Usica

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Ms. CANTWELL. Madam President, I come to the floor to talk about something that is impacting consumers every day, and that is our supply chain shortage as it relates to semiconductors, or abbreviated here as ``chips.''

I can't emphasize how important this issue is to Americans. It is affecting Americans who can't buy a used car. There is a 41-percent increase over what they would have normally been able to buy. It is really impacting Americans. Why? Because Americans can't get new cars. They can't get new cars because they don't have semiconductors. It is impacting our transportation sector that ships goods. It is affecting our ability on national security. It is affecting our communication systems.

I know that a year ago, we passed this legislation out of the Senate. I am pretty sure that if we would have passed the funding a year ago out of the U.S. Senate and it would have been adopted and gone to the President's desk, we would be in a different supply chain issue today.

I want to ask my colleagues to move quickly at going to conference on this legislation. Reporting indicates that semiconductor shortages may have cost the United States a full percent of economic input-output in 2021. Other reports highlight the fact that the semiconductor shortage is driving inflation. Yet our colleagues don't want to help get us to conference. When you don't have chips, you don't have trucks to drive.

We have an opportunity to invest in American workers and to show international leadership and innovation by going to conference and passing this Innovation and Competition Act.

I want to thank Senator Schumer and Senator Young for their work in a bipartisan fashion to get this legislation before us, to help us move it through the process, and now to help us deliver on what is impacting Americans--critical supply chain shortages.

My colleagues have long spoken about the need to reshore our semiconductor supply chain. That is why, when we passed this bill a year ago, we had strong bipartisan support, and we have continued to grow the support for this action.

We are here today, though, to say that if we continue to delay this issue, the investment is going to go somewhere else; that is, companies are trying to figure out how to deal with the shortage. They have a shortage; they want to get going on it. They know that not only is the shortage here today, but we have to double and triple the amount of chip fabrication that we need to do for the future economy. The longer that we don't get at that task, the more this supply chain issue is going to be exacerbated. So our colleagues need to sign up for helping America with a critical supply chain shortage issue and come help us deal with this issue.

I have spoken many times about the importance of semiconductors. We know that the cost of a used car has risen 41 percent since the semiconductor shortage, bringing them almost to the price of a new car. I have heard so many stories from my constituents about this. They just need to get to work. But all of a sudden, going and trying to find a used car or repair their car because they can't afford to get a new or a used car--all of this has had a huge impact. Yet people here don't want to solve that problem of moving forward.

The lack of security in the semiconductor supply chain isn't just affecting automotive industries; it is part of critical agricultural equipment. We are hearing stories now about agricultural equipment that had a chip in it, something has happened, and now you can't fix or replace that because there are no chips to do so. So, literally, our agricultural production is being slowed down, and they may miss growing season because they don't have the semiconductors.

All of these industries are being impacted.

In December of this past year, 59 different company CEOs--Apple, Cisco, Ford, GE Healthcare, and many others--wrote to Congress saying that they supported this important investment in design and research of manufacturing of semiconductors, and they pointed to the domestic vulnerability of our supply chain as the main reason to get this done. They knew that our domestic capabilities were sagging.

Companies like John Deere and other precision agriculture equipment companies depend on those chips to maximize the yield in the field so that our farmers can be fed.

Chip shortages create delays of 40 weeks or more for new equipment and parts needed to repair those of farmers and ranchers and those working in our important agriculture sector.

About two-thirds of the medical technology companies have semiconductors in over half of their products, like ventilators, respirators, and pacemakers. These medtech companies need mature chip technologies and compete with already impacted automotive and industrial sectors. They know what the shortage is about, and yet we continue to delay to go to conference.

If you care about anything in the supply chain and the shortages, then help us go to conference and get this legislation. Medical tech component delays of 1 year or more have been reported. Knowing the hard-fought experiences of the pandemic, we need to have this issue with our healthcare system addressed.

Early on in the pandemic, the aviation industry avoided supply chain experiences that we now see with the autos, and they know how much the safety depends on those chips. But now airlines are having to upgrade and modernize, and they also are seeing the chip shortage. This is coming from lots of different people in the aviation sector.

Space X Starlink, which is a satellite internet service provider, is trying to provide internet service to underserved areas and beneficiaries of some of the investments that we just made in broadband to the very, very hard-to-serve remote areas of our Nation. They say that the semiconductor chip shortage had impacted their ability to fulfill orders.

What more do my colleagues need to know?

We have a supply chain crisis. We have a chip shortage. And now people want to continue to delay going to conference and getting this done.

The aerospace and defense industries are important to our national defense, and they are impacted. In February, the Department of Defense published a report on our vulnerabilities. They said:

[The] decline in domestic manufacturing represents a substantive security and economic threat for the United States and many [of our] allied nations.

And yet people want to delay.

They also said that U.S. companies are finding it so expensive to build leading-edge chips that they are choosing not to do so, especially in face of the fact they can get foreign subsidies. It is 30 or 40 percent cheaper to build a semiconductor fabrication facility in Asia than it is in the United States. And this is one of the things, I think, our colleagues don't understand; that is, how expensive these facilities are, in the billions of dollars to get done, in the capital investment.

And I know some of my colleagues are concerned that ``Why should we help in this supply chain crisis?'' Well, we know that the United States wants to be a leader in this technology for our own national security issues. As one of my own constituents said, ``if there is a reason we support agriculture for food security, we should support chips for national security.'' I couldn't agree more.

I am not going to see the most advanced chips made by somebody else, threatening us at some point in time that they won't give us the chips that we need for the operations of our economy. We need to build this equipment now, and we need to move forward. American companies know that semiconductor supply chains are vital and that reshoring in the United States now--as we look at how supply chains due to COVID, now due to Ukraine--have caused national security issues. So these companies understand that being more secure by having the supply chain in the United States should be a national priority.

It should have strong bipartisan support. We have companies trying to invest, but they also are saying: Is this legislation really going to get done?

The fact that it was basically passed out of the Senate and now we are delaying in tactics to go to conference is frustrating.

Earlier this year, Intel announced they were investing $20 billion in Ohio to build semiconductor fabrication facilities. The CEO of Intel testified before the Commerce Committee about the importance of this investment and the importance of this underlying passage of legislation.

He testified that this investment of $20 billion could soon become as big as $100 billion, but not if we don't pass this legislation.

GlobalFoundries announced that it would invest billions of dollars in semiconductor manufacturing equipment in places in the northeast part of the United States, but they too are contingent upon us passing this legislation.

When I think about the workforce that is going to be needed to produce this kind of product or the workforce that is going to be needed in cleaner sources of energy, I know that passing this legislation is key to getting the training and skilling of that workforce underway, right now, as soon as possible.

There is one reason that Apple, one of the largest sellers of smart phones in the world, announced last year that they would have to bring back some of their production to the United States. It is because the government worked to bring leading-edge semiconductor manufacturing into Arizona.

This is about securing leadership in innovation. It is about this ``ah-ha'' moment that everybody around the world has seen, because of COVID and Ukraine, that the security of doing this needs to be done now and invested in the United States.

But some people are still dragging their feet. Congress needs to act now and act swiftly to go to conference, to reconcile these differences, and support this supply chain crisis that is affecting our economy.

Every day that we wait, our companies, our manufacturers, our universities, our workforce are questioning whether we are going to invest in the United States of America. The CEO of Intel told us that Europe has put $49 billion in a chips package, and they had the money available before we had our legislation done. That is right.

People listened to this issue of bringing, for more secure reasons, investment out of Asia and back to the United States, but, yes, Europe listened and went and got the money and got the bill done. That is why some people have said: We are not going to be buying chips in U.S. dollars. We will be buying them in euros.

This is so important. We must get this legislation done. Companies may test their ideas in Europe. Maybe the R&D is in Europe. But is that what we want? We want to be the leaders of this. There is an entire ecosystem in an information age that is about the next generation of advanced chips that leads to the next advanced manufacturing.

If you want our auto makers, if you want our truck makers, if you want the communications technology and the defense people to also have that ecosystem, you have to send this price signal now--that the Congress, the House and Senate, are serious about resolving this issue.

This is not a summertime issue. It is not an after-the-November- election issue. It is a now issue. Show the American consumer that you have concern for their costs and shortages that are plaguing them in all aspects of their lives and get an agreement, and let's go to conference and show Americans that we can work on a bipartisan basis to address the supply chain crisis.

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