Keep Student Loans Affordable Act of 2013--Motion to Proceed--Continued

Floor Speech

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Mr. MURPHY. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

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Mr. MURPHY. I ask unanimous consent to speak as if in morning business.

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Mr. MURPHY. Madam President, I rise today to speak on the American Jobs Matter Act. This legislation was introduced by myself, Senator Blumenthal, Senator Brown, and Senator Merkley.

No one is going to disagree that this country has the greatest, most powerful military in the world. Although the Defense Department has not been spared from the draconian cuts included in the sequester, we still have a robust defense budget. Annual defense spending has grown from $287 billion in 2001 to over $700 billion today. Today it is hovering at around 6 percent of GDP.

A significant portion of these Federal defense dollars are used to purchase manufactured goods that make our military the preeminent fighting force in the world. In order to have the best military, you need the best people--we certainly have that--and the best stuff, which we have as well.

It is not debatable that our industrial base--going all the way back to the iconic assembly lines that churned out the machinery which was used to defeat fascism during World War II to today's shipyards that are producing our nuclear-powered submarines--is not still the best in the world. But 20, 30, or 50 years from now are we still going to be the best? That is the question before us today and the question this legislation seeks to answer.

Over the past 5 years the Department of Defense has cumulatively spent about $700 billion on manufactured goods. Over that same period of time, the United States has lost 1.7 million manufacturing jobs.

Why is this? Obviously, there is no single answer to this question, but it is telling that during this period of time DOD has spent $124 billion purchasing goods from foreign manufacturers. Some of these foreign manufacturers are in countries that are our allies today and will always be our allies, but some of these foreign manufacturers come from countries that are not our allies today and will never be our allies.

The bottom line is that when we outsource defense-manufacturing capabilities--either to our allies or to our adversaries--manufacturers shut down in this country and our capability to create and make critical defense items for our soldiers vanishes. The erosion of our industrial base kills jobs, and it jeopardizes our national security.

There are countless examples of how these spending decisions harm our industrial base, but I will give two examples that affect my home State of Connecticut.

In Waterbury, CT, there is a company that makes the metal tubing which goes into every ship the Navy builds. It holds the wires and the conduits. It is an incredibly complicated product, such that there are only two or three companies in the world that make this. For over 150 years this company in Waterbury, CT, has employed people in my State and kept our Navy equipped with the tubing it needs.

Over the years, the Navy has started to favor a foreign competitor who, frankly, has a history of engaging in unfair trade practices in order to undermine its competitors. They are offering the Navy a slightly more discounted price than the American company. So from the Navy's perspective, it is tempting to award that bid to an overseas contractor, but the monetary costs to the Navy cannot be the only thing we look at.

First of all, if this company in Waterbury goes under, then we will forever lose the ability to make this critical defense item in the United States. The country from which we are buying this equipment might be our ally today, but who knows what the case will be 10 or 20 years down the line. The fact is, you cannot just recreate the expertise, personnel, and machinery that makes this specific type of metal tubing.

Second, even if the Navy gets a 5- or 10- or 15-percent discount on this particular item, that benefit to the Navy essentially disappears when you look at the overall cost to the U.S. taxpayer because when those jobs are lost in Waterbury, CT, those men and women start qualifying for Federal benefits such as unemployment and Medicaid.

We lose the tax revenue that comes to the local government, the State government, and the Federal Government. And, all of a sudden, that small discount they get by going to a foreign manufacturer vanishes before their eyes.

Here is a second example and one that to a lot of Americans will be absolutely maddening. We have a machine that makes dog tags. Essentially, we have a machine that goes out into the field and makes them for soldiers. There is nothing more iconic and emblematic of the danger soldiers put themselves in, the sacrifice they sometimes make, than the dog tag. It has historically been made by an American-built machine. But, recently, bids have been going to an Italian company that makes a similar machine simply because the Italian company's machine costs 3 percent less than the American machine.

First of all, it is not acceptable that our dog tags are not American made. Second of all, that 3-percent difference is negligible when we compare it to all of the money lost when those jobs disappear in the United States. How can this happen?

There was overwhelming bipartisan consensus when Congress passed something called the Buy American Act 75 years ago, which said we should give preference to companies in the United States when we are buying things for the U.S. military. I don't think anybody today questions the wisdom of that act. But over the years we have built loophole after loophole, exception after exception, into the Buy American Act such that sometimes a minority of the parts of a particular thing we are buying for the Department of Defense comes from American firms.

The real world examples I mentioned and many others have prompted me, along with Senators Merkley and Brown and Blumenthal, to introduce the American Jobs Matter Act. Here is what this legislation will do; it is pretty simple: It will require that the Department of Defense, for the first time, has to measure domestic employment as a factor in awarding a contract. It is a simple premise. In the same way that DOD considers price and past performance when awarding work, they should also consider the impact on domestic employment in the award of a contract.

Under this bill, our largest contractors would also have to account for the expected job creation of their subcontractors, because that is where a lot of the problem is. We are not buying a lot of big goods that are assembled in other countries, but the hundreds of thousands of parts that sometimes go into a submarine or a jet engine or a tank or a humvee are often made outside of the United States. This would require the contractor to present an estimate of how many jobs throughout the supply chain are created here in the United States. Under this bill, when DOD gets two similar bids and one would create more American jobs than the other bid would, DOD can take that into account when awarding the contract.

Frankly, most people I talk to back in my home State of Connecticut think this already happens. People assume that if past performance and price are about equal, the home team should win. But, today, there is no law that allows military contractors to make that distinction. This bill would allow them, for the first time, to do that.

Retired U.S. Army BG John Adams recently published a study about the vulnerabilities in our defense supply chain. His report, which mentioned actually some of the specific examples I referenced, said this:

The health of our manufacturing sector is inextricably intertwined with our national
security, and that the United States' national security is threatened by our military's growing and dangerous reliance on foreign nations for the raw materials, parts, and finished products needed to defend the American people.

It is time we changed that. The American Jobs Matter Act will put our defense industrial base on a stronger footing for the future.

I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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