Bring Steel Plants Back to America

Floor Speech

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Mr. KHANNA. Mr. Speaker, recently I traveled to Lordstown, Ohio, in Ashtabula County, Ohio; Johnstown, Pennsylvania; and Farrell, Pennsylvania. I saw steel mill after steel mill shut down, including in Cleveland, in Detroit, and in Downriver, Michigan.

Of the world's top 15 steel companies, China has 9 and the United States of America doesn't have a single one. How did we let this happen as a country? How did we decimate American steel, costing community after community so many good jobs, hurting urban centers with large African-American working populations, and hurting factory towns across America? This was a colossal mistake.

In the 1950s, we used to make over 50 percent of the world's steel. That is down to 2 or 3 percent. Today, China makes nearly 50 percent of the world's steel.

This is a national security issue if we ever have to mobilize for our military. This is a climate issue. China's steel puts three times the emissions into the atmosphere than American steel does because we use electric arc furnaces and recycled material, unlike the blast furnaces that China uses.

It is time for America to have a strategy to bring modern steel production back home. We can make steel that is cleaner and of higher quality; and we can revitalize towns like Johnstown, Pennsylvania; Lordstown, Ohio; Akron, Ohio; and Downriver, Michigan, if we build these modern steel plants.

I am going to be working with my colleagues on a bipartisan basis to introduce a modern steel act to say that the government should partner with our steel unions and with our steel companies to build modern steel in the United States of America.

This will be clean steel with either hydrogen or electric arc furnaces. This will create good-paying jobs. This will be good for national security, and this will ensure that America leads in steel in the 21st century, not China.

Mr. Speaker, we made a big, big error in the United States of America, losing our lead in domestic production. It is time for our country to become a manufacturing superpower again. It is time to begin that with modern steel.

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