Energy and Water Development and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2024

Floor Speech

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Mr. NORMAN. Mr. Chair, what my amendment does is it eliminates funding to the tune of $470 million for ARPA-E, Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy; $470 million.

What this Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy is designed to fund are high-risk, high-reward projects in which the private sector would never invest in.

Since it is taxpayers' money, what this proposed amendment does is to cut funding because it doesn't do the job that the dollars that they expended it to.

The problem is that ARPA-E does not always seem to follow its own guidelines. The Federal Government has awarded several ARPA-E grants to companies and projects that are neither high risk nor something that private industry cannot support. In other words, they don't need the crutch.

These problems with ARPA-E were identified by the GAO, the Department of Energy Office of Inspector General, and the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee.

Of the 44 small- and medium-sized companies that received an ARPA award, the GAO found that 18 had previously received private-sector investments for similar technology. It is a duplicate.

The GAO found that 12 of those 18 companies plan to use ARPA-E funding to either advance or accelerate prior funded projects.

I am in the real estate business. That is like paying me double to build you a house or a shopping center. How much sense does that make? It doesn't.

Mr. Chair, in your world, it pays double to do one surgery. How does that work out? It is taxpayers' money. It should never have been funded in the first place.

High-risk, high-reward programs are not necessary, especially when there is a bias to fund technologies that have already received funding to make the program appear on the surface successful. Congress should restructure the DOE to conduct the basic research that the private sector would never undertake and create a system that allows the private sector, using private funds, to tap into that research and commercialize it. Federal labs should allow basic research to reach the market organically.

Until that happens, we should defund ARPA-E, just as the Trump administration did. The market is the best place to determine the merit of an investment and whether it is a good or a bad investment. If a project cannot find private support, it is a good indicator of its prospects for success. Certainly, a lack of private investors alone does not justify using taxpayers' money to support a project.

Indeed, technologies that lose private financing as they move closer to commercialization are likely the worst bets for taxpayers' money, since professional investors have already determined them to be losers.

What you find out on grants such as this, if you really analyze the line items, it goes to overhead. What is overhead?

That is paying salaries of people with jobs that you can't have an outcome for. I have seen these. That is why a lot of the grants that are written are vague; they can use the money wherever. This isn't like it is a $50,000 investment, it is $470 million.

At the time when our growing national debt has surpassed $33 trillion, we cannot continue to use taxpayers' dollars to fund this useless research.

I think the last figure I heard one of my colleagues mention, that we are paying $20,400 per second in interest on the $33 trillion. That is just the interest, not counting the principal.

As I mentioned, ARPA-E does not follow its guidelines. It is loosely interpreted. They can use the money wherever they want. My question is: Why ARPA-E funding and not private capital?

If it is that good of a project, let the private sector invest in it. You have sharp investors that know what they are doing, they could determine whether they want to risk their capital.

In short, this project should be defunded. It is at a time we can't afford it. I would urge the cut of this $470 million project, for something that yields no benefit to the taxpayers, and I urge adoption.

Mr. Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.

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Mr. NORMAN. Mr. Chair, I demand a recorded vote.

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