OFFICIALS LEGISLATION INTEREST GROUPS PUBLIC STATEMENTS COMMITTEES VETOES

Accelerating Networking, Cyberinfrastructure, and Hardware for Oceanic Research Act

Floor Speech

Date: Sept. 23, 2024
Location: Washington, DC

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Ms. LOFGREN. Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of the ANCHOR Act and yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, the U.S. Academic Research Fleet is made up of an impressive array of marine research assets consisting of large and small oceanographic vessels, sophisticated submersibles, and high-tech autonomous vehicles.

More impressive is the invaluable research conducted by this fleet. It supports critical ocean environmental science that leads to a deeper understanding of our Earth system, improved and continuous assessments of our Nation's marine natural resources, and serves national security interests as well.

This diverse fleet is managed and operated by a diverse group that includes NSF, the Office of Naval Research, Federal research labs, and U.S. universities. These various entities bring with them assorted cyber infrastructure and networking challenges and vulnerabilities as well. This technological struggle has had real detrimental impacts, has hindered the production of needed scientific outputs, and has placed important expensive projects at risk.

This legislation directs NSF to collaborate with other appropriate agencies and ARF operators on the creation of a networking and cybersecurity improvement plan that could address these challenges by assessing equipment and personnel costs and time requirements for upgrading the fleet and developing a proposal for funding these upgrades.

The Senate companion to this bill, led by California's own Senators Padilla and Sullivan, recently passed out of the Senate Commerce Committee, so we have a real opportunity to get this bill passed and begin the process of closing this unfortunate gap so that the science gets done.

I thank the bill's sponsors, Mr. Mike Garcia and Ms. Stevens, for their work on the ANCHOR Act. I thank the chairman for his continuing bipartisanship on the committee.

We have made tremendous progress this year.
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