America Creating Opportunities for Manufacturing, Pre-Eminence in

Floor Speech

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Ms. CANTWELL. Madam President, I come to the floor tonight happy that the Senate is going to move forward on substituting what is originally the Senate-passed Schumer-Young bill on the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act. That is what we are going to be voting on and then sending that over to the House of Representatives to basically convey that that is our desire here in the Senate and, hopefully, get this process of going to conference and a response back from the House of Representatives so we can move forward on reinvigorating America's supply chain.

Madam President, I know you know how important this is, but the Senate bill, again, brought to us by Senators Schumer and Young, I think, was quite prescient on the problems that we were going to face as it relates to supply chains. But I don't think that everybody really understands that the Senate position is really about the fact that we need to have technology transfer happen at a faster rate; that other countries, because the United States has been such a prolific publisher of information and content, actually have taken that content and information and been able to turn it into actual commercial applications.

So in the United States we want to do something to create, while still protecting NSF, the National Science Foundation, on basic research and advanced research and the Department of Energy on research, and also work faster at translating the successes of our science into true application and translating that into helping our manufacturers here in the United States of America.

This is so important because we know that in various sectors of our economy, we are seeing much of the supply chain controlled in other parts of the world. We see that Asia now controls much of the supply chain for pharmaceuticals.

We are having a big debate about how we are going to drive down the cost of pharmaceuticals. We are going to invest here in the United States, I think, in more biotechnology and synthetic biology to find new ways to discover and make lifesaving drugs, and it is very important that we do that research here.

In the Senate bill, we are very focused on: In what areas do we want to do faster translational science to help bring the supply chain back to the United States?

As we talked last week, we see that Taiwan makes more than 90 percent of the world's leading-edge chips which drive our national security and our economic security, and we want to do the research here in the United States through the acceleration with the Tech Directorate to invent the next generation of chips and build them here domestically.

And we have heard about the risk of Americans falling behind on advanced communications, like 5G or 6G, and so we have ideas here about how to translate that into faster deployment of technology that could help our manufacturing base.

So I am actually very excited about all of that innovation because if we all work together, we collaborate, we have done the R&D, and we actually work harder at getting it translated, I think there are lots of solutions that we can put before our manufacturers here to help them with their competitiveness on a worldwide basis.

That is what the Tech Directorate does. The Manufacturing USA Institutes, the technology hubs, and the technology centers are all parts of this legislation that would help us move technology out into the world at a faster pace and work collaboratively to solve these problems that, again, would bring the manufacturing and the supply chain back into the United States of America.

I get really excited about the issues related to the automobile sector and the grid. Coming from a State that has had cheap electricity for a long time, it has built our economy over and over and over again; that is, that people want to locate there because the electricity is so affordable.

It is one of the reasons why we have one of the highest deployments of electric vehicles in the country, because it really only costs you about a dollar a gallon to fill up versus the rising, well-above $4 a gallon that we are seeing today.

So people are very excited about an electricity grid and a supply chain here in the United States that would build here the battery technology, implement this faster integration into our economy, and get a grid that works and enables that kind of electrification of the transportation sector.

I guarantee you the United States could be world leaders in the deployment of this if we get this legislation passed and we continue to make investments in the National Science Foundation and the Tech Directorate.

Now, I know some of our colleagues have been concerned that this somehow takes away from the National Science Foundation's focus on basic research. I would tell you that it does both. The Senate bill that we will be voting on does both. It basically continues to invest in the NSF in their traditional role and also gets this idea of a Tech Directorate which focuses on the translational science--again, to help us get more of the supply chain back in the United States. It does both.

This underlying bill, also, as I said, is the Senate version which made the same investment in the Department of Energy, which was so important because the Department of Energy plays such an important aspect in this.

It also does something that my colleague Senator Wicker and I and others worked on, which is trying to make sure that we are getting more technology development in a variety of places; that is, that we are building on STEM and the amount of investment in STEM education--the fact that we want to have innovation everywhere so that opportunity is also anywhere.

And we also make more investments in the idea of our EPSCoR Program, which is helping areas of the United States that may not have as much tech investment, to continue to increase the investment in their institutions.

I hope this is something my colleagues understand, that this is about growing the capacity for us to innovate in many different parts of the United States and across many different sectors of our economy and with increasing the capacity of women and minorities to also participate in the kinds of programs that will help America be competitive.

So I encourage my colleagues to support the underlying Senate bill. Help us get it moved forward and to also send this over on the second vote to the House and continue the process to get us to real negotiations and get us working on these supply chain issues.

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