as fast as we can without allowing the Chinese to steal it
So, look, I am asking everyone to vote against this motion to table because, frankly, I think we expose ourselves to a vulnerability. We are placing the faith that this existing system we have, and whatever new one we are starting up, is going to be able to withstand the force of the intelligence agencies of an entire nation-state and their No. 1 objective, and that is how can we get our hands on whatever these $200 billion are helping to innovate.
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