Lamar Alexander

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. I ask unanimous consent to speak for 2 minutes before the Senator from Oklahoma.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Reserving the right to object--I have no objection.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I want to thank the Senator from South Carolina for his amendments and for his initiative for being here and offering them. He is helping us jump-start the discussion, and I want him to know what we are doing is working on ways to get to action on his bills, not the reverse. In fact, as far as his suggestion about considering the impact of taxes as barriers to innovation, I think he is right about that. That was a part of the original legislation. It had 70 sponsors at one time, the PACE Act. It was the Domenici-Bingaman act at that time. It is also a part of the Augustine report. These were the recommendations of the National Academy of Sciences team, which included 21 individuals who spent the entire summer and early fall of 2005 looking at exactly what we needed to do, and they recommended tax incentives for U.S.-based innovation. This was a practical group, this Augustine committee. They made 20 recommendations. They knew there were a number of things that, if they recommended them, we wouldn't pass because we would have differences of opinion about them. So they stayed away from some areas. For example, since kindergarten through the 12th grade was their No. 1 priority in terms of improving education and encouraging innovation there, they might have felt giving low-income families scholarships or vouchers to go to private schools would be a good thing to do. But they didn't put that in their top 20 because they knew it was unlikely we would be able to agree on that here. I think the same is true here with taxes. They specifically said on page 10 of the summary of their ``Rising Above the Gathering Storm'' that while they recommended making permanent the research and development tax credit as one change in tax policy, they realized that wasn't enough to consider it. They mention other alternatives that should be examined to see if it would be beneficial to the United States. These alternatives, the summary said: . . . could include changes in overall corporate tax rates and special tax provisions providing research of high- technology and manufacturing equipment, treatment of capital gains, and incentives for long-term investment innovation. The Council of Economic Advisers and the Congressional Budget Office should conduct a comprehensive analysis to examine how the United States compares with other nations as a location for innovation and related activities with a view to ensuring the United States is one of the most attractive places in the world for long-term innovation related investment and the jobs relating from that investment from a tax standpoint. That is not now the case, is what the Augustine report said. So I believe the Senator from South Carolina is making a real contribution to the debate here. His amendment which he proposes to bring up would improve the bill, in my opinion. It was once a part of the legislation that was similar, and I am hopeful the Finance Committee will recognize this simply amends a study that is already in the bill so tax barriers can be included as part of that study. Mr. President, I look forward to the response by the Democratic manager as to how we shall proceed.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I know how important the President believes this is. I have talked with him about it at least a half dozen times personally, usually in bipartisan sessions with a number of Senators, sometimes individually. I know the Vice President has been deeply involved. When there is some more time on the floor this afternoon, if we have a lull in the debate, I will go through the Statement of Administration Policy and talk about it a little bit. Basically, it is very helpful to us. It points out that there is not much difference between the amount of money the President proposes to spend over the next 4 years and the amount we would propose to authorize to spend in this bill. As one might expect, the President likes his new programs but doesn't like some other new programs, and there are some other suggestions that are well taken that we can talk about, perhaps accept amendments, at least discuss with the Democratic majority those amendments, and there will be some amendments that are offered on the Senate floor. I will reserve my comments on the President's Statement of Administration Policy. It is good to have it. We will make it part of the debate--and taking the President at his word--given the President's statement and the administration policy statement that ``The administration looks forward to working with Congress to address these various policy concerns as the legislative process moves forward.'' I defer to Senator Bingaman, if I may. Senator DeMint is ready to offer amendments and speak about them whenever that is appropriate. Exhibit 1 State of the Union Address by the President, Jan. 31, 2006 ``And to keep America competitive, one commitment is necessary above all: We must continue to lead the world in human talent and creativity. Our greatest advantage in the world has always been our educated, hardworking, ambitious people--and we're going to keep that edge. Tonight I announce an American Competitiveness Initiative, to encourage innovation throughout our economy, and to give our Nation's children a firm grounding in math and science. First, I propose to double the federal commitment to the most critical basic research programs in the physical sciences over the next 10 years. This funding will support the work of America's most creative minds as they explore promising areas such as nanotechnology, supercomputing, and alternative energy sources. Second, I propose to make permanent the research and development tax credit--to encourage bolder private--sector initiatives in technology. With more research in both the public and private sectors, we will improve our quality of life--and ensure that America will lead the world in opportunity and innovation for decades to come. Third, we need to encourage children to take more math and science, and to make sure those courses are rigorous enough to compete with other nations. We've made a good start in the early grades with the No Child Left Behind Act, which is raising standards and lifting test scores across our country. Tonight I propose to train 70,000 high school teachers to lead advanced-placement courses in math and science, bring 30,000 math and science professionals to teach in classrooms, and give early help to students who struggle with math, so they have a better chance at good, high-wage jobs. If we ensure that America's children succeed in life, they will ensure that America succeeds in the world. Preparing our Nation to compete in the world is a goal that all of us can share. I urge you to support the American Competitiveness Initiative, and together we will show the world what the American people can achieve.''

Mr. ALEXANDER. As a courtesy to the administration, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record the administration's Statement of Administration Policy following my remarks.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I am waiting on the Democratic manager of the bill, Senator Bingaman, who should be here right away. Following that, we hope to go to the Senator from South Carolina, who has some amendments to offer, but it is not appropriate for me to do that until Senator Bingaman is here. That will take a moment. Then we will go forward, if that is all right with the Senator from South Carolina. We had a good discussion yesterday on the America COMPETES Act. To remind all Senators, this is the Reid-McConnell legislation, with 56 cosponsors, which seeks to help our country keep our brainpower advantage so we can keep our jobs. It is the result of 2 years of work within this body through three committees principally but really five or six. We asked the National Academy of Sciences to tell us exactly what we need to do to keep our competitive advantage in the world in competition with China and India so our jobs don't go there, so we can keep this remarkable situation we have of producing 30 percent of all the money each year for 5 percent of the people, with at least half of that based on our technological advantage. The National Academy of Sciences gave us a list of recommendations in priority order. The Council on Competitiveness formed the basis of a Lieberman-Ensign bill, the President made his own recommendations, and all that now has been worked through into this legislation. I see Senator Bingaman. If I may, I would like to finish 3 or 4 minutes of remarks and then go to Senator Bingaman. Yesterday, Senator Inouye, Senator Stevens, Senator Domenici, all of whom have been leaders on this legislation, spoke on the floor. Senator Chambliss as well spoke on the floor. Senator Bingaman, of course, has been a leader from the very beginning, asking the questions that helped produce this result. So we have before us a leadership bill on a subject that is as important as any. Almost all Members of the Senate over the last 2 years have had plenty of opportunity to influence this bill, and most have in one way or the other. It has been a remarkable exercise. But there still is time today and tomorrow for us to consider more options. The President, last night by e-mail--someone in the White House--sent a Statement of Administration Policy to Capitol Hill which outlines the administration's views on the pending legislation. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record the President's remarks on January 31, 2006, from his State of the Union Address in which he spoke about the importance of the competitiveness initiative.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I wish to say to the Senator from Alaska that if he, who last year was President pro tempore of the Senate, and Senator Inouye, one of our leading Senators on the Democratic side, had not from the beginning placed such a priority on this legislation, it could never have made its way through the committees and reached this point. So I salute them for their willingness to look into our country's future and see the importance of this issue. Mr. President, if the Senator from Hawaii doesn't have further comments at the moment, I might use the time for the next few moments to talk about a couple of items. One is how we got here with this legislation and, two, more about what it does. First, let me say on behalf of the leadership, Senators Reid, McConnell, Bingaman, Inouye, and others, we hope that Senators will bring their amendments today, or early. Let us see them so that we can talk about them and, if necessary, vote on them. The Democratic leader and the Republican leader have created an environment in which we can deal with this bill in the way the Senate ought to be dealing with a piece of legislation that is at least on a subject as important as any other subject that will be before us. In other words, the bill is on the floor. We are ready to receive amendments. We are ready to vote on amendments, if necessary. I am sure the Democratic leader, who will announce his schedule, would like to finish the bill by Wednesday sometime because we have other important legislation to consider this week. So I hope we make the most of today, tomorrow, and Wednesday. Just a word about how the Senate got here. I mentioned earlier that in China, President Hu could simply call a meeting in the Great Hall of the People and, with his national academies of science and engineering, declare that: This is where we are going for the next 15 years. In China, that works pretty well, and that is likely where they are going. They have very specific goals, for example, for the amount of gross domestic product they will be spending on research and development, what they will be doing with their universities, and how they hope to improve their schools. In the United States, we have to work in a little different way. The result we have here today with this legislation, which is 2,008 pages long--and I know that because I reread it over the weekend. It came in a different way. Senator Bingaman and I, with the encouragement and sponsorship of Senator Domenici, who was chairman of one of the affected committees here, literally asked the National Academy of Sciences this question a couple of years ago: What are the top 10 actions in priority order that Federal policymakers could take over the next 10 years to help the United States keep our advantage in science and technology? We figured that Members of Congress were not necessarily the best ones to make those recommendations. I am sure the Presiding Officer has some idea of some math or science program he thinks might be best or at least he has two or three friends who have an idea. I know the Senator from Hawaii has one. I have five or six myself. We thought perhaps we should ask the people who are supposed to know. We asked the National Academy of Sciences, the Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine exactly what should we in the Congress be doing. It is my view most ideas fail around here for the lack of an idea, so we asked them specifically for an idea. The academies took us seriously. They assembled an all-star panel of business, Government, and university leaders headed by Norman Augustine, as the Senator from Alaska said, the former chairman and CEO of Lockheed Martin, a member himself of the National Academy of Engineering. That panel included three Nobel Prize winners. Those very busy people, including university president Bob Gates, now Secretary of Defense, and the Nobel Prize winners, gave up their summer, and they took our question seriously. Exactly what does the United States need to do to keep our brain power advantage, is really the question. We asked for 10 and they gave us 20 recommendations. The recommendations are in this report, ``Rising Above the Gathering Storm,'' to which the two Senators have referred. To their credit, they put it in priority order. I will talk more in a minute about what the priorities are. They started with kindergarten through 12th grade, 10,000 teachers, 10 million minds, K-12 science and math education: ``Sowing the Seeds through Science and Engineering Research,'' ``Best and Brightest in Science and Engineering Higher Education,'' ``Incentives for Innovation and the Investment Environment.'' They gave us 20 recommendations in priority order. That was not the only idea before the Senate at that time, nor were those of us in the Senate the only ones involved. Representatives Sherwood Boehlert and Mark Gordon of the House Committee on Science had joined us in asking this question. I know Representative Gordon, who is now chairman of the House Science Committee, moved forward quickly to introduce in the House of Representatives similar legislation. What did we do when we got these 20 recommendations? As I mentioned, they were not the only recommendations. Senator Bingaman and Senator Hutchison, for example, had been working for many years to increase the number of children, especially low-income children, who could take the advanced placement courses. Those are a ticket to college, and there are a lot of bright kids who don't have the money to pay for the tests or who go to schools where the teachers are not trained to teach the courses. They have been working on that for a long time. Senator Bond from Missouri and Senator Mikulski of Maryland have been speaking about this for a long time. Then there was an excellent piece of legislation by Senator Lieberman and Senator Ensign which had in it recommendations from the Council on Competitiveness. Many of those recommendations were then included in the Commerce Committee's hearings and deliberations. So the question is how to take all this information in the Senate where people have lots of different ideas and get it all together into one bill and get it passed. Senator Stevens said: Let's form a joint committee. That is a little harder to do than before. Senator Inouye once served on a joint committee--well, it was a special committee in the Watergate days, but there are not that many around here because we have our own committees. What happened was our senior Members of the Senate, such as Senator Stevens and Senator Inouye, Senator Enzi and Senator Kennedy, Senator Domenici and Senator Bingaman, just by the force of their own personalities worked together to create an environment with the help of a lot of staff members to say: Let's take all of these ideas and let's work in a genuinely bipartisan way. We then had a Republican Congress last year. Senator Domenici, who will be here a little later this afternoon, was chairman of the Energy Committee. He went to the White House to talk with the President about this issue. He invited me to go with him, but he didn't just invite me, he invited Senator Bingaman, his ranking Democrat, to go with him. So all the way we have worked together on this legislation. Then we sat down shortly after this report came out, which I suppose was in 2005 in the fall, and had a series of what we call homework sessions. We invited representatives from the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Department of Education, the President's science adviser, and a whole variety of other people within the administration who were already working on these subjects to get their advice about these ideas and other ideas as we formed legislation. That is the kind of input this legislation has had. Finally, Senator Domenici and Senator Bingaman introduced what we call the PACE Act, Protect America's Competitive Edge Act. Symbolically, it had 70 cosponsors in the Senate--34 Republicans and 35 Democrats. So we have gotten to the beginning of 2006. I will say a little bit more in a moment about exactly what was in that legislation, but let me continue with the process because it is fairly remarkable and helped to produce this legislation which I found in rereading it over the weekend is remarkably coherent. It is in plain English. It is organized by sections. I could understand virtually every section. I have been reading it as we went along. Maybe this is a model for other complex legislation we have in the Senate. The President, in his State of the Union Address in 2006, and again this year, put the issue front and center with what he called his American competitiveness agenda. The President included $6 billion in his budget for just the first year. In March of last year, the Energy Committee reported eight provisions related to energy research and math and science education for students and teachers in association with the National Labs. So eight provisions of the Augustine report were reported out by the Energy Committee. Then in May the Commerce Committee reported a bill that included ideas from the Augustine report, as well as the President's Council on Competitiveness. We had it from two committees. Then the immigration bill passed the Senate. The immigration bill didn't finally become law, but it passed the Senate with pretty big numbers, and included within it were three provisions that tackled some of the most archaic provisions in our immigration laws, those provisions which basically prevent our insourcing of brain power. We have more than 500,000 foreign students who come here every year to study. They include some of the brightest people in the world, and we make them swear before they come that they will go home when, in fact, we should want most of them to stay here and create jobs for us so we can keep our standard of living. So three provisions from the Augustine report were in that immigration bill that passed the Senate last year, and it is my hope that when the Senate takes up immigration legislation before Memorial Day, which the majority leader has said we are likely to do, that legislation will, again, have the provisions from the Augustine report and other recommendations that will make it easier to attract and keep in our country the brightest men and women from around the world. If they are going to create good jobs somewhere, let's create them in the United States for Americans to have. The Defense authorization bill included a provision related to support for early career researchers funded by the Pentagon. There are so many good applications from so many talented people in the United States for basic research or even applied research that the investigators, as they are called, are sometimes in their forties before they win their first grant. That is discouraging to many of the brightest young minds in the United States. These recommendations have sought to include changes, and the Defense authorization bill last year took a step in that direction. One of the major recommendations of both of the reports I just mentioned was making permanent the research and development tax credit so that our brightest manufacturing jobs can stay here rather than be created overseas. In the so-called tax extender last year, the tax credit was temporarily extended, and so that was dealt with last year. Last year, just before Senators went home for the elections in October, the two leaders, Senator Frist then the majority leader, and Senator Reid then the Democratic leader, introduced a package--it was numbered S. 3936-- that included the work of the Energy and Commerce Committees and added an education component to improve our children's knowledge of math, science, and critical foreign languages. That bipartisan product was the work of the chairman and ranking members of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee and the Commerce and Energy Committees. We tried to be good stewards of the public money as we went through this process. That working group last year trimmed $3 billion from what the committees passed in order to make it more affordable. We did our best to stay close to the President's budget number, although we slightly exceeded that number. This year, to bring us to where we are today, the majority leader, Senator Reid, and Senator McConnell, the Republican leader, took that bill, the one introduced last year by Senator Frist and Senator Reid, and reintroduced it by removing authorizations for 2007 since we have already finished work on 2007 and are looking ahead to 2008. That is the bill we are considering today, the America COMPETES Act. That is a long train ride. To those who may be outside the Senate, they may think that is unnecessarily complex. We didn't really need to know all that. I think it is important for the American people to know all that. It is especially important for Senators and their staffs to know all that because virtually every Member of the Senate has had 2 years to get their say. I know on the Commerce Committee there have been long meetings of members of both sides. I know that is true with the staff meetings. Not all would write every provision of the bill the way it is, but that is the nature of work in the Senate. It is a very good piece of legislation. It may be improved on the Senate floor by amendment, but it has been a long and good process.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, before the Senator from Alaska speaks and while the Senator from Hawaii will be here for a while longer, I wanted to call attention to their leadership on this bill and their sense of urgency about the importance of it in the Commerce Committee. I wanted to relate specifically an event a year ago, in August, in Beijing, China, which I related on the floor when the bill was introduced. I think it puts into perspective why so many Senators on both sides of the aisle have worked on that, why the bill is being introduced by both the Democratic and Republican leaders, and why it came directly to the floor and is ready for action. Senator Stevens and Senator Inouye took a group of Senators to China. They were especially well received--this Congressional Medal of Honor winner and this Flying Tiger pilot who flew the first cargo plane into Beijing toward the end of World War II. As a result, we spent an hour with President Hu and another hour with the No. 2 man, Vice Premier Wu. We talked about all of the things one would expect in that discussion: North Korea, Iran, and Iraq. But the subject, I recall, about which both of those leaders of China were most animated was the subject we are discussing on the floor today: How is China going to increase its brainpower advantage so it can create more jobs? President Hu told us that he had done what we are doing today but in the Chinese way. He had, a month earlier, gone to the Great Hall of the People in China and assembled their national academy of science and engineering of China and established a 15-year goal for innovation and declared they would spend a certain amount in research and investment. That was the way they were going to raise their standard of living to compete with the United States. We see that with the recruitment of Chinese-born scholars who were educated in the United States and are going back to China to create even better universities there. We saw, under the sponsorship of these two Senators, that the two top leaders of that country understand very well America's brainpower advantage, which has been the greatest source of this remarkably high standard of living we have, and the fact that we produce 30 percent of all of the money in the world for just 5 percent of the people. I wanted to acknowledge their leadership and put into perspective that visit just last year in China.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, we have Senator Inouye here, who has played a major role in the development of this legislation, and I believe we will have a little later Senator Stevens, who is right behind me now, and Senator Domenici after that. So I am going to let the two distinguished chairs of the Commerce Committee speak.

Mr. ALEXANDER. I thank the Senator. Mr. President, our former colleague Zell Miller was Lieutenant Governor of Georgia when I was a Governor. He was a professor by profession and he was always interested in education and very skillful in education policy. Every Governor I know spends a lot of time trying to think of how we are going to recruit jobs. Well, if you study it, you learn after a while you don't recruit nearly as many as you grow. The way you grow them is with brain power. So the single best thing any State can do to create the largest number of good new jobs in that State is to keep the brightest kids at home. Governor Miller, when he was there, initiated the HOPE scholarship, which played a major role in attracting many of the brightest Georgia students, and I would say many of the brightest Tennessee students to come across the border to go to the University of Georgia, and then the residential school for math and science did the same. This legislation would permit every other State to do the same, and it is just one of the things it would do. If I may, if the Senator from Georgia is finished with his remarks, he has highlighted an area I wish to enlarge on. Sometimes our legislation, particularly when we talk about big phrases such as competitiveness and globalization, takes us off into the stratosphere and one might say: Well, what does that have to do with me? We have just talked about one example. If you are the Governor of Georgia or Tennessee or Illinois and you are thinking: What can I do over the next 10 years to grow the largest number of good new jobs, a residential school for math and science is a very good start. I remember as Governor, after we recruited the Nissan plant and the Saturn plant, I was feeling pretty good. Then I counted up the number of jobs, and it was 10,000 or 12,000 jobs in a State that employs 2.5 million people. We were losing 200,000 or 250,000 jobs per year, so we had to be creating that many more. In our country, in the United States of America, we are losing jobs all the time. We don't want that to happen, but that is happening. So the real test of our society is: Can we create a lot more good new jobs than we are losing, a constant supply of good new jobs. Most of that comes from the subject of this legislation: from brain power, better schools, better colleges, better universities, more research, and especially technological innovation. Illinois, I am told, already has such an academy: the Illinois Math and Science Academy, a residential high school. I am sure the Presiding Officer is very familiar with it. He may have helped start it, given his long tenure in the Congress. This legislation would give it an opportunity as well to expand. On the subject of creating new jobs, the chief State school officers are in town. That means the superintendent of education of Illinois and Tennessee's commissioner of education are here in town. I am meeting with them tomorrow at about noon for a while, and what I can tell them--even though they probably heard all about math and science they want to hear through No Child Left Behind--is we are doing a number of things to help them at least authorize funding to help them succeed. For example, we are authorizing grants to States to promote alignment of elementary and secondary education with knowledge and skills. That means in plain English helping States line up the math and science they are teaching with what you need to know to go into the Armed Forces, what you need to know to go to college, what you need to know to go to work. Sometimes there is not a good fit there. This would help schools and education systems, those chief State school officers, do that. The second thing we would be doing is strengthening the skills of thousands of math and science teachers by using our national laboratories in Illinois, New Mexico, Tennessee, and around our country, and a host of summer institutions and academies for outstanding teachers of math and science, as well as for students, but especially for teachers. I found in my experience as Governor, one of the most successful and productive things we did were Governors' schools, where we would take the Governors' schools for teachers of mathematics or teachers of reading, or students of international affairs, and the students would come for 2 to 4 weeks--sometimes it would only be teachers, but the students would come, you would bring in a core of faculty members from around the State, too. It would inspire those students so much, and what could be more inspiring for math and science teachers than to have a chance to be at the National Labs with Nobel Prize winners and some of the outstanding scientists in the world. It would refresh them, excite them, improve their skills, and help them carry a sense of mission back to their classrooms to inspire a new generation of math students and hopefully math and science teachers. I can say to the chief State school officers of our various States, we are expanding the Robert Noyce teacher scholarship program at the National Science Foundation to recruit and train individuals to become math and science teachers in high-need, local education agencies. We are finding as we review No Child Left Behind in elementary and secondary education that 80 percent of our schools are, we can say, achieving, or even high achieving. In other words, their students, by category, are meeting what we call adequate yearly progress, so let's catch them doing something right. About 5 percent of those schools--I have missed it in one category--I would say they are still achieving pretty well. Only about 15 percent of the schools are high need, and usually what we find is they are children of low income, children whose parents haven't been able to help them, children whose parents have neglected them, children who have not yet learned English, children who have just arrived in this country and may not be in the same school in January they were in October, children who are hard to teach, and children who need more than even good teachers are usually able to give them. I am coming to the conclusion that we need to train teachers especially to help these children. About 10 or 15 percent of all the children in our public schools across the country are these children, and these are the ones we are leaving behind. Well, we are expanding teacher scholarship programs at the National Science Foundation to recruit and train individuals to become math and science teachers in high-need educational agencies. We are assisting, we have just said, teachers in establishing statewide specialty schools in math and science, and we will use the National Laboratories' staff to help with that. For example, if Tennessee wants to expand the new math and science academy Governor Bredesen has established--I salute him for doing it; he has wanted to do it for a while, but it is expensive and he only has a few students in it. This legislation makes it possible to use the National Laboratory staff to help Governor Bredesen in Tennessee expand and enlarge and make better the summer residential school for math and science. I can say to the chief State school officers tomorrow, and they can take it back to their States across the country, that if the Congress enacts this legislation sponsored by the majority leader and the Republican leader, with 56 Senators on both sides of the aisle, its goal is to train 70,000 more teachers so they can teach advanced placement courses in math, sciences, and foreign language, so we can bring to the number of 700,000 the number of students who can take advanced placement courses in math, sciences, and critical foreign language. As we have said before in the debate on this bill, students who don't get to take those AP courses now don't take them because they are not smart enough or because their brains don't work well enough; they don't take it often because they can't afford it or because the teachers aren't available to teach them in the schools they attend, so this will help to remedy that. I can say to the chief State school officers, Governor Jim Hunt of North Carolina, one of our leading educators in America, a former Governor for 16 years in that State, who testified before the President's Commission on Higher Education that the University of North Carolina only graduated three physics teachers in 1 year at its College of Education. As I mentioned earlier, if we are not teaching physics, nobody is going to be learning it. So what are we going to do about that? What this suggests is that after reviewing programs from all over the country, the Augustine commission recommends that we expand the You Teach program at the University of Texas. So there will be money that may be appropriated under this law that would permit universities to do as they do in Texas, in Austin, to go into the chemistry and biology programs and recruit students who are majoring in those science subjects, or a student who is majoring in math, and give them a scholarship to go to the College of Education and become a teacher of chemistry or biology or math. Now, the Augustine report recommended that we then pay $10,000 a year in fellowships for those students so they can go into teaching in high- need areas, rather than for IBM or Google or Dell or some other high- paying job. That part of our provision is not in this legislation, the $10,000 fellowship. I would like to see it in there. Senator Reid, the majority leader, the principal sponsor of this legislation, suggested when he introduced the bill the other day, that he had a very good experience--he and Paul Simon, the former distinguished Senator from Illinois--with finding ways to give stipends to teachers of math and science so they would stay in teaching. Well, this You Teach program at the University of Texas is now going to be available in Michigan, Tennessee, and other States around the country so we can recruit outstanding students into teaching. In addition, the Augustine commission, after reviewing dozens and dozens and dozens of programs, found an especially good program at the University of Pennsylvania in science called Penn Science, and instead of recruiting students into teaching, it takes existing teachers and puts them through continuous training during the summer and during the year so they can be even better teachers of science. I can say to the chief State school officers who are meeting in Washington, DC today that this legislation will permit you in Wyoming and in Tennessee and in New York and in Michigan and wherever to create a partnership between our National Laboratories and local high-need schools to establish centers of excellence in math and science education. So suddenly you match up a high-needs school with one of the greatest National Laboratories in the world. What can be more exciting for the teachers in that school or the students? It might go from being a high-needs school to one with a line around the block of students waiting to get in the door. This legislation also has significant authorization for funding for a program called Math Now. This is the President's proposal, from his American Competitiveness Act which has been included in this legislation, and it would provide grants to improve math instruction in the elementary and middle grades and provide targeted help to struggling students so all students can master grade level math standards. Finally, I can say to the chief State school officers who are meeting in Washington--and I will say it to them directly tomorrow at lunch-- that the bill also authorizes expanding programs to increase the number of students from elementary school through postsecondary education who study critical foreign languages. We find this not just in our military needs in Iraq and Afghanistan and around the world, but we increasingly live in a worldwide economy, and our students, our citizens will be better citizens, more effective citizens, if more of us speak more than one language. There is a long list. There are 10 or 11 programs that either expand or create efforts to, as the Augustine commission says, ``increase America's talent pool by vastly improving K through 12 science and mathematics education.'' Senator Bingaman, I, Senator Domenici, and the House Members asked our national academies: Please tell us exactly what we need to do to keep our brain power advantage so we can keep our jobs. We understand that since World War II, more than half of this remarkably high standard of living we have has come through innovation and technology. We understand that and we have an idea or two and we have friends with an idea or two about what to do, but tell us exactly what to do about it. Tell us in priority order. They put down K-12--vastly improving K- 12 science and mathematics education. I see the Senator from New Mexico is present. We have had a good discussion this afternoon. Some of the principal advocates have been here, and I especially appreciate Senators Stevens and Inouye who have given a great sense of urgency to this legislation. The Presiding Officer, Senator Stabenow, has as well. Michigan has a tremendous number of research institutes and great universities that add fuel to the economic resurgence of that State and every other State. Really, we are all interested in this legislation. The key is, How do we put it together in a way that we can get it through this interesting process we call the Senate? I think we are reasonably close to doing that, thanks to the senior leadership of this body and Senator Bingaman and Senator Domenici on the Energy Committee. Madam President, I will conclude my remarks now and yield he floor to Senator Bingaman.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Certainly.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Georgia for his comments but, more importantly, for his leadership. We usually think of Senator Chambliss in terms of leadership on intelligence matters, Armed Services matters, on agricultural matters, where he is the ranking member. But from the very beginning on this legislation, he has been out front. I can remember when Norm Augustine, chairman of the Augustine committee, came to the Senate and had a dinner with us right around the corner. Senator Chambliss was one of the first Senators there. He has been one of the major leaders in this endeavor for the last 2 years. His comments about the Georgia residential high school for math and science illustrates a good way to help take this legislation from the abstract and put it in concrete terms. Section 3171 of this legislation, specialty schools for math and science, will assist States in establishing or expanding such residential high schools for math and science. I spoke a little earlier on the floor about North Carolina's math and science program which they have had for 25 years. Tennessee is a little behind. We haven't had one yet; we have summer governor schools for math and science. This legislation would authorize the Congress to appropriate funds which could pay for up to 50 percent of the cost of operating that school in Georgia which would permit Georgia, if it wished, to expand that school. The Senator cited in his remarks one good reason to do it in addition to the Nation's competitiveness. I think I heard him say 48 percent of the students went to Georgia Tech. So if our goal is to keep bright students at home to create jobs for us in the United States, a more specific goal is to keep bright Georgia students at home so they can create jobs for Georgians.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I wish to speak to the amendment, the managers' package the Senator from Hawaii has proposed. I wish to make two points about it. The first is it reduces the cost of the bill by $280 million over 4 years. That is important to all of us and it is especially important to some of us. We are trying to spend money wisely. At the same time, there are significant increases in the National Science Foundation education programs--about $300 million, in fact, over the President's requested level. But it is important that we know what these are. They are directly in line with the recommendations of the Augustine report and the Council on Competitiveness. Remember, we asked them to put these recommendations in priority order. The first thing is not the R&D tax credit, it is not bringing in more foreign students--it is not. The first thing was kindergarten through 12th grade math and science education. That is where our academies believed we had the biggest problem. So this new money for education programs in the National Science Foundation goes to graduate research fellows, to graduate education, research traineeships for a program called Professional Science Masters. This is a program where colleges are helping students earn master's degrees, not necessarily with the goal of going on to a Ph.D., but a master's degree that might take you on into a highly technical field in business; in other words, making us more competitive. It includes the Robert Noyce scholarships, which were expanded to help train more math and science teachers, and the teachers institutes in the summer. These programs are education programs of the National Science Foundation, but we save $280 million over 4 years, and we have directed those toward nonduplicative programs that are consistent with the commission reports. I wonder if, before Senator Domenici speaks, I could say a word. Senator Domenici is here. He is going to speak now. I am going to step to the side while he does. But I wish to say a word about Senator Domenici's crucial role. I have already spoken to the fact that without the sense of urgency of Senators Inouye and Stevens, we would never have gotten to this point. But Senator Domenici was there at the beginning of this work. Even though, in our caucus, only one Senator is more senior, he stepped back and created an environment so Senator Bingaman and I and many other Senators could work on this. He watched it very carefully, he supervised it, he chaired it, but he left room for us, many of us, to work on this. When it came time to go to the White House, it was Senator Domenici who asked the President if we could come see him. It was Senator Domenici who, rather than go down by himself as a Senator might have done, invited his junior colleague, me, to go with him. But more important than that, he invited his senior colleague, the Democratic Senator from New Mexico, Senator Bingaman, to go. It was Senator Domenici who insisted in the Energy and Commerce Committee he chaired that all this work be done in a bipartisan way. So because of that and the way Senators Stevens and Inouye work, we were able to do this. It was a Domenici-Bingaman piece of legislation called the Protect America's Competitiveness Act that was introduced last year with 70 sponsors, 35 Democrats and 35 Republicans. So before, Senator Domenici came, I thanked and saluted other Senators whose leadership has made a difference. But no one has been more responsible for this piece of legislation coming through. Now that the assistant Democratic leader is here, I want to use this occasion to say how much I, and many of us, appreciate the way he and the majority leader have handled this piece of legislation; created an environment in which we have it on the floor in a way it can succeed. Senator Durbin, the Presiding Officer, has been a strong supporter of this legislation and a cosponsor of it from the beginning. I also wanted to recognize that. Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I thank the Senator. His example with Senator Stevens is a good example for all of us. I hope he is right. The American people know we all have our principles, and we have our politics. They know that. But I believe they also know there are some issues that are simply too big for one party to solve, whether it is Iraq, whether it is immigration, whether it is energy independence, whether it is affordable health care. And one of those issues is how do we keep our brain power advantage so we can keep our jobs from going overseas to India and China. It will take a comprehensive approach. We take for granted sometimes that we produce 30 percent of all the money in the world for 5 percent of the people. That is one of my favorite statistics. If I were a citizen of China or of India and I was looking at the United States and I saw that disproportionately our wealth comes from our brain power, I would be encouraged because many of the brightest people in the world are in China and in India, wonderful researchers, wonderful scientists. There is no reason in the world that they cannot use that great resource they have to improve their standard of living, and they are setting about to do it. If the Senator from Hawaii has no objection, I thought I might talk a little about what is in the bill, just to go over it. As I said, for those who like to read whole bills, it is 208 pages, but any contractor will tell you that it is cheaper to start from scratch in building a house sometimes than remodeling it. I think we may have found something here working together in a bipartisan way. In starting from scratch, we actually may have produced a better organized bill, more straightforward than trying to remodel a lot of existing laws. But here is what we sought to do. Based upon these recommendations, this legislation doubles funding for the National Science Foundation over 5 years. Now, this is the work of Senator Inouye and Senator Stevens and their committee. This is merely an authorization bill--it doesn't appropriate a penny, but it has to be within the budget. Senator Bingaman offered an amendment, which I joined in with during our budget discussion, and it created room in the budget, nearly $1 billion of room in the budget, for the first year appropriations of the America COMPETES Act. So these dollars are within the budget, and I will talk a little more about the dollars a little later. I might say one thing about the dollars. The dollars are an additional $16 billion in spending over the next 4 years. That is real money. But we might remember on what else we spend money. That is about 2 months of the war in Iraq. We spend about $8 billion a month on the war in Iraq. We spent $237 billion on debt last year, $378 billion on Medicare, $545 on Social Security, and $100 billion or so on hurricanes. These are all very important priorities, but somehow we have to put gas in the engine, and the gas in the engine is our brain power advantage. We have to invest in research, education--K-12--in order to keep the advantage that creates the dollars that pay these bills for our most important programs. But we have worked hard. We have worked hard to have fiscal discipline. The $16 billion over the next 4 years that this bill would authorize to spend, and which is within the budget for this year, is a significant savings over the original legislation last year. More than $3 billion over the 4 years in authorized funding has been cut from last year's competitiveness bills passed by the Energy and Commerce Committees. We also worked hard to avoid duplicative undergraduate scholarship programs that were proposed in earlier legislation, and it reduced the cost of a number of other proposed and existing programs. For example, the Robert Noyse scholarship program of the National Science Foundation was very similar to a recommendation of the Augustine report. So after discussions with the National Science Foundation in our homework sessions, we thought, well, why create a new duplicative program when we already have a good one. So we simply sought to expand it. With regard to the education and energy portions of the bill, the total cost closely tracks the President's proposed American Competitive Initiative. Remember, he put in $6 billion in his budget last year. The President has proposed over 10 years doubling research funding at the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the Department of Energy's Office of Science. The cost of the commerce portion of this legislation is a bit higher, but that is because Chairman Inouye and Cochairman Stevens agreed last year that they wanted to double the National Science Foundation's funding at a faster rate, of about 5 years rather than 10. So I would argue that this is progrowth legislation and a small price to pay for that growth in our standard of living. Mr. President, I would say to the Senator from Hawaii that any time he would like to interrupt my presentation, I hope he will. Some of the specific provisions are the doubling of funding for the National Science Foundation, I just mentioned, from $5.6 billion in the current year to $11.2 billion in 2011. Before I arrived, the Congress doubled funding for the National Institutes of Health with a great payoff, most people felt, in terms of our health and research for cures for diseases. But we did not do as good a job during that period of time on the physical sciences, which are also important to the health sciences. This, hopefully, will begin to change that. Second, setting the Department of Energy's Office of Science on track to double in funding over 10 years, and increasing from $3.6 billion in the current year to $5.2 billion in fiscal year 2011; establishing the innovation acceleration research program, which will direct Federal agencies funding research and science and technology to set as a goal dedicating approximately 8 percent of their research and development budgets toward high-risk frontier research. This was a recommendation of both of the major organizations, the Augustine committee and the Council on Competitiveness. What this means is that there are so many good proposals before the peer review and merit review groups that give out basic research grants that they obviously tend to be a little more conservative when presented with so many good ideas. The disadvantage of that is that it reduces the impulse to take a few risks, to roll the dice, or to try some idea that has less of a chance of succeeding but might be the next Google or the next hybrid or the next Internet or the next stealth invention. So this legislation encourages all through the America COMPETES Act in virtually every section that we fund, the idea of setting as a goal--not a mandate but as a goal--8 percent of the research and development budget toward this high-risk frontier research. Next, it authorizes bringing the National Institute of Standards and Technology up from $703 million next year to $937 million in fiscal year 2011. It would direct NASA to increase funding for basic research. It will authorize coordinating ocean and atmospheric research and education at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other agencies to promote U.S. leadership in these important fields. This has been a major priority of Senator Inouye, as well as others. The Augustine committee, at our request, was asked to give us some priorities and not just give us a random list. And I might say, when they gave us 20 recommendations instead of 10, and they gave them in priority, they didn't just go out and get the first 20 they heard about. Over the summer, the working group of 21 members--and I am sure the Council on Competitiveness did the same--considered hundreds of ideas. So our leading scientists and the people we asked to give us their best advice on science and their best advice on medicine and their best advice on engineering, they waded through dozens and dozens of operating programs and other ideas and gave us just a handful of the best ideas. This has been a tremendously important screening process. I believe one reason this has been so broadly accepted in the Senate and by those outside the Senate is that it is not just one Senator's idea of what is a great math program or another's best friend's idea of a good research program. This is, in effect, a merit-based, peer-reviewed set of recommendations and an answer to the question as to what are the most important things we can do to keep our brain power advantage. So, No. 1, authorizing competitive grants to States to better align elementary and secondary education with knowledge and skills needed for success in colleges and universities and the Armed Forces. Now, what that means in plain English is to make sure our elementary, middle, and high schools are teaching what students need in order to go to college, to go to work, and to go to the Armed Forces. That is the key. Next, strengthen the skills of thousands of math and science teachers by establishing training and educational programs at summer institutes hosted by the National Laboratories, and increasing support for the teacher institutes at the National Science Foundation's institutes. One Senator said to me the other day: This is new, isn't it, the idea of giving the National Laboratories such a specific role in training outstanding math and science teachers and inspiring math and science students to learn and achieve more in math and science? The answer is, yes, it is new. But the feeling of the Augustine commission and others is that we have a crisis in math and science. And that is not too strong a word. The former Governor of North Carolina, Jim Hunt, told me the University of North Carolina only graduated three physics teachers in a recent year from its college of education. So we are not going to learn much physics if we don't have anybody teaching much physics. So why not take advantage of these remarkable National Laboratories we have around the country. I guess there are about two dozen or so of them, like the Oak Ridge Laboratory in the State of Tennessee, but there is also Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore. They are all around the country. If you are going to inspire a student or inspire a teacher to be active in math and science, why not place them in an environment for 4 weeks in the summer with some of the finest math and science researchers and individuals in the United States? It would be a choice for a young musician--give them a choice whether to be on the road with Johnny Cash or be in the business office at the Grand Ole Opry, and they will go on the road every time because that is how a singer learns to be a singer. And that is how a student learns what they can do with math and the joy of mathematics. When I was Governor of Tennessee we created summer academies--we called them the Governor's schools--for outstanding students and teachers of various subjects. About 20 States have done the same thing. We have found it is the best money we ever spent to offer 4 weeks at the University of Tennessee connected to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory for 200 of the most outstanding high school juniors interested in science and math. The teachers love to teach them, the students love to come. Instead of becoming a nerd in their rural school, suddenly they are with 200 peers, and they are all celebrated for their academic achievements. Why not use these National Laboratories to our advantage? No other country in the world has the National Laboratories that we have. One thing they can do is to help inspire the next generation of math and science students and improve this generation and the next generation of math and science teachers. So expanding the Robert Noyse teaching scholarship program at the National Science Foundation--this is a very fine program at the National Science Foundation which has had for a long time a role in education as well as research. This program trains individuals to become math and science teachers in high-need local education agencies. Assisting States in establishing or expanding statewide specialty schools in math and science. Now, I don't know whether the State of Virginia or the State of Hawaii has a full-time residential school in science and math. I know the State of North Carolina does, and I went to see it. Governor Jim Hunt set it up. I went to see it when I was Governor. We didn't believe we had enough money to create one in Tennessee, so we created those summer academies about which I just spoke. But Governor Bredesen, our current Democratic Governor of Tennessee, wants to start, and has made a very small start, of what we call in the legislation a specialty school in math and science, and several other States have followed North Carolina's example. This would help States up to about a 50- percent level. All the rest of the money would have to be private, State, or local. Establish schools like the North Carolina residential high school for math and science. Not only will it give gifted students a greater knowledge, but it helps us compete with the world. North Carolina has felt as though over the last 20 years it has helped keep many of those bright students in North Carolina because if they go there to school, they may go there to college, or at least they may come back if they go somewhere else, and then they create more jobs and build up that economy. Facilitating the expansion of advanced placement in international baccalaureate programs by increasing the number of teachers prepared to teach those courses and foreign language courses. The AP courses, advanced placement courses, are a ticket to success. College entrance examiners read them carefully. If you get a 4 or a 5--those are the highest grades in math or science--or if you take several of them, your chances of being admitted to a variety of institutions are increased. But they are offered to a very limited number of the students--not limited by their brains but limited by their money. They either do not have the money to pay for the tests or they do not go to the schools where there are enough teachers who are trained to teach in the preparation for their tests. This builds on a program in Houston, TX, which has been very successful in the last 10 years, of expanding the opportunities for low-income students to take more advanced placement courses to prepare for college and also to train teachers to meet that demand. Senator Hutchison and Senator Bingaman have been two of the leaders in this for 10 years in the Senate. There are a variety of other proposals. Adopting another program from Texas, the You Teach program--this wasn't sent over from the White House although this is two straight Texas programs; this is from the National Academy of Sciences, because they have a terrific program at the University of Texas at Austin, where they take students who are enrolled in chemistry and recruit them into the College of Education with an attractive scholarship and then the idea was to pay them $10,000 a year to teach at a high-needs school for 5 years after they leave. In other words, they get the people into teaching and they will put them in the schools where they are needed the most. That is called the You Teach program. It would expand that. There was a program from the University of Pennsylvania which would take teachers who are now teaching and give them intensive summer training and improve their ability to teach math and science, all toward the same objectives. Then the President proposed Math Now grants, improving the teaching of mathematics in the elementary and middle schools. That is in here as well, after it went through the process. Then we expand the programs to increase the number of students who study critical foreign languages and become proficient. That was recognized here for a variety of reasons as a part of keeping our brain power advantage. Finally, there are a number of proposals that would identify continuing organizations within the White House and Cabinet councils and other studies to try to keep a spotlight on this subject. This is not the whole answer to the book ``The World Is Flat.'' It is on the same subject. It is part of the answer. It is a good start. In fact, it is a very good beginning. But we need to continue this attention to our position in competitiveness. What I have tried to review here is how this legislation came to the floor, why it has attracted this unusual leadership from the majority leader and Republican leader, why it has had such a sense of urgency from senior leaders such as Senator Inouye, Senator Stevens, and others, why today it has 56 sponsors, why the House of Representatives is considering legislation on a parallel track, and why I believe there is no more important piece of legislation that will come before us in this session of Congress. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. ALEXANDER. I yield.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, we will have plenty of time to debate this next week, so I will reserve most of my comments until then, but let me reiterate some of the major provisions that are here. As Senator Bingaman said, this is only an authorization bill. It is permission to establish programs, but it is backed up by an amendment to the Budget Act which creates room in the appropriations bill to pay for these programs. Here is what we intend to do: Double funding for the National Science Foundation; set the Department of Energy's Office of Science on track to double its funding; strengthen the skills of thousands of math and science teachers by establishing training and education programs at summer institutes hosted by the national laboratories; and by increasing support for teacher institutes for programs at the National Science Foundation. These are the kinds of programs that Senator Reid, the majority leader, was talking about. Expand the teacher scholarship programs at NSF; help establish academies for math and science in the various States. North Carolina has had one for a long time, and 20 years ago, when I was Governor, I went to see if Tennessee could create one. We decided we didn't have the money to do it, so we created a summer Governor's school, which turned out to be a good idea, where outstanding students from math and science could go to the University of Tennessee for 4 weeks in the summer. The faculty loves it, the students love it, and they participate in the Oak Ridge Laboratory. They go back fired up into their classrooms, and the teachers are fired up as well. Our Governor Bredesen wants to create a summer school for math and science, and he has started on a modest basis, but this will help him expand that. We will expand advanced placement in international baccalaureate programs by increasing the number of teachers who are trained to teach math, science, and foreign languages. This would allow thousands of new students to take these courses. The AP courses, as we call them, are a good track to college, and college is a good track to success. Those students are the ones who will help create the jobs to keep our high standard of living. But we have a lot of students, many of them lower income, who don't take these courses and who easily could. So we will help pay for their tests, and we will train more teachers so they can be taught, and we will see that three or four times more students will be able to do this. These programs weren't picked out of thin air. This group of distinguished Nobel laureates, university presidents, and business leaders spent their summer 2 years ago reviewing many programs. For example, the AP program comes from a Texas program which has been successful for 10 years. They picked the 20 best ideas in priority order from among hundreds of ideas. This is not merely a group of Senators and Congressmen picking our best friend's favorite program. We all have one of those. This is the National Academies of Sciences and Engineering and the Institute of Medicine reviewing hundreds of programs with a distinguished panel in answering our question exactly what do we need to do to keep our brainpower advantage, and they say here are the first 20 things you ought to do. Not in this legislation are other provisions that were part of this report and that were acted on in the last Congress. One was the temporary extension of the research and development tax credit. It should be made permanent. Another are several provisions for attracting and keeping in this country talented professionals from overseas. These 500,000 foreign students who are here include some of the brightest students from China, some of the brightest students from India, some of the brightest from around the world. They are going to create jobs somewhere. We would like for them to stay and create jobs here, yet our archaic immigration laws prevent that. They require these students to swear they are going home before they come. They make it hard for them to stay once they get here. So the Senate, last year, in debating the immigration bill, adopted three of the provisions from this report. One, for example, pins a green card on any foreign student who gets a graduate degree in math, science, engineering and technology so that person can stay here and create jobs for us here. I am hopeful when we get to the immigration legislation within a few weeks that we will do at least that much to change our archaic immigration laws and allow those students to stay here and create jobs for us. We talk a lot about outsourcing jobs. This would be insourcing brain power, and we would be smart to do it. I particularly thank our staffs, and we will do this specifically by name next week. This is a complex bill with many different parts, as the section-by-section analysis shows. They have worked evenly to try to make this a well-crafted bill. We have more work to do. I conclude by again thanking the Democratic and Republican leaders, Senator Bingaman, Senator Domenici, especially, who was chairman of our committee last year, Stevens and Inouye, Enzi and Kennedy, Ensign and Lieberman, Bond, Hutchison, Chambliss, Murkowski, and Mikulski--all of these Senators made major contributions. I am sure they will be on the Senate floor next week to address this legislation and to support it. We are talking about keeping our brain power advantage so we keep our jobs. We are talking about a country that has grown accustomed to 30 percent of all of the money in the world being produced each year with just 5 percent of the people, and we are saying, unless we take at least these steps, that won't continue. Exhibit 1 U.S. Senate, Washington, DC, April 10, 2007. Dear Colleague: We are writing to invite you to cosponsor the America COMPETES Act; a bipartisan bill to help America maintain its edge in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics in an increasingly competitive global economy. An earlier version of this bill was introduced in the final days of the 109th Congress as S. 3936. The America COMPETES Act is based upon recommendations from both the national Academies' ``Rising Above the Gathering Storm'' report and the Council on Competitiveness' ``Innovate America'' report. It contains revised versions of the legislation approved by both the Senate Energy and Commerce Committees [from the 109th Congress] in response to those recommendations: S. 2197, the PACE-Energy bill, and S. 2802 the American Innovation and Competitiveness bill, which were reported without opposition to the Senate floor. The bill also includes provisions developed by the bipartisan leadership of the HELP Committee to improve science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and critical foreign language skills. The competitiveness package would significantly increase the federal investment in basic research, foster and innovative infrastructure, improve the teaching of math, science, engineering and technology to our children, and encourage the brightest minds to pursue careers in these fields. Among other provisions, the bill would: Double the investment in basic research at the national Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST), and the Department of Energy's Office of Science (DOE-SC) over five to ten years; Improve teacher training in math and science, through summer institutes hosted by the NSF and the DOE-SC and grants to increase university degree programs that combine math and science study with concurrent teacher certification; and Increase support for Advanced Placement programs to expand access for low income students to take and succeed in college preparatory courses. This bill alone will not secure American leadership in the decades to come. But it is a critical first step toward protecting our competitive position in the world. We hope you will join us in this effort and cosponsor this bipartisan legislation. Sincerely, Harry Reid, Majority Leader; Jeff Bingaman, Chairman, Committee on Energy and Natural Resources; Daniel K. Inouy, Chairman, Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation; Edward M. Kennedy, Chairman, Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions; Joseph I. Lieberman, U.S. Senator; Barbara A. Mikulski, U.S. Senator; Bill Nelson, U.S. Senator; Mitch McConnell, Republican Leader; Pete V. Domenici, Ranking Member, Committee on Energy and Natural Resources; Ted Stevens, Vice-Chairman, Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation; Michael B. Enzi, Ranking Member, Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions; John Ensign, U.S. Senator; Lamar Alexander, U.S. Senator; Kay Bailey Hutchison, U.S. Senator.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from New Mexico. No one in the Senate on either side of the aisle has been more consistent or more effective in advancing our Nation's position in science and technology. He is also a delight to work with. It is rare to have a chance to work across the aisle in the way we have the last couple of years, not only on this legislation, but Senator Bingaman, for example, noticed that we were losing our edge in world-class computing. He saw that because of a visit to Japan. He came to me, and we worked together to try to restore that edge. He constantly is doing that in a quiet and effective way. It is a pleasure to work with him. I also thank the majority leader, Senator Reid, and the Republican leader, Senator McConnell. Senator Bingaman and I went to see the majority leader 2 years ago when he was the minority leader. We asked him to do exactly what he has done. He and Senator Frist did. They created an environment in which this bill had a chance to succeed. Then Senator McConnell stepped right up, following Senator Frist's tremendous help and leadership in this effort, and it is fairly remarkable that we worked so evenly together in the last Republican Senate on this bill that the legislation was introduced in the Democratic Senate in the same way because we worked together on it and, hopefully, that has produced a better result. I begin my remarks with a story. Last August, a group of Senators went to China. We were led by two of our most distinguished Members, Senator Stevens and Senator Inouye, the two leaders of the Commerce Committee and two of the major contributors to this legislation. Those two Senators were very well received in China. Senator Inouye, of course, is a Congressional Medal of Honor winner from World War II, and Senator Stevens was a Flying Tiger. He flew the first cargo plane into Beijing toward the end of World War II. So he was very well received in China. As a result, we had a chance to meet with the senior leaders of China in a way most Americans had not to that time. We spent an hour with President Hu. We spent another hour with the No. 2 leader in China, Mr. Wu, who is chairman of the National People's Congress. We talked about the issues one would expect an American delegation of a dozen Senators would talk about with the leaders of China. We talked about their military posture. We talked about North Korea. We talked about Iraq. We talked about Iran. But, Mr. President--I can still see this--in both of the meetings we had, one with Mr. Hu, the second with Mr. Wu, there was one subject about which those two leaders of China were most animated, and that was the subject we are discussing today: how to develop China's brain power advantage so they can create more good, new jobs in China. That was the subject they really wanted to talk about. President Hu had gone to the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Engineering just a month earlier in July. He assembled them in the Great Hall of the people. He outlined a new 15- year plan to make China a technology leader in the world. In his speech, President Hu said China must ``promote a huge leap forward in science and technology. We shall put strengthening independent innovation capability at the core of economic structure adjustment.'' Anyone who follows China knows that when their leaders talk about leaps forward, it is a pretty big deal. President Hu's new plan appears more likely to succeed and includes reforming China's universities and massively investing in new research. We regularly see stories of how Chinese-born academicians, some of our most distinguished faculty members at our major universities, are now accepting invitations to go back to China, their homeland, and create great universities there. There are a lot of people here--one- half of the Nobel Prize winners in physics who are American are immigrants or the sons and daughters of immigrants. So China is serious about this plan. Mr. Hu said: We all bear the time-honored mission to provide strong scientific support for the construction of a well-off society by improving our independent innovation capability and building an innovative country. I hope that our scientists and technicians will strive hard to make our brilliant achievements and constantly contribute to our country and our people. Those are the leaders of China. They know what to do. The United States has a remarkable position. As Senator Bingaman said, Senator Reid said, and Senator McConnell said, we don't want to take it for granted because we can't. But let's stop and think about where we are. This huge brain power advantage we have in the United States of America has given us a situation in which we produce about 30 percent of the gross national product in the world in for about 5 percent of the people. About 30 percent of all the dollars, volume in the world this year is being produced in this country, a country that only includes 5 percent of the people. How does that happen? The United States has a number of advantages: its location, its resources, the great diversity we have here, the fact we have turned all that diversity into one country. But when we look at all of our advantages-- and I should quickly put the great entrepreneurial engine we have here, the fact that if you want to come to a big country and start from scratch and create a company--and I have had the privilege to help do that in the private sector--this is the place to do it. But when you look at our major advantage, it is our brainpower. No other country has had the broad system of education we have had. No other country has the large number of great research universities the United States of America has. No other country has the great National Laboratories we have. As a result, over the last century, especially since World War II, no other country has come close to turning its brainpower advantage into jobs, into dollars, into a high standard of living for a large number of people, and the rest of the world sees that. They see it on television. They see it on the Internet. They see it because more than half a million students from around the world, many of the brightest men and women in the world, come here to our universities, and they see what we have been able to do, and they say: Why can't we do this at home in China? Why can't we do this at home in India? Why can't we do this in Ireland? And they are doing it. We are glad they are doing it. We want them to have a high standard of living, too. The more money they make, the more goods they can buy from the United States of America. So we encourage that activity. It also spreads our democracy, our ideals. We go to Thailand or some other country, and we find the Minister of Agriculture is a graduate of the University of Tennessee. He has learned here. He goes there and teaches about agriculture, and he promotes our ideas. Our higher education system has probably been the most effective foreign aid we have ever invested in, just those half million students who go there. However, we are at risk of losing our brainpower advantage. If we lose our brainpower advantage, we lose our advantage and our standard of living. In other words, in plain English, we don't have as much money in our pockets, we don't have as many good jobs, and our families don't have the kind of prosperity many have come to take for granted. That is what this piece of legislation is about. We talk a lot about outsourcing jobs, about growing new jobs. Well, this is the way to keep good new jobs in the United States and to grow them. When a graduate of a university, such as the student at the University of Maryland--I think he dropped out, actually--a foreign student--creates Google, that creates thousands and thousands of new jobs in the United States, as Thomas Edison did years ago, as Bill Gates did more recently, and as thousands of entrepreneurs do every day. It takes the brainpower advantage to create the job and it takes the brainpower advantage to work at the facility or the plant that has the jobs. That is why, toward the end of a long Budget Committee hearing 2 years ago, I was getting a little depressed listening to what I heard about the numbers. According to the budget 2 years ago, and the budget last year, and the budget this year, we are on an unsustainable course in terms of being able to pay for Medicare and Medicaid. So the question came to me: Well, if we are going to squeeze out everything else in order to pay for Medicare and Medicaid and other programs, the war in Iraq, then how are we going to invest in this great engine of brainpower that creates the money that pays all the bills? I struggled with this as the Governor of Tennessee. I was trying to raise our standard of living in Tennessee. We were the third poorest State 25 years ago when I became Governor, based on family incomes. We already had low taxes. We had a right-to-work law. We needed to change some rules about the usury limit in banking. We needed to add a new four- lane highway system. All those were progrowth. But the most progrowth action I discovered we could take was to improve our colleges and our universities and our research facilities. That is progrowth. As a result of better schools, better colleges, and better universities, combined with our other advantages, we moved ahead in our State. Better schools meant better jobs. Better colleges and universities mean better jobs. More research means better jobs. So we are talking today about better jobs--progrowth. We better realize as well that we have some pretty big bills to pay. Last year, we spent $237 billion on debt, $378 billion on Medicare, $545 billion on Social Security, $70 billion or more on hurricanes, and we are spending about $4 billion a week on Iraq. What this legislation does is authorizes $4 billion a year over the next 4 years. As Senator Bingaman said, we made room for it in the budget this year to create and encourage and continue to push ahead this brainpower engine that creates the money to pay for all these necessary and urgent needs we have, these priorities we have. This is a progrowth piece of legislation. I would say this may be the most important piece of legislation the Congress considers in this 2-year session. If it is not the most important piece of legislation, there is certainly no more important subject to most American families than: How do I keep money in my pocket to pay my bills? How do we keep our jobs from going to India and China? How do we keep our economic advantage? How do we come close to continuing to be the country that produces 30 percent of all the money in the world for only 5 percent of the people? That is why, at the end of that Budget Committee hearing I mentioned a little earlier, I literally walked down the street to the National Academy of Sciences and asked them, on behalf of Senator Bingaman and myself, with the approval of Senator Domenici, the chairman of our committee, and with the endorsement of Representatives Boehlert and Gordon in the House of Representatives--I said: Most ideas in Washington fail for lack of the idea. You are here at the end of a long day in the National Academies. You are supposed to be our advisers. So let me ask you a question: Why don't you tell us the 10 most important things we can do, in priority order, to keep our brainpower advantage? I said to them: I am merely one Senator, but I will bet if you do that, we will do it. We will take your advice. The National Academy of Sciences and of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine formed an immediate group. They asked Norm Augustine, the former chief executive officer of Lockheed Martin and a member of the National Academy of Engineering, to chair the group. He turned to 21 distinguished Americans who know a lot about the world and our country, Craig Barrett, chairman of the board of Intel; Steven Chu, cowinner of the Nobel prize in physics and Director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; Robert Gates, who was then head of Texas A&M and now is the Secretary of Defense, and a number of others; the former head of MIT, Peter O'Donnell, a Texas businessman who has worked on AP courses, and they did this report: ``Rising Above The Gathering Storm.'' They didn't make 10 recommendations, they made 20, and they made them in priority order. Their priorities began with K-12 education. They went next to engineering and research. They went next to higher education. They went next to incentives for innovation. At that point, we formed a bipartisan group of Senators and began to have what we called ``homework sessions'' with the various agencies of the Federal Government that had jurisdiction over these programs and the areas where the programs would fit. We also recognized that Senator Lieberman, Senator Ensign, and others had been working hard with the Council on Competitiveness, and they had similar recommendations. We also acknowledged that Senators Hutchison, Bond, and Mikulski had for many years been advocating various aspects of these programs, so we tried to integrate all of this into a whole. That produced a long piece of legislation that had to make its way through five different committees, but it attracted 70 sponsors last year--35 Democrats, 35 Republicans. The Republican leader, Senator Frist, and the Democratic leader, Senator Reid, were the principal sponsors of the bill. Senator Bingaman has done a good job of outlining most of the provisions of the bill, so I will, in a few minutes, put those into the record, but there is no other piece of legislation during the past 2 years that was so broadly recommended by disinterested groups outside of the Senate and the House, that has been worked on by so many Senators here, and that has moved forward in the way this has. Making this even more remarkable is not only was it introduced by the Democratic and Republican leaders, it has been brought directly to the floor for debate. So what we hope is our colleagues will carefully read the bill, bring their amendments to the floor, and maybe we can operate in an old-fashioned way here. Maybe we can consider the amendments, or the improvements, debate them, vote on them, go to the next amendment, and then after we have finished with that, have a vote on whether to pass the bill, which I believe we will. I think we have a good chance of doing that. Mr. President, I wish to now insert into the Record a few items that are important for our colleagues and those who are following this debate, so I ask unanimous consent that following my remarks a ``Dear Colleague'' letter of April 10, written by Senator Reid and Senator McConnell to all of our colleagues, signed by the chairmen and Democratic and Republican leaders of the three major committees which contributed to this, and which produced 50 cosponsors--we hope there will be more by next week--be printed in the Record.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that a two-page summary of the America COMPETES Act be printed in the Record.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that a list of the cosponsors of the America COMPETES Act, the 50 cosponsors, as it stands today, be printed in the Record.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I see no other Senator on the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Finally, Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that a section-by-section analysis of the America COMPETES Act be printed in the Record.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Jack Wells, a fellow on my staff, be granted floor privileges for the duration of the debate on S. 761, the America COMPETES Act.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I have one other short comment I would like to make, and then I will yield the floor or note the absence of a quorum. The Governor of Virginia has asked our country to take a moment of silence to remember the tragedy this week at Virginia Tech at noon today. It is also a good time for us to think about our responsibilities in the U.S. Congress. There is hardly any way we can express our grief to these families and to that university for what they have been through this week. It is of such a scale that it is hard to imagine. We want them to know we have been thinking about them, and we would like to do whatever we can to help them and to help make sure nothing like this happens again. So while Virginia Tech and the Commonwealth of Virginia are reviewing their responsibilities in light of the tragedy this week at Virginia Tech, we in the Federal Government ought to be reviewing our responsibilities too. Our focus should be on whether Federal laws or regulations unwisely restrict or limit how universities are able to deal with students who have mental health problems or who otherwise exhibit behavior about which parents, authorities, or other third parties should know. Generally, and many Americans do not know this, under Federal law universities cannot tell parents about their child's problems or their grades without their student's consent. At least one professor at Virginia Tech who was tutoring the shooter has been quoted as saying that she felt that Federal laws prevented her from going to his parents or to others about her concerns. Therefore, I am sending a letter today to Senator Kennedy and to Senator Enzi, the chairman and the ranking member of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee on which I serve. I am writing them to request that our committee ask the Secretary of Education, Margaret Spellings, to conduct a review of Federal laws, regulations, and relevant State laws that limit the ability of universities to tell parents or other third parties about a student's problem without the student's consent. I would hope that Secretary Spellings could review not only the laws and the rules, but also the implementation of these rules on campus. I am a former president of a university. I understand it may very well be that faculty members, and perhaps even some administrators, are unaware of the rules, or at least uncertain about how to apply them. My hope would be that Secretary Spellings could complete her review within 120 days, and after that our committee might hold a hearing or roundtable to determine whether there is action we need to take. I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record at this point a copy of my letters to Senator Kennedy and Senator Enzi and an article from the New York Times dated April 19 entitled, ``Laws Limit Options When a Student Is Mentally Ill,'' which describes very well the situation in which many university faculty members find themselves.

Mr. ALEXANDER

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, today I introduce legislation to reduce air pollution and the threat of global warming by enacting strict standards on the four major pollutants from powerplants. I send the legislation to the desk and ask it be introduced.