America Competes Reauthorization Act Of 2010

Floor Speech

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Mr. HOYER. I thank the gentleman from Tennessee, the chairman of the committee, for yielding. I congratulate Mr. Hall, my good friend from Texas, for his leadership. And I rise in support of the America COMPETES Act.

I want to congratulate Mr. Gordon in particular. Mr. Gordon has been focused on the subject matter of this bill--innovation, entrepreneurial efforts, science, technology, math, and engineering efforts--to make our economy more competitive worldwide and more vibrant here at home. This bill creates jobs in the short term and builds a strong foundation for prosperity in the long term. That's what we need to be focusing on. That's what Americans want us to focus on. They want us to get jobs now. But they also want to have a resilient, growing economy for the future. We can accomplish both goals by expanding our support for research and development so that the United States remains the world's technology leader.

This bill establishes innovative technology Federal loan guarantees for small- and medium-sized manufacturers. Those loans, which are especially needed at a time when credit is tight, will help our businesses keep pace with a changing economy, increase productivity, and hold their own with overseas competitors. By supporting innovation, as this bill does, this bill will help those businesses save and create jobs. It will also promote job growth and innovation on the regional level by creating regional innovation clusters--collections of local businesses that collaborate on emerging technology in similar fields.

As Chairman Bart Gordon of the Science and Technology Committee has observed, ``Clusters can strengthen or revive a region's economy and can advance the work being done in their field by bringing their leaders together to share ideas and build off one another.'' I agree with that comment. That's why I think they're so important.

However, as Mike Muro of the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution points out, America ``lags other nations in fostering these distributed, bottom-up systems of business development, innovation, and talent matching. The time has come,'' Mr. Muro went on, ``for America to make regional industry networks a defining aspect of the Nation's effort to catalyze the next era of high-quality job creation and growth.'' Bart Gordon and the Science and Tech Committee have done that. I congratulate them for that. It's an encouraging step that this bill does just that.

In addition, the America COMPETES Act helps ensure that our workforce will meet the challenges of the 21st century economy, by investing in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. It reauthorizes and increases funding for the vital National Science Foundation, which promotes cutting-edge research by funding innovation in fields from computer science to mathematics to genomics.

Madam Chair, Federal support for research is one of the best investments we can make. I congratulate Mr. Gordon, again, not only on his leadership on this bill, but on his leadership through the decades that he has served in this institution on these very issues. Federally supported research gave us GPS, the computer mouse, computer-aided design, and the Internet. There's no telling the ways in which it might shape our lives in the years to come. The legacy that Mr. Gordon will leave--unfortunately, he's leaving our midst at the end of this year, voluntarily, deciding to do some other things. I congratulate him, though, on the extraordinary contributions he's made during his years of service here.

In a competitive world economy, the National Science Foundation reported that our R&D expenditure has fallen as a share of the world total, as the growing Asian economies gain a greater share. This bill can, and will, help reverse that trend. The America COMPETES Act won bipartisan support the first time Congress authorized it in 2007. I hope and expect that that bill will garner such bipartisan support that it deserves this time around.

Again, in closing, Madam Chair, let me congratulate Mr. Gordon and thank Mr. Hall for his role.

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