The Federal Government's Shutdown and Its Impacts on our Department of Energy National Labratories

Floor Speech

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Ms. LOFGREN. I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, as my friend and colleague Representative Swalwell has pointed out, the government shutdown is causing serious damage to our country. The shutdown is putting Americans out of work and hurting the economy--not only the jobs of Federal employees, but the thousands of small businesses who provide goods and services to the government and to government employees who are not spending money that they no longer are getting in paychecks.

This harm is being felt across the country by millions of people. The closures impact thousands of important programs and services. We know parks are closed, stopping travel plans. We know that the Small Business Administration is not lending to the tune of a billion dollars a month. Federal business statistics are not being released, leaving us essentially flying blind when it comes to how the economy is doing. Army Corps of Engineers projects are halted. The Consumer Product Safety Commission is not reviewing products to keep us safe. The VA is not able to decide claims from veterans. We saw the horrifying news earlier this week that death benefits for members of our armed services and their families were impacted. Meals for seniors are not being served, and children are being thrown out of Head Start. These are real issues. The economy is being held hostage.

But what we want to talk about this evening is not just those impacts that have been so well covered in the press, but how our economy's future is being held hostage by this government shutdown and by a lack of funding for science.

We were very proud in the San Francisco Bay area that we had three Nobel laureates just this week--Stanford's Michael Levitt and Thomas Sudhof and UC Berkeley's Randy Schekman--for terrific success. They were funded not through the labs but through the National Institutes of Health.

However, it is worth noting that this government shutdown is resulting in the furlough of 13,000 researchers. It is blocking hundreds of projects. The amazing thing to me was that their partner, James Rothman of Yale, who shared in the Nobel Prize, because of budget cuts and sequester, the research that actually got him the Nobel Prize was cut. Because of the sequester, the funding was cut for the research that got him the Nobel Prize. So there is an issue here not just on the shutdown holding the economy hostage, but also the underlying poor funding.

But let's talk just a minute about the national labs. A lot of people don't really know what the labs are. Those of us who are close to them do.

They were founded in 1943, and they were really meant to address the need to mobilize the Nation's scientific assets to support the war effort. Subsequent to that, they were utilized to bring the smartest people in the country together to focus on things that would keep us safe. As a matter of fact, they have helped keep us quite prosperous. Out of the lab have come things such as optical digital recording technology that is behind all music video and data storage, communications and observations satellites, advanced batteries now used in electric cars, supercomputers that as a society we would be lost without. So much from the national labs.

But one of the things that I think is enormously important and, unfortunately, has not received the kind of publicity it should have is the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

At 5:51 a.m. on September 29, there was a leap forward in the fusion experiment underway at that national lab. That Saturday shot was the latest in a series of carefully designed and incremental ignition experiments that have increased the yield. But here is the interesting thing. For the portion of the target, the 192 lasers that went into that target, there was more energy coming out than was put into the target. That has never happened before. So this is not the end of the quest to finish that science, but it is a major, major step forward. It is something that is actually threatened by this government shutdown.

I just received a copy of a notice that is going out to Lawrence Livermore tomorrow, and here is what it says, from the management at the lab to all the scientists:

This is to remind you that beginning today, October 11, the lab will begin shutting down normal operations. Only essential functions necessary to assure safety and security will be ongoing.

The lab is shutting down. The employees are furloughed, as we have just gotten the most important step forward on this most important experiment going on in the United States. How can that be possibly be good for the United States of America?

Of course, Lawrence Livermore is not the only national lab that is adversely impacted. Just up the road from my home in Santa Clara County, we have the Stanford Linear Accelerator Laboratory, with their fabulous Linac Coherent Light Source. It is the world's most powerful x ray laser. Its focused beam, which arrives in staccato bursts a few quadrillionths of a second long, is allowing researchers to probe complex ultrasmall structures and freeze atomic motions. They will be able to see what is going on at a molecular level in real-time.

What is happening at the Stanford lab? The same cutbacks that are afflicting the Lawrence Livermore lab.

Look at some of the things that are coming out of these fine science facilities, like the wonderful corkscrewing lasers that can be the key to unlimited bandwidth that was recently devised at the Stanford Linear Accelerator, and the national lab at Livermore that has developed a safe and versatile material known as DNA Tagged Reagents for Aerosol Experiments. It is going to be a critical tool for protecting the United States.

All of these things are at risk. And for what? For a stupid, foolish partisan fight.

We could change this this evening, tomorrow morning. All we need is to have a bill on the floor to vote to

reopen this government and to allow these scientists to continue to move forward to change the world and to create a brilliant future for our economy and for our safety and security.

So I thank my colleague, Representative Swalwell, who does such an excellent job of representing the two labs in his district, as well as all the other constituents who are so proud of him here in his service in the Congress and for standing up for them--not just for their jobs, but for America's future.

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